ESRA conference, Porto, July 9-12, 2025 (https://esra2025.com) 

Seminar 2: “To be or not to be”: Trauma, Crisis, and Shakespearean Fragments

Organizers: Richard Ashby, King’s College London, UK (richard.ashby@kcl.ac.uk), Natalia Khomenko, York University, Canada  (khomenko@yorku.ca), and Georgina Lucas, Edinburgh Napier University, UK (g.lucas@napier.ac.uk).

Speaking to the British Parliament two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky famously quoted Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” as a lead-in to expressing his country’s resolve to continue fighting for independence whatever the costs. The assumed cultural weight of Shakespearean quotation is unmissable in Zelensky’s plea for aid. At the same time, as “an act of creative appropriation,” to use Peter Kirwan’s definition (2018, p. 247), this quotation re-contextualized Hamlet’s soliloquy to reflect on – and to contest – a grim potential future in which Ukraine might be erased as a sovereign nation.

This seminar explores the use of Shakespeare quotations and allusions in confronting past cultural and political trauma, and in bracing against the harrowing visions of the future produced by conflicts and crises that threaten the continued existence of individuals, nations, cultures, and peoples. Existing studies of Shakespeare’s potential for memorializing and addressing conflict, as well as its personal and collective traumas, have been largely concerned with histories of performance (Silverstone, 2011; Carla Dente and ‎Sara Soncini, 2014; Anderson, 2016; Lidster, 2023). This seminar shifts its focus to Shakespearean quotations and allusions that float free of their textual or performative contexts. We ask what cultural work is performed by these disintegrated fragments of Shakespeare (re)appearing at the moments of trauma and crisis, and to what extent de-contextualized quotation and/or allusion can support the visions of the past and the future to which it is harnessed.

Contributors might consider why some quotations, such as Hamlet’s widely cited “to be or not to be” speech, are often seen as suited to articulating a response to crisis, including the threat of total destruction and even genocide, and how these familiar lines might be reframed or rewritten in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Contributors are also invited to examine the use of Shakespearean fragments that are less immediately placed or whose origins are deliberately obscured, as well as those that are mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare.

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to all three organizers by December 31, 2024.