Seminars

This talk explores Timothy Ponce’s student-centered pedagogical approach, which values the dialogical relationship between reader and texts, to investigate whether our twenty-first-century students can view Shakespeare’s works as engaging sites for questions about race and the lingering effects of empire-building in our world. This talk outlines how Shakespeare is recognized as a cultural and literary icon who is widely respected; however, for students from marginalized communities, he increasingly feels distant from their lived experiences. When Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students consider literatures that engage these social issues, Shakespeare is not often mentioned. Nonetheless, once a dialogic channel is established between Shakespeare’s works and students, the playwright’s interest in exploring a range of minoritized identities becomes apparent. I propose that students should bring their inquiries regarding our unexamined biases on race and empire-building to Shakespeare through what I refer to as experience retrieval exercises.

Adam Zucker’s new book, Shakespeare Unlearned, dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too slight to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called ‘stupidity’ in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge – on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period – when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language or characters or plotlines that exceed and at times entirely undermine the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. And each suggests that a framing of putative ‘stupidity’ pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. This talk explores the communal soundwork of Caliban’s voice, with special attention paid to the ways nonsensical songs and syllables echo across time and place, both inside and out of the text of The Tempest. Topics touched upon include the critical tradition pertaining to Caliban’s intelligence, stultifying pedagogy, the noise of outsider characters in early modern plays, wicked dew, madrigals, and, briefly, Cecil Taylor.

“Be cunning, Abigail”; “Be close, my girl.” With these injunctions, Marlowe’s Barabas initiates his daughter into his project of machiavellian dissembling. Crucially, he also urges Abigail to “be silent,” encouraging her to turn her ordinary identity—that of an obedient young woman—into a cloak for iniquity. Taking the combination of cunning, closeness, and silence as its starting point, this paper analyzes instances of feminine dissimulation onstage and off. Situating The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine, part 2, alongside period prescriptive texts for women, it argues that Marlowe’s plays offer early instances of an overlooked stage trope: the ingenue initiated into dissimulation under duress, whose subsequent silences operate as cover for her own secret ends. ‘Silent’ women, I argue, are relatives of the stage Machiavel: characters formally organized around a gap between being and seeming, and dramatic embodiments of the potential split between social identity (including gender identity) and strategic role.

Through this analysis of Shakespeare's songs, this lecture will provide an in-depth look at the delicate interplay between linguistic, rhythmic, and musical elements. Particular attention will be given to how composers balance the strictures of iambic pentameter, the challenges of Elizabethan pronunciation, and the nuanced shifts in meter, such as the trochaic tetrameter of "Double, Double Toil and Trouble." Additionally, the lecture will explore how contemporary composers like Lucía Caruso and Pedro H. da Silva navigate these complexities while making deliberate interpretive choices, such as altering the emotional tone of a piece, as seen in their rendition of "Sigh No More." Ultimately, it will offer insights into how composers reconcile historical authenticity with the creative demands of modern performance, transforming Shakespeare's texts in ways that resonate with contemporary audiences.

The murder of Lady Macduff and her child in 4.2 Macbeth is considered, by some, a crucial incident that contrasts innocence and virtue with the heartless brutality of Scotland’s usurping king. The scene, according to Coleridge, “heightens the pathos” of the play. Similarly, A. C. Bradley argues it is intended “to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and pathos” and “open the springs of love and of tears.” Both noted it provides the play “variety” in tone, quality, and content, and offers “relief” from the more horrific emotions elicited by the script. This short scene, complete in itself, touching and powerful, is yet incongruous in many ways and has troubled both scholars and theatre artists. William Davenant reduced the scene by half during the Restoration and David Garrick excluded 4.2 from his Drury Lane performances in the Eighteenth Century. One early critic condemned it as farcical, “trifling,” “superfluous,” and “unnecessary.” Most major productions in England and the United States omitted the scene in performance through the early twentieth century. Critical and theatrical commentary regarding the scene questioned its authorial integrity, dramatic expediency, theatrical practicality, and aesthetic and moral quality, drawing scholars and performance practitioners together in fascinating dialogues for two centuries. This talk will examine the intersections of that discourse and its impact on the play.