Seminars

Shakespeare

  • Founded
    1982
  • Seminar Number
    581

This seminar explores issues of interest to the current Shakespeare scholarship. Principal topics include the relation of play-script to performance, the implications of recent changes in textual study, the relevance of texts to the social and political world in which they were produced, and the impact of contemporary theory on Shakespeare criticism. A Bernard Beckerman Memorial Lecture is presented annually in honor of the seminar’s founder.

Co-Chairs
Professor Lauren Robertson
lr2859@columbia.edu

Professor Debapriya Sarkar
debapriyasarkar@uconn.edu

Rapporteur
Shanelle Kim
sek2212@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

09/09/2022 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM
Falstaff and Wisdom Literature.
Lars Engle, The University of Tulsa
Abstract

Abstract

Falstaff quotes the bible more than any other Shakespearean character. His relation to Judeo-Christian wisdom literature -- specifically, to the biblical wisdom books Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the apocryphal Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus -- presents an evaluation problem for readers. He uses biblical wisdom richly, sometimes uniquely, and it is used of him.


The second scene of 1 Henry IV introduces Falstaff and Prince Hal and closes with Hal's "I know you all" soliloquy. It seems designed to offer reflective audiences an instruction manual on how they might assemble the elements of the Henriad to make the dramatic machine function according to plan. This paper maps how the citations of wisdom literature in that scene -- some of them apparently unnoticed hitherto by commentators on Shakespeare and the bible -- support and disrupt those instructions. It also touches on larger questions: is Falstaff wise? What does wisdom literature do to merit its name?
10/14/2022 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
"The Taste of Fears”: Horror and Disgust in Macbeth.
Jesse Lander, University of Notre Dame
Abstract

Abstract

Macbeth is not unlike a mashup of two horror subgenres: supernatural horror and the slasher film. This continuity has been obscured by the mainline of Shakespearean criticism, which has generally overlooked elements of what has been deemed sensationalism, on the one hand, and superstition on the other. Instead of looking past the play’s seemingly exploitative deployment of violence and the supernatural, I argue that Macbeth elicits feelings of horror and disgust in order to engage its audience in a searching treatment of human vulnerability, a vulnerability that is both physical, a matter of frail bodies, and intellectual, a question of unreliable perception. My attention to horror and disgust, informed by recent work on the history of emotions, contributes to a revised understanding of the place of the supernatural on the Tudor-Stuart stage. Under the influence of Weber, the supernatural has usually been addressed primarily in terms of disenchantment, which invariably turns on questions of belief and disbelief. I argue instead that the staging of the supernatural is, in the first instance, an occasion for visceral, embodied responses and that while these responses provoke reflection, the conclusions reached are unpredictable.
11/11/2022 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
TBD
Matthieu Chapman, SUNY New Paltz




12/09/2022 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
TBD
Allison Deutermann, Baruch College




02/10/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
History, Contingency, and Order: Shakespeare’s Tragic Endings
Rhodri Lewis, Princeton University
Abstract

Abstract

This talk looks afresh at the ways in which Shakespeare brings his tragic plays to a close. It will put the case that by doing so we are equipped to arrive a better sense of 1. what is most distinctive (read: subversive) about Shakespeare’s tragic practice, and 2. the demands placed on us as readers and spectators of the plays by the push and pull of (on the one hand) history and contingency, and (on the other) artistic and philosophical order. Particular attention will be paid to Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth.
03/03/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
Looking Up from a Naughty World: Negotiating Salvation History in Merchant of Venice
Lauren Silberman, Baruch College
Abstract

Abstract

Merchant of Venice explores the difficulty and importance of looking up from the secular, material world to a transcendent reality beyond that world. The play frames a critique of and corrective to the materialism of nominally Christian Venice by gesturing to the context of salvation history largely overlooked by the characters. How the individual subject negotiates the binary of sacred and secular and from what subject position is a major concern. Merchant of Venice puts in play multiple conversionary structures in order to explore how the story of an individual life figures into temporal and salvation history. The Augustinian model of conversion as an autobiographical event, an Archimedian point that gives structure to a human life as exemplified in the Confessions, figures into the stories of individual characters largely in the Pauline terms of putting off the Old Man and putting on the New Man. Portia skillfully exploits the anomalous subject positions of both Shylock and Antonio in the world of Venice for her own personal interest, while acting as an agent of the drama in presenting that anomaly to the audience.
04/14/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
7:00 PM
TBD
Colby Gordon, Bryn Mawr College




05/12/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM
TBD
Katherine Schaap Williams, University of Toronto