Previous Events 2014-15
11th November 2014
Shakespeare On the Road: A Summer exploring the special relationship between the US and Shakespeare.
With Dr Paul Prescott (Warwick)
In the summer of 2014, Dr Paul Prescott led a team that undertook an epic road trip, visiting fourteen Shakespeare festivals across the length and breadth of the US (with one notable Canadian incursion). The team conducted over 150 interviews with North Americans of all backgrounds and from all walks of life who – year in, year out – make Shakespeare happen across the continent.
In this our first seminar of the year 2014/15, Dr Paul Prescott outlined the Shakespeare On The Road project, which has raised vital and often emotive questions about the politics of race and gender, about community-formation and individual self-fashioning, about national and regional identity in twenty-first-century America. As a piece of oral history, it clearly captures the catalytic, therapeutic and often transformative role that Shakespeare plays in the lives of thousands of Americans. Dr Prescott’s illustrated talk will attempt to explain why the trip was undertaken and what the experience revealed about America’s ‘special relationship’ with Shakespeare.
Monday 1st December 2014
Anna Marsland, Assistant Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Anna Marsland, Assitant Director on the 'Roaring Girls' Season' at the Royal Shakespeare Company discussed her professional life in a Q and A discussion led by Dr Teresa Grant and Dr Paul Prescott.
Anna trained in theatre directing at Birkbeck College, London and has since worked at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and Shakespeare's Globe. 2014 was her debut season at the RSC where she worked in The Swan Theatre on The White Devil and The Roaring Girl.
Monday 9th March 2015
'Certain o'er incertainty’: eliding Troilus and Cressida’s ambiguity in the Lewis episode ‘Generation of Vipers’.
Dr Sarah Olive, lecturer in English in Education at the University of York.
Troilus and Cressida may appear an unusual choice for appropriation in Lewis, a detective drama drawing on the traditions of Golden Age crime fiction: particularly given the genre’s need for ultimate certainty to conquer initial ambiguity and for multiple possible meanings to give way to a single, fixed interpretation of ‘whodunit’. Yet, in appropriating the play, Dr Olive argued that the episode stakes its identity as part of a richly allusive series. This paper considered the history of Shakespearean appropriation in one long-running UK television franchise and the dilemmas facing its 2015 season.
Tuesday 9th June 2015
'The Incomplete Works of William Shakespeare: Handling the Apocrypha'
Dr Peter Kirwan.
To celebrate our 5th birthday, Sidelights on Shakespeare was delighted to welcome back Dr Peter Kirwan. Now Assistant Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham, in 2010, whilst he was a PhD student at Warwick, Peter was one of the founders of Sidelights on Shakespeare . It seemed particularly fitting that he should be our final guest speaker in 2014/15, bringing our anniversary year to a close.
As new major ‘Complete Works’ projects seek to consolidate the constitution of the canon while other multi-volume series add ever more plays, Peter asked what is at stake in editing and author-ising those plays whose authorship may never be resolved beyond doubt?
Dr Peter Kirwan prepares to cut the Sidelights on Shakespeare 5th birthday cake.