Shakespearean Surfaces

Recent Shakespeare studies have variously explored ways in which a sense of inwardness is constructed through overlapping discourses of anatomy, subjectivity, and psychological character. By contrast, this panel seeks to examine "surfaces" as a means to understand early modern identities in Shakespearean performance and writing. Surfaces are a threshold between the body and the world, inner and outer, private and public, imagination and production, actor and spectator, writer and reader, teacher and students. As such, they are all sites for interpreting Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Permeable, opaque or transparent, surfaces are the material means by which our experience is structured and meaning is translated and mediated. The seminar will further previous critical work that has sought to probe beneath the furfaces by re-focussing attention on surfaces themselves as complex elements in the ways meanings about Shakespeare are generated, by or from the multiple perspectives of directors, editors, actors, critics, readers, spectators, teachers, students. Examples might include (but are not limited to): manuscripts, printed text, inscription, skin, prosthetics, props, textiles (including costumes), architectural structures, places of performance, settings, design. The session will consist of five 5-minute position papers followed by an interactive discussion.

This seminar was chaired by Alison Findlay ( a.g.findlay@lancaster.ac.uk )and Liz Oakley-Brown ( e.oakley-brown@lancs.ac.uk ). For more information about specific papers, please contact the participants individually. Contact details are listed at the bottom of each abstract.

Abstracts will be available here shortly.