Essential Information
| Type | Conferences |
|---|---|
| Location |
National Maritime Museum
|
| Date and Times | Friday 8 September 2023 - Saturday 9 September 2023 |
| Prices | Adult (In-Person) £120 | Student/Early Career Researcher (In-Person) £60 | Online £30 |
Keynote Speakers: Professor Steve Mentz (St. John's University) and Professor Emma Smith (University of Oxford)
Across Shakespeare’s plays, the sea’s agency can be felt shaping plots and characters’ lives. In addition, images of wild, deep, and boundless seas, even in landlocked plays, give expression to characters’ passions, suggest matters concealed from view, and provide a vocabulary for notions of transformation and sublimity.
Over the past four centuries, Shakespeare’s seas have been staged in theatres across the world and have provided inspiration for artworks both textual and visual; and further, Shakespeare’s plays have themselves been taken to sea - read and performed aboard ships traversing the world’s oceans.
The growth of the Blue Humanities as a critical field is drawing deeper and more meaningful connections between art and the oceans, attending to the ever-evolving ways in which humans perceive and interact with the maritime world and, in particular, illuminating our impact (and reliance) on the seven-tenths of the globe covered by water. Shakespeare’s plays are ripe for re-examination through a nautical lens, and most especially at the unique moment that marks 400 years since the publication of the First Folio.
For those attending in-person, this is also an opportunity to discover the material culture of maritime history offered by the museum and even a chance to encounter the First Folio, a copy of which will be on display at the museum for part of this year.
Day 1: 9.00am - 5.00pm | Friday 8 September 2023
09.00 - REGISTRATION
09.30 - WELCOME TO ROYAL MUSEUMS GREENWICH AND INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
09.45 - PANEL OPTION A
- SHAKESPEARE’S MARITIME KNOWLEDGE AND INSPIRATION
- Kirsten Sandrock (University of Wuerzburg) - Lear’s Hurricane: Global Water Environments in King Lear
- Erich Freiberger (Jacksonville University) - Hamlet and Plato’s Ship of Fools
09.45 - PANEL OPTION B
- SEAS OF CONNECTION: COASTS, PORTS AND INTERTEXTUALITY
- Edina Eszenyi (Maritime Training Academy, UK/HEI Pegaso International, Malta) - “In the Rialto you have rated me”: The Likeness of Shakespeare’s Venice in Contemporaneous Literature
- Sayan Parial (Independent Scholar) - Subaltern Witches and the Sea: Eco-Poetics in Mandaar
11:15 - BREAK
11:30 - PANEL OPTION A
- THE METAPHORICS OF SHAKESPEARE’S OCEANS
- Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) – “We are like our Sea provision”: Drowned Revenants in The Tempest, Albumazar, and The Sea Voyage
- Theodora Loos (University of Regensburg) - Navigating the Maritime Imagery of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- Alys Daroy (Murdoch University) – “Blue Eden”: The Psychological Impact of Shakespeare’s Maritime Ecology
11:30 - PANEL OPTION B
- THE EARLY MODERN OCEAN
- Francisco J Borge (University of Oviedo) - From Deloney’s Ballads to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Pedro de Valdés in England’s Post-Armada Imaginary
- Neah Lekan (Johns Hopkins University) - A Realm “Endamaged”: Spectres of the Sea(borne) in The Comedy of Errors
- Emily Green (University of Oxford) - Going with the Flow: The Ocean as the Force of Fate and Chance in Shakespeare's Drama
13.00 - LUNCH (PROVIDED)
14.00 -
- KEYNOTE - Steve Mentz (St. John’s University) - "By sea, by sea!”: Water, Distortion, and Utopia in and beyond Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
15.15 - PANEL OPTION A
- ARTISTIC RESPONSES TO SHAKESPEARE’S SEAS
- Dorka Tamás (Independent Scholar) - Sea-Fathers: A Comparative Reading of Prospero from The Tempest in Sylvia Plath's and Margaret Atwood’s Writings
- Jane Draycott (University of Oxford) - Coast Road: Shakespeare’s Women on the Shorelines – A Poem-Cycle
- Tom Cook (The Shakespeare Institute) - The Fisher Kings: T. S. Eliot, Pericles, and Poetic Authorship
15:15 - PANEL OPTION B
- EARLY MODERN MARITIME LABOUR
- Daniel Vitkus (University of California) - Merchants and Sailors: Watery Work in Shakespeare’s Plays
- Mollie Carlyle (University of Aberdeen) - Sea Songs and Shanties in Shakespeare’s Plays
- Michael Powell Davies (University of Kent) - The Launching of the Mary and the Lives of the Middling Sort in the East India Company Yard at Blackwall
Day 2: 9.00am - 5.00pm | Saturday 9 September 2023
09.30 - Tea and Coffee
10:00 - PANEL OPTION A
- SHAKESPEARE’S MARITIME ECOLOGY
- Douglas Clark (Université de Neuchâtel) – Sea Green Shakespeare
- Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University) - Siting Shakespeare’s Seaweed
- Chloe Kathleen Preedy (University of Exeter) – Shakespeare’s Unruly Seas
10:00 - PANEL OPTION B
- THE TEMPEST AND EMPIRE
- Christopher Astwood (City College Norwich) - Tempest Noise – Bermuda’s Shakespearian Feedback Loop
- Lynsey Ford (University of Oxford) - No Man is an Island: An exploratory study of William Strachey's “most dreadfull Tempest”.
- Morgan Daniels (Arcadia University) – Radio Ariel
11.30 - BREAK
11.45 -
- ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION - An Audience for Your Research
13.00 - LUNCH (PROVIDED)
14.00 - PANEL OPTION A
- THE ARCTIC
- Irene (Irena) R Makaryk (University of Ottawa) - “For this relief much thanks”: Shipboard Hamlet in the Arctic
- Owen Kane (Brock University) – Jellied Seas and Icy Geography in Shakespeare’s Poetry and Plays
14:00 - PANEL OPTION B
- INWARD VOYAGES
- Jiamiao Chen (University of Bristol) – Religion and the Sea in Pericles
- Annabelle Higgins (Independent Scholar) - Drops of Water: The Role of the Sea in the Stories of Shakespeare’s Young People
15:00 - TOUR – Shakespeare’s First Folio (IN PERSON ONLY)
15:30- BREAK
15:45 - KEYNOTE: Emma Smith (University of Oxford) - Her Seas, her Us and her Ts: Twelfth Night, the Mediterranean and Migration
17:00 - Conference ends
Shakespeare and the Sea | 8-9 September 2023
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