“Shakespeare’s Europe – Europe’s Shakespeare(s)”
European Shakespeare Research Association Congress 2015
University of Worcester, UK
29 June-2 July, 2015
The traffic of Shakespeare’s stage invites spectators and readers to travel to different places, imagined and real. Italian and French cities – Verona, Venice, Mantua, Padua, Florence, Milan, Rome, Navarre, Roussillon, Paris, Marseilles – set the scenes of his plays. Rome, Athens, Ephesus and Troy occasion travels in time. On Britain’s map – divided in King Lear – other places are mapped: Scotland, England, Windsor, the Forest of Arden, York. Viola arrives on ‘the shore’ of Illyria while, in The Winter’s Tale, the action shifts between Bohemia and Sicilia. Othello sets up camp in Cyprus and Don Pedro returns, victorious, to Messina. Within the confines of one play, Hamlet, too, maps Europe: from Elsinore, Laertes requests permission to return to France; the Mousetrap is set in Vienna, which will become the setting for Measure for Measure; Hamlet is sent to England, and on his way encounters the Norwegian army marching across Denmark on its way to Poland.
Time and geographical travels map a whole continent and its social, political and cultural exchanges – a feature that Shakespeare’s plays shared with his early modern contemporaries as much as they have with his readers, editors, translators, spectators, film adapters and critical commentators since.
The 2015 ESRA conference continues the long-standing dialogue between Shakespeare’s Europe and Europe’s Shakespeare(s). It asks scholars to take a look at the wider playwriting context of the early modern period and the European reception of Shakespeare as a subject that has been continuously developing, not least due to Europe’s several recent remappings. Twenty-five years since the first events that focused exclusively on European Shakespeares (Antwerp 1990) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sofia 1992), ESRA 2015 invites a look back at 425 years of European Shakespeare and towards a vigorous debate on what Shakespeare means for Europe today, as well as on ESRA’s place in Shakespeare Studies, European and beyond.
We welcome proposals for papers in the following seminars (please see the CFP for details of seminars). Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief biography (150 words) by 1 December 2014 to all conveners of the seminar of your choice. All participants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals by 1 March 2015. The deadline for submitting the completed seminar papers (3,000 words) is 1 May 2015.