S.01
Anthropocene Shakespeare:
Research, Practice, Transformations

Organisers: Sophie Chiari, Randall Martin

Description: This seminar invites scholars and practitioners: to examine how Anthropocene conditions can make fresh sense of Shakespeare’s plays; to explore how today’s earth-system and environmental crises are reshaping Shakespeare criticism and performance; and to discuss how environmentally impacted and adapted Shakespeare can productively suggest post-Anthropocene futures. The use of non-Western forms of knowledge to reincorporate ecological values into Shakespeare, the institutional and transcultural mediation of eco-Shakespeare in performance, the environmental footprints of theatre production — these are just some of the many issues worth investigating in today’s contexts of rethinking and staging Shakespeare on a precarious planet. How does Shakespeare’s attention to the non-human resonate with today’s Anthropocene crises? How does eco-dramaturgy imagine alternatives of environmental preservation, equity, and coping mechanisms? And how can it encourage best practices and post-growth sponsorship and investment?   

S02.
Antony and Cleopatra as Cosmos

Organises: Eric S. Mallin, Paromita Chakravarti, W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. 

Description: For “Antony and Cleopatra as Cosmos” we invite essays that consider Shakespeare’s play through the lens of Universal order and galactic design. From our current perspective, such an interpretive frame seems faintly absurd—or, at least, Roman. Scene after scene attests to the exigent chaos produced by the titular lovers and their rivals; we are drawn to them precisely because they are so often sloppy, petty, political, earth-bound.  
Yet the lovers and their rivals think of themselves in cosmic terms. Their planetary yearnings are proposals about scale and affinity; nearly every expression of theme, affect, or selfhood in Antony and Cleopatra partakes of the transcendent. From assertions of racial identity to issues of conquest and empire; from desire to grief; and from encomium to augury, the play argues for human encounters with or emulations of the supralunary real. How should we take these characters who think themselves virtually divine, planetary objects? Cleopatra imagines in Antony a “man of men” harmonizing with the heavenly spheres. But if her idealizing thought of Antony is formed from the Eurocentric, Vitruvian conflation of Roman man with Universal humanity, how can we understand the other cosmos in the play—the capacious Egyptian world, particularly “Eastern” culture and sexuality? Cleopatra’s multifocal power, her nation’s ungovernable geography, and her court’s feisty and erotically indeterminate diversity seem designed as a second, grandly inclusive counter-cosmos to the Romans’. Given these two world orders, what does Caesar’s hegemonic “Universal peace” mean for the planet? Anticipating our present life of endless acquisitiveness, global warfare, and environmental disaster, does the play suggest such peace is always self-undoing, a monumental mockery?  
We want to explore the questions the play asks about empire, universality, and globality. About aspirations to divinity and an irenic vision that might not accept such aspirations. About Antony and Cleopatra’s cosmic challenges to Eurocentric thought and belief—the local and provincial believing itself to be Universal. 
Essays might also address the disruptive meanings of astrology, meteorology, or soothsaying; racial and sexual difference as world-changing features; the fantasy of global order and its relationship to (Eastern or Western) religion, statecraft, or cosmology; and the notion of beautiful chaos as its own kind of cosmos. We hope for culturally diverse presentations which consider these questions from the vantage point of non-Anglophone cultures, particularly since the clash of cultures is the play’s generative theme.

S03.
Blue Shakespeares  

Organisers: Steve Mentz, Shaul Bassi, Dyani Johns Taff   

Description: Shakespeare’s planetary vision often focuses on the sea and other bodies of water. From the “boundless” seas of love that animate Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas” and Hamlet’s “sea of troubles,” the World Ocean operates throughout Shakespeare’s plays and poems as both metaphor and fundamental physical reality. Water operates dramatically as an actual setting, as in The Tempest’s opening scene, or as a force making its presence felt on dry land, as in The Merchant of Venice’s metaphor of the “wind cooling my broth” (1.1). The great waters are spaces of war and love, history and myth, trade and cross-cultural encounter.  
This seminar invites papers that attend to Shakespeare’s watery visions in and beyond the poetics of oceans. We anticipate explorations of Shakespeare’s seas, and also invite investigations into fresh water, ice, clouds and fog, and other watery forms. We aim to engage with recent scholarship in the blue humanities, ecocriticism, and different kinds of planetarity and globalization. Areas of special interest include the symbolic functions of waterborne travel, colonialism and the slave trade, questions of gender and maritime labor, and Shakespeare’s vision of human-water relations in such distinctly watery historical spaces as London and Venice, or perhaps on magical islands or the coast of Bohemia. We invite papers on how Shakespearean productions on today’s world stages envision, represent, perform, and give agency to the sea and other water; papers might, for example, examine Eimuntas Nekrosius’s water imagery in Othelas and ice imagery in Hamletas or take up other Shakespearean adaptations in literary, auditory, visual, or other forms. We are eager to discuss water as a collaborating force in theatrical and artistic productions.
Beyond Shakespeare, many other early modern European writers responded to the violent and disorienting culture of early globalization, which included novel encounters with places and peoples in the Americas as well as increased maritime trade with Africa and the Far East. The vast historical corpuses collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, among many others, testify to the breadth of experiences and texts generated by transoceanic exploration. The historical events associated with “wet globalization” brought the human and nonhuman ecosystems of the Americas and Afro-Eurasia together for the first time in millennia, generating what earth systems scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, in their book The Human Planet (2018), call “a new Pangea,” or what many disciplines in and beyond the humanities today call the Anthropocene. We invite papers that think ideas about the early modern Anthropocene, including challenges to the Anthropocene as a concept, mediated by and through water. 
Oceanic scholarship in early modern studies has for the past several decades been leading broader developments of the “blue humanities” across various disciplines and historical periods. We invite papers that connect Shakespeare and early modern studies to emerging trends in transhistorical blue humanities, critical ocean studies, and related discourses.

S04.
Caliban and the (Inter-)Planetary:
The In, the Out and the Beyond

Organisers: Michela Compagnoni, Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik 

Description: As a figure that repeatedly comes to represent and challenge the fraught dynamics of cultural contact, conflict and resistance, Caliban allows for an in-depth analysis of the relations between space, identity and representation on a truly planetary scale. This seminar intends to promote cross-cultural, transnational and/or inter-species understanding of one of Shakespeare’s most debated and culturally charged characters. Caliban has long come to epitomise what it means to be the ‘other’ in Western culture(s). With the emergence of postcolonial discourse and the pedagogies of race and land, this hegemonic vision has been repeatedly challenged. We invite contributions that critically examine over three centuries of ‘Caliban watching’, particularly from the moment when readers and viewers began to give less credence to Prospero’s account of the past and more sympathy to Caliban and his ‘rebellious’ claims. We seek submissions that discuss adaptations and transcreations of The Tempest which, through the figure of Caliban, provide fresh insights into the play and human/non-human power relations; that foreground new forms of social awareness and engagement, and question how ‘we’ can understand enslavement and colonisation, disability and physical otherness, sexual and racial violence, territorial dispossession, climate change, language appropriation, embodiment and disembodiment, human/non-human/post-human co-existence.
We invite the seminar participants to address the following questions:
— In what ways do rewritings, adaptations, or transcreations of The Tempest offer potential alternatives to traditional humanist perspectives?
— How is the character of Caliban translated into the popular culture and what are the reasons for the rewritings of his/her/its/their identity?
— What are the alternative, trans- or post-human scenarios in which The Tempest and Caliban find their new forms of imaginary existence?
— How and in what terms can we shift from merely discussing environmental concerns that are made visible through the conflicts between re-imagined Prosperos and Calibans to addressing planetary or inter-planetary conditions (with which the figure of Caliban can be intertwined)?

S05.
Contemporary Shakespeare Fiction

Organisers: Koel Chatterjee, Kinga Földváry

Description: Shakespearean characters and plotlines, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been an inspiration to many authors through the ages. There are fictional accounts of Shakespeare’s life such as The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan, and novels that take the reader into the world of sixteenth century London such as Bernard Cornwell’s Fools and Mortals and even imaginative novels like Shakespeare’s Mistress by Karen Harper which explores the fictional Anne Whately and her potential role as the Dark Lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets. There are novels told from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters such as Beatrice and Benedick by Marina Fiorato, Ophelia by Lisa M. Klein, Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike, and Nutshell by Ian McEwan. In recent times, an increasing amount of Shakespeare adaptation in novels, films, art work, and material culture is being instigated by people of colour and queer identifying creators such as Chloe Gong and her Romeo and Juliet Duology These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends, The Death I gave him by Em X. Liu, a locked room thriller adaptation of Hamlet, and Brinda Charry’s The East Indian where the writer invents a biography for an Indian boy, the first native of the Indian subcontinent to arrive in Colonial America, who feels a connection to Shakespeare’s play. It stands to reason then, considering the reach and impact of Shakespeare outside of the anglophone world, that Shakespeare novels in other languages, other settings, or from the point of view or overlooked characters exist outside of the western world such as Vidyasagar’s Bhrantibilash based on The Comedy of Errors written for reading and learning a new simplified Bengali in Colonial India, Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Kabuki translations of the Shakespeare canon in 1928, or even The Klingon Hamlet and William Shakespeare’s Avengers by Ian Doescher and Danny Schlitz in more recent times.  
Topics of interest for this seminar might address, but are not limited to, the following broad areas: 
— The relevance of Shakespeare fiction and the context of telling the story in a different time, place, or setting; 
— The use of Shakespeare to address anxieties about environmental concerns;
— Shakespeare’s fictionality or Shakespearean challenges to modern fiction;
— Individual responses to Shakespeare through writing, editing, or interpreting the plays, for example fanfiction;  
— Experimentation with genre and form; 
— Shakespeare fiction adapted to unusual genres, from YA to undead horror; 
— The proliferation of Shakespeare biofiction; 
— Non-Anglophone novelisations of Shakespeare from the sixteenth century to present times.

S06.
Crisis and Resilience in the Roman Plays

Organisers: Pascale Aebischer, Lubaaba Al-Azami, Courtney Lehmann, Hassana Moosa 

Description: This seminar explores how Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and the Roman plays address resilience in the face of catastrophe to confront planetary permacrises wherein environmental, health, migratory, military, and sociopolitical violences intersect. Through the lens of Marcus’ nihilistic plea for planetary destruction, participants are invited to reflect on individual and communal coping mechanisms that reimagine Shakespeare’s stoicism as a mode of creative improvisation, fostering kinship and emergent forms of collective resistance among diverse communities. The seminar also encourages considerations of how productions and editions of these plays engage with themes of empire, neo-fascisms, racisms, statelessness, sexual violence, and (dis)ability.

S08.
The End(s) of Global Shakespeare 

Organisers: Alexa Alice Joubin, Dennis Kennedy

Description: Political thinkers on both the left and right now generally reject the neoliberal policies of the 1990s that enabled unrestrained free trade among nations. Those policies, which established novel modes of communication and distribution, often supplanted local manufacture of goods in developed nations by exploiting cheap labour in emergent economies. Parallel to the rise of economic neoliberalism, anglophone Shakespeare studies in the 1990s began to realize that criticism and performance outside the English language had a greater place in the field than previously acknowledged. In turn, some of the contributions of international Shakespeares, in print, on stage, and on film, partially displaced the dominant twentieth-century theory that Shakespearianism was primarily about understanding the original language and meaning of the plays. Local Shakespeare was not supplanted, but concepts of global Shakespeare nonetheless began to assume an importance in scholarship and performance that eventually opened the anglo-centred, text-centred approach to other ways of seeing (and hearing).
That history is backdrop for this seminar, which proposes to investigate how the idea of an international or global Shakespeare has altered in the past thirty years. Did neoliberal economic and political ideas enable the paradigm shift in Shakespeare studies? Did lower-cost and easier travel—to WSC in Tokyo in 1991, for example—prompt a wider awareness of the fact that Shakespeare had actually been a global phenomenon for some time? Was the new internationalism in Shakespeare studies in reality a neoliberal concept, encouraged by the desire to make the teaching and performance of Shakespeare significant at the end of the Cold War? Has Shakespeare been used (or misused) as part of an internationalism that may always have been illusionary? Is global Shakespeare just another way of claiming his universality?
Specifically, the panel will ask if the term “global Shakespeare” has gone beyond its usefulness as a theoretical concept and if it has been instrumentalized to serve only certain institutions in developed countries. Could it be that critical notions of the foreign—the ethnic, cultural, or linguistic other—have lost their meaning for Shakespeare studies through overuse? Are the insights of postcolonial theory still relevant to the subject? Have the political, educational, and arts institutions that promote Shakespeare as humanistic and edifying been ambushed or co-opted by nationalism or capital? Is inserting Shakespeare into social or political circumstances justified, or just another way to mark the commentator’s virtue?
The seminarians will be invited to offer divergent approaches that reconsider the significance of global Shakespeare and its usefulness as a concept.

S09.
Geopolitical Dynamics in Shakespeare Adaptations:
Perspectives on the New Cold War

Organisers: Dong-ha Seo, Hisao Oshima   

Description: During the Cold War, Shakespeare’s plays were frequently adapted to reflect the ideological battles of the time, particularly within a European context. Notable examples include Boris Pasternak’s Russian translation of Hamlet (1939), Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet (1949), the American Troupe’s Hamlet (1949) at Kronborg, Elsinore, Grigori Kozintsev’s film version of King Lear (1971), Adrian Noble’s Henry V (1984), and Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Henry V (1989). These adaptations not only entertained but also engaged audiences in the critical issues of their era, reflecting the cultural and historical moments in which they were produced. 
Additionally, the trope of the siege—prominently featured in plays such as Henry V and Coriolanus—offers a powerful metaphor for understanding the pressures and strategies of geopolitical conflict. However, it also serves as a lens through which to explore the cultural and historical narratives that influence both individual and collective memories. The imagery and dynamics of sieges in Shakespeare’s works resonate strongly in periods of intense international tension and continue to do so in the context of the New Cold War, as well as in ongoing cultural discourses about identity, memory, and history. 
This seminar will invite students, scholars, and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare from various regions to present on how Shakespeare’s works are being reinterpreted in the context of current global conflicts, particularly the emerging tensions within Europe and East Asia. We encourage submissions that address the following themes: 
Comparative analysis of Cold War-era Shakespearean adaptations and contemporary adaptations in the context of the New Cold War, considering both geopolitical and cultural/historical perspectives. 
The role of Shakespeare in reflecting and shaping collective memory, particularly in how past conflicts and cultural histories influence the present and condition the future across various aspects of contemporary life. 
Case studies of recent theatrical productions, films, or literary adaptations that employ Shakespeare to comment on twenty-first-century geopolitical and cultural issues, with an emphasis on the intersections of history, memory, and conflict. 
The phenomenon of urban war alongside the siege as depicted in Shakespearean adaptations, and how these portrayals resonate with current urban conflicts and sieges in the context of global political tensions. 
The role of the siege as a recurring trope in Shakespearean adaptations and its relevance to modern interpretations of both geopolitical standoffs and broader cultural-historical narratives. 
The impact of these contemporary adaptations on audience perceptions and expectations, particularly in terms of how they engage with and reflect individual and collective memories. 
By examining how Shakespearean adaptations continue to resonate in times of geopolitical strife and cultural reflection, particularly through the metaphors of the siege and the complexities of memory, this seminar aims to deepen our understanding of the cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions of the New Cold War and its broader implications.

S10.
International Shakespeares:
Soft Power and National Cultural Identities 

Organisers: Helen A. Hopkins, L. Monique Pittman 

Description: In contrast to so-called “hard” forms of “command power,” “soft power,” as Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (2004) defines the concept, trades on a given nation’s culture, history, and ideology for geopolitical advantage, elevating the nation’s global status not through force or coercion but by means of appeal and attraction. In the most straightforward iteration of Nye’s conceptualization, the soft power of Shakespeare would be wielded by England as his nation of origin, capitalizing on notions of his cultural supremacy to assert influence. However, the very same notions lead other nations to deploy his life, work, and iconicity for complex self-assertions in a range of guises. Though seemingly benign, soft power often simply repackages old forms of colonial-imperial domination into less sinister and yet still troubling impositions of authority. Thus, this seminar seeks to investigate the ways that other nations (in addition to the UK) have appropriated Shakespeare for their own advocacy, identity, and power.
This seminar aims to examine the many forms of Shakespearean soft power that manifest through global networking, negotiations, and performances of cultural cohesion in a variety of locales and institutional and media modalities. How is Shakespearean power consolidated through the production, collection, and exhibition of material artifacts, for example, or on political rather than theatrical stages? How might Shakespeare be repurposed in postcolonial contexts? And what media forms are most habitable for such alternate purposes? In asking such questions, this seminar aims to theorize the mechanisms of soft power and to define and distinguish it from concepts of cultural diplomacy, seeking not simply to identify examples of Shakespearean soft power but to interrogate the functionality and use of such deployments.
This exploration of the use of Shakespeare’s cultural capital for national forms of power opens a new sphere of enquiry and approach to the notion of Shakespeare’s ‘universality’, or indeed, ‘neutrality’, while highlighting the deceptive connotations of the ‘soft’ in soft power. Where Shakespeare is used to forge a national identity that is ‘in tune’ with imperially-established notions of intellectual prestige and/or ‘civilisation’, must this always re-establish colonial hierarchies of world power? Can uses of Shakespearean soft power disguise the machinations of hard power and marginalize cultural others?
The seminar hopes to explore some of the following questions:
— How is Shakespeare used to create or shape national identities?
— How can the power relations of such nation-building be traced?
— How are national identities expressed through acts of commemorative practice and memorialization?
— How do academic institutions, museums, and heritage sites guard and expand Shakespeare’s soft power?
— What roles do performance, adaptation, and appropriation play in recirculating Shakespeare as a form of soft power?
— Can recirculations of Shakespeare as soft power be separated from British colonial-imperialism?
— How can Shakespeare’s canon be repurposed for resistance against colonial-imperial legacies?
–What are the consequences for the non-British nation’s self-conceptualization when adopting and adapting Shakespeare for the purposes of soft-power?
— This seminar welcomes papers exploring a wide range of artifacts and national identities analyzed through the lens of nationhood and cultural power-brokering.

S11.
Lunar Intersections

Organisers: William C. Carroll, Pascale C. Drouet

Description: The two most important astronomical publications bracketing Shakespeare’s life were Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (1610). While the heliocentric theory seemed the most shocking discovery, the moon became nearly an equal locus for anxiety, speculation, and investigation. The English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, wrote about Galileo’s publication within days of its appearance, noting that ‘the Mathematical Professor at Padua’ had, among other discoveries, shown ‘that the moon is not spherical, but endued with many prominences, and, which is of all the strangest, illuminated with the solar light by reflection from the body of the earth’. For Wotton, then, it was as radical as Copernicus’s revelation: ‘he hath first overthrown all former astronomy . . . and next all astrology’. But even before Galileo’s publication, early modern writers puzzled over its nature. The moon enabled the measurement of time (‘The moon is down. I have not heard the clock’) and ruled the tides; it represented madness and the imagination (‘the lunatic, the lover, and the poet’), chastity and eroticism (‘The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle’), and catastrophe (‘Alack, our terrene moon is now eclipsed’), among many conceptions. It was personified in multiple ways (‘Dictynna . . . A title to Phoebe, to Luna, to the moon’), perhaps more than the sun; always gendered female, the moon was both inferior to the sun but in many ways more mysterious, more present in earthly manifestations. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is only the most obvious of many dramatic representations of the moon’s power. 
We invite papers on representations, invocations, and speculations on lunar topics, from early modern imaginings and scientific investigations to contemporary deployments in performance, gender theory, queer theory and and eco-theory. Suggested topics and questions: 
— visual representations of the moon; 
— Shakespeare and Lyly’s Endymion and The Woman in the Moone; 
— the cultural circulation of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius; 
— the aftermath of Galileo’s discoveries, for example in Ben Jonson’s News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) and John Wilkins’ The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), to the very different example of Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687); 
— the moon and the cult of Elizabeth, from Raleigh’s ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ and the entertainments at Kenilworth and Elvetham, George Chapman’s ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, the iconology of royal portraits; 
— the moon’s long association with madness; 
— the moon’s long association with diseases in medical discourse; 
— the Man in the Moon: the supposed derivation from the Bible, links to Judas or Cain, and folkloric associations; 
— voyages to the moon/the moon as utopian world, from Lucian’s A True Story (published in English in 1634), Kepler’s Somnium, seu Opus Posthumum de Astronomia Lunari (1634), and Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone: Or A Discourse of a Voyage thither (1638), to Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon (1659).

S12.
‘More … than fancy’s images’:
Shakespearean Characters in Their Context

Organisers: Sandra Pietrini, Svenn-Arve Myklebost, Rachele S. Bassan

Description: Shakespeare’s plays have a life in book illustrations, in theatre posters, on book covers, on painted canvases, in comics, manga and graphic novels, graphic satire and other visual genres besides. Ontologically, such representations of Shakespeare have the ability to merge character, plot, themes and environments on the same plane, in the same medium, be it ink or paint on paper or canvas, or pixels on a screen. Graphic or visual Shakespeare reconfigures action, theme and temporality into space, thus making the notion of place a central concern. 
The particular melding of time, character and spatial context that characterises visual forms lends itself to analyses that incorporate interrogations of the plays and their afterlives through the critical lens of space, place and environment. This seminar thus reflects Lefebvre’s exhortation to his readers “To recognise space, to recognise what ‘takes place’ there and what it is used for”: it aims to investigate the relationship between Shakespearean characters and the spatial contexts in which they are graphically represented, with a special focus on the unique affordances and limitations of such representations. 
As Sillars has demonstrated, for example in Painting Shakespeare, a single image can utilise iconography, gesture, perspective, setting and other techniques to suggest the temporal and thematic thrusts that energise a play. These re-elaborations in different codes and languages indicate a pervasive visual intertextuality or intermediality, rooted in the plays themselves. An image, therefore, is an act of literary criticism – an interpretation and an intervention, something which reveals as much about its creator and the time in which it was produced as it does about Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s works themselves constitute critically complex intersections between disciplines such as performance, gender and race studies, memory studies, cultural geography, and more. The plays’ relationship with space — material, cognitive, virtual — has been revived recently, and their dialogue with contemporary or present contexts — historical, socio-economic, political — has been explored extensively. Ecocriticism has investigated the relationships between human and nonhuman entities portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays, and their implications in terms of the early modern “coextensive nature”. However, the plays’ visual/graphic versions have rarely been considered from such perspectives. 
This seminar focuses on the relationship between Shakespearean characters and the context in which they are visually or graphically represented. We interrogate ourselves about the ways in which the Shakespearean play-space is translated visually, and how characters-place relationships are played out in this context. Illustration (broadly meant) is an act of world-building, transcending the limitations of the playhouse stage, but bound by other constrictions. For instance, colour – or lack thereof – can tie characters to their surroundings, and there are many ways of visually translating movement through space and time: how does this impact the reader’s experience of the ‘visually staged’ play? Furthermore, the image space can be more or less independent from the textual environment surrounding it, either directly (e.g., on the illustrated page) or indirectly: how does the visual world-building add to, or subtract from, characters’ identities as outlined in Shakespearean texts and their critical interpretations? 

S13.
The Natures of Shakespeare, Ecological Shakespeare, 
or Environmental Shakespeare 

Organisers: Melissa Croteau, Stephen O’Neill,  Victoria Bladen 

Description: The “green turn” in Shakespeare studies over the past 20 years has been a key development in the field, a significant part of the environmental humanities. In the context of the current planetary crises, applying an eco-lens to our contemporary critical and creative thinking through culture in all its forms becomes ever more relevant and pressing. Writing at the beginning of the Anthropocene, Shakespeare engaged with ideas of green space as well as the relationship between humans and the flora and fauna of their environments from his earliest works to his last plays. This engagement encompasses not only the natural spaces of many of his plays, where green [or blue] worlds may threaten, offer pastoral escape or constitute agents of metamorphosis and renewal. It also includes mythic and metaphorical uses of green space, [blue space], natural elements, such as weather, and animal imagery to articulate ideas from the political to the personal, familial relationships and histories, ideas of nurturing and governance, and the state of the soul. This seminar will explore these various facets including consideration of how green space has been represented, created and recreated in adaptation and performance and across various media. 
Issues to be explored in the seminar:
This seminar on Eco-Shakespeares invites papers that explore Shakepeare’s engagement with green space [and blue environments], in all their forms. Papers might explore, but are not limited to:
— ideas of the garden, green space, green worlds, [or blue worlds] in Shakespeare’s texts, textual adaptations (eg novels and poetry), and performances (including stage and screen); 
— intersections between green spaces [or blue spaces] and ideas of planetary cycles and cosmic phenomena; 
— restorative vs. destructive representations of the natural environment in text, adaptation and performance; 
— more-than-human agency, storied matter, and animism in Shakespeare and adapted Shakespeare; 
— eco-cinema theory applied to screen Shakespeares and allusions to Shakespeare in media; or 
— ways in which Shakespeare provides a conceptual tool for living in the Anthropocene and is being used to communicate environmental messaging. 

S14.
New Worlds of Words:
Shakespeare’s Language, Near and Far

Organisers: Emily Louisa Smith, Carla Mazzio

Description: Tools for the study of Early Modern English and Shakespeare’s English have existed since Shakespeare’s own time. Yet no analytical tool is neutral: dictionaries shape the languages they seek to describe; concordances elevate certain writers and privilege the word, or string, over the phrase, sense, or sentence; algorithms, it has recently been claimed, flatten as much as they deepen. 
This seminar will explore the many “filters” through which Shakespeare has been approached: linguistic, computational, cultural, or otherwise. It asks its participants to consider where such a filter deepens their engagement with Shakespeare and where it, in contrast, flattens. The seminar thus invites papers that address Shakespeare’s language from a wide variety of approaches – from traditional philology to innovative digital and quantitative analysis; from semantics to syntax to metrical analysis, close to distant reading and all points in-between. 
Our title nods to John Florio’s second dictionary, the hugely expanded Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611), and this is intended as an acknowledgment of the vibrant history of Shakespearean interpretative companions in print, in dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, keys, and more (produced by such key figures as Florio, Johnson, Cowan, Schmidt, Abbott, and the OED, to name just a few). Recent years have seen an explosion in digital tools and approaches which can put the EEBO-TCP texts to various uses: AntConc, EarlyPrint, VEP, sentiment analysis, network creation, and more. The recent boom in what is often grouped under the term “artificial intelligence”, in all of its many forms, is likely to inspire even further analytical methods. 
Each of these tools, print or digital, views Shakespeare’s language through different lenses, or, to use a different metaphor, dissects and reassembles it to privilege a specific element. This seminar asks its attendees to critically reflect upon what their individual approaches afford but, also, what they lose.  
Papers could focus on a single word, or Shakespeare’s whole vocabulary; on editing before and after the electronic revolution; on theory-building or quantitative description; on explication or extrapolation. We also welcome papers that take a critical stance towards algorithmic study and/or the tools scholars have traditionally used to work with Shakespeare. Does algorithmic analysis entail flatness? Do dictionaries distort what they claim to describe? Have literary scholars ever really understood what the OED was trying to do and what it was not trying to do? Why are we so bad at explaining iambic pentameter to our students? How might AI affect our approach to textual analysis, teaching and publishing, or indeed to reading itself? The ambition of this seminar is not to answer these questions, but rather to reflect upon how we should think about the way that we approach our analysis of Shakespeare’s texts – and its inevitable blind spots.

S15.
Perfect Body, Perfect World’:
Proto-Eugenics and Fantasies of the Human in Early Modern Utopia

Organisors: Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Hanh Bui

Desription: Early modern texts interrogate the boundaries of who—or what—qualifies as ‘human’, exposing entrenched cultural hierarchies that define humanity in exclusionary and imperial terms. From Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man’ to Miranda’s wonder at a ‘brave new world’, these works reveal a fascination with valorised individual bodies and populations, inviting critical reflection on how ideals of the ‘human’ intersect with broader social, political, and biopolitical concerns. This includes strategies for improving human populations through selective breeding, geronticide, social and reproductive control, and theories of biological inheritance.
The fascination with eugenic futures is evident in explicitly utopian texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. However, it also surfaces in genres such as drama, pastoral and romance, as well as nascent forms of non-fiction travel narratives and ethnographies. Visions of model societies were invariably built around visions of the preferred minds and bodies that would inhabit them. By delineating the ‘perfect’ or perfectible subject in contrast with those deemed undesirable, utopian narratives laid crucial foundations for what would eventually evolve into the modern eugenics movement.
This session examines the centrality of the ideal or default ‘human’ in early modern texts, tracing how identity categories such as disability, race, gender, and age both shaped and were shaped by the development of proto-eugenic thought and practice. Utopian ideals of social optimization were instrumental in articulating notions of European selfhood, particularly whiteness and able-bodiedness, against which ‘otherness’ was defined. Utopias, then, provide a unique lens through which to examine those subjectivities whose presumed normalcy allowed them to maintain power and privilege.
At the same time, fantasies about the biopolitical regulation of individuals or entire societies, hierarchies of ability, and rational control over ‘natural’ bodily processes like ageing expose the mechanisms that sustained systems of dominance. Multiple and tightly entangled stigmatized identities form the murky, distorted background against which the white male normate body was constructed, expressing key criteria for privileges such as citizenship in modern liberal political thought. ‘Perfect’ bodies co-create the emergence of ‘perfect’ worlds, where whiteness and able-bodiedness are presented not just as fanciful possibilities but as rational, achievable goals.

S16.
The Planetary and the Sacred in Asian Shakespeares

Organisers: Ted Motohashi, Yong Li Lan

Description: In the most common relational paradigms that connect Asian locales with Shakespeare, inescapably, “Asian” as an adjective for “Shakespeare” is enmeshed in western colonial and imperialist historical trajectories. Properly to intervene in the hierarchies of power within the global being carried over into the planetary requires attention to the inter-relating of the material planet and the spiritual cosmos that informs artistic practices on the ground. Shakespeare’s plays are transformed in the various cosmologies that shape performance forms such as Noh, Gut (Korean shamanism), Jingju (Beijing Opera), Mak Yong (a type of Malay dance-drama) and even varieties of realism: the performativity of the set, echoes of ritual, the playing of characters, and the lingering of their lives after death may all expand from the premise of performance in non-finite worlds towards a spiritual inter-relatedness. Hence, the seminar aims to compare ways in which a planetary modality and the aesthetics of the sacred in specific performance forms may be connected, and to explore how Asian Shakespeares may articulate ethical, ecological and spiritual dimensions, moving beyond finite, fixed worlds for theorizing and adapting Shakespeare in a particular tradition, nation or ethno-religious community into realms of interconnectedness and transcendence.
We invite papers that examine the relationships between the planetary and the sacred in Asian Shakespeare performances in any medium. Papers comparing between and across cosmologies are particularly welcome. The following topics and questions:
— What role does ritual play in harmonizing or separating the secular planetary and the spiritual cosmology?
— How do planetary and sacred frameworks present life, death, and / or the after-life?
— How are spiritual landmarks, terrains, spaces related to the physical and / or political geography of a place?
— What aesthetic principles that distinguish the planetary from the sacred, and how are these united through the staging?
— How do translation and adaptation strategies alter the orientation of Shakespeare’s work in a spiritual cosmos, realm, dimension?
— How are notions of time—cyclical, linear, eternal—treated and represented?
— How do specific belief systems influence the portrayal of ecological themes in Shakespearean performance or adaptations?
— How might planetary and sacred philosophies intersect to challenge anthropocentric narratives in Shakespeare’s plays?
— What is the role of cosmology in shaping characters, narratives, or symbolic motifs in Asian Shakespeare adaptations?

S17.
Planetary Plenitude:
Nature and Multiplicity in Shakespeare

Organisers: Rocco Coronato, Andrew Hadfield

Description: Shakespeare, more than many of his contemporaries, often turns to nature for inspiration, exploring themes of multiplicity and diversity that foster a sense of planetary plenitude—a feeling of fullness and completeness characterized by a collective of beings, places, and things with which his characters engage, confront, or renew, in “a plenitude of subtle matter” (“A Lover’s Complaint”). The term “plenitude” carries rich connotations of abundance, fullness, completeness, and perfection. It can refer to the fullness of shape, thickness, or the totality of entities, as well as the abundance of humours or the completion of a time span. 
In Shakespeare’s works, planetary plenitude emerges as a model that advocates for a nearly unattainable abundance of beings—a collective of interacting entities that form a dynamic habitat, adapting natural templates of multiplicity. This underlying concept of planetary plenitude can vary widely, oscillating between orderly representations of the world and more chaotic interpretations of the cosmos. One could explore several potential correlations between planetary plenitude and various genres (for instance, do comedy and romance necessarily depict a benign nature? Do romantic characters frequently reference natural plenitude, and if so, in what ways?), genders (is there a discernible difference in how various genders refer to the framework of planetary plenitude?), and race (do colonisers more readily invoke the multiplicity of nature to assert their dominance, while subjects advocate for multiplicity to assert their claim to unity?). Put another way, can plenitude be bad as well as good? 
This inquiry becomes even more relevant in light of emerging technologies such as digital humanities and artificial intelligence, which empower scholars to analyse the vast expanse of words and references in Shakespeare’s works, enabling comparisons across a multitude of corpora. How might a collective, pluralistic, ‘planetary’ approach reshape our understanding of Shakespearean multiplicity? How can the intricate data inherent in Shakespearean texts be examined through similarly complex, “planetary” frameworks that reflect their richness?
In this seminar we hope to be able to explore these issues and think about Shakespeare as a writer who thinks about plenitude and totality, as well as what it means to examine his works from such perspectives and to understand how we can understand how we think he understood the world in all its plenitude. These topics aim to stimulate scholarly dialogue on the intersection of nature, multiplicity, and plenitude in Shakespeare’s works, encouraging a diverse range of interpretations and analyses. 
We invite submissions for papers that explore the theme of planetary plenitude in Shakespeare’s works, focusing on the rich interplay of nature, multiplicity, and the abundance of beings. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
— ecocritical approaches: how Shakespeare’s works portray nature as an active agent, revealing themes of interconnectedness and environmental abundance within planetary plenitude;
— gender: how female characters engage with natural plenitude differently from male characters; 
— race and class dynamics: how natural plenitude can be wielded as a means of asserting dominance or recognizing multiplicity across different social and ethnic categories; 
— pluralistic methodologies: exploring diverse approaches to enhance our understanding of Shakespeare’s representation of nature and multiplicity;
— philosophical themes: how characters in Shakespeare’s works grapple with philosophical ideas related to abundance and their place in a vast, interconnected universe; 
— nature as character: how Shakespeare’s plays depict nature as a character that embodies plenitude, along with the role of natural imagery in poetry to convey themes of love and abundance;
— complexity of plenitude: mapping intricate networks of characters, themes, or intertextuality to reveal the complex, multifaceted nature of Shakespeare’s works; 
— technology and plenitude: how emerging technologies, such as Big Data and AI, provide new methods for analysing textual multiplicity and nature-related references in Shakespeare’s works. 
The seminar “Planetary plenitude: nature and multiplicity in Shakespeare” invites papers that explore the themes of abundance and diversity in Shakespeare’s works. It highlights how Shakespeare engages with nature to create a sense of planetary plenitude, characterised by a rich interplay of beings and environments. Scholars are encouraged to examine how this concept relates to various genres, genders, and race, considering whether plenitude can have both positive and negative connotations. The seminar also addresses the impact of emerging technologies like digital humanities on the analysis of Shakespearean texts, fostering dialogue on the intersection of nature, multiplicity, and plenitude. 

S18.
Planetary Poets 

Organisers: Paul Edmondson, Claudia Olk

Description: As the World Shakespeare Congress encourages us to re-think Shakespeare’s impact on ‘the planet’ and to even to imagine brave new worlds, we invite our seminar participants to re-think, re-imagine, and re-negotiate the ‘planetary’ question: how and why do countries align poets from their own cultures with Shakespeare?
In the vein of John Keats who, when ‘first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ feels ‘like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’, Shakespeare constitutes an emerging poetic presence for many places and countries with or against which they formed and transformed – and indeed continue to transform – their own traditions.
The convenors of this seminar represent an international connection that started in 1864. Each year the Goethe Haus in Frankfurt sends Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon a wreath on Shakespeare’s birthdate, and receives a wreath from Shakespeare’s Birthplace on Goethe’s birthdate. In more recent times other ‘national’ poets have aligned themselves with Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon: Cervantes (Spain), Jan Kochanowski (Poland), Iqbal (Pakistan), Tagore (India), and Tang Xianzu (China).
Our seminar raises the following questions as prompts to conversations and discussions:
— Who are the ‘national’ poets who are aligned with Shakespeare in some way, either by influence, dissension, or by subsequent (posthumous) appropriation? Why has this alignment taken place, and how does it express itself?
— What forms of celebration do countries enjoy on the anniversaries of their poets, ‘national’ or otherwise?
— How, if at all, do the celebrations of other ‘national’ poets include, appropriate, or refer to Shakespeare, and why?
— How does Shakespeare as an emerging poetic presence work with or against other traditions? How does he, or how might he, transform them?
— How, if at all, is Shakespeare’s birthdate celebrated around the world, and what forms do those celebrations take? 
— How does Shakespeare become part of the processes of cultural contact and transfer (e.g. which plays were particularly popular during certain historical periods)?
The seminar convenors are experienced in the practical manifestations as well as the scholarly consideration of other ‘national’ poets in relation to Shakespeare, and invite papers which address one or more of the above questions.

S19.
The Rhetoric of Ecology and Racial Difference
on Page & in Performance

Organisers: Nora Galland, Anita Raychawdhuri

Description: In Shakespeare’s time understandings of the world were shifting dramatically, from extended navigation of oceans to new understandings of the cosmos, from travel to different lands to microscopic and atomic knowledge. Simultaneously, early modern England was aiming to define itself on the world stage. Resultantly, efforts to define and negotiate the limits of whiteness and explicate otherness were exploding. This seminar, grounded in premodern critical race studies, considers how concerns of ecology were often also about race. The seminar is open to different interpretations of “ecology,” from watery spaces, topography and mapping, cosmography, natural philosophy, vitalism, animal studies, botany, biology, or alchemy. The seminar is attentive to the rhetoric of race and racialization as it appears in discourses of the environment. When describing, mapping, cultivating, or naming the natural world, how and when were ideas of race entangled and how was language developed or shifted to accommodate such ideas?
From the Old French ‘estraction’ meaning ‘origin’, ‘extraction’ refers to what is drawn out, taken out, pulled out, or removed from a fixed position. It therefore suggests motion, and mobility, change and adaptation, uprooting and belonging. Extraction becomes the metaphor to address how humans’ “use” of the environment and other humans, as well as understanding of one’s relationship to the environment and other people, are interlinked.
Throughout history, humans have been extracting natural resources to manufacture tools and various objects to improve their lifestyle. When European countries embarked on colonial projects, undergirded by imperialism, white supremacy, and enslavement, discourse on race expanded. The exploitation of natural resources echoes the exploitation of Indigenous Americans as well as the enslavement of Africans. By extracting and exhausting the natural resources of a colonized environment, or by extracting and shipping out enslaved people to the colonies in the Americas, Western Europeans have been extracting both nature and other humans. Thus, race and ecology became inextricably linked.
Such extractive dynamics are mirrored in Shakespeare. Take, for example, how Shakespeare evokes the iconography of our planet to describe Lucrece’s breasts as “ivory globes surrounded by blue” that will be “scaled” by Tarquin. Consider Macbeth’s attention to the weather and landscape amidst consistent use of anti-Black rhetoric to distinguish the Macbeths and the Weird Sisters from the other Scots. Another example is The Tempest’s portrayal of shipwreck, shore, and sea that seems related to the characters’ negotiation of belonging. 
— What does it mean to read ecology alongside consciousness of race in Shakespeare? 
— How were ideas of ecology and science in Shakespeare’s time undergirded by beliefs about race and racialization?
— Do descriptions of the landscape encode ideas about race, ethnicity, or the nation?
— How do racial hierarchies reflect ecological taxonomies?
— What sorts of rhetorical tools or figurative language were used to describe ecology and the natural world?
— Was this language reflected in rhetoric describing or making meaning from race?
— In Shakespeare’s time, what were the politics and concerns about ecology?
— When and how were such concerns also about population, identity, and belonging?  

S20.
Shakespeare and the Luso-Hispanic Planet

Organisers: John Stone, Deanne Williams

Description: This seminar welcomes work exploring all aspects of Shakespeare and the Luso-Hispanic world, including a) the reading and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in Spain, Portugal, and the Luso-Hispanic world, b) Spanish, Portuguese, and Luso-Hispanic influences on the work and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, c) other forms of dialogue about Shakespeare and the performance of Shakespeare on the Iberian peninsula and in the broader Luso-Hispanic world, from the early modern period to the present day, d) Shakespeare’s role in the dialogue between English-speaking diasporas and Hispanic and Lusophone cultures in the territories where they settled.

S21.
Shakespeare and the Musical Planet

Organisers: Alina Bottez, Michelle Assay, David Fanning 

Description: In today’s cultural context that has moved beyond an East-versus-West model and towards a more pluralist valuation of intellectual/artistic models and legacies, every ‘universality’ is being questioned. Subjected to close scrutiny, Shakespeare has proved to have become planetary indeed, not only as an author whose works are performed and published all over the world, but also as collective, global patrimony that has permeated everything that surrounds us: pop culture, television, trade, industry, tourism, everyday language, and art. In this context, music and sound studies, both as responses to Shakespeare’s oeuvre and as applied to it, are a particularly useful gateway to the analysis of ‘global’ Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s own references to music hint at the duality of the universal (the harmony of the spheres) and the local (references to the music of the time, such as the first literary mention of the ballad “Greensleeves” in The Merry Wives of Windsor). This duality is even more marked when it comes to Shakespeare’s afterlife in music, where references to his works and words transcend boundaries, be they geographical, cultural or temporal. The incidental music written for specific Shakespearean productions has infused them with the local colour of the composer’s respective country, e.g. Sullivan in the UK (The Merry Wives of Windsor), Mendelssohn in Germany (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Ion Dumitrescu in Romania (Macbeth with Masks), Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko in Ukraine (Hamlet – Dramma per Musica), or Subhadeep Guha in India (Macbeth Mirror).
Musical adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare have also defied generic and stylistic boundaries, finding their way into the symphonic repertoire, opera, operetta, musical, vaudeville, song (art, jazz, popular/rock and protest), and even game music, contributing to the multi- and trans-cultural phenomenon of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin) or ‘transmediation’ (Charles Suhor).
This seminar considers the multi-faceted field of ‘Shakespeare and Music’ in tandem with such polarities as ‘global vs local’ and ‘art vs popular,’ continuing and complementing the lines of research and discussion of the “Shakespeare and Music” seminars and panels organised within World Shakespeare Congresses and ESRA conferences since 2016. For our 2026 seminar, “Shakespeare and the Musical Planet,” we welcome cross- and interdisciplinary approaches and invite papers on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:
— The music in Shakespeare’s plays as performed in English-speaking countries and its equivalents in non-English productions around the globe;
— The musicality of Shakespeare’s verse in English or translations;
— International Shakespeare-inspired film/incidental/dance music;
— Shakespeare and international songs (art, pop, protest);
— Shakespeare and international opera;
— Nationalism in Shakespeare-inspired music;
— Shakespeare and music in Sci-fi and games;
— Shakespeare and music at times of conflict and war around the world;
— Shakespearean remediations/transmediations in music;
— Shakespeare and world folklore;
— Planetary and cosmic references in Shakespeare-inspired libretti and lyrics;
— Shakespeare-inspired music as subversive instrument of resistance against totalitarian regimes;
— The role of translation in Shakespeare’s afterlife in music;
— The planetary publication of Shakespeare-inspired music scores.

S22.
Shakespeare and the New Psychoanalysis

Organisers: Catherine Bates, James W. Stone

Description: Networks. Global Shakespeare. Planetary Shakespeare. And psychoanalysis, whose spread around the world is encompassing but uneven, un-universal; whose influence has seen many ups and downs since Freud made the case for Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex in 1900. Our proposal for the World Shakespeare Congress in Verona is to create a vibrant and diverse dialogue with all forms of psychoanalysis and its critics in order to interrogate Shakespeare’s treatment of sex and gender, race, social customs, history, trauma, and the construction and dissolution of the self. Ecocriticism, adaptation studies and presentism (including fans on social networks), and colonization and its aftermath will be on the analytical table. Global contexts and planetary networks may contest the provincialism and Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis both in its classical and neo-classical forms (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, et. al.) and in the manifold critiques that these have had to face in subsequent decades.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, psychoanalytic and other depth-oriented therapies became less popular in the clinic than cognitive and behavioral approaches. During this same period, by contrast, in literature departments psychoanalytic methodologies continued to be productively explored, though they encountered significant resistance from the New Historicism. The turn into the twenty-first century and its first two decades saw psychoanalytic models of reading become less visible in Shakespeare studies (and in literary studies in general) as many scholars began drawing from neuroscience, the study of affect, and other fields in the cognitive sciences. During this period historical and political approaches to Shakespeare continued to push successfully against psychoanalytic readings of the poems and plays. (Most historicists regarded psychoanalytic literary criticism as ahistorical and too formalistic.) The pincer antipathies of cognitive psychology and historicism made it hard for psychoanalysis to flourish.
This anti-psychoanalytic trend in twenty-first century Shakespeare studies is changing, now, significantly. In 2023 James Newlin and James W. Stone published an edited collection of essays, New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains (Routledge). This was the first anthology dedicated to psychoanalytic approaches to early modern literature to appear in over two decades. James W. Stone and Catherine Bates are under contract with Palgrave Macmillan to publish in 2025 an edited collection of essays, New Developments in Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis. Both of these collections demonstrate that psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is returning to the centrality it had in the last two decades of the twentieth century, when Lacanian and feminist approaches confronted each other at fever pitch, in a battle royal of myriad publications.
Some Questions for Our Seminarians:
— How did Shakespeare influence psychoanalysis and how have psychoanalytic methodologies impacted our understanding of Shakespeare’s works?
— In what ways have the turns and counterturns of new literary criticisms in the current century challenged and changed our understanding of Shakespeare and psychoanalysis?
— To what degree can or must psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare accommodate cognitive sciences, historicism, and political and ecocritical analysis?
— How does the psychoanalytic critique of Shakespeare meet the challenges posed when it is interpellated by gender studies, feminism and the exigencies of LBGTQ+?
— What are the parameters and potentials, across the globe, for Shakespeare and psychoanalysis in the future?

S23.
Shakespeare in the Cloud(s)  

Organisers: Maria Elisa Montironi, Reto Winckler

Description: This seminar invites papers that reflect on the temporal, spatial and political identities of digital Shakespeares at home in “the cloud.” Digital Shakespeare performances, adaptations, appropriations, AI-revivifications and memes exist in a curious space between pan- and non-locality, while temporally hovering between past, present and future. They invite, like “the cloud” itself, associations of a lofty remove from earthly affairs and the constraints of time and space. Yet, like Antony’s ‘dragonish’ cloud, the digital cloud does ‘mock our eyes with air’ (Antony and Cleopatra, IV.15.2). As Kate Crawford has powerfully shown, the apparently disembodied digital sphere of the internet and AI systems depends for its existence on ‘the twin moves of abstraction and extraction’ (2021, The Atlas of AI, p. 18): the abstraction necessary to turn reality into computable data, and the extraction, at enormous human and environmental cost, of the material resources and cheap labour involved in producing the gigantic amounts of energy and data sets consumed by server farms and data centers.
We suggest that something similar is at work in the production of Shakespeare in the cloud(s). Shakespeare’s works themselves, as commonly encountered, shared and adapted online, are an editorial abstraction from a much more complex material reality of often messy and ambiguous original texts that do not lend themselves well to being read as the singular product of an individual English genius who somehow captured humanity’s essence in his creations. Yet it is precisely that abstraction which continues to motivate the release of enormous amounts of creative energy around the globe, while also consuming, via its use of generative AI and the internet, the actual energy expended on conjuring digital Shakespeares out of and into ‘the cloud’.
Shakespeare in the cloud(s) therefore forms a fortuitous site of overlap that invites scholars to both explore and challenge assumptions in the three chief areas of concern of this conference. It forms a ‘Shakespeare galaxy’ that, through the digital sphere’s unique interactive possibilities across material and ideological borders, provides a space for creative expression and community in which diverse people can connect to face earth’s ecological crises together – potentially providing a space for a positive kind of universality arising from an exchange of differences. At the same time, it exacerbates the same ecological crises through its participation in the logic and practice of capitalist acceleration and exploitation, linking Shakespeare in the cloud(s) to older colonially tainted universality claims. Shakespeare as current global icon of timeless universality is created through countless locally and temporally specific acts of adaptation and performance. Yet “the cloud” in which digital Shakespeares have their home tends to mask and obscures the locality of their creation, perpetuating the myth of a Shakespeare transcending the material reality of his place and time and ushering in an endless loop for which Shakespeare in the cloud(s) constitutes, perhaps, the event horizon. We invite the participants of this seminar to wrestle with these and related contradictions through concrete examples of Shakespeare in the cloud(s).
Along with other possible questions related to these issues, contributors might engage with the following:
— How do digital Shakespeares challenge established ideas of temporality and spaciality in practices of editing, archiving, performing, teaching, and adapting?
— What are the meanings acquired by “local” and “global” when it comes to Shakespeare in the cloud(s)?
— How do digital and AI-driven adaptive practices challenge or confirm Shakespeare’s status as global icon of human universality?
— Where do AI-created Shakespeare adaptations fall on the spectrum from local to global? Does it matter?
— What are the political implications of Shakespeare in the cloud(s)?

S24.
Shakespeare in the Global Musical Opera:
From Stage to Sound 

Organisers: Elena Biggi Parodi, Adriana De Feo, Elena Abbado

Description: This seminar will explore the pivotal role of Shakespeare in shaping global opera traditions, focusing on how his works have inspired composers, librettists, and performers across different cultures and historical periods. Participants will investigate a wide range of musical adaptations, from operas to ballets and contemporary compositions, examining how Shakespeare’s themes and characters resonate in diverse musical languages. The seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, musicians, and artists, encouraging new insights into the enduring influence of Shakespeare on world music and its role in the ongoing reinterpretation of his legacy.

S25.
Shakespeare, Spirituality, and Universal Spaces for Encounter

Organisers: Marta Cerezo, Marguerite Tassi

Description: In Shakespeare’s oeuvre, different religious faiths and denominations—whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist—have found in the past, and still do in the present, common ground to explore, from various perspectives, human concerns about existence, ethics, and interpersonal relationships. In other words, the works of Shakespeare amount to a universal creed which over the centuries has played an essential role in bridging and paring down critical, religious, social, and cultural differences and creating spaces for encounter. Shakespeare’s religious afterlives are the responses to that creed on the part of an ecumenical, transnational and transhistorical community of readers and performers of various religious affiliations. In this seminar, we would like to reflect on unexplored religious and spiritual readings of Shakespeare which address and rethink the following issues: (1) Shakespeare’s texts as “universal” in the sense that they hold space for many voices, for difference, and evoke communion and social cohesion, rather than supremacy; (2) “spaces of encounter” which take shape in Shakespeare’s texts themselves, but which also exist outside them, such as religious, civic, cultural, natural and even digital locations where Shakespeare takes center stage as evocation of a spirituality and ethics whose main values point to social reconciliation and fight against polarization and division. We, therefore, ask for contributions that deal with (1) the analysis of Shakespeare’s texts that evoke spiritual and ethical spaces for social reconciliation and tolerance; (2) “universal” religious and spiritual readings of Shakespeare that take place in theaters, churches, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and any other cultural civic, natural or online “spaces for encounter” where the secular and the religious join hands and where spirituality turns into a driving force of social reconstitution. In this seminar we want to strengthen the connection between spirituality and social welfare. We will consider that religious and spiritual readings of Shakespeare, of various orientations, can counteract affliction and conflict in ages which, like ours, have undergone intellectual, spiritual, social, and humanitarian crises. It is in this sense that we consider Shakespeare to be a universal artist. During our discussions we hope to answer questions such as: (1) what are the global interconnections resulting from Shakespeare’s various religious afterlives?; (2) can different spiritual readings of Shakespeare provide a universal blueprint for social healing?; (3); how might Shakespeare’s religious readings offer an ethical and universal value in our globalised environment? We hope to find some answers to these questions or, at least, reflect on them and turn our seminar into an effective Shakespearean “space for encounter”. 

S26.
Shakespeare’s Sonic Galaxies and Constellations
of Emotional Response

Organisers: Jennifer Linhart Wood, Maddalena Pennacchia

Description: This seminar is interested in the wide range of sounds in, and prompted by, the Shakespearean multiverse: music, sound-effects, soundscapes, and later musical adaptations such as operatic works, songs, and popular music. Taking such a wide range of sonic phenomena as its starting point, this seminar will investigate the myriad ways in which sound was employed in Shakespeare’s theater and what affective or emotional responses it may have generated in its audiences.
Shakespeare’s music alone ranges from the galactic “music of the spheres” (performed in Pericles and discussed in Merchant of Venice) to the sacred (as is the performance of angels’ music before Queen Katharine’s death in Henry VIII) to the profane (the music performed by the Witches in Macbeth) to the quotidian (as with the drinking songs in Othello, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra) to art songs (like the music in The Tempest). This expansive variety of different kinds of music was intended to create theatrical atmosphere and evoke emotive audience responses, oftentimes directed by other characters onstage—which we hope to examine acutely in this seminar.
Similarly, the range of sound effects in Shakespeare’s plays consist of bells, clock chimes, thunder, lightning, sounds of war, birdsong, flourishes, and even “confused noises,” all of which were also intended to incite audience responses. Renaissance writers, including Thomas Wright, Franics Bacon, Thomas Dekker, and Richard Braithwaite all posit the capacity sound has to touch a deep interiority in humans, reaching to “the centre of the heart” as Braithwaite describes. Given the early modern understanding of sound as intensely provocative of emotional response, we seek to explore the constellation of emotional responses to the music and sounds of Shakespeare’s plays—responses of both characters and audience members alike.
The seminar addresses (new) historically oriented textual issues as well as the exploration of contemporary audience emotional response to the synergy of sound, music, and language in performance. Questions this seminar will address include:
— How are sounds imagined on Shakespeare’s stage and what is the relationship between page and stage (i.e., stage directions and performance practices)?
— Were sounds and music effective tools in producing audience reactions and what evidence might there be for this?
— What makes the function of sounds and music on the stage profound in a way that sight or other sensory experience might not be?
— What do modern musical adaptations, such as opera or musical theater, with their additional music compared to Shakespeare’s works, have to offer through their extra-musicality?
— Can sound and music in Shakespearean performance particularly stimulate both a reflection about significant emotional issues for teen-agers and the creation of new educational models for the personal and collective expression of their emotions?

S27.
Shakespeare’s Tragedies and their Twenty-First-Century Reverberations

Organisers: Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, Edel Semple

Description: In the galaxy of the Shakespearean canon, the tragedies exist as the celestial body with the strongest gravitational pull, into whose orbit countless other entities are perpetually drawn. Arguably, the pull of Shakespearean tragedy lies in how it ‘helps us make sense of how we interact with one another’ by working through the loss of social bonds and comforting absolutes, ‘with only the interactions themselves as sources of intelligibility and meaning’ (Kottman, 2018). This perceived property of sense-making causes the tragedies to persistently reverberate in twenty-first-century art and culture, far beyond direct adaptations. This reverberation resounds in cultural objects whose relationship to Shakespeare is indirect, fleeting or subconscious, and often not explicitly stated, in what have been described variously as ‘Shakespeare aftershocks’ (Conkie, 2009), ‘Shakespearean echoes’ (Hansen and Wetmore, 2015), ‘textual ghosts and hauntings’ by (Sanders, 2016), or ‘uncanny fidelity’ to, Shakespeare (Newlin, 2024).
The new millennium has seen an outpouring of creative retellings and echoes of Shakespeare’s tragedies, each prompting debate, speculation, and enquiry on the processes of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation, and the nature and value of Shakespeare’s legacy. Venturing beyond the safely-charted territory of traditional stage and screen performances, this seminar will explore the less familiar constellation of reverberations of the tragedies across a range of media.
Seminar papers should consider how Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, villains, narratives, tropes, themes, and sensibilities haunt, echo in, or inspire contemporary cultural objects. Such diverse objects caught in the orbit of Shakespearean tragedy include, but are not limited to: novels, e.g. Capin’s Foul is Fair (2020), Gong’s Immortal Longings (2023), St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014); films, e.g. O (dir. Nelson, 2001), Ophelia (dir. McCarthy, 2018); musicals, e.g. Something Rotten! (2015), & Juliet (2019); plays e.g. Ijames’s Fat Ham (2021), Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia (2018); advertising campaigns e.g. Red Bull’s Shakespeare Stymied (2010), Amazon’s Black Friday Romeo & Juliet TV spot (2022); discursive engagements with contemporary narratives, e.g. Romeo and Juliet in season two of Netflix’s Sex Education (2019-present), or #ModernShakespeare interpretations on TikTok; and objects where the tragedies reverberate with no explicit Shakespearean connection, e.g. AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013), or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008-present).
Questions the seminar will explore include:
— What is the value of tracing reverberations of Shakespeare’s tragic narratives and characters in twenty-first-century cultural objects?
— To what extent are the reverberations of Shakespeare’s tragedies informed by sociopolitical concerns, such as the #MeToo movement, racial inequality, global displacement, and the environmental crisis?
— How do reverberations of the tragedies reposition the ownership of the Shakespearean canon and those who get to contribute to Shakespeare’s cultural capital?
— In what ways do contemporary artists critique, resist, or talk back to Shakespeare through his tragic narratives and characters?
— Returning to Kottman’s idea that Shakespearean tragedy ‘helps us make sense of how we interact with one another’, how might reverberations, whether conscious or unconscious, galvanise shifts away from outdated, imbalanced power structures, and towards greater empathy and equality for historically marginalised communities?

S28.
The Skirts of the Forest:
Re-placing Arden

Organisers: Tom Bishop, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, William N. West 

Description: “Well,” begins Rosalind, walking onstage and initiating the great conjuration of As You Like It, “this is the Forest of Arden.”  Commentators have long observed that Rosalind’s assertion gestures towards many plausible spaces—the Warwickshire forest of Arden beside Stratford-upon-Avon and the affective ambit compassed by Shakespeare’s mother’s maiden name; the Ardennes (Arduenna silva) of France, near where the kings of France were crowned and a Catholic seminary trained English priests (and later compiled a manuscript that included As You Like It); and the great mysterious forest of the “matter of France” romances, where Merlin and Orlando and Bayard the magical horse were all to be found.  As she calls on playgoers in the newly-framed Globe to place an artificial forest of Arden in the actual recycled wood that encircles them, Rosalind invites them to consider the future of forests and their place in the rapidly changing ecosystems of all the world and the stage.  Perhaps above all Rosalind’s gesture exemplifies the power of performance in the tradition of playing to which Shakespeare contributed to call forth a space and all its connotations on a bare stage, to find, or make, a world elsewhere.  The Forest of Arden may be Shakespeare’s most evocative and multifarious locale, so famous and ramifying that any number of towns, parks, gardens, suburbs, tree-lined streets, hotels, shopping centres and retirement villages world-wide are named after it, including even a mountain in Antarctica. One thing Arden’s many offshoots have in common is that they present a magic-seeming elsewhere—a place to escape to, or to come back from, neither home nor away, and perhaps also a place to long for. This seminar invites participants to revisit Shakespeare’s Arden and to relate what they find there.
— What kind of place is Arden/ are Ardens, and what kinds of place does it become in other contexts?
— What kinds of action does Arden allow, among actors, audiences, or others?
— What kinds does it check or reform?
— How might we extrapolate from there to discuss the sorts of places, literal and figurative, real and fictional, hither and yon, that have been made of it in the centuries since As You Like It brought us into it?
— What other commonalities might they have?
— What sorts of calculated differences or distances from Shakespeare’s Arden, or Ardens, or each other?
— How do these Ardens beside Shakespeare’s Arden reflect or reflect on the Arden that Rosalind first evokes in As You Like It? Are they all pastoral (and if they are, what is pastoral)? Are they geographical? Educational? Virtual? Environmental?
— Do they do the same work, or afford the same respite, that Arden did—and what kinds of work, or relief from work, is that?
— What kinds of Ardens have been realized by a now-global history of performances (in stage, film and story) of the play, or of works based on, derived from, or in touch with it?
— Can one still seek Arden, or has it become an impossible destination?

S29.
Sport on Stage:
Playing across Difference

Organisers: Jade Standing, Jonathan Koch 

Description: Early modern sports treatises offer three main reasons why it is important to practice and play sport: 1) to protect the health of the mind and the body 2) to improve judgement 3) to foster fortitude. Whether the sport is fencing or football, ballooning or archery, the list of benefits remains remarkably consistent. Yet sport offered more than personal development opportunities. As evidenced by the sports integrated in plays, from the wrestling in As You Like It to the chess match between Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, sport provided men and women with opportunities to meet, practice, and play across individual difference. Sports events and training spaces constructed micro-communities that operated as a sort of temporary collective conscience, opening the possibility for differences in identity to be subsumed, tolerated, amplified, or redefined by sporting play.  
Our seminar invites participants to think about the kinds of players, venues, rules, occasions, and audiences involved in the playing of early modern sports and the relationship of these sports to playhouse plays. Within this larger comparative frame, the seminar asks after the construction, valuation, conflict, and compounding of different identities—religious, class, racial, gender, physical, and personal—within and among the media of playhouse drama and competitive sport. Recent scholarship has uncovered how such difference was staged by players and playwrights and negotiated by audiences (Akhimie, 2018; Gurnis, 2018; McManus, 2015; Preiss, 2014; Smith and Whipday, 2022), while others have explored early modern perceptions of sport and its connection to state politics (Semenza, 2003) and examined the overlaps between sports training and actor training (McCarthy, 2022). Our seminar combines and expands these discussions by approaching sports, theatre, and the world as interconnected systems. Together we will consider what new experiences and ideas of difference emerge when players and audiences dressed, addressed, and redressed their markers of identity in the sports that occurred on and near the stage. We invite participants to approach the concept of ‘sport’ capaciously. Sport might denote athletic games such as tennis, bowling, and fencing; physical pursuits including dancing, riding, and ropewalking; or other forms of organised competition like chess, cockfighting, and hunting. We also invite participants to connect sport to related research interests and methodologies like stagecraft, cultural materialism, performance studies, and the histories of science, religion, and ideas.  
Our discussion will be guided by the following questions: In which plays does sport address differences in identity? When do these moments relate to historical examples or anecdotes about sport? How do objects bend and extend identity within sports? What differences emerge between the performances of professional and amateur players? How much authority did playwrights have over sports on stage? What was the audience’s role in judging sporting competitions? How might non-organised competitions (e.g., playwright collaborations, inter-company rivalries) be read as examples of sport? What cultures of fandom emerged from sports on stage? By exploring such questions, ‘Playing Across Difference’ will reappraise and develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of the dramaturgical, social, and ontological role of sport in early modern England.

S30.
Storms, Tides, Floods:
Shakespeare and the Power of Climate

Organisers: Susanne Wofford, Christian Billing

Description: The powerful effect of storms, floods, high winds, and other climate events worldwide, emerging from and signaling climate change, brings flooding, shipwreck, refugees, and ecological disaster that is imminent in many parts of the world, especially with rising sea-levels. Using an eco-critical lens, this seminar will explore the ways in which environmental crises intersect in Shakespeare’s works with questions of genre; with geography and travel; with island studies; with mythology and Shakespeare’s debt to/inclusion of epic; with representations of environmental forces as figurations of the gods, among other things. Storms serve as key structures or devices of plot in many plays; they create refugees; they can offer a planetary perspective of the power of climate that allows for the representation of forces that completely overwhelm and control the human. 
But Shakespeare does not only evoke such extreme climate events for their destructive power. He employs storms, floods, and tempests as catalysts for profound shifts in characters‘ worldviews and relationships to nature, frequently eroding the perceived boundary between human and non-human realms, and this happens across genres. These moments of environmental upheaval in the plays create epistemic ruptures that can lead characters to reconceptualise their place in the cosmos–just as humans must do now if we are to answer to the current environmental emergency. Climate crisis as manifested in plays thus presents opportunities for change that characters can seize. To be “taken at the flood,” as the lines from Julius Caesar suggest, doesn’t present only threat but the power of being taken somewhere new, upon the flood, into action. Seminar participants will be invited to explore the many ways that extreme climate events in Shakespeare may provide moments of philosophical and theatrical opportunity for the characters and for us. 
Shakespeare often uses extreme climate events as a fulcrum, then, a tipping point, in which there is a shift in how human beings think of themselves in relation to the natural world. As we see in a play like King Lear, Shakespeare shows that the power, the force of climate, asks us to re-think the place of the human. These climatic events in the plays align with what Bruno Latour describes as environmental ‘matters of concern’ that blur the lines between nature and culture (or the non-human and human forms of nature). For Shakespeare’s characters, extreme weather becomes a hybrid phenomenon that is simultaneously natural and social, collapsing the distinction between human affairs and environmental forces. Michel Serres has argued that such moments of gestalt insight reveal our ineluctable embeddedness in nature. Shakespeare’s climatic events dramatically remind us of this connection and renew this reciprocity, forcing or enabling characters to recognise their vulnerability and dependence on the non-human world. 
The epistemic shifts triggered by Shakespeare’s climate events resonate also with Latour’s concept of the ‘Parliament of Things’ in which non-human entities gain agency and voice. In Shakespeare’s plays, storms and floods become active participants that speak with devastating eloquence, reshaping human understanding. We think participants may find environmental ethics, especially the works of Latour and Serres, a useful philosophical resource for our interpretations of Shakespeare. For Shakespeare’s use of climate events as structural and epistemic turning points anticipates contemporary discourse on the entanglement of human and non-human realms. These moments powerfully rupture anthropocentric worldviews and initiate new modes of ecological awareness, demonstrating the power of dramatic art to explore shifting ontologies in times of environmental crisis.  
We welcome papers on all aspects of Shakespeare’s representations of the power of climate, and comparative work that connects Shakespeare to other early modern drama and to performances.

S31.
Theorizing Global Shakespearemes

Organisers: David Nee, Jason Eng Hun Lee

Description: This seminar puts pressure on how we conceptualize “Global Shakespeare” at the level of the element or unit. Folklorists use the term “motifeme” to designate the smallest minimal unit of a folktale. Can we, like at least one prior critic (see Fineman 1986), find a use for the parallel term “Shakespeareme,” defined as the smallest minimal unit of Shakespearean text or performance? How might we repurpose this concept in the context of global Shakespeare? In our critical work to date, how, in practice, have we defined the smallest minimal units of global Shakespeare performance? What concepts do we use when breaking global Shakespeare down into its elements? Can we historicize those concepts? Rethink them, drawing on different theoretical resources? Are there, for instance, non-Western concepts of the elements of art or culture that have informed global Shakespeare, and that can give us fresh ways of looking at our objects?
By asking these questions, we engage important trends in global Shakespeare studies and literary, cultural, and performance studies more broadly. First, the effort to theorize the smallest minimal units of global Shakespeare speaks to growing interest in Shakespeare’s digital afterlives, whether they occur across theatrically (inter-)mediated performances (Sullivan 2022); born-digital or fan-created avatars that proliferate across web communities (Carson and Kirwan 2014; Holland 2009); or commercial “Shakespop” entities that redeploy his global cultural cache as consumable media (Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin 2018; Lanier 2002). A pressing question in this research area has been how to theorize Shakespearean “memes” as well as the uncanny returns of Shakespearean motifs in mass media forms like serial TV (Desmet et al. 2017; Bronfen 2020; Wald 2020). Second, we seek to spark conversations between global Shakespeare and recent efforts to rethink Shakespeare source study (Britton and Walter 2018; Drakakis 2021; Kerrigan 2018; Maguire and Smith 2015). From Shakespeare’s sources up to global Shakespeare, more attention to the concepts we use to isolate small narrative and dramatic elements can refine our accounts of how those elements circulate and recombine. Returning to the related concept of the “mytheme”—the smallest irreducible element of myth, deployed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the context of comparative mythology (1955)—we can more closely compare Shakespeare’s borrowings from prior texts with how global Shakespeare adaptations remix Shakespearemes with elements from local and global traditions (Burnett 2007; Cartelli 2019). Finally, we aim to address broader discussions regarding the role of scale in literary history and the digital humanities (English and Underwood 2016). How we conceptualize the units of literary analysis has major ramifications for how we conduct distant reading, the analysis of “persistent forms,” and the study of other longue durée literary phenomena (Kliger and Maslov 2016; Moretti 2013; Underwood 2019). We think studying the circulation of Shakespearemes at the planetary scale can contribute important insights to these larger discussions.

S32.
‘There is no world without Verona walls’:
Exile in Shakespeare, Now and Then 

Organisers: James M. Sutton, Stephanie E. Chamberlain, Jane Kingsley-Smith

Description: Set in “fair Verona,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is crowded with references to exile and banishment in addition to plague, poison, and death. When Romeo is unexpectedly banished from Verona for killing Tybalt, he tells Friar Laurence: “Be more merciful, say ‘death’, / For exile hath more terror in his look, / Much more than death” (3.3.12-14). Forced out of home to the uncertain welcome of strangers, under a capital sentence never to return, exile becomes worse than death, a pronounced loss of place, with identity, home, family, love, and all that is familiar stripped away.  
Romeo and Juliet is but one of many of Shakespeare’s plays, among many other literary texts, that reflect upon the torturous plight of exiles in their new lands. If the exile ceaselessly looks backward to an unrecoverable home, as Edward W. Said has argued, do exilic texts become fertile ground, or sterile promontories, in the search for signs of hospitality offered the geo-culturally dispossessed? Can Shakespeare bridge the gap between diverse cultures, speaking to the travails of those forced from their native borders? We invite papers that will examine representations of the exile in Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare’s other plays as well as their reception in world-wide adaptations and contemporary exilic performances. We also welcome papers that explore exile in the works of Italian writers such as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto, Francis of Assisi, Tasso, Pirandello, or Primo Levi, especially in connection with Shakespeare. Finally, as we look for papers theorizing exile and related categories, we hope that our seminar might forge new ground as we discuss the nature of uprootedness and banishment in Shakespearean literature and performance.  
To that end, our seminar invites a wide range of essays, both historicist and presentist, treating the page, stage, film and more—all tied together in a common effort to explore exile in Shakespeare and other exilic texts, especially Italian works. Topics might include a close study of exile within Romeo and Juliet or in other Shakespearean or early modern plays; the significance of space in the representation of exile; early modern practices conducive to exile and their representation within the plays; stage histories of a particular play focused on the treatment of exile within specific productions; studies of performances where the issue of exile was foregrounded; and examinations of “global Shakespearean appropriation” employed as a prism wherein we might apprehend exile in its contemporary and particular manifestations. Also, given the preponderance of plague, poison, and death in Romeo and Juliet, essays might also address crises of environmental and medical degradation, and their ties to exile.

S.33
Vindicta mihi!
The Performance of Revenge from Classical and Italian Drama to Shakespeare

Organisers: Michele Marrapodi, Graham Holderness

Description: This seminar proposes a critical journey of the idea and performance of revenge from the earlier pagan uses in Classical and Senecan tragedies to the various Italian Renaissance forms and practices imbued with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation until Shakespeare’s Hamlet and beyond, extending where appropriate to the modern world where revenge remains a primary driver of human conflict and social tragedy across the planet. 
Most Greek and Roman tragedies have placed the revenge system of theatregrams (Clubb, 1989) at the core of their tragic pathos and the hero’s scelus the primary cause of his fall. Variations in the performance of the avenger’s role and the related consequences of his actions, whether or not aroused by the unexpected violence of a real wrong suffered, are rife in Seneca’s output and, also through the mediation of Boccaccio’s cruelly vengeful novelle (Marrapodi, 1988), produced a strong impact on the multifaceted responses of the Italian Humanists. Giraldi Cinthio’s “ideology of horror” in his tragedia nova, Orbecche (1541), and his subsequent experiments with tragedia a fin lieto, inspired by Counter-Reformation beliefs, theorized other forms of ruthless violence and vengeance, associating them to a cathartic representation of scelus for didactic reasons (Ariani, 1974). This changing attitude spills over the influences and variations in early modern English theatre, where the revenge-trope is also carried out as a retribution for political intrigue and social corruption. The most significant examples range from Elizabethan to Jacobean drama, from the Seneca-based prototype of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1590) and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (ca. 1591) to Tourneur’s (or Middleton’s) The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), from Webster’s Italianate tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (1612 and 1613), to Middleton and Rowley’s sexually driven The Changeling (1622), Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1623), and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1626), but the revenge genre has brought about its most innovative effects, in terms of dramatic structure and the hero’s characterization, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) (R.M. Frye, 1984). 
Why and in what manner has Hamlet affected the subsequent production and dramatic characterisations of Jacobean revenge tragedy? Was that influence exercised on contemporary drama with the same moral and ethical effects as it has produced in our post-modern era? What are the real issues and moral scruples in both private and public (or political) spheres that are still disputable in our conscience and post-human philosophy today? 
Papers are invited to question this wide topic with an open-ended strategy and a variety of approaches, either through a moral-historical perspective or through a presentist method mediating towards today’s existential predicament, by singling out and evaluating the striking contrasts and controversies in early modern English drama prior to and after Hamlet. We welcome studies that draw on (for example) the treatment of revenge in psychology (Danziger, 2021), theology (Schimmel, 2002), politics (Haiven, 2020), war and conflict studies (Christensen, 2016), or engage with discourses that mine classical myths around revenge, such as the environmentalist idea that climate change is the earth’s ‘revenge’ on humanity (Lovelock, 2007). 
Proposed papers might address, although are by no means limited to:
– The changing ethics of revenge drama from antiquity to post-modern era; 
– The debate on revenge in Elizabethan moral, religious, and philosophical treatises, including debates on free will and determinism in cosmology, problematised by the pervasive imitation of classical tragic examplars; 
– The representation of fierce violence and retribution in the period’s emblematic literature; 
– The performance of revenge and the avenger’s role in Anglo-Italian Senecan tradition and its derivations in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; 
– The different treatments of revenge in Shakespeare’s canon;  
– The multifaceted theatricality of revenge in Elizabethan, Shakespearean, and Jacobean theatre; 
– The significant swerve of Hamlet and the play’s pivotal role in the subsequent developments of revenge tragedy; 
– The experience of the past in both private and public forms of vengeance and retaliation in early modern literature in light of the actual religious and political situations of a globalized culture. 

S.34
Without Words:
Dance Adaptations of Shakespeare 

Organisers: Lynsey McCulloch, Emily Winerock  

Description: “Shakespeare and Dance” is having a moment. Alan Brissenden’s seminal Shakespeare and the Dance (1981) now sits alongside a plethora of publications on the topic. This seminar invites scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship of dance, language, and meaning in Shakespearean performance, with special attention paid to dance-centred productions and dance adaptations across the globe. From Kathakali to hip hop, tango to ballet, opera to musical theatre, danced Shakespeare asks questions about authorship, authenticity, identity, and the relationship between text and movement. Researchers working in this area alongside “dance curious” theatre practitioners, musicologists, and literary scholars are warmly welcomed. 

S.35
World, Fate, Time, and Space in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 

Organisers: Avraham Oz, Jyotsna G Singh, Camilla Caporicci

Description: The lack of narrative in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence (with the exception of the two last “Cupid sonnets“), the self-containment of which, although typical of similar sixteenth– and early-seventeenth-century sonnet sequences, distinguishes it from Shakespeare’s plays or the narrative poems, may make for a wider focus of the texts on abstract notions and pointed views of “planetary” and universal themes, devoid of necessarily restrictive dependence on local or biographical material. Thus, our wide scoped seminar seeks to invite fresh contributions on the various perspectives the sonnets may throw on themes from the “injurious distance” of space and spatial practices, the tyranny of “never resting time”, “the spite of fortune” and “everything that grow,” or the earth devouring “her own sweet brood“, and the “slow elements,” to passion, love, desire, and humanism. Our planet is challenged nowadays by complicated, often violent and volatile crises of practice and thought, which, among other responses, call for a revision in our reading of Early Modern texts and Shakespeare in general, and the sonnets in particular. These fresh readings may involve political, performative, or psychological issues, and range from re-interpreting individual sonnets to translating, performing or relating the entire sonnet sequence to current developments in aesthetic thought or confront or encounter it with other literary genres or other forms of arts.