P01. Hamlet in Taiwan and South Korea: Posthuman and Biopolitical Encounters

Organisers: Jaecheol Kim, Yehrim Han, Yilin Chen 

Description: This session is one of the two joint sessions proposed for WSC by the “Taiwan Shakespeare Association” (TSA) and the “Shakespeare Association of Korea” (SAK). This session aims to contribute to WSC’s “Planetary Shakespeares” project by discussing how Hamlet is studied in East Asia, especially in South Korea and Taiwan. In particular, this session pushes Shakespeare’s posthuman and biopolitical thoughts illustrated in Hamlet to their extreme. This panel explores, for instance, how AI technologies have changed the idea of theatre, how a peculiarly East Asian Buddhist philosophy can negotiate Hamlet’s internal conflicts in a posthuman view, and how Hamlet addresses (and even foreshadows) the post-pandemic existence of humanity. To be more specific, Prof. Yehrim Han’s talk, “In this distracted globe,” explores the way the new theatre platforms, such as NT Live and NT at Home, have changed the epistemology of theatre, by making an amusing and scintillating analogy between Hamlet’s ghost and AI hallucinations. Buddhist philosophy is an East Asian thought that developed posthuman philosophy for millennia before its advent. Prof. Yilin Chen argues that Buddhist thought offers successful alternatives and answers to Hamlet’s inner turmoil, pain, and anxiety from uncertainty. This Shakespearean encounter with Eastern religion sparks Hamlet’s deeper, posthuman reflection on the nature of existence and his consciousness. Finally, Prof. Jaecheol Kim’s presentation on Hamlet in a biopolitical framework explores a post-pandemic thought foreshadowed in Shakespeare, exploring Hamlet’s understanding of social immunity. By exploring the semantic feature of the word “inoculation” in the play that in fact first appears in English documents, Kim’s study explores how Hamlet’s pandemic thoughts emphasize the ethics of symbiosis. Collaborating on the two sessions was certainly an invaluable experience and pleasure for both TSA and SAK. After much talk and discussion, now we are fully sure we are friends in the same planet, connected by Shakespeare studies. 

Yehrim Han, Korea National Open University 

“In this distracted globe”: Epistemological Crisis and the Theatre in the Age of AI

This study surveys the affinity between Hamlet’s ghost and AI hallucinations, arguing that both epitomize distinct yet relevant epistemological anxieties. The ghost represents the Reformation crisis over the authenticity of human perception, provoking Hamlet’s “distracted globe” to question reality, representation, and truth. If Hamlet reacts to the Reformation crisis with a theatre, which proves its transformative power, my study inquires how new theatre functions in a world increasingly influenced by digital and AI technologies. By examining evolutions of Shakespeare adaptations via new theatre platforms such as NT Live and NT at Home, I hope to explore how theatre struggles to deal with issues of representation by redefining “liveness” to address new epistemological challenges. 

Yilin Chen, Providence University

Hamlet Meets the Buddha: From “To Be or Not to Be” to “Being.” 

This study proposes that Hamlet’s soliloquy serves as a meditation on consciousness, applying Buddhist teachings to his search for self, and the concept of “being” from mindfulness practice. Shakespeare invites audiences to confront profound human anxieties, illustrating how the mind grapples with complex existential dilemmas. As Hamlet contemplates “to be” (to live) or “not to be” (to die), he explores the essence of authentic existence, questioning what it means to live when life is filled with suffering and doubt. Trapped in his mind, Hamlet’s struggle reflects the Buddhist concept of suffering caused by attachment and uncertainty. 

Jaecheol Kim, Yonsei University 

A Biopolitical Hamlet and A Post-Pandemic Thought 

This study surveys Shakespeare’s biopolitical philosophy by surveying the semantic radius of “inoculat[ion]” in Hamlet. After the eighteenth century, inoculation signifies creating an artificial immunity by injecting a pathogenic entity taken from an external body through a small cut. This biomedical procedure was called inoculation because it was like grafting—mixing two different bodies with a horticultural metaphor. By using “inoculat[ion]” as a key concept, Hamlet explores the immune politics by exploring ideas such as corpus politicum, sovereignty, social contract and most importantly a symbiotic community. 

P02. Comedians Sans Frontieres: Theatre Beyond Borders in Early Modern Europe.

Organisers: Laurie Johnson, Elizabeth E. Tavares 

Description: Studies of Shakespeare and English theatre history have long had a tendency to reinforce national delineations of one dramatic heritage from any others. Yet as Johan Huizinga pointed out in Homo Ludens (1938), Western Civilization and its various formations such as cultures or nations are “sub specie ludi,” that is, they come after play (173). Accordingly, playing in its various forms represents a pre-cultural field of exchange. Within recent studies of London playhouse culture, the idea that “a play” was a self-contained unit of dramatic entertainment has begun to erode. From puppetry to acrobatics, fencing to flyting, the leisure marketplace of early modern England comprised a wide range of options beyond drama. The overlap of playhouses with animal baiting arenas has long been presupposed but we now acknowledge that many other kinds of entertainments also competed and collaborated in these spaces. Playgoers could also take in penmanship and archery contests, watch stilt walkers and plate spinners, and participate in a game of chance or bowling. Dancing and rope-dancing performances by international troupes including women or trainers working alongside horses and baboons could be taken in for a small fee. These activities were sometimes embedded in plays through scenes of combat, gaming, or dancing, but were not contained by the expectations of stage drama.  
 
The traffic between plays and other performance practices illustrates an entertainment environment defined by exchange, multiplicity, and an unstable line between representational and presentational forms of theater. The same is true when extended well beyond the city walls of London. Performers and theatre-makers of all kinds routinely toured the countryside but then also crossed international borders, and may have even been traded as a sign of the Renaissance princely ideal. Considering the variety and complexity of early modern entertainment types and places provides an opportunity to reassess the concomitant, imbricated role of theatre within the wider leisure industry, particularly the ways in which itineracy facilitated modes of artistic engagement beyond mere “contact” between the cultures or communities of a single national polity.  
 
To examine a range of perspectives on play as a site of exchange and inter-play, this panel brings together scholars working across performance-based entertainment media—and themselves from different subject positions, career stages, and parts of the globe—to complicate the impact of different European performance traditions on the evolution of early English drama. By decentering drama as but one part of a complex ecosystem of victualling, hospitality, and leisure, as well as England as an implicit nexus of theatrical innovation, we hope to enliven a cross-disciplinary conversation exploring theatricality, entertainment, and the notion of “play”.  
 
Lines of inquiry raised in this panel include: 
• playing as a bridge between national contexts 
• itineracy and international touring, official and otherwise 
• collaboration between troupes from different national origins 
• travel and/as performance 
• varieties of play as modes of transgression 

Hana Ferencová, Palacký University Olomouc, CZE 

Borders and Confessions: English players in the Holy Roman Empire 

While in Renaissance England the theatre was a highly developed entertainment industry, in Germany, English acting companies were entering a field that, at the time, was still in its infancy. Consequently, the theatre was conveyed to them in a modified form, reflecting the different cultural, and religious contexts. The paper focuses on the travels of English players through the Holy Roman Empire from a confessional perspective ca. 1590s–1650s. The objective is to identify the strategies employed by English touring companies to overcome religious boundaries in the confessionally divided Germany and to discuss the audience’s perceptions of their performances. 

Laurie Johnson, University of Southern Queensland, AUS.

“Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?” — Playing as Englishmen and Strangers 

A sense of dislocation marks Hamlet’s greeting to the players who have come not just to Elsinore but to Denmark. These evidently border-hopping players provide a tangible connection to those members of Shakespeare’s own company who had travelled to Germany with the Earl of Leicester in 1586, were gifted to King Frederick of Denmark and then sent to serve the Elector of Saxony. This paper considers player identity when, within England, provincial touring companies were defined in law as “foreigners or strangers,” but when they crossed borders while travelling in Europe they did so as “English” players. 

Elizabeth E. Tavares, The University of Alabama, USA 

Moving Metaphors: Tumbling in and across Early Modern Europe  

Wending through a London bedecked, Mary I and Philip II were interrupted by a rope-dancer. With streamers ablaze, Peter the Dutchman sailed down from St. Paul’s weathervane with a series of risky somersaults to the surprise of the 1553 nuptial train. A “feat of activity” associated with women and international performers, tumbling was a feature of English Court, civic, and fair-going culture. This paper develops a history of tumbling in England as part of a Europe-wide re-interest in Olympic sports. Exploring the appeals of their dramaturgy affords a reconsideration of state-sponsored traveling theatre troupes across international borders and gendered boundaries. 

P03. Cosmopolitan Shakespeare 

Organisers: Robert Stagg, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Goran Stanivukovic

Description: This panel will think through scholarly descriptions of a ‘Global Shakespeare’, in part by wondering whether the adjective ‘global’ is the most apt for Shakespeare’s accomplishment. Might we think of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Shakespeare, or a ‘worldly’ Shakespeare, instead? Unusually, this panel will think about the ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘worldly’ aspects of Shakespeare’s style, from diction to rhetoric to verse form. How was Shakespeare’s style informed by the world beyond England? And how much was Shakespeare a (consciously) cosmopolitan or worldly writer? 

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchatel 

‘all of one communitie’: intertextual and lexical ‘cosmopolites’ 

This paper introduces early modern notions of the ‘cosmopolite’ and proposes an application to Shakespeare. It argues that intertextual and lexical practices by Shakespeare and others, notably John Florio, evince features of the ‘cosmopolite’: openness towards strangers and their cultures and an attendant tendency to cross normative and proprietorial boundaries. The hospitality towards the language(s) and writings of past and contemporary others exemplified in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Florio’s Montaigne puts into question the production of boundaries of authorial ownership and an authoritative native vernacular. By contrast Ben Jonson’s Volpone asserts these boundaries and exposes to critique the ‘would-be’ ‘cosmopolite’. 

Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University 

‘Global Style and the Mediterranean Tragedy’ 

This paper argues that stylistic and rhetorical properties in the tragedies of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Peele exhibit what Cicero describes as the ‘Asiatic’ way of writing: verbal redundancy and lack of concision. This paper will contend that the (re-)emergence of ‘Asiatic’ style in Marlowe’s plays was motivated by the politics of the eastern, and especially Ottoman, Mediterranean. It will explore how George Peele imitates a Marlovian ‘Asiatic’ style in The Battle of Alcazar, and then how ‘Asiatic’ style is critiqued for excess and ostentation in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra (while at the same time being a source of pleasure for readers and audiences). 

Robert Stagg, Texas A&M University 

Shakespeare’s Worldly Style 

This paper will wonder about the extra-European dimensions of Shakespeare’s style, from diction to meter to verse form. How might his sonnets have been inflected by the Arabic pre-history of sonnet form, and by contemporary Middle Eastern verse? How did the discussions of ‘Asiatic’ style in North’s Plutarch inform the ‘Egyptian’ style of Antony and Cleopatra? What could it mean for Rosalind to speak of ‘Ethiop words’ in As You Like It? Can we talk of Shakespeare’s ‘worldly’ style, in the double sense of it having been affected by the extra-European world and it having been conscious of, even cosmopolitan about, that world? 

P04. Ecophilia and Ecophobia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the Global South 

Organisers: Murat Öğütcü, Amrita Sen 

Description: The difference between ecophilia and ecophobia lies in the contrasting attitudes towards nature and the environment. Ecophilia refers to a deep love and appreciation for the natural world, leading to a desire to protect and preserve it. On the other hand, ecophobia is characterized by a fear or aversion towards nature, often stemming from a lack of understanding or negative experiences. By exploring the intersection of ecophilia, ecophobia, and literary adaptations of Hamlet from the Global South, we can gain a deeper understanding of how cultural perspectives shape our relationship with the environment. While Metin Erksan’s Kadın Hamlet showcases nature as a claustrophobic entity, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider focuses on the destruction of nature by the forces of capitalism and terror, and Varouzh Karim-Masihi’s Tardid illustrates how nature resists human-made corruption. Therefore, this panel will explore how Turkish, Iranian and Indian adaptations confront the eco-crisis. This panel will try to explore the following questions:  
 
1. How do the concepts of ecophilia and ecophobia manifest in contemporary film adaptations of Hamlet from the Global South? 
2. In what ways does Shakespeare’s work serve as a platform for exploring ecological themes in adaptations from the Global South? 
3. What role does nature play in shaping the characters’ identities in Metin Erksan’s Kadın Hamlet? 
4. How does the portrayal of Kashmir in the film Haider challenge traditional notions of paradise and reflect the intersection of ecological destruction and socio-political turmoil? 
5. How does nature affect the conceptualisation of human-made corruption in Tardid? 
6. How can adaptations of Hamlet from different cultural contexts provide insight into global ecological issues? 
7. What are the implications of the eco-crisis for the ways we interpret Shakespeare’s texts in modern adaptations? 
8. How does Shakespeare’s adaptability across cultures highlight the universality of human experiences concerning nature? 
9. What messages can be derived from the contrasting portrayals of nature in Kadın Hamlet, Haider and Tardid? 
10. In what ways do the ecological themes in these adaptations prompt discussions about community and care? 
11. How can the concept of ecophilia be seen in the actions of characters in these adaptations? 
12. What significance does the setting hold in shaping the narrative of the said adaptations, and how does it reflect the characters’ emotional states? 
13. How can the exploration of ecological themes in Shakespeare adaptations contribute to a broader understanding of the eco-crisis we face today? 
 
All in all, when we examine adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the Global South, conflicting and co-existing attitudes towards nature shed new light onto current studies on ecophilia and ecophobia. 

Murat Öğütcü, Adıyaman University, Türkiye 

Eco-claustrophobia in Erksan’s Kadın Hamlet 

In Metin Erksan’s Kadın Hamlet (1976), also known as Female Hamlet or the Angel of Vengeance, nature is portrayed as a phenomenon that entraps individuals rather than offering solace. The film explores how the characters are confined by their natural surroundings, highlighting the claustrophobic nature of the forest. This surreal adaptation intertwines themes of intergenerational power struggles and questions of action and inaction within the upper class of rural society. Metin Erksan’s Kadın Hamlet delves into the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, showcasing how individuals can disrupt the tranquillity of nature through their own conflicts and struggles. 

Amrita Sen, University of Calcutta, India 

Haider: Conflict and Ecological Crisis 

The film Haider (2014) directed by Vishal Bhardwaj adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is set against the backdrop of Kashmir, historically lauded as a paradise. While Kashmir was once celebrated for its natural beauty in literature and mainstream cinema, Bhardwaj’s portrayal starkly contrasts this idyllic image, revealing a landscape marred by terrorism and counter-insurgency. The film visually represents this transformation, showcasing once-romanticized locations now stained by violence and despair. The Jhelum river, once a symbol of beauty, is depicted as a site of horror. Through its narrative, Haider critiques the socio-political turmoil in Kashmir, illustrating how ecological destruction reflects broader themes of capitalism and terror. 

Parviz Partovi, Independent Scholar, Iran 

Nature and Corruption in Tardid 

In Doubt (Tardid, 2009), the director Varouzh Karim-Masihi reimagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet within a contemporary Iranian context, featuring a distinctively proactive Ophelia named Mahtab. The narrative follows Siavash, the Hamlet figure, grappling with his father’s mysterious suicide and haunted by his father’s ghost during a Baluchi Zar ritual. As Siavash struggles with inaction and doubt, Mahtab intervenes, challenging the traditional portrayal of women in early modern English and contemporary Persian cultures by taking charge of her destiny and motivating Siavash to confront his challenges. Throughout the film, nature communicates via natural elements such as wind, and thunder, the character Mahtab (which means the light of the moon), and Baluchi people dressed in white whose tribal life directly involves nature. Nature is an active character throughout the film, symbolising truth and resistance against corruption, with the story beginning and ending in natural settings reflecting the characters’ emotional turmoil and eventual quest for balance. 

P05. Fostering critical hope: creative engagements with Shakespeare in times of environmental and political crisis 

Organisers: Gretchen Minton, Kirsten Sandrock, and Sandy Young

Description: Contemporary cultural productions adapt, rewrite, and trouble Shakespeare for many reasons. This panel examines cultural productions that turn to Shakespeare as a tool to think through the intersections of environmental crisis, socio-political injustice, war, planetary dispossession, migration, and indigenous knowledges. We examine the interconnections between the “new” realities of environmental, material, and socio-political crisis in late modernity and the early modern concerns that emerge in Shakespeare’s works. We consider how contemporary literary and cultural productions set up a novel dialogue between Shakespeare and present-day audiences, enabling transhistorical perspectives on the present and the imagining of more just futures.  
The panel probes the impact of creative practice in bearing witness to the intertwined realities of environmental and political crisis. The works under focus include a range of genres (new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, innovative adaptations, documentary films, and contemporary fiction that invokes Shakespeare in some way) and a range of political contexts beset by environmental crisis, cultural conflict and political turbulence, including Ukraine and Palestine. Guided by the creative innovations of the works, we seek to explore the parallel stories of anthrocide and ecocide. In what ways might the early modern works offer themselves as a resource for answering questions about the urgent concerns of “late” modernity, as the impact of centuries of extractionist degradation and colonialist exploitation manifests in climate crisis and political turmoil? We consider what Shakespeare might contribute to discussions of environmental crisis, migration, planetary dispossession, climate change, and socio-cultural hierarchies. How do creative practitioners work with Shakespeare to invite audiences and readers to engage with disturbing histories, bear witness to unfolding crises in the present, and imagine together a more just and sustainable future?  
Taking our lead from playwright Madeline Sayet who cautions, “Shakespeare … has become weighed down by the baggage of its performance history, instead of the possibility of its performance future,” the panel thus explores how Shakespeare’s works serve not only as historical backdrop to contemporary crises but also as active interlocutors for questions about environmental justice and the ongoing processes of war, dispossession and injustice. Fostering critical hope through creative engagagements with Shakespeare in contemporary culture is one of the ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived of as “planetary” in the twenty-first century. 
 

Gretchen Minton, Montana State University, USA 

“Making our Ukraine bleed: Reflections on ecocide and reclamation in contemporary Shakespeare adaptations” 

Max Webster’s production of Henry V opened at the Donmar Warehouse shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Webster’s original aim to highlight the links between imperialism, masculinity, and ecocide inherent in Henry V thus gained urgency in the face of the war and its atrocities unfolding in real time. Reports listed not only massive human loss, but thousands of instances of ecosystem damage. Such a bleak picture of the loss of a country due to military destruction is evident in a documentary entitled King Lear: How we looked for love during the war, about a troupe of refugees who staged Lear in Uzhhorod, Ukraine and subsequently in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2024. As the director Viacheslav Yehorov repeatedly emphasized, “Although we are saddened by the events of this real-life tragedy, we have to live in hope, be strong and love.” This paper will look at the ways in which these contemporary adaptations offer parallel stories of anthrocide and ecocide, while also using Shakespeare to reclaim a more just future founded upon a stewardship of “this best garden of the world”. 

Kirsten Sandrock, University of Wuerzburg, Germany 

“Planetary Crises, Critical Hope: Shakespeare and Contemporary Dystopias” 

In an age of planetary crises, Shakespeare features surprisingly frequently as a vehicle to express hope in contemporary dystopias. Recent fiction repeatedly turns to Shakespeare as an interlocutor to negotiate different crises, including climate change, environmental disaster, pandemics, refugee experiences or socio-political hierarchies. This paper discusses how Shakespeare features in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), and Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023) to ask what kinds of dialogue the novels initiate between early and late modernity and how Shakespeare unites dystopian traditions with critical hope. Shakespeare functions not only as a bridge between past and present, but also as an interlocutor to negotiate the complex and frequently uneasy role literature and the arts play in our crisis-ridden culture. 

Sandra Young, University of Cape Town, South Africa 

“What the land remembers: contemporary encounters with Hamlet from a place of dispossession and outrage” 

Contemporary activist creatives continue to turn to Hamlet as a play with which to give expression to outrage and mourning in the wake of political violence. In a paper that reads Isabella Hammad’s novel, Enter Ghost (2023), alongside the documentary, The Village Under the Forest (dir. Heidi Grunebaum, 2013), I reflect on the way in which the novel invokes Shakespeare’s most widely travelled play as part of its work of witness. Inviting readers to imagine a bold staging in the West Bank, the novel draws Hamlet and his discontents into a contemporary Palestinian landscape, reminding readers as it does so that the landscape itself tells a story of dispossession and loss, and that the ecoviolence it is subjected to is intertwined with the dispossession of its people. The paper approaches the Palestinian landscape as a site of memory and forgetting, through an exploration of Hammad’s imaginative rendering of a Palestinian Hamlet and his struggles. 

P06. Grounding Shakespeare, Responding to Ecological Crisis: Land, Soil, and the Inappropriable 

Organisers: Daniel Vitkus, Liz Oakley-Brown,Carolyn Sale

Description: How do we marshal Shakespeare to make his work available as a resource for helping humanity address our current state of deepening ecological crisis worldwide? To think in terms of the “planetary” as scholars of Shakespeare is to think of how we might interrogate the various cultural legacies that have played a part in creating a global state of ecological crisis—not just for humanity but for non-human nature. At the same time, it is to engage the question “what can be done?” as we face the impending and rapidly escalating threats of the climate emergency. How does our work with Shakespeare assist with this? How might our readings of the Shakespearean drama and other early modern literature help us address the crisis? What sort of approaches and methods might enable new ecocritical readings of literary texts that illuminate the long struggle to shield the Earth from harm and build a shared sociality supportive of more just orientations toward both human and non-human natures? How can our work as teachers and scholars help to shape a governing ethos for humanity and specific practices and institutions that may drive responses adequate to the scale of humanity’s concatenating crises? 
 
This panel seeks to ground our understandings of Shakespeare in new or newly urgent ways by showcasing the Shakespearean drama’s orientation to land, soil, and an ethos of the inappropriable. How does the Shakespearean drama and other early modern literature represent and confront the material conditions and social developments in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime that have contributed to our contemporary global ecological crisis? How does this work diagnose the problems, and how does it orient us to prospective solutions? Where might historical ways of thinking or historical ideas orient us, urgently and positively, to present concerns? How might a consideration of “the commons” in tension with exploitative individuality and private property help us now as we confront neoliberal power and its ecocidal economy? 
 
The three talks engage with the important creative and critical opportunities that scholarship on Shakespeare brings to the urgent need for planetary responsibility and investigate some of the ideational obstacles, historic and current, that stand in the way of collective action to protect our planet. Daniel Vitkus will offer a paper about how Shakespeare’s purchase of land in Stratford-upon-Avon, his leasing of tithes, and his activity as a “grain badger” provide a window into the early history of the commodification of the land and the exploitation of labor that have culminated today in a world of agribusiness and food scarcity. Liz Oakley-Brown’s talk argues that Shakespeare studies (broadly defined) have a key role in the difficult task of “communicating the crucial importance of soils to the public” today. And Carolyn Sale’s talk on As You Like It will argue for the imperative of a new legal order of the inappropriable. In tandem, the panel’s papers activate a dialectical synthesis of early modern contexts and present crises in order to propose radical reorientations to life on our planet. 

Daniel Vitkus, University of California San Diego, USA 

Leasing the Land: Shakespeare, Property, Commodity 

With the wealth he accumulated as a sharer in the Globe Theater, Shakespeare purchased land in Stratford-upon-Avon, leased a right to collect local tithes there, and stockpiled large amounts of grain during times of scarcity. The archival record of these financial transactions provides a window into the early history of the commodification of the land and the exploitation of agrarian labor under early capitalism. The paper concludes by developing some fruitful connections between these transactions and the language used by Shakespeare to describe the land and the ways it was controlled and commodified by the landowning class that Shakespeare joined. 

Liz Oakley-Brown, Lancaster University, UK 

Shakespeare’s Soil and Marlowe’s Muck: Timon of Athens, All Ovid’s Elegies and Safeguarding Planetary Surfaces 

As William Rueckert’s ‘first Law of Ecology’ puts it, ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ (‘Literature and Ecology : Experiment in Ecocriticism’, 1978). With this principle in mind, my short comparative talk suggests that Shakespeare’s play and Marlowe’s poems are key texts for raising awareness of and acting against the global soil crisis. In so doing, ‘Shakespeare’s Soil and Marlowe’s Muck’ shows how Shakespeare Studies has a key role in the difficult task of ‘communicating the crucial importance of soils to the public’ today (Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory, Granjou, Kearnes, Krzywoszynska, and M. Tironi (eds) 2020). 

Carolyn Sale, University of Alberta, Canada 

As You Like It, Ecological Crisis, and the Inappropriable 

This talk will focus on what is most optimistic about representations of the ecological in Shakespeare’s drama. While much of the drama critically represents the problems of developments in the sixteenth century which permitted the expropriation of life-sustaining resources into fewer and fewer hands, As You Like It, especially through its melancholic Jaques, promotes, in a hopeful register, an ideology of the common, and, more specifically, the imperative of humanity’s orientation to an ethos of non-appropriation or a logic of the inappropriable. Global orientation to this ethos will be essential to extricating humanity from our planetary state of ecological crisis. 

P07. My Place, My Shakespeare: Making Decentred Shakespeare(s) Through Site-Based Digital Performance in Brazil, Ghana and India 

Organisers: Dr Henry Bell, Ben Crystal

Description: The main objective of the session is to explore the process of de-centring Shakespeare practice through the site-based digital performances of the Network as a way of addressing the key theme of WSC2026: Reconfiguring ‘Global’ Shakespeare. 

By de-centred we mean to acknowledge, respect and celebrate the creative, professional and linguistic specificity of Shakespeare performance outside of English-speaking countries and cultures. This context foregrounds performers and the place of performance and explores the relationship with the Shakespeare text in a cultural landscape which is seeking to understand how to create an artistic response within a de-colonised conceptual space. The work of the network to date has resulted in three projects across four continents: Lockdown Shakespeare: Transnational Explorations and Decolonial Process (2021); Process and Product: India-Ghana-Brazil-Scotland Inter-cultural Shakespeares (2021); and Pericles on the Seas (2022). All network members are developing and making practice and research for the live project, My Place, My Shakespeare (forthcoming summer 2025) which will also form a key foundation of the panel at the WSC2026. The central questions and problems which will drive the discussions and demonstrations of digital performance will be:

– What is the sound of Shakespeare in my voice, in my mother tongue? 

What does Shakespeare mean in the place where I live and work? 

What does Shakespeare mean to my culture? 

The practitioners within the network will respond to these prompts by considering and problematising how they have positioned their local environment as the starting point and inspiration for interpreting the text, weaving in signifiers of local identity, language and location as a means of reinterpreting and repositioning Shakespeare. They will discuss how the significance of Shakespeare in performance is found through a deep knowledge and engagement with the local and specific, which then leads to the universal. 

As well as exploring the products of the various digital performance projects at the centre of the network, this WSC2026 panel will also explore and demonstrate how the ubiquity of digital technology has enabled collaboration during the preparation, rehearsal, and delivery of decolonised Shakespeare performance between artists, communities, and researchers across four continents. 

Finally, the network will discuss and demonstrate how this working methodology has created a permanent, open access record of this unique, de-centred project for future collaborators to see, as well as being used as a teaching resource across multiple countries. This will steer a discussion as to the current process of de-colonising curricula and ask questions of the commitment within Higher Education and the performing arts industry to supporting and spotlighting Shakespeare artists and scholars outside of the English-speaking world. 

P08. Painted with Unnumber’d Sparks: Sign Language translation ideologies for Shakespeare’s works

Organisers: Peter Novak, Janet Guest, Katherine Williams (co-author/co-presenter with Andrew Morrill) 

Description: This panel will feature several presenters well versed in translating Shakespeare into sign language, specifically American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL), discussing their respective approaches to translating Shakespeare’s works for an audience that relies upon visual language rather than the spoken word.

Different ideologies and rationales will influence the choices made in translating text/performance into sign language, and the culture of theatre and the Deaf communities in the U.S., Canada, and the UK will also be featured as factors to be considered in this field of study.

The variety of productions based upon Shakespeare’s works may seem as numerous as the stars in a galaxy, and the sign language translations for each production is as unique as each star is, yet there is research in progress on how to take a more linguistic approach to translating Shakespeare for general consumption in sign language, rather than re-invent the wheel for each individual show performed from Shakespeare’s canon and all its limitless adaptions.

The presenters participating in this panel are all experienced in both the theoretical and practical aspects of sign language translation, and through their own experiences and expertise, have developed ideologies that reflect current attitudes in theatre inclusivity and diversity, the ever-changing nature of modern sign languages and the revered Early Modern form of Shakespeare’s writing, and bridging the sociolinguistic gap between both.

Some problems/issues the panelists will be addressing will include:

The key to successful translation is rooted in idiomatic conveyance of the message, not an attempt to retain form. Yet Shakespeare’s form is an integral part of experiencing his work; the language, meter, and imagery, not just the stories themselves. How then, can a visual language convey those elements in a way that will do Shakespeare’s style justice and yet remain easily understandable for a Deaf patron who may or may not be at all familiar with Shakespeare’s language?

Sign languages are concept-based languages, not lexicon based. One sign can be used to equate any number of English synonyms, but given that Shakespeare incorporates a diverse range of vocabulary, including ones that were coined at the time of writing, what other aspects of sign language syntax, paralinguistics, and expression can be utilized to reflect the lexical depth of Shakespeare?

Access to Shakespeare through sign language translation is relatively new on a global scale; in Italy, translating Shakespeare’s plays into Italian Sign Language (LIS) has only been done within the last two decades. BSL translations did not begin in earnest until the 1970’s, not too far behind ASL translations in the U.S., with the earliest documented ASL performance of Shakespearean text taking place in the 1950’s. This means that interest in Shakespeare as a patron, scholar, or student has been historically proportionally lower in the Deaf community. How can the translation work and research being undertaken by the panelists and others in the field be disseminated effectively into the Deaf community, therefore increasing the contributions to this universe of language modality and access to Shakespeare’s work?

Peter Novak, University of San Francisco

The Epistemology of Silence: Twelfth Night in American Sign Language

This paper (with video examples) explores the planetary reach of Shakespeare through the unique medium of American Sign Language (ASL), highlighting how digital technology enables ASL to offer a four-dimensional reinterpretation of Twelfth Night. By examining the challenges and innovations in translating Shakespeare into ASL, this study underscores the intersection of language, technology, and cultural identity. The translation process, captured exclusively through film, not only expands Shakespeare’s global accessibility but also challenges traditional notions of textual primacy, offering new avenues for understanding Shakespeare’s relevance in a digitally connected, post-human world.

Janet Guest, Association of Sign Language Interpreters/THEATRESIGN

To Sign or Not to Sign: Translating Shakespeare into British Sign Language (BSL)

This paper discusses the intricate challenges of translating Shakespeare into a visual language. The translation process, while rewarding, can be daunting. This paper outlines the complex process of translating the original text, what the words meant then, and the importance of the work for the Deaf audience. Because the Deaf patrons are not listening to the words, the opportunity exists for ‘show me don’t tell me’ using BSL Visual Vernacular (VV). This paper, and discussion with other translators, may foster understanding of the process that interpreters may face and the benefits then reaped by Deaf and hearing audiences alike.

Katherine Williams (co-author/co-presenter with Andrew Morrill), University of Toronto

The New Lexicon: Transfiguring ASL Poetics and Shakespeare’s Verse

This paper will explore emerging trends in translating Shakespeare into American Sign Language, contributing to creative collaboration and the expansion of ASL Shakespeare lexicon. Sharing their experience working together as experts in acting, linguistics, poetics, and Shakespeare studies, the co-authors will detail how this creative collaboration reinvents the translation process and offers fresh perspectives on familiar Shakespeare text by discussing their findings from Titus Andronicus and As You Like It. The challenges and opportunities of exchange between artistic and scholarly expertise highlight dialogue on best practices and future directions for translation, enhancing the effectiveness and inclusion of ASL in Shakespeare.

P09. Planet Kott: Opening up the Archives of the 20th-Century Shakespeare Critic 

Organisers: Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk, Zoltán Márkus, Nicoleta Cinpoeş

Description: The panel intends to offer a new take on the legacy of Jan Kott (1914–2001), one of the most important Central and East European Shakespeare critics, whose work strongly impacted both Shakespeare scholarship and theatrical practice of the post-WWII decades and beyond. 
The main objective of the panel is to reassess Kott’s international stature and influence, based on newly accessible documents donated to the Emigration Archive at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. This largely unexplored collection is rich in documents, diaries and letters, mapping Kott’s ideological and spatial trajectories, his shifts of allegiances and intellectual agility. The resources testify to Kott’s progress through times and regions, his gradual absorbing new cultural affinities and agendas and yet rebounding to his strongly political and presentist stance. Kott’s international approach and reputation, his encounters with widened cultural domains and uprooted identities as well as his theater-centered resistance to historicist philology paved the way for globalism. By reassessing some of the old political East-West polarities now reactivated, the panel intends to throw new light on the mediation of East European politics to Western audiences and the instrumentality of Shakespearean criticism in the process.  
 
The panel addresses the following specific issues: 
 
– Kott’s complex relation with his native land/continent, explored from within and then reconfigured from an American perspective; 
– Kott’s embracement of new cultural contexts and attempts to nuance the paradigm of “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”; 
– the uses of self-narrative(s) in the construction of Kott’s critical discourse;  
– Kott’s ties with fellow Shakespeare scholars, theater practitioners and literati involved in the dissemination of his work; 
– the incongruent perception of Kott’s Shakespeare criticism in the East and in the West, before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain; 
– the relevance of the concept of Kott’s “Grand Mechanism” in current stage practice.  
So far, the most complete picture of Jan Kott as a Shakespeare scholar as well as the origin and dissemination of his criticism can be found in chapters written by Madalina Nicolaescu (“Jan Kott in the East”, Great Shakespeareans. Ed. Hugh Grady London: Continuum, vol. xiii, 2012. 130–153) and Zoltán Márkus (“Kott in the West”, ibidem, 53–174). Neither of these studies draws on the resources available in Kott’s archive. These have been first explored by Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk (2021), “Shakespeare in purgatory: (re)writing the history of the post-war reception”, Theatralia, vol. 24, special issue, 17-32, https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2021-S-2. By reassessing Jan Kott’s work and legacy in light of the newly available documents, this panel opens new perspectives on the origins of presentism and globalism in the study and performance of Shakespeare. 

Anna Cetera-Włodarczyk, University of Warsaw, Poland 

‘In his own land’: Eastern Europe and the Birth of Kottian Criticism 

With recourse to the (un)published diaries of Jan Kott, this contribution sets out to reconstruct the key geographical spaces, with their tensions and ideologies, which shaped Kott’s understanding of man and history and were gradually incorporated into his Shakespearean discourse. With the main emphasis falling on the immediate pre- and post-WWII period, the paper juxtaposes Kott’s repeated failures to see through the hazards of his own time with the sharpness of his critical insights. Thus Kott’s presentism is seen as dependent on the immediate shaping pressures, but also on his processing of memories, including radical changes of optics, lapses and disclosures. 

Zoltán Márkus, Vassar College, USA 

Shakespeare East and West: Kott’s Academic Reception in the USA 

In 1969, Alfred Harbage posed the question regarding Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, “…whether the kind of ‘contemporary’ that Shakespeare proves to be depends less on when one lives than on where one lives. Or putting it another way: is there now a ‘Shakespeare West’ and a ‘Shakespeare East’?” Harbage emphasized Kott’s geographical alterity: his Polish-American colleague represented “Shakespeare East” to him. Based on materials newly available in the Kott Archive, this paper explores this East-West divide in Shakespeare studies as a harbinger of a disciplinary shift towards the study of non-English-speaking, postcolonial, and glo/calized Shakespeares. 

Nicoleta Cinpoeş, University of Worcester, UK 

When ‘the unbearable and the absurd are constantly in tandem’: Re-visiting the Kott – Ionesco Connection 

East of Berlin, the reception of Jan Kott’s works and ideas is more diverse than what a general(ised) “Bloc” approach might claim. Re-reading Kott’s published remarks and views on Eugène Ionesco in tandem with the rich collection of notes and letters discovered in the Jan Kott Archives, held at the University of Torun, this paper brings to bear the constancy of their lifetime friendship as strengthened by surviving similar terrors, ‘obliteration by decree’ in their homelands (Marowitz: 1994) and living diasporic existences. In doing so, the paper aims to re-visit this intellectual fellowship in its potential relevance to understanding Kott-ean Shakespeare criticism, before and after 1989. 

P10. Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Globe around the Planet 

Organisers: Dr. Miles Gregory, Alex Baines, Angus Vail, Dr. Miles Gregory

Description: This panel brings together theory and praxis, focusing on several cases in which the early modern Globe theatre has been reconstructed in different locations around the world: Shakespeare’s Globe in London, UK; the Container Globe in Detroit, Michigan; the Pop-Up Globe in Auckland, New Zealand and elsewhere in Australasia, as well as the Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo and Rome’s Gigi Proietti Globe Theatre Silvano Toti. Surveys of the Container Globe and Pop-Up Globe will be delivered by their founders.  

Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Southbank opened in 1997. Initially disparaged by some scholars for the extent of its perceived “inauthenticity,” the venue has since become an iconic part of London’s contemporary theatrical scene in its own right: a vibrant aesthetic space which continues to attract flocks of tourists as well as vast bodies of scholarship and press attention. The Container Globe in Detroit is currently situated on the grounds of the former Herman Kiefer Hospital in the Midtown neighbourhood of the city, constructed from repurposed shipping containers. Conceived by Angus Vail, a business manager in the music industry, the Container Globe hosts a variety of events and aims to recreate the intimacy and raucousness of early modern theatregoing at a site of low-cost and mobile materials. The Pop-up Globe was a project and production company founded by theatre director Dr. Miles Gregory. Between 2015 and 2020, five temporary reconstructions of the Globe hosted over 700,000 people at theatrical performances in four cities across New Zealand and Australia. The panel will also reflect on two prominent sites outside the Anglosphere: the Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo, which opened in 1988, and Rome’s Gigi Proietti Globe Theatre Silvano Toti, which opened in 2003. These spaces invite different kinds of responses to, and assessments of, dynamic acts of linguistic and cultural translation as well as the broader “Planetary Shakespeares” conference theme.  

Thinking with sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s celebrated proposition that “(social) space is a (social) product” and theatre studies scholar and practitioner Dorita Hannah’s idea of “performative architecture,” the panel locates this range of projects within the multitudinous social and material networks in which they were produced. The panel asks, broadly: Why rebuild the Globe theatre? What features are necessary for a rebuilt Globe theatre to be considered a version of the Globe theatre at all? What can reconstructed Globe theatres offer present-day communities in vastly different geographical, temporal, linguistic, and social contexts?  

A further aim is to gesture towards the “gathering” work that they each perform, deploying the term from archaeologist Ian Hodder. The panel as a whole suggests that part of the value of the structures under consideration here lies in this gathering work they perform: gatherings of people, of places, of materials, of timeframes, and of ideas. This in turn provokes much broader reflections about the kind of imaginative and material work that is done when buildings from other times and places are reconceived in new cityscapes, landscapes, and social-environmental contexts. 

Alex Baines  

“These Unworthy Scaffolds”: Rebuilding Shakespeare around the World   

This paper serves as an introduction to the key themes of the panel. It offers a brief survey of reimagined Globes around the world, both speculative projects and material rebuilds, and seeks to theorise their importance. The paper includes especial consideration of Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s Southbank, opened in 1997, the Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo, opened in 1988, and Rome’s Gigi Proietti Globe Theatre Silvano Toti, opened in 2003. It examines the venues’ functions beyond theatrical productions and argues for the importance of the “gathering” work that these reconstruction projects perform, borrowing the term from archaeologist Ian Hodder.   

Angus Vail

The Container Globe, Detroit, Michigan 

The Container Globe, located in Detroit, is a venue based on Shakespeare’s original Globe theatre, constructed from repurposed shipping containers. A multifunctional space, the innovative design and modular construction of the building provides entertainment and education in the arts, design, conservation, and engineering fields, so far hosting Shakespearean productions, student performances, and a techno music festival. The site is fully transportable and can be moved to various locations, including various underserved communities. This paper reflects on the Container Globe’s role as a nexus of cultural and economic activity for the Detroit community.  

Dr. Miles Gregory

The Pop-Up Globe, Australasia 

The Pop-up Globe, a temporary reconstruction of Shakespeare’s second Globe, functioned as more than a physical space; it was also as a site of significant social-cultural gatherings across Australasia. The performances it hosted sparked dynamic cultural exchanges, with, for instance, Australians cheering for England during Henry V, provoking an interrogation of nationalisms and showcasing the global malleability of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the Pop-up Globe’s engagement with local theatregoing practices in Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, the paper will consider the transformative role of temporary architecture in shaping and reflecting present-day responses to Shakespeare’s works.  

P11. Rescripting Shakespearean Worlds Through the New York Shakespeare Festival 

Organisers: Vanessa I. Corredera, Louise Geddes, Stephen Purcell

Description: This panel thinks about how the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), later known simply as Shakespeare in the Park, has used Shakespeare to engage with both local and global issues, responding to a changing world and taking advantage of New York City’s diversity to explore how Shakespeare can create radical acts of world building that respond to changing historical moments. Although it is hardly original to point out that the theatre offers acts of world-building, these papers explore how performance can be radical acts of world-altering, in turn disrupting Shakespeare in unexpected ways as a means of unsettling the world in which he is performed.  
 
The vision of the Shakespeare festival was to create a Shakespeare for American audiences. It has thus always embraced the global community who move through the hub of the city, imagining a Shakespeare that speaks for and to the people who live in its boroughs. The locus of this engagement was the public space of the city’s Central Park. This remit, however, has expanded with the festival’s increased popularity, drawing crowds from outside of NYC. As such, NYSF Shakespeare routinely sits at an unusual intersection of radical performance and crowd-pleasing commercialism. Because of the diasporic makeup of New York City and the tourists who flock there, the festival is both intimately local and broadly global (and even inter-galactic) in its scope. This scope has only increased as performances from the NYSF have been streamed to audiences around the world.  
 
This panel thus examines how the NYSF strives to alter the world it performs to and in by rescripting the Shakespearean worlds it stages. The papers in this panel thereby examine different forms of rescripting, from multiple “rescriptings” of the same play over time to new frameworks that “rescript” a familiar play in order to offer audiences a fresh take on theatre’s radical possibilities to offering new racial scripts that counter the longstanding parameters that shape how Blackness can and should be performed.  
 
Together, then, these papers trace moments in Shakespeare’s twentieth and twenty-first century performance history in which traditional social and performance worlds are challenged by varying levels and types of radical performance. These rescripted and therefore altered Shakespearean worlds disrupt easy assumptions about the universes that Shakespearean texts construct, thereby directing attention to the impact of rescripted Shakespeares on changing cultural climates.

Vanessa I. Corredera, Andrews University

“I’ve got the joy, joy, joy”: The Rescripted, Radical Affect of Black Joy Merry Wives and Fat Ham 

When considering the affects of Black theatre perhaps the heartbreak in Fences, the discomfort of A Slave Play, or the communal hope at the end of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide spring to mind, not joy. Yet Black joy plays a vital role in countering racial oppression. This paper turns to two Shakespearean adaptations-–Jocelyn Bioh’s Merry Wives and James IJames’s Fat Ham–that center Black joy. I argue that both plays use Black joy to offer audiences a new, and therefore radical, racial script that counters the longstanding one of Black trauma.  

Louise Geddes, Adelphi University 

The Radical Simplicity of the Spanish Mobile Unit 

During the 1960s, the NYTW made two attempts at Latinx Shakespeare: the bi-lingual Mobile Unit and the “Naked” Hamlet, a radical retelling that featured Martin Sheen using a Puerto Rican accent. The touring production presented the festival’s English options in Spanish translation, and took a grassroots approach, bringing in renowned artists from Mexico and South America, and celebrating Hispanic culture by running Macbeth alongside Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays. The paper compares the simplicity of the mobile project to the Naked Hamlet to suggest that the most radical staging of Shakespeare is simply the one that brings him to new audiences. 

Stephen Purcell, Warwick University 

‘Amazing and modern’: Troilus and Cressida at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 1965-73

In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1961), Jan Kott redefined thinking about Troilus and Cressida, interpreting it as a savagely ironic anti-war satire that mirrored the disillusionment and radicalism of the 1960s. This paper tells the little-known story of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s engagements with this ‘amazing and modern’ play over the decade that followed, spanning science fiction, drag, and anti-war protest: from Joseph Papp’s groundbreakingly feminist 1965 production, through his development of a rock musical with Hair composer Galt MacDermot over 1969-71, to David Schweizer’s absurdist (and critically panned) production of 1973.   

P12. Shakespeare and Artificial Intelligence 

Organisers: Gabriel Egan, Anja Muller-Wood, Heejin Kim

Description: Since the Enlightenment, Shakespeare’s plays have been served as heuristics for exploring human behaviour and personality. The uncanny capacity of Shakespeare’s characters to make us infer an inner mental life from exterior behaviour and words is, for the first time, being matched by a similarly uncanny ability in machines. Shakespeare’s plays do not merely reflect human behaviour but create plausible prognostic simulacra of human minds not unlike modern Artificial Intelligences (AIs). If, as some believe, the machines are starting to actually understand us, then they do so in ways that drama has understood people (and predicted their behaviour) for centuries. 
 
This panel will explore how Shakespeare’s creative explorations of human society, culture and interaction can contribute to the comprehension of the increasingly sophisticated AIs that are being developed, while also honouring the fundamental difference between machine and human intelligence. The precise inner workings of artificial neural networks are too complex to be fully understood even by their creators. We account for them by how we train them and by what they subsequently do. So it is, to a large extent, with people. As machines start exhibiting human characteristics, the methods by which we have long made sense of human behaviour will increasingly be needed to understand machines, while, in turn, the inscrutability of AI might have a bearing on the way we think about plays.  
 
The problem of inscrutability affects our understanding of AIs and Shakespeare’s characters in similar ways. In both, ‘inner workings‘ can only be hypothesized from outward manifestations; characters are black boxes to each other and spectators. Even theatrical strategies that serve to reveal characters‘ minds at work (soliloquies, asides) ultimately affirm the inscrutability they ostensibly transcend by sourcing it for plot devices such as dramatic irony. When plot construction is foregrounded in this way, plays illustrate that they are not about human desires, intentions and plans, but, like AIs, goal-driven systems following a theatrical rather than a psychological logic. 
 
In English studies we have specialists who discriminate between existing writings (literary critics and linguists) and those who create new writings. AIs likewise divide between the discriminative (for example those detecting spam in email and cancers in x-ray images) and the generative (those creating new texts and images). If techniques from English studies help us make sense of AI, it may be worth exploring whether this likeness is significant or trivial. 
 
The research questions the panel will seek to explore are: 
 
* How can the linguistic and structural properties of Shakespeare’s plays help model the inscrutable workings of AI? 
 
* In turn, how can what we know about AI contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of these dramatic properties (for instance, does this knowledge help shed light on how plays lead spectators to develop a sense of character)?  
 
* What are the limitations of comparing dramatic art and AI? In how far will inscrutability also increasingly differentiate art and AIs, especially generative AIs whose communicative transparency can be developed and improved by, among other things, prompt engineering.

Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University, Leicester, England

How are the speeches of Shakespeare’s characters individuated? 

The transformational generative grammar introduced by Noam Chomsky in ‘Syntactic Structures‘ (1957) offered the first model that could plausibly account for how the human mind generates original sentences. Chomsky thought he had proved that finite state automata were inadequate to the task, but the new Large Language Models that so impressively mimic human speech are built on those derided finite state automata. This talk will compare how these two ways of modelling speech help us understand Shakespeare’s techniques for individuating his characters‘ speaking styles. 

Anja Muller-Wood, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz, Germany  

Inscrutable Plots 

Anthropomorphism is a problem in the discussion of plays and of AI. Neither dramatic characters nor machines have minds of their own, and yet intuitively we seem to think about both in this way. Strongly plotted plays such as ‘The Comedy of Errors‘ and ‘Othello‘, however, defy such psychologizing and instead foreground that character is subjected to, even created by the plot and its integral logic. In this paper I will consider how such plays demand to be thought of as “systems” not unlike AI and how this take on plays may also shed light on the inscrutability of AI.

Heejin Kim, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea 

Computational Dramaturgy: Deep Learning for Character Type Analysis in Early Modern Plays

This study explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence with literary analysis to examine character archetypes in early modern dramas. By leveraging a dataset comprising more than 500 plot summaries linked to full dramatic texts, a neural network model is used to provide quantifiable insights into the prevalent character archetypes of the period and their narrative functions. The model, trained on both summaries and full texts, aims to classify complex character roles, such as heroes, villains, and sidekicks, based on their narrative contributions and developmental arcs. 

P13. Shakespeare and Eco-Romance 

Organisers: Elizabeth Freestone, Katherine Steele Brokaw, Christina Wald

Description: This panel will explore the ecological affordances of romance from creative and critical perspectives. At a historical moment when we are trying to come to terms with the catastrophic effects of climate change, patterns of tragedy on an apocalyptic scale have become pervasive in creative practice, cultural analysis and eco-theory. Accordingly, Bruno Latour has suggested that climate change ‘has not only become a piece of news, not only a story, not only a drama, but also the plot of a tragedy […] so much more tragic than all the earlier plays’ (‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, 12–13) and Timothy Morton has observed that ‘[r]ight now, ecological awareness presents itself as tragedy’ (All Art is Ecological, 27). More recently, however, scholars and artists have emphasized that despair in the face of loss is an unhelpful, even paralyzing response to climate change: it usually does not inspire action and can instead induce passive suffering. We propose that when it comes to the most versatile genre for addressing environmental crisis is the tragicomic romance so beautifully articulated in Shakespeare’s late plays. Romances stage loss and yet end in hopeful, if often fragile, reconciliation of a community, thus offering productively hopeful models of restoration, collaboration, and solidarty. 
On page, stage and screen, Shakespearean eco-romances are also effective for informing, moving, and motivating audiences because of their evocations of various ecosystems like forests and oceans; their portrayal of many kinds of love including intergenerational, romantic, social, and inter-species; their processing of eco-grief, eco-anxiety, pre-traumatic stress disorder and solastalgia; and their evocation of hope, forgiveness, and community repair. This panel, featuring both scholars and scholar-artists, will offer three case studies of Shakespearean eco-romance in the 2020s to open up a more general discussion about the epistemic, experiential and activist potential of planetary romance. 
Questions to be addressed in the panel include, but are not limited to the following:  
—As a way of conveying both the tragedy of environmental catastrophes and the reconciliatory efforts needed to mitigate and make more just such crises, what advantages does Shakespearean romance have over tragedy, comedy, or history? What are its limitations? 
–How does the experience of eco-romance via the theatre or film differ from that of reading in terms of impact and effectiveness as environmental communication? 
—What particular plays–including both Shakespeare’s late plays and earlier plays that can be adapted to fit or emphasize a tragicomic narrative arc–lend themselves best to eco-romance? 

Elizabeth Freestone, Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Institute (U. Birmingham), UK 

‘Mine would, were I human’: Intergenerational and Interspecies Healing through Acts of Witness, Time and Care in Cymbeline and The Tempest  

To consider eco-romance within the current outlook of mass extinction and climate chaos is to recall the trauma of living through what may prove to be the end times. In the context of such ‘ecological grief‘ socio-environmental connectivities between individuals, communities, and more-than-human neighbours rupture. It is within this space and temporality that Shakespeare’s romances enact the careful attention of witness and the patient act of repair; the dual energies required to embark on the process of what Derrida calls ‘successful mourning‘. Through stories that span years, against backdrops of environmental change, the late plays model intergenerational and interspecies healing, platforming the possibility of forgiveness. Jo Confino suggests that failing to recognize the collective pain of ecological grief ‘block[s] us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us find another direction‘ (2014). Through an exploration of The Tempest and Cymbeline, this paper suggests that acknowledging past hurts is the first step towards an improved ability to enter empathetically into the existence of others, and therefore to care better for our shared oikos. 

Katherine Steele Brokaw, University of California Merced 

Endangered Forests and Cautious Forgiveness in the 2025 Shakespeare in Yosemite As You Like It

The conditions of outdoor Shakespearean theatre lend themselves particularly well to providing audiences with affective, informative, and galvanizing experiences of eco-romances. Shakespeare in Yosemite, which performs free productions of Shakespeare’s work every April for Earth Day, adapts Shakespeare’s plays to speak to the Sierra Nevada’s ecosystems, environmental challenges, and both ancient and modern solutions to these challenges; leverages the audience’s experience of being in Yosemite National Park; and re-scripts the play’s narrative arcs into the shape of romance. For example, Romeo and Juliet in Yosemite (2023) featured one tragic death (Benvolio’s) and the catastrophic wildfire, but ended with the community coming together in solidarity to help reintroduce the red-legged frog to the local ecosystem, and Midsummer Yosemite’s Dream (2024) staged eco-grief and the irrevocable destruction of 20% of the world’s sequoias in the dark center of the play. This paper will discuss the 2025 production of As You Like It, still under development, describing its depiction of worldwide losses of the world’s Ardens and intergenerational, community-based efforts that lead to the preservation and restoration of wild spaces. 

Christina Wald, University of Konstanz, Germany 

Foe as Post-Apocalyptic Tempest Adaptation: Romance as Renewable Resource

How can we use romance as a renewable resource to come to terms with climate change and resource depletion? Is the portrayal of romantic love an escape from planetary questions, an inadequate indulging in the private concerns of the couple (or throuple) – or do the genre patterns of love romance have their own ecological affordances? How can love melancholia and eco-grief be thought together in the Anthropocene? Addressing these questions, this talk will discuss the film Foe (2023), starring Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal and Aaron Pierre, as an unmarked Tempest adaptation. Translocating the romance of Miranda and Ferdinand to a post-apocalyptic future where AI, robotics and human colonies in space promise brave new worlds, Foe intertwines the study of a failing marriage with the ecological ruin of climate change. Yet, true to Shakespearean romance, it also offers ways of thinking towards hope and restoration on a personal and planetary scale.

P14. Shakespeare’s Planetary Roots and Routes. African Oral Literature as a Re*source of Shakespeare’s Trans*Textuality 

Organisers: Susan Arndt, Ife Aboluwade, Michael Steppat

Description: This panel explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been transtextually impacted by African literatures and oratures. In doing so, we start off from the thesis that Shakespeare knew people of African descent that have had an impact on his work in two respects. For one thing, Shakespeare was most sensitive to the power and violence of colonialism, slavery and racism. For another, Shakespeare’s plays display a profound knowledge of African folktales as well as other textualities of African societies such as the Yoruba-religious corpus of “Ifa divination” (Nigeria). We hold that both layers of knowing are intersected. 
 
By thus transgressing the normative focus of Shakespeare Source Studies on written texts in languages that Shakespeare is said to have been able to read, the panel will thus offer a step towards reconfiguring Shakespeare Source Studies. Accordingly, we will present a respective theoretical and methodological framework. By looking at power constellations, particularly also with respect to British-West African encounters around 1600 and to the subsequent reception histories, we will complicate conventional notions of “the global” and “universality”, while using “planetarism” (Spivak), “decoloniality” (Mignolo) and “provincialising” (Chakrabarty) as categories of practice (Brubakar).  
 
Thus tuned, we will discuss the modalities of the “contact zones” (Pratt) between Shakespeare and African Oral Literature. In doing so, we will also trace the sources as well as roots and routes of such textual meetings and possible encounters with persons of African descent. We even dare to investigate into Shakespeare’s relatedness to travelling the world and seaman/sailorship.  
 
Another goal of this panel is to employ “cultural memory”, claiming that contemporary African dramatists Shakespeare’s amplify Shakespeare’s indebtedness to African orature by focalizing this transtextuality. These objectives will be pursued in three entangled papers that focus on Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest and the Sonnets 127, 130, 132 and 144 as well as respective contemporary theatre productions by Femi Osofian and Ahmed Yerima. The panel is a plea to study Shakespeare and the respective adaptations by taking the very power constellations into account that code ideas of Shakespeare being global and universal. 

Susan Arndt, Professor of English and African literature, Bayreuth University 

Black Knowledge in Shakespeare’s: Othello, The Tempest and The Sonnets  

The first paper “Black knowledge in Shakespeare’s: Othello, The Tempest and The Sonnets” by Susan Arndt will discuss the theoretical and methodological context for complementing Shakespeare Source studies with a decolonial perspective on Shakespeare’s indebtedness to African oral literature and Black knowledge. Thus framed, Susan Arndt will focus on the decoloniality that informs the character design of Othello and Caliban in general and their monologues in particular. Moreover, she will pursue the thesis that sonnets 127, 130, 132 and 144 address a Black woman of African descent.

Ife Aboluwade, University of Bayreuth, Postdoctoral Researcher 

Othello’s Nigerian Ancestors and their Future Heirs  

The second paper “Othello’s Nigerian ancestors and their future heirs” by Ife Aboluwade is designed as a case study of Othello, bridging it to Ifa-divination as well as other Nigerian folktales. In doing so, a close reading of given parallels in terms of characters and phrasings between the Ifa-divination poetry and Shakespeare’s tragedy is at the fore. To conclude her paper, she will discuss the adaptations of Othello by Femi Osofisan and Ahmed Yerima and the ways in which they focus on the given textual analogies between Othello and the Ifa-divination.

Michael Steppat, Professor of English, University of Bayreuth 

Of Witches and Tricksters. Archetypes and Contact Zones  

The third paper “Of Witches and Tricksters. Archetypes and Contact Zones” by Michael Steppat will look at “universal” archetypes such as the trickster and witches in both Shakespeare’s work and West African oral literature. In doing so, given commonalities and differences are discussed – as well as the modes that have prioritized Western versions of this archetypes at the cost of silencing West African ones. This paper will suggest modes of reconfiguring Shakespeare (Source) Studies as well as tools of how to allow Shakespeare to be multiversed. In doing so, the sources for Shakespeare’s knowledge about Africa as well as for his critical stance racism and colonialism will be mapped, focusing on Antony and Cleopatra and its most recent performance at The Globe. 

P15. Shakespeare’s Sonic World: Sound Studies and Early Modern Theatre 

Organisers: Antonio Arnieri, Lara Ehrenfried, Alexandra Siso

Description: This panel session delves into how sound studies foster new insights and engagement with Shakespeare’s theatre. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of his works, we explore how auditory elements—both diegetic and extradiegetic—shape the aesthetic, socio-cultural, and political frameworks of his plays. 
The session features three presentations that examine the role of sound in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy from different angles: Antonio Arnieri’s The Island’s Soundspace explores the setting of The Tempest as an auditory universe, Lara Ehrenfried’s Soundscapes of Violence examines sonic representations of violence in Macbeth and Richard III. Alexandra Siso’s Sounding Death investigates how sound underscores themes of mortality in Hamlet. 
Current scholarship has emphasised the critical role of acoustic environments in understanding historical contexts and how these soundscapes were employed to represent the world on stage. Since Bruce Smith’s seminal work The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) pioneered sound as a hermeneutic tool, evolving methodologies in sound studies offer new pathways to a multisensorial engagement with the past, connecting disciplines like literature, musicology, cultural studies, and the history of science to reconstruct a more nuanced understanding of the early modern sonic world. 
Shakespeare’s works offer a fertile ground for these explorations. Sound in his plays functions both as a vehicle of meaning and as a tool for interrogating the epistemological assumptions constructed on stage. His acute awareness of the aural dimension reveals a strategic use of sound and music, reflecting broader cultural and scientific currents of the time. Re-examining these auditory elements enables new interpretative possibilities. 
How can we recover the meanings associated with sound to deepen our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays? The answer lies in an interdisciplinary approach, which draws on a variety of sources—historical records, philosophical treatises, scientific texts, and rhetorical manuals—to construct a detailed picture of the role sound played in early modern life and theatre. 
 
The objectives of the session are as follows: 
• To explore how sound studies can deepen our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy by revealing the layered meanings carried by sound and music in his plays. 
• To examine how early modern modes of listening differ from contemporary practices and the implications of these differences for interpreting Shakespeare’s works. 
• To investigate the interdisciplinary connections between auditory history and Shakespeare studies, specifically how sound intersects with broader cultural, political, and scientific discourses. 
• To encourage scholars to rethink the role of sound as a central, rather than peripheral, element in both the creation and reception of Shakespearean drama. 
Through interdisciplinary dialogue, this panel aims to foster a renewed awareness of Shakespeare’s auditory world. We seek to open a discussion on how listening functioned in the early modern period, enriching our understanding of Shakespearean soundscapes and contributing to broader discussions on the role of sound in both historical and contemporary performance contexts. Ultimately, this panel offers a unique opportunity to reconsider Shakespeare’s plays not only as visual spectacles but as immersive auditory experiences that continue to resonate today, albeit in a transformed auditory world.

Antonio Arnieri, UAB – Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

The Island’s Soundspace: The Auditory Universe of Shakespeare’s The Tempest 

Antonio Arnieri’s paper examines the island in The Tempest as a self-contained world, representing a sonic abyss. Through an auditory history analysis, it explores how the island functions as a resonating shell—a metaphor for sound, knowledge, and spatiality. Referencing early modern treatises like Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1616), the paper likens the island to an ear, capturing and amplifying sound to shape reality, thus challenging Renaissance views on hearing as a tool for knowledge. The study concludes by connecting this interpretation with Alessandro Serra’s 2022 adaptation, La Tempesta. 

Lara Ehrenfried, LMU – University of Munich 

Soundscapes of Violence  

Lara Ehrenfried’s paper Soundscapes of Violence examines the links between the auditory dimension of Shakespeare’s plays and Early Modern theatre’s dramatization of violence. Ehrenfried argues that attuning ourselves to the sonic element of Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Macbeth and Richard III, offers new insights into Early Modern conceptions of brutality and treason and critically interrogates what it means to ‘hear violence’. Macbeth and Richard III, for instance, rely on dissonant and discordant acoustics to explore socio-political upheaval. By establishing direct links between sound and violence on stage, Shakespeare’s tragedies also open up new spaces for performance and remediation. 

Alexandra Siso, University of Sheffield 

Sounding Death

Alexandra Siso’s paper Sounding Death examines the voice of Hamlet’s ghost as a sonic expression of Purgatory. While the Tudor era saw Purgatory’s gradual disappearance from religious doctrine, theatre—particularly in the Jacobean period—became a space where it could still resonate. The dead, once silent, silenced, and unseen in the mortal world, regained a voice and presence on stage, among the living. Nowhere is this more striking than in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the vivid and disturbing representation of Hamlet’s father breaks the silence of death, sounding with the echoes of Purgatory.   

P16. Shakespearia: A Comparison Between Teenagers 

Organisers: Kamil Tukaev, Johathan Salway, Solimano Pontarollo

Description: SHAKESPEARIA is a project launched in 2015 by Kamil Turkaev. Its goal was to create plays based on the works of William Shakespeare with teenagers aged 14-16, performed in English. The project was launched within the walls of Natalia Vlasova’s IH Linguist language school in Voronezh, Russia. 
Starting from “Romeo and Juliet” the teenagers and Kamil read and analyzed the material in deep detail, identifying the circumstances and events happening in this great tragedy.  
Kamil assumed that the conclusion of this period would be his question, “What do you feel at the end, having gotten to know this story so well?” To his surprise, all the participants in the youth group called Romeo and Juliet idiots, immature individuals, and used other derogatory terms from their youth lexicon. What upset them the most was the death of the protagonists, whom they blamed for their own death.  
Kamil realized that the approach and methodology needed a radical change; the traditional principles used in professional theater were not working here.  
To ensure that the responses from the teenagers weren’t just a peculiarity of this specific group (around 12-14 people), Kamil decided to repeat the experiment with an adult group, all of whom were parents. Once again, he heard from the group of about 12-13 adults the same lack of understanding toward the characters, insulting comments about them, and unanimous support for the actions of the adults in the play. He must admit, he was slightly indignant: “How can you think this way? You’re all parents! The first thing I expected to hear from you was the word ‘PITY!’ Pity for the children! That’s the phrase I was waiting for.” Only later did he understand that the adult audience, through their criticisms of the main characters, might have been concealing some personal pain, as if this tragedy had occurred in their own lives, and they were carefully trying to avoid letting this experience enter their hearts. 
Kamil returned to the teenagers and asked them to write monologues on a very simple topic: WHO OR WHAT DO YOU DISAGREE WITH? WHO DO YOU BLAME FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO ROMEO AND JULIET? Kamil insisted on hearing their genuine, heartfelt thoughts on the subject. He urged them not to worry about offending him or William Shakespeare. In the end, he received a wonderful response, which began as an open conversation and eventually took shape in monologues.  
These monologues, developed with his colleagues in the Shakespearia project Jonathan Salway and Solimano Pontarollo, are presented for this showcase. The monologues appeared to be so sincere and honest that they seem to require no further commentary. 
In conclusion, Kamil will say that the play came to life and had an interesting run. 
Some of the children were cast in the roles of characters they had initially criticized. Like in a real court, they became both the prosecutors and the defenders of their roles. The play was performed in Russia, in Ghent (Belgium) and in Verona (Italy). 

Kamil Tukaev, Voronezh Chamber Theater 

SHAKESPEARIA in VORONEZH 

Presentation of the results of the Shakespearia project with the students of Voronezh. 
Their monologues and their judgments show how the universal Shakespearean values ​​are elaborated according to their culture, society and desires. 
A result that is then compared with the same process proposed to the English and Italian students, expressing equalities and differences in reading and growth methods of the same students after the Shakespeare experience. 
Finally the monologues are presented to the students of the other nations to receive feedback. 

Johathan Salway, “Moscow English Theatre”. The company is relocating to Barcelona as “Met on The Road”

SHAKESPEARIA in LONDON  

Presentation of the results of the Shakespearia project with the students of London. 
Their monologues and their judgments show how the universal Shakespearean values ​​are elaborated according to their culture, society and desires. 
A result that is then compared with the same process proposed to the Russian and Italian students, expressing equalities and differences in reading and growth methods of the same students after the Shakespeare experience. 
Finally the monologues are presented to the students of the other nations to receive feedback. 

Solimano Pontarollo, Casa Shakespeare – Verona 

SHAKESPEARIA in VERONA  

Presentation of the results of the Shakespearia project with the students of Verona. 
Their monologues and their judgments show how the universal Shakespearean values ​​are elaborated according to their culture, society and desires. 
A result that is then compared with the same process proposed to the English and Russian students, expressing equalities and differences in reading and growth methods of the same students after the Shakespeare experience. 
Finally the monologues are presented to the students of the other nations to receive feedback.

P17. Thinking Like a Planet – Shakespeare’s New/Old Ecologies 

Organisers: Joseph Campana, Jessica Rosenberg, Laurie Shannon

Description: This panel assembles three unfamiliar pathways into understanding core ecological questions (around quotidian rhythms, renewable energy, exploitation and use). These “Shakes-planetary” points of view invert what so many describe as the human-centered designation of “Anthropocene” – turning our attention (eyes, ears, hands) towards macrocosms and microcosms not scaled to human use. The era, these papers find, offers vast imaginative resources for formulating alternatives to destructive/extractive eco-modernities as well as early modern alternatives to the presentist nature of most energy and environmental humanities scholarship. These essays try to think like a planet, which is to say they offer “planetary” points of view: points of view inverting what so many describe as the human-centered designation of “Anthropocene.” Indeed, so many critiques of the Anthropocene preserve the logic of its designation by preserving its core structure of causality but substituting a different culprit (Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Wasteocene) or backdating the start date (1945, 1769, 1610, the invention of agriculture) without allowing those earlier histories to alter the logic of the Anthropocene. 
To paraphrase Vinciane Despret, “What would the planet say if we asked the right questions?” In trying to ask the planet the right questions, we draw on a range of interlocutors. We invoke “natural history,” despite its sometimes imperial legacies, to seek in early modern thought a “planetary” sensibility. What if “natural” histories (of tides and earthly rotation, of use, of the sun) might help reframe later and darker environmental eventualities? We place a range of later thinkers in dialogue with Shakespeare, be it Lamarck for his pioneering theories of evolution (especially including questions of “use”) or influential environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose lesser-read reflections on tides and oceans offer new pathways. These papers work to transform recent environmental criticism, with its highly presentist focus, not only by revisiting figures like Lamark and Carson but also by offering longer genealogies of critical concepts in energy and the environment. 
This panel proposes to bridge the gap between environmental work centered in the present and the rich environmental terrain within Shakespeare studies by marking longer arcs that might connect them. Shakespeareans have been and remain central to the development of eco-critical approaches refined through interpretations of the plays and poems, analyses of critical environmental histories in an era of political transformation and early globalization, and accounts of the relationship between these plays and early modern theatrical practice and the complex instabilities of the little Ice Age. In fact, the iconicity and canonicity of Shakespeare the “man of all seasons” and expert on nature, allows critical leverage on an “all–too-human” Anthropocene. 
 
Our panel is structured with three papers addressing core questions in energy and environmental humanities through Shakespeare’s works and worlds. Given the logistics and timing, we were not able to secure greater international participation by the deadline for submissions. Our intention, should the panel be accepted, is to bring on a fourth panelist who would serve as a chair and respondent to the panel and who would enhance the international diversity of the panel. 

Joseph Campana, Rice University 

Solar Shakespeare  

This paper approaches what Michael Marder might call the “energy dream” of solar energy in the works of Shakespeare. This paper places a decade of fascinating if presentist energy humanities scholarship in conversation with Shakespeare’s solar moments (Timon of Athens, King Lear) and other early modern reflections on the sun that provide alternatives to present day global energy crises. What was solar before it was renewable and apart from human worlds? Must “energy” be party to disaster and tragedy? What can Shakespeareans learn from the energy humanities? What can energy humanities learn from the pre-fossil fuel energy regimes of early modernity? 

Jessica Rosenberg, Cornell University 

“The Natural History of Use on Planet Shakespeare”  

This paper takes Shakespearean drama as an inflection point in longer natural histories of use and utility, in order to ask: What do we understand about the ethics of using nature and one another when we begin to see utility on the planetary scale towards which Shakespeare points us? Its argument tracks accounts of “use” as a category beyond (and even indifferent to) the human, through accounts of plant and animal habit, cunning, and instinct in early modern nature writing and in Shakespeare’s plays, before tracking these concepts forward into Lamarck’s Law of Use and Disuse and contemporary theory.

Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University 

“The Quotidian Cosmos: Girdling the Globe, from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Day to Rachel Carson’s Tides”  

Midsummer’s notorious sublunary matters make inconstancy fundamental to humankind. But have we fully fathomed the play’s cosmic affordances? What else might it say about our planetary place, speaking from a time when sensibilities about cosmic scale made a more quotidian mark? Midsummer’s lunar phases and diurnal earthly rotation establish a nonhuman calibration of time and an ultra-global sense of our earthly standing as minor (even puny). Using Rachel Carson’s 20thC rediscovery of a world without us, this paper considers how her oceanic writings about tidal forms suggest new perspectives on Shakespeare’s prescient capacity to conjure a planet without us. 

P18. To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores: Shakespeare, language and learning in Oceania 

Organisers: Joanna Erskine, Kyle Morrison, Dr Florence Boulard, Dr Claire Hansen

Description: In this session, two presenters from Australia – Joanna Erskine, Head of Education at Bell Shakespeare, and actor, director and cultural consultant Kyle Morrison – and two presenters working in Kanaky-New Caledonia – Dr Florence Boulard and Dr Claire Hansen – speak to the ways that Shakespeare is being used as a vehicle for transformative learning and cultural connection in marginalised Australian communities and Oceania. 

Joanna Erskine will speak to the power of Shakespeare as an educational tool in regional, remote and socially-disadvantaged Australian schools. Bell Shakespeare is Australia’s national theatre company specialising in Shakespeare, founded in 1990. Since its inception, the Company’s vision as set by Founding Artistic Director John Bell, is to ensure access to Shakespeare and high-quality arts experiences for all Australians, regardless of socioeconomic challenges or geographic location. 

A key feature of Bell Shakespeare’s education program is engaging with schools and mentoring teachers in regional and remote Australia. This takes the Company into schools and communities experiencing myriad challenges including geographic isolation, environmental disasters, trauma, industry closures affecting employment, lack of resources, low levels of attendance, low value of education, and more. In addition to student engagement programs, the company also provides specialist training for teachers via the renowned National Teacher Mentorship program. 

Next, actor and director Kyle Morrison will speak about the intersection of Shakespeare’s works with Aboriginal Noongar culture and language, from south-west Western Australia. He will explore these ideas and themes as he speaks to the journey of creating, rehearsing and performing Noongar sonnets (based on Shakespeare’s sonnets) and how we are still learning the best ways to situate and connect Shakespeare on and to the dreaming of this country. 

Morrison, the former Artistic Director of Yirra Yaakin Theatre, has an extensive history working with Shakespeare including translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Noongar language, presented at the World Shakespeare Festival in London at Shakespeare’s Globe. The Noongar Sonnets project broke ground on the cultural collaboration between Noongar language and Shakespeare’s texts by creating six of Shakespeare’s sonnets fully adapted into Noongar worldview and philosophical paradigm through Noongar language. 

Dr Florence Boulard and Dr Claire Hansen will then extend this session’s focus from Australia to Oceania. Their presentation will explore the adaptation of Shakespeare’s works in Kanaky-New Caledonia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, Kanaky-New Caledonia is the native island home of Kanak families, whose descendants first arrived on the archipelago over three thousand years ago, after travelling from Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea. Colonised by the French in 1853, Kanaky-New Caledonia’s theatrical histories may historically have favoured Molière over William Shakespeare, however the country also enjoys a vibrant history of Shakespearean theatre and has witnessed a revival of Indigenous art and theatre. This paper will explore the work of a contemporary New Caledonian playwright, Pierre Gope, including the 2007 production of his adaptation, La nouvelle et sublime histoire de Roméo et Juliette. This production facilitates a shared exploration of Kanaky-New Caledonian cultural exchanges around race, gender, politics and place. 

Joanna Erskine, Bell Shakespeare 

Shakespeare as a vehicle for transformative learning in regional and remote Australian communities  

What value can Shakespeare have to young people in regional and remote Australian communities, and how can teachers in these settings meaningfully engage with his works? 
In this paper, Bell Shakespeare’s Head of Education Joanna Erskine will share how Shakespeare’s plays are used as a vehicle for transformative learning in regional and remote Australian communities. From Christmas Island to Arnhem Land, farming communities to mining centres, Erskine will detail how an active engagement with Shakespeare’s plays can enhance social, emotional and academic outcomes for young people in geographically-isolated Australian communities, and transform teacher capacity via the National Teacher Mentorship program. 

Kyle Morrison 

Aboriginality in Shakespeare 

What are Shakespeare’s stories when told through a ‘classical’ Aboriginal lens? How do we connect the classical text to the world views of Australia’s first peoples and are there synergies which facilitate these creative collaborations? 
 In this session Kyle Morrison will speak about the intersection of Shakespeare’s works with Noongar culture and language, from south-west Western Australia. He will explore these ideas and themes as he speaks to the journey of creating, rehearsing and performing Noongar sonnets and how we are still learning the best ways to situate and connect Shakespeare on and to the dreaming of this country. 

Dr Florence Boulard – James Cook University 

Dr Claire Hansen – The Australian National University

Shakespeare in Oceania: Adapting Romeo and Juliet in Kanaky-New Caledonia 

In this paper, we explore planetary or ‘global’ Shakespeare by looking to the French and Kanak language adaptation of his works in Oceania – specifically, in Kanaky-New Caledonia. We will focus on the work of Pierre Gope, a director and theatremaker, offering an exploration of his French and Kanak language adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, titled La nouvelle et sublime histoire de Roméo et Juliette. The paper will offer insights from an interview with Gope and analysis of his script and a 2007 production of the play. In this adaptation, we find a reimagining of Shakespeare that enables a playful exploration of community tensions – social, political and environmental – in Kanaky-New Caledonia through an enmeshing of Shakespeare’s symbolism with contemporary, local concerns. 

P19. A translational approach to Shakespeare’s transnational sources 

Organisers: Laetitia Sansonetti, Alessandra Petrina, Iolanda Plescia   

Description: This panel, which presents work by Laetitia Sansonetti (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Alessandra Petrina (Università di Padova), and Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza Università di Roma), seeks to conceptualise Shakespeare’s relationship to his sources as possible acts of translation: specifically, and according to the different languages in which his sources were first composed – most often Latin, Italian, French, and English – as instances of interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation, to pick up again the thread of Roman Jakobson’s well-known and fruitful tripartite structure. Such a structure considers translation not as mere transposition but as the expression of a dynamic relationship within, and between, languages, and even at times within the same language.  

Rather than try to demonstrate that Shakespeare was a translator in any current or literal sense of the word, the papers in the panel will use the translation category to apply pressure to Shakespeare’s creative process involving his use of transnational and multilingual sources, shedding light on the distinctive phases of their transmutation and transmission. His interlingual appropriations of sources in foreign languages or of mediating translations and his intralingual rewritings of sources in English are to be read on their own terms not as simple inspirations or revisitations but as the result of complex technical processes which adapt celebrated source materials for the stage.  

Interesting implications arise when this model is adopted: Shakespeare can be seen as one of the protagonists of the process whereby English was trying to establish itself as a language with some prestige of its own with regard to the Continental languages and nations. His acts of ‘translation’ can be placed in a continuum from interlingual translatio linguarum to imitatio through paraphrasis: such a perspective can be understood by bringing together classical and early modern proto-translation theory with recent developments in the field, redefining intertextuality as a form of translation.  

Drawing upon the outlined premises, and using three distinct case studies, the proposed panel will seek to answer some foundational questions. What is added, eliminated, amplified – terms which have direct applications in translation studies today – in order to obtain dramatic effect? What linguistic transformations are effected upon the source words? Can early reflection on translation and contemporary translation studies help us understand some of the dynamics at play? And finally, what does it mean to place Shakespeare at the centre, or consider his creative process as a node, of a network of wider, transnational cultural exchanges in which linguistic transformation takes main stage? 

Laetitia Sansonetti 

Shakespeare’s multilingual sources for Romeo and Juliet 

For most people nowadays, the story of Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s. Of course Shakespeare scholars know that he borrowed the plot from an Italian tale which had circulated in at least two English translations via French. From Arthur J. Roberts’ “Sources of Romeo and Juliet” (MLN, 1902) through Silvia Bigliazzi’s “Whose memory?” (in Bigliazzi, ed., Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources, 2024) via Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957) and Jill L. Levenson’s “Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare” (SP, 1984), to mention but a few, there have been many contributions to the study of Shakespeare’s appropriation of his multilingual sources. What I would like to offer in this paper is of a slightly different nature. I would like to bring together Shakespeare’s written knowledge of the story, which he gathered from books, and Shakespeare’s aural knowledge of Italian, which he may have gathered from books too (in particular John Florio’s manuals for learners of Italian), but which he may have also acquired from direct contact with Italians living in London. I will focus more particularly on the language of fencing, comparing this technical lexicon (and more generally Italian words) as it appears in the 1597, 1599 and 1609 editions to test the hypothesis that the move from the Theatre to the Globe by Shakespeare’s acting company, by bringing him closer to the area where foreign fencing masters had their schools, may have changed his perception of and relation to the Italian language. I will thus analyse Romeo and Juliet as a transnational play where written and oral multilingual sources meet on stage. 

Alessandra Petrina 

A pilgrim everywhere: Petrarch and the Italian nation as a cultural model for Shakespeare 

In the English Renaissance Italian texts were often servilely imitated, lifting words or phrases that the audience need not understand; they also were more freely translated and adapted, subtly used to enrich the text. Especially in his early plays, Shakespeare experimented with a wealth of literary sources and with the linguistic variety that is behind the importation of literature into England in the sixteenth century, offering us a variety of approaches that went from the parodic reproduction of an Italian sententia, as we can see in Love’s Labour’s Lost, to a complex interplay with the source text that goes well beyond our idea of translation and/or imitation, as can be seen in the great tragedies. Transnationality here takes the form of a critical overview of the heritage of a nation that has hitherto been proposed as a cultural model: Shakespeare’s act of translation is also a critical appraisal. 

This is a topic that has been often and successfully studied, but there are areas that still repay critical analysis, and one such is the influence of Petrarch on Shakespeare. This topic has tempted a number of scholars; but their efforts have been mainly articulated upon the use that Shakespeare made of the sonnet. However, a direct filiation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the Canzoniere is impossible to demonstrate; any comparison yields unsatisfactory results. The suggestions emerging from the Triumphi, in this context, tends to be shelved.  

This paper posits that it is useful – and indeed, revelatory – to tease out some strands and isolate contexts in which the Triumphi appear to play a role that goes beyond the evocation of the Roman ceremony. Shakespeare’s complex and critical use of the triumphal meditation he found in Petrarch also asks us to rethink the categories of translation and the relationship between source and target text, and suggests a dynamic, organic model of imitatio. Given Petrarch’s definition of himself as peregrinus ubique – a pilgrim everywhere – such an analysis yields fascinating results also on the relation between translation and transnationality.  

Iolanda Plescia 

Shakespeare’s ‘historical translations’ 

This paper proposes taking a fresh look at Shakespeare’s use of historical sources, drawing on current work for an edition and translation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or All Is True. It posits that the use of a source such as Holinshed’s Chronicles – indeed, in principle any historical writing source – may be understood as an instance of intralingual and intersemiotic translation, in that it must be considered as an act of mediation both within the same language and towards the semiotic system of dramatic language. The paper will apply categories largely studied within contemporary translation studies to traditional source work to ask what insights can be gained from identifying the linguistic and cultural processes behind ‘lifting’ historical passages for dramatic purposes ; it will also consider the transnational theme of Henry VIII’s break from Rome as represented in different sources to ask how historiography is ‘translated’ on stage from varying points of view.