British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Seminar - Shakespeare and the Representation of Women’s
Speech
Sunday 4th September 2005, 9.30-11.00am,
Bedson Teaching Centre LG35
Participants | Call for Papers
Participants
Convenor - Jennifer
Richards, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Convenor - Alison
Thorne, University of Strathclyde
Christian Billing, University of Hull
'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?: Mark Antony and
the tradition of female lament in Ancient Athenian drama'
Dermot Cavanagh, University of Edinburgh
'The Gender of Memory: Female Lament in Shakespeare's
Early Histories'
David Crosby, Alcorn State University
Lessons from Three Wives: Kate, Desdemona, and Katherine
of Aragon as Rhetorical Agents in Domestic and Political Discourse
Laura Jacobs, Birkbeck College, London
'"I am your spaniel.. spurn me, strike me, neglect
me, lose me": Helena's rhetorical agency'
Yvette Khoury, King's College London
'Ophelia in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare'
Carolyn Jess, University of Sunderland
'Silencing the Female in Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's
Lost'
Shehzana Mamujee, Birkbeck College London
'John Lyly and the Child Actors: the pre-Shakespearean
'Boy Heroine''
Thongrob Ruenbanthoeng, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
title tbc (On female silence in The Tragedy of Mariam)
Call for Papers
Below is the original Call for Papers, as circulated. Please note that the date for submissions has passed and the successful participants are listed above.
Convenors: Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle) and Alison Thorne (Strathclyde University)
Since the late 1980s feminist critics have explored the relationship between rhetoric, gender and socio-political formations in Renaissance culture from a variety of perspectives. They have examined the interactions between rhetorical, political and economic discourses and the place of the ‘feminine’ within their overlapping taxonomies. This has involved exploring how women negotiated the suppression of the female voice in classical and early modern culture, but also the formulation of a more flexible definition of rhetoric that can accommodate women’s speech.
This seminar aims to explore the relationship between gender, politics and the art of speaking in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We invite proposals that question the belief that women were necessarily precluded from exercising rhetorical agency, and that challenge and extend the model of political discourse which has been used to perpetuate this assumption. What rhetorical strategies and examples are offered in dramatic texts that enable women to intervene in or connect with political issues? And, in what ways are they inhibited from such intervention? We also invite proposals that consider how political discourses appropriated the ‘feminine’ as a trope for certain modes of speech in ways that might either denigrate female articulation, or unsettle contemporary conceptions of the commonwealth and its membership.
Contact: Jennifer Richards (Jennifer.Richards@ncl.ac.uk)
and Alison Thorne (A.Thorne@strath.ac.uk)
