Daily Archives: 16 March 2015

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions – Meanings Collaboratory: Play of Emotions – Call For Papers

Play of Emotions: Meanings Collaboratory
The University of Western Australia
19-20 November, 2015

This will be a free event but for catering purposes a registration page will be posted before the end of March 2015.

Confirmed Speakers:

  • Professor Ros King, University of Southampton
  • Professor Jennifer Radden, University of Massachusetts, Boston

‘Go, play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I Play too…’ (The Winter’s Tale)

Leontes’ words, spoken by a ‘player’ in a ‘play’, open up multiple and complex ideas about the various senses in which ‘play’ may ‘play’ many parts in emotional lives, from early childhood into maturity and old age. We aim to open up as many of these meanings as possible, considered in the context of the history of emotions from 1100-1800 and across disciplines.

The word ‘play’, as both noun and verb, has many meanings, some obsolete or now rare in occurrence, which can give glimpses of the past, and others sometimes intriguingly contradictory in their senses. Although the root meaning of the word refers to some kind of aimless physical activity which involves moving about swiftly in a lively manner and sometimes clapping the hands, yet invariably we find through context, the word indicates an emotional driving force or impetus. The question is, then, ‘why do we play?’; ‘what emotional needs does play satisfy or respond to?’. At the ‘innocent’ end of a spectrum, play is an expression of joy and merriment, which was once associated with the souls of the blessed in heaven. Huizinga in 3 generalised that play has a ‘civilizing function’, and yet also underlies war and any form of ritualized violence. Children’s play is considered the most quintessentially innocent diversion, as is playing a musical instrument, while parents might regard play variously as a waste of time or as an affectively bonding experience. As adults we play as an alternative to work, a recreation, a therapy for damaged minds; however, some play as a job – actors, musicians and professional sportspeople. Like Shakespeare’s Venus, Milton’s Adam proposes sexual intercourse as a form of play: ‘Now let us play … For never did thy Beautie … so enflame my sense / With ardor to enjoy thee’, a meaning which has led to the promiscuity of ‘playing the field’, ‘playing around’, ‘playing false’ and even committing adultery, as extensions of sexual dalliance. We might play a game like dice or cards, and the implicit level of counterfeiting can shade into more general forms of pretence or representing fictional personages in drama and films that lead to accusations of deviousness or cheating, or the ambiguity with which players in the theatre have historically been regarded. Play can be considered a dangerously undermining activity – in 2014 the Chinese State Broadcasting Authority banned wordplay in the media as likely to damage culture and linguistic heritage values. A word associated primarily with innocent activity is surprisingly charged with many differing emotions when context reveals the emotional motivations behind play. Our symposium will open discussion on a range of historical factors in considering the emotional meanings of ‘play’.

Some possible areas for questions and discussion:

  • Meanings of Play
  • Historical and semantic dimensions
  • Survivals of older meanings into the modern world
  • Huizinga Revisited
  • Imaginative play in its creative forms
  • Gender and play
  • Portmanteau phrases (play off, play on, play out, play at …)
  • Theatre – playmaking and playgoing
  • Music – playful; musical jokes (e.g. Mozart?)
  • Children’s Play – can it be historicised?
  • “War games”: the play of weapons, bringing military forces into play
  • Theoretical approaches: Locke, Rousseau, Huizinga etc.
  • Sexuality and play – foreplay
  • Wordplay, jokes, tricks
  • Animals and playing
  • Play in art

Proposals Due: 30 July, 2015 to ciara.rawnsley@uwa.edu.au

For further information please contact: bobwhite@uwa.edu.au and pam.bond@uwa.edu.au

Professor Ewan Fernie, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture
“Shakespeare’s Freetown: Why the Play Matters?”, Professor Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare Institute)

Date: Thursday 23 April, 2015
Time: 4:00pm
Location: Room 275, Global Change Institute (Bldg 20), UQ St Lucia campus
RSVP: uqche@uq.edu.au, or (07) 3365-4913 by Friday 17 April

All welcome, reception to follow

What good is Shakespeare?

The proliferation and specialization of Shakespeare studies tends to have the unfortunate effect that we neglect the big question of why we bother with him at all. One of the great merits of Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare was that it directly faced up to this question, but Bate’s book is nearly twenty years old now and we need to renew its effort. After the World Shakespeare Festival that was central to the Cultural Olympiad of 2012, and then the four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday celebrations of 2014, and what with 2016’s four-hundredth anniversary of the playwright’s death rapidly approaching, there is a real and frankly reasonable danger of everybody without a vested interest in the playwright simply getting sick of him. And there’s no logical reason why that sickness shouldn’t prove terminal, why Shakespeare shouldn’t finally begin to die off in human culture. If Shakespeare matters—and I mean still matters—then in this context especially, we need a better, more accessible and powerful reason why he matters than the ‘aspectuality’ and ‘performativity’ which Bate ultimately comes up with. Of course there is truth in what Bate says, but ‘aspectuality’ and ‘performativity’ will not by themselves explain the poetry and reality of what Shakespeare has, in the past, given human life; nor by themselves will they explain why we should continue to lavish such disproportionate attention on a long-dead dramatic poet from Warwickshire.

Ewan Fernie’s paper will argue for a better reason to read, perform and celebrate Shakespeare. It will argue that Shakespeare means freedom. Fernie will sketch a distinctively Shakespearean vision of freedom, homing in on a rich speech from Antony and Cleopatra. But he will argue that Shakespearean drama can’t ultimately be seen as a hymn to purely individual liberty. Shakespearean freedom is never forged in isolation; it is made in interaction. In short, it is always political.

Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon, where he co-convenes the pioneering MA in Shakespeare and Creativity and helps run the collaboration with the RSC at The Other Place. He is General Editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the Shakespeare Now! series, and his latest critical book is The Demonic: Literature and Experience. Fernie also writes creatively. He led the AHRC grant-winning project which culminated in Redcrosse: A New Poetic Liturgy for St George’s Day that was performed in major UK cathedrals and by the RSC, and published in 2012. He is currently completing a Macbeth novel (also with Palfrey), and beginning to develop a play with Katharine Craik and the RSC called Marina, as well as seeing through the press a volume of essays edited with Tobias Döring on Shakespeare and Thomas Mann. Fernie’s present critical project is a book entitled Shakespeare’s Freetown: Why the Plays Matter. But he also has a developing interest in the part played by Shakespeare in the nineteenth-century reformation of industrial Birmingham, and in particular in the work and life of the radical preacher and lecturer George Dawson.