Shakespeare on Screen Forum

Date: Saturday 23 April, 2016
Time: 1:00pm (4 hours)
Venue: Cinema 4, GOMA, Brisbane, QLD
Cost: Free
Register: Please RSVP for this free event through Eventbrite.

Join prominent local scholars of Shakespeare at the Gallery of Modern Art for a lively discussion of the history of Shakespearean adaptation and the continuing relevance of the plays for contemporary audiences. Speakers will include: Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland); Dr Yvonne Griggs (University of New England); Associate Professor Rob Pensalfini (University of Queensland); Associate Professor Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland); Dr. Brandon Chua (University of Queensland); Dr. Christian Long (University of Queensland/QUT). The event will be chaired by University of Queensland lecturers, Dr. Jennifer Clement and Dr. Lisa Bode.

Event Schedule:

• 1:00pm Opening Talk by Peter Holbrook “Shakespeare’s Afterlives”
• 1:30pm – 3:00pm Panel 1 / Roundtable Discussion “Why Shakespeare?”
• 3:30pm-5:00pm Panel 2/Roundtable Discussion “Shakespeare on Screen”

Presented by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the UQ School of Communication and Arts, and the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800).

Speakers:

Peter Holbrook: Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Queensland, Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions, and Chair of the International Shakespeare Association. He has published widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, including several books, and is internationally respected as an expert on Shakespeare’s work.

Rob Pensalfini: Rob Pensalfini is Associate Professor in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Queensland, Artistic Director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, and founder of the Shakespeare Prison Project. He has published on Shakespearean performances in Australia and his latest book, Prison Shakespeare: For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities (2015), details the history of Shakespearean performances in prisons since the 1980s.

Laurie Johnson: Laurie Johnson is Associate Professor in English at the University of Southern Queensland, and specializes in the study and teaching of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. He is vice-president of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, and has published many articles on Shakespeare. His most recent book, The Tain of Hamlet (2013), explores how the story of Hamlet moved from medieval Denmark to Renaissance England and became the focus of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.

Yvonne Griggs: Yvonne Griggs is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of New England, specializing in the teaching of screen adaptation, film, and television studies. She has published several articles and a book on screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear (2009). Her latest book is The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies: Adapting the Canon in Film, TV, Novels and Popular Culture (2016).

Brandon Chua: Brandon Chua is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Queensland. He has published a book and several articles on English Renaissance drama, and is especially interested in the topic of literary celebrity.

Christian Long: Christian Long is a film scholar, Honorary Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Language and Learning instructor at the Queensland University of Technology. He is a film scholar who has written on Shakespearean film adaptations and adaptation more widely.

Jennifer Clement: Jennifer Clement is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Queensland. She has published articles and a book on Shakespeare and on English Renaissance Literature, and is especially interested in Shakespeare and film adaptation.

Lisa Bode: Lisa Bode is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland where she teaches and supervises research projects on screen adaptations. Her recent research and publications focus on the history and reception of screen performance, casting practices, and special effects.

“What is Iago? Shakespeare on Imagination and the Demonic”, Dr Patrick Gray (Durham University)

Date: Tuesday 5 April, 2016
Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

Literary critics tend to find Shakespeare’s archvillain, Iago, a puzzling character. What is the root cause of his relentless evil? Othello wonders if his nemesis might be the devil himself. Drawing on recent work on Shakespeare’s indebtedness to medieval drama, I argue that Iago should be understood symbolically as well as naturalistically. He represents an aspect of Othello himself—his imagination, led astray by his emotions, as well as some measure of diabolical malevolence. This interpretation of the imagination as dangerously unreliable, prey to strong passions, susceptible to demonic influence, yet even so liable to be confused with conscience, is not limited to Othello; the same might be said of the witches in Macbeth and the ghost in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s sense of the imagination is indebted in these plays to Aristotelian faculty psychology, as well as Protestantism. Shakespeare’s personification of imagination in the figure of Iago closely resembles Spenser’s character Archimago in his allegorical poem, The Faerie Queene. In Aristotle’s account of what he calls phantasia (“fantasy”), the imagination is relatively innocent; if it proves deceptive, it is because we ourselves have allowed our emotions to run riot: we as moral agents are in this sense responsible for our own misjudgement. With the advent of Protestant pessimism about human nature and Protestant iconoclasm, however, this chain of causality becomes more ambiguous. Imagination takes on a role akin to that of the demonic in Christian thought—an external danger which we are responsible for holding at bay, yet nonetheless might not be able to resist.

Patrick Gray is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is co-editor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2014) and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of Critical Survey on Shakespeare and war. He has published in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Critical Survey, Comparative Drama, and Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir. He is currently working on a monograph on shame and guilt in Shakespeare, and co-editing a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Montaigne. In April/May 2016, Patrick Gray is Early Career International Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.