Date: Monday 27 April 2015
Time: 4:30pm-6:30pm
Venue: Room 471, Global Change Institute (Bldg 20), UQ St Lucia campus
RSVP: uqche@uq.edu.au, or (07) 3365-4913 by Friday 20 April
Free, all welcome, however numbers are limited so please RSVP by the date indicated.
Afternoon tea will be provided from 4:00pm
CPD Certificates of participation will be available on request
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In an attempt to cast fresh light on Romeo and Juliet, Ewan Fernie will approach this familiar masterpiece from some almost wilfully oblique angles. Why does Shakespeare turn ‘Freetown’ from the mere, meaningless name of a posh villa into a real place and prospect where justice will be done? Who are the male Valentines that are slated to come with Mercutio and Tybalt to Capulet’s momentous ball, and where do they disappear to? How does Mercutio’s furious negativity relate to Romeo and Juliet’s more positive passion?
In the second part of the workshop, Peter Holbrook and Ewan Fernie will talk about the new Masters program in Shakespeare and Creativity - a collaboration with the RSC at The Other Place - which Professor Fernie convenes in Stratford-upon-Avon. They will also screen a playful exploration of Shakespeare’s role in society written, directed and performed by the first cohort of students on this pioneering programme.
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.
Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, and Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). His research has focused on political, social, and philosophical aspects of English Renaissance literature (in particular, tragic drama), and on the influence of Shakespeare on diverse writers and thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (for example) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, and Philip Larkin. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (Newark N.J. and London: University of Delaware Press, 1994), and is currently completing a book on ideas of freedom in the tragic drama of the English Renaissance. He is editor of a special issue of the Shakespeare International Yearbook entitled Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited, and co-editor, with David Bevington, of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Image: 'L’ultimo bacio dato a Giulietta da Romeo' by Francesco Hayez,1823. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.