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John Donne’s Books in the Middle Temple Library: A New Approach Adlington, Hugh Keele University (United Kingdom) Panel: 13 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
In a recent article Keith Whitlock (Sederi 14 (2004), 153-75) argued that in 1631, after the death of John Donne, Robert Ashley acquired a substantial part of Donne’s library. At Ashley’s own death in 1641, Donne’s books (eighty-one of which have been identified as bearing his motto or signature) formed at least a part of Ashley’s founding bequest to the Middle Temple Library. My research builds on Whitlock’s supposition, and seeks to identify further volumes in the Middle Temple Library that may have been owned or read by Donne. My bibliographical method (following its successful use in discovering further Donne books in the Chichester Cathedral Library) aims to establish Donne’s readership of individual Middle Temple volumes on the basis of his characteristic pencil markings. Such ‘Donne’ volumes might have evaded prior detection for two reasons. First, because previous cataloguers had not been primed to recognise Donne’s fine graphite marks in the margins; and second, because of over-zealous trimming of signature, motto, and margins. In my survey of over 270 such titles in the Middle Temple, by authors ranging from George Abbot and Christoval Acosta to Thomas Wegelin and Johannes Windeck, I have identified six volumes (all at the MT callmark: B530) that bear some indication of Donne’s characteristic notation. In my paper, therefore, I present evidence of this notation (via digital photographs) and consider the implications both for Donne scholarship in particular, and, more generally, for the wider study of reading habits and intellectual culture in the early modern period. - o O o -
Pamphlets, Newspapers and Public Opinion: The Discourse against Spain during the English Commonwealth Álvarez Recio, Leticia Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 9 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
After the Civil War and execution of a legitimate monarch, the international image of the new English Republic was seriously damaged as most European powers did not accept its legitimacy. Significantly, Spain was the first nation to recognise the new regime and send an ambassador. These good relations lasted only for the first years of the Commonwealth, when England was involved in a war against the Dutch for commercial interests. However by 1652 pamphleteers started to use the press to demand the end of the hostilities and defend the need to confront what many considered their main enemy: Catholic Europe and more concretely, Spain. The peace with the Dutch and the inmediate declaration of war against Spain took place in 1654 as part of an imperialistic program that included an expedition to the Spanish West Indies. This anti-Spanish feeling would characterise England’s foreign policy until 1659, when the Republic was collapsing and Spain no longer posed a threat to England. This paper will analyse several contemporary pamphlets and newspapers and their contribution to the rise of anti-hispanic feeling. I intend to show how they used this xenophobic discourse as part of the general debate about England’s foreign affairs and how they paralelled the rhetoric employed by the government to justify their imperialistic intentions. - o O o -
The Effect of Franco’s Censorship Boards on Luis Cernuda’s Troilo y Crésida: An Exception to the Rule Bandín Fuertes, Elena Universidad de León (Spain) Panel: 3 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
During Franco’s dictatorship more than 500 different Spanish editions of some of Shakespeare’s plays were submitted to the censorship boards in order to be published. All these translations were authorised without any kind of restriction, except for Cernuda’s translation of Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida presented in 1953 by the publishing house Ínsula. In this paper, I offer an overview of the process that this translation had to go through in order to be approved by the state censorship: certain passages of the text had to be modified according to the morals of the time. By examining the censorship file, I will show that Luis Cernuda did not censor himself but suffered the consequences of external censorship. In this particular case, it seems that the play written by Shakespeare was not censored but the translator was. I will also look at whether these modifications imposed by the censors have been removed in current editions or, on the contrary, whether we still read the censored version of the play. - o O o -
Shakespeare Re-Located: Translating the Plays through Space and Film Location in Shakespeare Retold Calvo López, Clara Universidad de Murcia (Spain) Panel: 12 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Events take place in space and films, even if they are recontextualizations of Shakespearean plays, can be said to take place in what Stephen Heath has termed filmspace. The purpose of this paper is to dissect the new BBC Shakespeare Retold, a series of four films based on three comedies and a tragedy by William Shakespeare, to see how space influence choices made in the adaptation process and how space directs us to read a play or a movie in a particular direction. By means of contrasting the new BBC Shakespeare series with other recent recontextualizations of the tragedies and the comedies (Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet; Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night and Adrian Noble’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) it will be possible to show how space matters in Heritage Shakespeare. It will be suggested that what is new about this new BBC Shakespeare is that Shakespeare Retold is ‘Shakespeare Re-Located’ – just as the text is translated into modern English, the play’s filmspace is translated into a contemporary setting, enabling this new BBC Shakespeare to be not about Shakespeare but mostly about the contemporary social and cultural fabric of today’s Britain. - o O o -
Introducing SH·ES·TRA: A New Digital Tool for the Research of Shakespeare in Translation Campillo Arnáiz, Laura Universidad de Alicante (Spain) Panel: 5 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Research that focuses on Shakespeare’s translations in Spain faces a series of problems. Among these, the most important is that Spanish criticism lacks an updated comprehensive study that records the number of plays rendered, the years when these were published and the translators that carried them out. As part of my recently completed PhD thesis, I carried out a searching and compiling process that has allowed me to determine the sum total of all the Shakesperean translations published in Spain from 1772 to 2004. In order to facilitate the access to these data, I designed SH·ES·TRA (Shakespeare en ESpaña en Traducción) [Shakespeare in Spain in Translation], an electronic database that contains all information relevant to the 531 translations recorded in my study. The SH·ES·TRA database can be defined as a new tool that enables a quick and accurate search for any of the Shakespearean translations published in Spain. However, despite its innovative and ambitious design, SH·ES·TRA still has a number of limitations, born out of the necessity to comply with a series of criteria in the selection of the translations, dates and translators. My aim in this paper is to account for the creation of the SH·ES·TRA database to explain the selecting criteria used, to record the problems previous studies originated, to discuss the exposition of the data and to establish the new updates pending its future improvement. - o O o -
Emblems for the Prince: The Manuscript 2492 (Biblioteca Nacional) Cano Echevarría, Berta Sáez Hidalgo, Ana Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) Panel: 4 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 18,30 to 17,30 Room: Sala "García Matos"
In Sederi Conference of 2005 we presented a paper that surveyed the occasional literature written at the English College in Valladolid from 1592 till 1615. This research has continued up to the present, and more results have been obtained. The most outstanding is the identification of a manuscript containing some of the original emblems that were later only described in the pamphlets or relaciones that were commisioned by the College. The unique character of this collection lies in the fact that, up to now, they are the only surviving pieces written at the College where the pictures of the emblems appear. This, together with the fact that they are hand painted and colored, makes them an extraordinary testimony of the decoration that could be found in this and similar celebrations as it is possible they are the original pieces that were hanging on the walls of the College. We pretend to present this manuscript in its context and explain its significance both literary and artistic in the frame of our ongoing research. - o O o -
Bastard Lines: On Shakespeare and some Anglo-Portuguese Intertexts Carvalho Homem, Rui Universidade do Porto (Portugal) Panel: 2 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
This paper is not a study of translations, and yet it derives its raison d’être from a circumstance highlighted by translation. In their textual strategies as much as in their critical apparatus, Portuguese versions of Shakespeare’s histories hardly contribute to their readers’ awareness of how closely imbricated English and Portuguese history were in the period covered by Richard II, the Henry IV plays and Henry V. This paper will argue that a critically productive reading of Shakespeare’s histories in a Portuguese context will have to coincide, to an important extent, with the acknowledgement and interrogation of these interconnections. It aims to offer a contribution to such a reading that will involve a consideration of some of Shakespeare’s sources against Portuguese historiographic accounts of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Conversely, it will also highlight that an Elizabethan perception of the Portuguese implication in historical processes that mattered to the English was in fact bound to draw on developments that were then historically recent. Ultimately, this entails an unravelling of historiographic intertexts constituted by Shakespeare’s histories, in the conditions of their production as much as of their reception – and consequently the articulation of historical narratives that have all too often been separated and diminished by being constrained within national borders. - o O o -
"A Comedy … in Every Part True Tory!". Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress and Its Socio-Political Context Coperías Aguilar, María José Universidad de Valencia (Spain) Panel: 2 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
The Restoration was an extremely marked political period which greatly influenced literature and especially drama. In the late 1670s two events, the Popish Plot and the beginning of the Exclusion Crisis, led several playwrights to support one of two political parties which had recently appeared in the country, the Whigs –dissenters and parlamentarians– and the Tories –Anglicans and royalists. In 1681 and 1682 Aphra Behn wrote a series of plays (the second part of The Rover, The False Count, The Roundheads and The City Heiress) which were openly political and defended the royalist cause upheld by the Tory Party. In this paper, we would like to present some of the most relevant socio-political aspects of these years and then analyse how they are reflected in The City Heiress, a "true Tory comedy", as it was described by its author. Here, the old Whigs are presented as greedy, dishonest and hypocritical, in contrast with the young Tories, who –although no more honest or sincere– eventually come out of the contest victorious after fooling the Whigs. Several characters in the play can be identified with some of the most noteworthy Whig figures of the period and the references to the Popish Plot and the people behind it are countless. - o O o -
Ambiguity and Violence in King Lear. Analysis of a Dialogue Corchado Pascasio, Mª Teresa Universidad de Extremadura (Spain) Panel: 3 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
King Lear has been
judged the darkest of Shakespeare’s plays by a good share of the critics.
Perhaps the violence that permeates this text is not only one of the
explanations for this epithet, but also the most salient feature in the
tapestry of this tragedy.
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Richard More: In Defence of Nicholas Ling and the Poor Men’s Privileges. Englands Helicon 1600-1614 Domínguez Romero, Elena Universidad de Huelva (Spain) Panel: 11 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Nicholas Ling’s major implication in the compilation of Englands Helicon was never really acknowledged at his time. Like many other poor booksellers so commonly deprived of privileges, Ling spent many years of his life trying to survive without being really allowed to officially enter nothing at the Registers. In 1614, however, clashing with the poorest men of the Stationers’ claims for equal privileges, Richard More adds a new motto to his second edition of Ling’s work which reads: "The Courts of Kings heare no such straines, / As daily lull the Rusticke Swaines". The present paper intends to show the vindicating aim of a motto which pays tribute to all those "rustic, poor men", book-sellers like Ling, who were deprived of royal privileges. They compiled and sold the books which did actually delight people at court. But they were forced to do it both anonymously and illegally. - o O o -
Splitting up of a Hero: Walt Disney's Pocahontas and Its Handling of Captain John Smith Espejo Romero, Ramón Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 1 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Among the early chroniclers of America, those people in charge of "explaining" and making sense of that new land for Europeans of the early 17th century, Captain John Smith deserves a special place. His General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles remains a must for the study of early America. Its status as the historical treatise that the title seems to promise is greatly to be doubted, however. I believe that the interest of such a work is mostly artistic, which is not to say that it is a great work of art. Largely neglecting his avowed subject, Smith’s work is finally about Smith himself. Interestingly, he manages to divert attention from Virginia, New England and all the other territories and draw it to his own status as an epic hero, one whose task is, against all odds, to subdue and tame this new land, rendering it the source of wealth that the Virginia Company (for which Smith worked) needed it to be. Once this initial standpoint is stated and clarified, I will move on to the real focus of my analysis, Walt Disney’s motion picture Pocahontas. Nearly four hundred years after Smith’s book was published, the film takes us back to some of the episodes narrated by Smith, namely those connected with the role played by Powhantas’ daughter, Pocahontas, in bringing about the liberation of Smith after his capture by the Powhatans. Different in their goals and nature though the text and the film seem to be, it is my final aim in this paper to show them to be up to pretty much the same thing: transforming a soldier of fortune, John Smith, into a heroic figure. The only difference is that the film, for which such a politically correct company as Disney Inc was responsible, had to split up the historical John Smith into two separate characters, one of them taking up all that we would nowadays regard as unacceptable in the historical John Smith, and the other already the modern, tolerant hero that children of the late 20th century can harmlessly identify with. - o O o -
Human Beings Are Animals: Metaphor and Metaphoric Expressions in Shakespearean Tragedy Fernández Pizarro, Silvia Universidad de Extremadura (Spain) Panel: 6 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
It is a fact that metaphors are not exclusively used in literary language, in which they have a very important role; they are also fundamental in our everyday language. According to the point of view of cognitive linguistics, the genesis of metaphors corresponds to certain specific mental mappings with a universal character. Through the analysis of some metaphorical expressions used by Shakespeare in Othello, and with the aid of lexicographical works to decipher the connotations of the vocabulary used in the play, it is possible to highlight the existing mappings which make easier the understanding of the double meanings used by this Elizabethan author. In this paper we will try to explore the relations between the metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS and the metaphorical expressions in which this metaphor is applied in Othello and how we can take advantadge of those aspects in the possible translations of the play. - o O o -
Alexander Oldys’s The Female Gallant, or The Comedy of Gender Masquerade Figueroa Dorrego, Jorge Universidad de Vigo (Spain) Panel: 7 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Alexander Oldys’s The Female Gallant, or The Wife’s the Cuckold (1692) is one of those largely unknown narrative texts written at the end of the seventeenth century that are normally grouped under the tag of Restoration novels. This kind of prose fiction draws on the contemporary French nouvelle and anti-romance, Spanish novela, and English drama. It is characterised by a tendency towards brevity, verisimilitude, brisk plots, dramatic structure, open treatment of sexuality, intrusive narrators, and urban, familiar settings. Most of them are like Restoration comedies in narrative form, dealing with the sexual intrigues of fictional members of the gentry and the middle class in a ludicrous and cynical manner. Stock actions of comedy such as cuckolding, duping, disguising, and duelling, as well as a happy ending with multiple weddings are all present in The Female Gallant. The reason for the paradoxical subtitle is the complex final part of the plot, which consists of a series of deceits by means of transvestism that produce humorous confusion of gender identity and lead to the comic motif of the trickster tricked. This paper will analyse those final scenes and their semantic relevance as regards gender and genre issues. - o O o -
From Spanish Setting to Setting in Spain: Of How Shirley's The Brothers Prefigures Spanish Neoclassical Drama of Moratín García García, Luciano Universidad de Jaén (Spain) Panel: 1 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 12,00 to 13,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
Departing from what the author of the paper terms the "pre-comedy-of-manners" of James Shirley (1596-1666), he proceeds to examine The Brothers (1626?/1641?), a play by this Caroline dramatist which provides one of the most remarkable and surprising example of Spanish setting and characterization in pre-Restoration England. Starting with the analysis of the Spanish textual relationship in The Brother and its relationship to his "pre-comedy-of-manners" (Hyde Park, The Lady of Pleasure), this paper follows up with the treatment of Spanish setting, topic, and characters according to the lens or point of view of Caroline upper and aristocratic circles for whom Shirley wrote. This point of view produces the curious "optical effect" of presenting a Spain not yet in existence, but which would come to be, or at least, to be represented in a very similar perspective in the Spanish neoclassical drama of the eighteenth century epitomized in Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1769-1828). The issue of the possible textual relationships with the Spanish author through the latter's direct knowledge of English drama and his knowledge and translations of French drama, notably La escuela de los maridos (cf. Shirley's The School of Compliments), is addressed as well. - o O o -
A Comparative Approach to English and Spanish Early Modern Printed Playtexts Giuliani, Luigi Universidad de Extremadura (Spain) Panel: 9 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Throughout the XVIth Century, the transformation of the playtext conceived to be performed into a "literary work" to be read entailed a series of technical decisions that publishers and printers had to take into consideration in order to shift the target of the text from the spectator to the reader. Those decisions affected the use of formats and printing types, the layout of the text, the modification of stage directions, the addition of engravings that illustrated the scene, etc. As a result of a century of printing experiments, new editorial genres devoted to dramatic literature appeared in early modern Europe. The comparative analysis of their formal characteristics, focused on the English Quarto and Folio and their Spanish counterparts, the so-called Parte de comedias and the Suelta, allows us to shed light on the different status of printing and reading the drama in Reinassance and Baroque Western Europe.
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Characters, Humours and the Politics of Space in Restoration Comedy: Town and Country in The Woman Turned Bully Gómez Lara, Manuel J. Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 7 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Traditional historicist critics have fashioned the concepts of Town, City and Country as stable categories. More recently McLaren et al (1999) have defined these concepts as having "permeable boundaries" hence the need for their particular reassessment in each specific text. The Woman Turned Bully, an anonymous comedy performed in 1675, presents a group of Country characters -a widow, her steward and maid, her son and daughter— who visit London and meet there a series of Town characters –from the witty gallant to the greedy common-lawyer. By means of a series of clichés popularized in books of character, the play offers an alternative both to Shadwell’s comedy of humours and Dryden’s comedy of wit. The corrupt common lawyer Docket and his clerk Dashwell are a good match for Widow Goodfield and her maid Loveall and though they all show the conventional weaknesses of the Town and Country respectively, they manage to come to the happy ending with enough dignity to avoid public scorn. This paper will try to relate these trends in dramatic characterization with the new policies of space developed in Restoration England when the influence of the metropolis resignified the whole concept of public space and its use by citizens of different social origin.
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"Mar a Curious Tale in Telling It and Deliver a Plain Message Bluntly": Evaluative Narrative and Shakespeare’s Messengers Grandage, Sarah University of Notthingham (United Kingdom) Panel: 12 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Typically consigned to the briefest of mentions at the end of the list of dramatis personae, nameless bit-part messengers people the background of Shakespeare’s plays. Their role is commonly regarded as that of a minor participant in the action, simply reporting the necessary elements of off-stage plot development and keeping the temporally and spatially disparate participants and events in the audience’s view. However, some of Shakespeare’s messengers, despite being nameless entities, play a more important role than just being ‘a bit of necessary stage machinery’. Considerations of Greek tragedy have suggested that messengers can be seen as playing a more fluid role, functioning both as participant in the drama and offering glimpses of the evaluative presence of an extradiegetic narratorial voice. With specific reference to the messengers in the opening scene of King Henry VI, Part 1, this paper takes a similar approach to Shakespeare’s messengers. It examines this extradiegetic commentary, through the linguistic devices by which this evaluative voice is heard, in order to assess to what extent the messenger provides a critical commentary which reflects wider political issues surrounding the play. - o O o -
Botanic References in Álvaro Cunqueiro and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Jarazo Álvarez, Rubén Universidad de La Coruña (Spain) Panel: 8 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
One of the most complicated fields of study, as far as any specific literary genre, author or work is concerned, is related to the analysis of intertextual and cross-cultural references. The difficulty is specifically based on the searching and tracing detailed or ambigious references and its study. However, in this paper we will only analyse the impact botanic references in the works of William Shakespeare, taking Hamlet (1603) as a case study, have in the corpus of a contemporary Spanish writer, Álvaro Cunqueiro, and his adaptation of the tragedy, O incerto Señor D. Hamlet principe de Dinamarca (1959). Similarly, the analysis and study of the botanic world and its references have always been acclaimed amongst scholars. Particularly, in the study of William Shakespearés classical works such as The Winter’s Tale (1623) in the case of Perdita, King Lear (1608), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), The Tempest (1623) or Titus Andronicus (1594). However, the same analysis and study of classical botanic references in O incerto Señor D. Hamlet principe de Dinamarca has never been considered as relevant. In fact, few dissertations considering botanic references in Cunqueiro have been done in relation to works such as Escola de Menciñeiros (1960) and Tertulia de boticas prodigiosas (1976). It is interesting enough, considering the importance botanic references have in Shakespeare, the minor interest scholars show in the study of crosscultural references in Cunqueirós adaptation on Hamlet́s myth. As we will appreciate in the following lines, the significance of its study and analysis should be considered as crucial in order to compare and contrast both plays. - o O o -
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum - Aemilia Lanyer's Female Oriented Poems Machado, Salomé Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) Panel: 10 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Among the women to whom Renaissance innovative ideas gave a new lease of life by encouraging fathers to allow girls to be educated along with the boys, Aemilia Lanyer stands out as the first woman writer to publish a volume of original poems. It can, thus, be said that she exceeded the boundaries of what was proper, as far as women were concerned, since they should keep to the private sphere and never go public. Although confining herself to biblical subjects, as it was fit, in the main body of her text, she broke the rules once again by focusing on the female characters of her poems. Besides, she tried to mitigate the anathema that weighed upon women since the remotest antiquity and that Christian doctrine had seemed only too happy to appropriate: they were held responsible for every evil that harassed humanity including death. Notwithstanding the skill with which she pleaded her cause, her efforts had no visible immediate results; tradition, the laws of society and the mentality of the period she lived in conspired against her. But she definitely made a difference in regard to other women writers. Encouraged and emboldened by her example both her contemporaries and those of the succeeding generations took upon themselves to tread the difficult path of finding a place of their own in the male controlled literary domain. - o O o -
Wordplay and Translation: The Poetic Language of William Shakespeare Marín Calvarro, Jesús Á. Universidad de Extremadura (Spain) Panel: 5 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Any dramatic or poetic work by William Shakespeare presents serious problems of understanding. But, maybe, the translation of his works into another language poses the greatest difficulty. The reason for this is, of course, in the frequency of one of the most important features of the language used by him in his works, that is to say, the great number of puns, ambiguities, innuendoes, and word play in general that this author handles with superb craftsmanship. While the use of word play greatly enriches Shakespearian discourse, at the same time, it defies easy translation. This paper seeks, first of all, to identify and explain the ambiguities that embellish Sonnet II, and, later on, to evaluate some of the most important translations into Spanish. To achieve the first aim it is necessary to peruse the best editions of the Sonnets and also the literary criticism on this work. Furthermore, the lexicons specialized in the English language of that period and on the language used by Shakespeare in particular are very relevant. In Sonnet II, those elements that pose great difficulties not only for a good understanding of the poem but also for its translation into other languages are ‘Field’, ‘weed’, and ‘use’. - o O o -
Marlowe Becomes Postmodern: Kurt Vonnegut’s Recreation of Doctor Faustus in Mother Night Martín Párraga, Javier Universidad de Córdoba (Spain) Panel: 13 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (1966) is a postmodern reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and from its very title (taken literally from Marlowe’s play) the American novelist deals with the very same questions the English playwright did: mainly what is knowledge, the origin of knowledge and the moral dimension of knowing. In Vonnegut’s novel, as well as in Marlowe’s play, knowledge is not a cause of happiness or satisfaction but rather of anxiety and finally of doom, and in both texts the price paid in order to reach that unsatisfactory knowledge is far too high to be paid by human beings. Vonnegut, who is an atheist, declares in the preface to Mother Night: "this is the only story of mine whose moral I know" (Mother, vii); and Doctor Faustus, written by another atheist, pretends to be a morality play. Yet the ultimate question remains unanswered in both texts: which moral point are they defending? Another central point of contact between both texts is the apparition of a mysterious women invoked by the protagonists as a means to salvation. Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus and Helga Noth in Mother Night play similar roles… yet again their function in the texts is quite ambiguous and complex. From my point of view, Kurt Vonnegut presents contemporary readers with an updated version of Marlowe’s classic play, and thus a detailed analysis of Mother Night will help us understanding Doctor Faustus… and the other way round. - o O o -
The Welsh Dialect in William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wiues of Windsor and Its Translations into Spanish in the 20th and 21st Centuries Martínez Magaz, Judit Universidad de León (Spain) Panel: 3 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
The Merry Wiues of Windsor is one of the best known comedies by William Shakespeare. Traditionally dated around 1602, this play contains passages written in the Welsh variety in the utterances of Sir Hugh Evans, a Welsh parson. Evans is the only character who speaks a regional English variety other than standard in the comedy, but his speeches are ample enough to give us a clear idea of what the Welsh dialect was like in Shakespeare’s times. The translation process, being a complex one in itself, becomes even harder when the translator faces passages written in non-standard varieties. This paper presents a corpus-based study with two clear aims in mind: firstly, the analysis of the types of dialectal features appearing in the English play The merry wiues of Windsor (spelling alterations, morphological, syntactical and lexical features); then, by choosing five different 20th-21st century Spanish translations of the text, the study of how translators solve the problem of transferring those dialectal features into a target language, Spanish in this particular case. - o O o -
Shakespeare's Reception under Franco: Luca de Tena's Macbeth (1942). Strategies for a Francoist Pedagogy Montalbán Martínez, Nicolás Universidad de Murcia (Spain) Panel: 8 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
The purpose of this work is two-fold: on one hand to try to describe the complex cultural use to which Shakespeare was put after the Spanish Civil War, and on the other, to explore how a particular work, Macbeth, was performed. Once the Civil War ended on April 1st. 1939 a new ideology was imposed. The Falange, the only party exerting political influence, unwittingly put into practice the Marxian notion that "the dominant ideas in each time have been those of its dominant class". The regime needed to maintain a drastic control of all creative processes, with very few works eluding the gaze of the censor. A possible exception was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Macbeth we have the case of man losing all his humanity, and, under his wife's influence, committing all manner of cruel acts and murders to attain and keep the crown. All of these events could be said to bear a relation to the exploits of the new dictator who conquered the political power in a war full of bloodthirsty crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, Luca de Tena’s Macbeth is surprisingly presented by the official press as "the work that will demonstrate what the New Spain is capable of offering to the rest of the world" and none of the play’s possible political implications is mentioned. The visual aspects of the play are defined as "complex", stressing the work developed by Siegfried Burmann, who designed a synthetic décor based on German tendencies, consisting of life-size canvasses, playing with light effects and giving rise to spectacular scenes such as the conjuring witches, the murderers and the banquet with Macbeth’s hallucinations. - o O o -
Thomas Lodge in Tenerife Monterrey Rodríguez, Tomás Universidad de La Laguna (Spain) Panel: 2 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
This paper attempts to examine different hypotheses about the sea-voyage of Thomas Lodge to the Canaries and Azores, during which he wrote Rosalynde, the main source text of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Biographers of Lodge have dated this voyage by basically considering the name of the captain, mentioned in the dedicatory epistle, but they have completely ignored the destination and a simile about a dubious farming practice of the inhabitants of Tenerife. This paper will revise the three main theories proposed on this matter by taking into account the studies in the history of the Canary Islands, such as the pirate attacks and the proceedings of the Court of the Inquisition. The practice referred to in the simile will be explained. In the ending part, it will also be suggested that the Forest of Arden was largely inspired by the vegetation of woods and fields of the Atlantic archipelagos. The landscape, and arguably the myth, of the Fortunate Islands offered Lodge an incomparable Arcadia to construct his Arden, which Shakespeare kept intact when he translated Arden to English soil for the comedy that culminates with the representation of the ideal order of the world by means of the four weddings at the end of the play. - o O o -
Authorship and the Marketplace: The Printing of Plays in the Early Restoration Period Mora Sena, María José Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 11 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
A good number of plays printed in the early Restoration period do not indicate authorship on the title-page. This is hardly surprising, since publication was not a central concern of playwrights; they could only make a modest sum by it, whereas they stood to gain much more from performance. However, an analysis of the play-texts printed in the 1660s and 1670s reveals an increasing interest of the poets in vindicating their work, and their reflections in prefaces and dedications show a growing awareness of the value of authorship as social—if not financial—capital. - o O o -
The Making of the Women’s Poet: Self-Fashioning in John Banks’s Prologues and Epilogues de Pando Mena, Paula Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 10 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Restoration writers had to ingratiate themselves with their audiences: imprudent moves could turn friends into foes. Plays became increasingly intricate and no element in them was accidental. Skilful playwrights used prologues and epilogues as a way to elicit their audience’s sympathy, and to introduce political allusions or gender issues that substantiate the core of their plays. In the beginning of his career (The Rival Kings, 1677) John Banks follows the heroic fashion while trying to enlist the support of a new and influential group: ‘the fair sex’. He tries to avoid censorship by claiming that he supports no political faction, and that he only aims at entertaining women. He presents himself as a seductive figure who conquers his audience, made of influential patronesses and anonymous theatregoers whose ‘sympathetic tear’ could guarantee a full third night. However, as his drama becomes more personal and sentimental, and the heroic gives way to the new genre of the ‘she-tragedy’, Banks’s self-fashioning changes too: he progressively identifies himself with his heroines and audiences, and his writing style gets closer to the conventions deployed by women writers. Banks creates a poetic persona only paralleled in his time by Cavendish and Behn’s. Nevertheless, while gender subversion has been extensively analyzed in women’s writing, Banks’s challenge of the conventions of his own sex is still unexplored. - o O o -
Where Linguistics and Literature Meet: Cognitive Linguistics and Literary Analysis Peña Cervel, Sandra Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid (Spain) Panel: 6 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Literary works can be interpreted from many varied points of view. In this proposal we attempt to provide a new perspective from which the potential reader of any literary work can benefit. An analysis that makes use of some of the tools of Cognitive Linguistics can go a long way towards elucidating many intricacies of literary works (Freeman 2000, Gavins and Steen 2003). This proposal contributes to analyzing Macbeth from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics going beyond the analysis offered by Freeman (1995). Macbeth shows a unity of vision which depends on the cognitive operations which arise at all levels of the play (characterization, relationships between the characters, the way the plot is developed). The image-schemas of CONTAINER, PATH, BLOCKAGE, REMOVAL OF RESTRAINT, and LINK, the DIVIDED SELF and A CAREER IS A JOURNEY metaphors, and some metonymies like the double metonymy whereby blood stands for guilt (Ruiz de Mendoza 2000), among others, help us provide a unified interpretation of Macbeth by giving shape to a myriad of seemingly unmotivated uses of language, central characters, and settings. In sum, the different idealized cognitive models put forward within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics contribute to giving coherence to Macbeth. - o O o -
On Translating William Shakespeare's Sonnets into Spanish, with Special Reference to Sonnet XX Pérez Prieto, Pedro I.E.S. "Gregorio Marañón", Madrid (Spain) Panel: 5 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
There have been numerous approaches to translating William Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish. As there is still some room for improvement, this paper will attempt to explain the reasons why the author translated those sonnets as he did. The translation was done following a holistic approach, paying attention to the fact that translation has to be ‘adequate’ and ‘acceptable’. Content and form are inseparable; therefore, the perception of the poem by the translator must be adequate because if defective, the outcome would be missing the point. Hence the importance of research previous to translation. The stylistic features in both the source text and the translated version have to be equivalent. Among the stylistic features, the author emphasises the function of rhythm, which must have meaning. He also points out that the more complex a text is, the more possibilities there are for the translator to place the right words or structures in the different and varied relations that cross the vast network of a poem. Following this line of thought, this paper aims at showing the holistic approach to translation at work on the author’s version of Sonnet XX by commenting on the different strategies used to deal with the complexities that led to the final version, special attention being paid to wordplay and double meaning. - o O o -
The Rise and Fall of Durfey’s Don Quixote Trilogy Portillo García, Rafael Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Panel: 1 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 12,00 to 13,30 Room: Sala "Europa"
Three musical dramas based on Don Quixote were written by Thomas D’Urfey—with music composed by several notable musicians—and were subsequently staged in London by the United Company in 1694-95. The first one was met with enthusiastic approval and, even though the second somehow managed to succeed, when the third play was performed, public opinion turned against the dramatist and the premiere became a real fiasco. This paper studies the texts of these three dramas and analyses the artistic and social circumstances in which they were produced, in an attempt at finding out the reasons for the initial success and later failure of the trilogy. By so doing, new light is cast on the way show business operated in late 17th-century London. - o O o -
Spelling Standardisation in Shakespeare’s First Editions: Evidence from Quarto and First Folio Editions of Romeo and Juliet Queiroz de Barros, Rita Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) Panel: 8 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
The aim of this paper is to present an assessment of spelling standardisation in Shakespeare’s original editions. Though ignored so far in literature, in which the orthography of Shakespeare’s texts has been considered mainly as an authorial and chronological test (eg.: Pollard, 1923; Partridge, 1954 and 1964), for purposes of textual reconstruction (eg.: Hinman, 1963) or as a tool for phonological reconstruction (eg.: Cercignani, 1981), this issue certainly deserves attention. An appraisal of the degree of spelling standardisation in Shakespeare’s first editions, which we know incomplete, may:
Assuming standardisation essentially as a trend towards uniformity, this analysis will make use of electronic tools for text analysis and consider as sample the Quarto and First Folio digital versions of Romeo and Juliet as edited by the Internet Shakespeare Editions. - o O o -
Metaphors of Opulence and Power in the Life of Thomas Wolsey, the King’s Cardinal Relvas, Maria de Jesus Universidade Aberta (Portugal) Panel: 13 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (1558), by George Cavendish, appeared at the beginning of the Elizabethan Age. Its author, Wolsey’s Gentleman Usher, lived close to the minister and his king, a privileged eyewitness to many events that are told in the narrative and an active character in a court that proved to be the embryo of the English Renaissance court par excellence. Thomas Wolsey’s rise to the highest offices of the nation may be seen as a metonymy of the whole age, especially in which display and opulence are concerned. His best known portrait does not exhibit embroidered silks, jewels or rich velvets, as Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I, or the Renaissance courtiers’ do – he was, after all, a man of the Church – but the vast mass of his figure dressed in red, emblematic as it is, symbolizes all the immense power and exceptional wealth of someone who, for some time, effectively ruled England. The period of his supremacy is told by Cavendish through elaborate descriptions full of rhetorical devices that verbally expand on what the portrait merely hints at; they constitute metaphorical canvases, as colourful as the portraits of the age, which will be the topic of this paper. - o O o -
Thou’rt a Strange Fillee: A Possible Source of ‘y-tensing’ in Seventeenth-Century Lancashire Dialect? Ruano García, Francisco Javier Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) Panel: 7 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Drawing from the orthographical representation of dialect traits in Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancashire Witches and Tegue O Divelly, the Irish Priest: a Comedy (1682), this paper tries to account for the phonological reasons that seem to attest ‘y-tensing’ in Early Modern Lancashire. Although Wells (1997) dated this allophonic variant in the latter part of the 20th century, it is our contention, in the light of the spellings used, that Shadwell quite probably intended to portray a tense pronunciation of word-final weak / I /. We aim, therefore, to examine both the historical linguistic background which led to the emergence of a tense / i / in Lancashire fillee -PdE fellow-, as well as the deviant spellings that apparently point at such a regional variant. With a view to clarifying our theory, the presentation will briefly focus on the biographical links of Thomas Shadwell with the county of Lancashire in order to ascertain the linguistic accuracy of his literary representation. Attention will also be paid to the use of dialect in Early Modern English literature and its potential for linguistic research. In so doing, it is our attempt to shed some light on the traditionally neglected and unexplored domain of Early Modern English dialectology. - o O o -
Emblems for the Prince: The Manuscript 2492 (Biblioteca Nacional) Sáez Hidalgo, Ana Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
See "Cano Echevarría, Berta", for further details. - o O o -
The Printing of Medieval Romance in Early Modern England: A Case Study Sánchez Martí, Jordi Universidad de Alicante (Spain) Panel: 11 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
Usually considered as contributing factors in the textual degeneration of romance, the early printed editions of Middle English metrical romances have been the object of limited critical scrutiny tending to confirm the prejudice of traditional criticism. Nevertheless, if issues of reception, readership, and editorial revision of medieval texts in the print era are to be better understood, it is imperative that this tendency be reversed. By discussing the case of The Lyfe of Ipomydon, this paper hopes to describe some of the circumstances that influenced, and determined, the transfer of a romance from manuscript to print. Printed at least twice by Wynkyn de Worde after 1517 (see Short-Title Catalogue, 5732.5 and 5733), Ipomydon is the only printed Middle English romance for which the printer’s copy has been preserved. Not only does the printer’s exemplar show signs of the editorial processes applied, it also provides us with significant historical evidence. Professionally produced in the late fifteenth-century, the manuscript text of Ipomydon first existed as a booklet and was some forty years later bought by the London mercer John Colyns, who bound it in his commonplace book now British Library, Harley 2252. With the exploration of the circumstances and processes accompanying the transferral of Ipomydon to the print format I hope to improve our understanding of the conditions of survival of medieval romances in the post-medieval period. - o O o -
Mary Tudor and the Ideological turningpoint Serras, Adelaide Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) Panel: 9 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 16,30 to 18,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
This paper aims to explore the different layers of symbolism of Mary Tudor as a sixteenth-century regal figure. I plan to contrast the more frequent and popular view of a vilified Mary Tudor as the "Bloody Mary" with her image as the defender of an ancestral idea of national love and loyalty. After Henry VIII’s historical decision concerning the English religious standing within Christendom and the resulting new guidelines of his external policy, Mary Tudor’s reign presented a significant challenge. The arising notions of nationalism were split into two distinct trends: a more traditional perspective positioning England under the scope of a unified Christian Europe, and a rather insular view of England as a more autonomous European power in relation to continental Europe. What had been triggered by her father authoritative wish became a political decision stemming from a wider basis of participation in the res publica. The fact that she was a woman also highlights the difficulty of conciliation between the prerequisites expected of her from a gender point of view and her representation as the monarch. - o O o -
"What a Pox Art Thou Afraid of a Woman–?": Challenging Gender Hierarchy through Humour in Aphra Behn’s The Second Part of the Rover Tomé Rosales, Ángeles Universidade de Vigo (Spain) Panel: 10 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 9,30 to 11,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
In her comedies, Aphra Behn makes use of humour in order to challenge the gender hierarchy which identifies patriarchal society. Through humour, she manages to ridicule male characters and, therefore, these men quit the superior position they have always occupied in patriarchal society in favour of the female characters, though temporarily. So, this leads us to forget about gender as a biological concept unable to change. Obviously, if women are able to occupy the superior position, gender proves to be a cultural concept which can be altered. As we will find out through the analysis of The Second Part of the Rover (1681), Aphra Behn’s comedies challenge the traditional concept of gender. Precisely, that may be one of the reasons why Aphra Behn’s comedies have not been studied until the end of the twentieth century, when the feminist movement revived them. This paper attempts to analyse how Aphra Behn undermines the patriarchal conception of gender through humour in The Second Part of the Rover, a comedy which never achieved the popularity of Part I in the seventeenth century but which is as disrupting and funny as The Rover is. - o O o -
The Function of Animal Metaphors in Shakespearian Drama Varandas, Angélica Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal) Panel: 6 Day and time: Thursday, 6th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "Europa"
The plays of William Shakespeare contain about 4.000 references to animals. It would be tempting to analyse them in the light of the allegoric and symbolic universe of the bestiaries that were so popular in English culture and literature just two centuries before the Renaissance. Yet, we find out that, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Neo-Platonist world of medieval bestiaries was beginning to collapse under the revolutionary Aristotelian theories. Also, the wide circulation of classic fables during the 15th century contributed to a whole new conception of animals and the natural world, as well as to a new understanding of the relationship between man and the other creatures. In fact, we realise that in Shakespearian drama there are other sources and influences for animal metaphors which no longer fulfil an exegetic function but instead point to aesthetic, social, ideological and political aspects. In this paper, instead of focusing on a single play, we will explore these topics by giving some examples taken from several plays in order to cover the most relevant functions of animal metaphors in Shakespearian drama.
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"Our Worser Thoughts Heavens Mend!" Because William Shakespeare Wouldn’t: A View on Egyptian Women in Antony and Cleopatra Vicente Calvo, Manuel Universidad de Alcalá de Henares / Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid (Spain) Panel: 12 Day and time: Friday, 7th, from 12,30 to 14,00 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Womanhood presented in Shakespeare’s Roman plays is double-faced. While "Roman womanhood is not seductive but ‘holy, cold and still’" (Carol Cook dixit), which is reflected in the attitudes and language spoken by Roman female characters, non-Roman women are not depicted with such traits. William Blissett points out that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare displays Oriental ‘levitas’ against Roman ‘gravitas’ to give the impression of two incompatible worlds and ways of life. Women were made part of this game, where Rome would stand for the masculine and the positive virtues, while Egypt for the feminine and negative ones. It is precisely this relation between the Egyptian female characters and negative values which I intend to show. By paying special attention to a group of secondary characters, Cleopatra’s female servants mainly in the second scene of the first act of Antony and Cleopatra, I will try to demonstrate here how Egyptian women are presented as a negative model not to be followed because of their renunciation to feminine virtues such as silence, chastity or motherhood. The analysis of Iras and Charmian will show them as a model of vice to compare to virtuous Roman women displayed in his other plays. However, I will always bear in mind that both negative (Egyptian) and positive (Roman) female paradigms, often based on the views of influent writers and philosophers, were used in Renaissance drama to impose on the feminine audience a single model of womanhood fashioned by male authors in a male dominated society. Along the communication I will compare the scene mentioned and texts from philosophers and literary critics to illustrate my point of view. - o O o -
"A Mere Iest and Fable"?: William Adlington as a Humanist Translator Zunino Garrido, María de la Cinta Universidad de Jaén (Spain) Panel: 4 Day and time: Wednesday, 5th, from 18,30 to 19,30 Room: Sala "García Matos"
Apuleius’ The Golden Ass was first translated into English by William Adlington in 1566, and, though later than other vernacular translations, it certainly enjoyed a wide popularity at that time. Despite of such a late translation, the Latin Golden Ass still had a good reception in 16th century England and before: Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia regum Britanniae, Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, William Paynter in his Palace of Pleasure, Gascoigne in the poem "David saluteth Bersabe", Reginald Scott in The Discovery of Witchcraft, Sidney in The Defense of Poesie, Spenser in the Faerie Queene, Marlowe in Hero and Leander, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, among other authors, alluded to Apuelius’ work. For the most part Adlington’s translation owed his success to the Humanist touches with which he coloured his translation, which he did following the precepts established in Beoraldo’s edition of The Golden Ass and the trends established by other European translators of Apuleius like Diego López de Cortegana or Michel de Tours. For The Golden Ass to be adapted to Renaissance parameters, several interpretational changes were necessary, and these Adlington and the other translators provided. As suggested by Erasmus, fiction was worthwhile if shaped with verisimilitude and with didactic and moralistic tones. Apuleius’ Milesian fable therefore would only go from "a mere iest and fable" to a verisimilar and moralistic Renaissance tale by means of an allegorical interpretation. - o O o - |