Shakespearean Surfaces
Recent Shakespeare studies have variously explored ways in which a sense of inwardness is constructed through overlapping discourses of anatomy, subjectivity, and psychological character. By contrast, “surfaces” can now be relocated as a means to understand early modern identities in Shakespearean performance and writing. Surfaces are a threshold between the body and the world, inner and outer, private and public, imagination and production, actor and spectator, writer and reader, teacher and students. Permeable, opaque or transparent, surfaces are the material means by which our experience is structured and meaning is translated and mediated.
Professor Alison Findlay and Dr Liz Oakley-Brown are working collaboratively on this project to further previous critical work that has sought to probe beneath the surfaces of Shakespearean texts. By re-focussing attention on the surfaces themselves as complex elements in the ways meanings are generated, the project seeks to explore how ‘superficial’ Shakespeare is understood from the multiple perspectives of directors, editors, actors, critics, readers, spectators, teachers, students.
Professor Alison Findlay and Dr Liz Oakley-Brown launched 'Shakespearean Surfaces' with a panel at the British Shakespeare Association Conference (University of Warwick, 2007) with invited papers from Wolfram Keller (Marburg University) Dr Sybille Baumbach (University of Giessen), and Collette Gordon (Queen Mary College, London), as detailed below.
The ideas opened in the panel link to the Shakespeare Programme’s work on the Hesketh Collection and to performance-based research that moves beyond the written text. The initial findings of Professor Findlay’s research on ceremony, developed through the interdisciplinary research grouping “Re-Placing Ceremony and Ritual” will appear in two forthcoming essays: ‘Surface Tensions: Ceremony and Shame in Much Ado About Nothing,’ which will appear in Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), and ‘Henry IV and the Jacobean Court,’ in I Henry IV, ed. Stephen Longstaffe (Continuum Renaissance Drama, 2010). The project’s performance-based focus will feed into Dr Liz Oakley Brown’s research on the significance of skin as an early modern corporeal surface and Professor Findlay’s theatrical history of Much Ado About Nothing (contracted to Palgrave, 2010). A larger conference on ‘Shakespearean Surfaces’ at Lancaster University is also planned. Following this, the project’s long term goals include the publication of a monograph by Dr Liz Oakley-Brown, provisionally entitled Shakespearean Skins: Reading, Writing and Performing Corporeal Surfaces in Elizabethan Drama and a book by Professor Findlay on Shakespeare and Ceremony.
‘Shakespearean Surfaces’ Panel, University of Warwick, 2007
Alison Findlay (Lancaster University), ‘Superficial Shakespeare’
Wolfram Keller (Marburg University), ‘From Surface to Interface: Fifteenth- Century Masking and Shakespearean Performance in the History Plays’
Sibylle Baumbach, (International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, University of Giessen), Sur-faces or: how to do things with physiognomy'
Since the conference, Dr Baumbach has published a monograph Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008), discussing the poetics of the human face, the art of physiognomy, and strategies of nonverbal communication in Shakespeare’s plays. It offers new insight into Shakespeare’s modes of characterisation, and his art of performance.
Dr Baumbach's monograph is priced at £10.00 and available exclusively from Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk
Colette Gordon (Queen Mary, University of London), ‘An open hand’: character reading/reading character in Twelfth Night’
Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University), ‘Shakespearean Skins: Reading, Writing and Performing Corporeal Surfaces in As You Like It’
Department of English & Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University,