Dates and Times

Monday 10 June 2024 from 1.00pm - 8.00pm

• Symposium Panels - The Senate Room, QUB / 1.00pm - 5.00pm
• Symposium Plenary and Drinks Reception - The Great Hall, QUB / 5.30pm - 8.00pm

Tuesday 11 June 2024 from 9.00am - 5.00pm

• Symposium Panels - Senate Room, QUB / 9.00am - 5.00pm

Leads

Professor Mark Thornton Burnett, Dr Emer McHugh and Dr Taarini Mookherjee.

Registration

Day 1 - Panels          l          Day 1 - Plenary and Drinks Reception          l          Day 2 - Panels

Description

Across the Shakespeare canon, ideas of unsettledness and unsettlement recur. For example, Leontes, jealous husband in the late romance, The Winter’s Tale, is described as seeming ‘something …unsettled’, while Prospero, bidding farewell to his island kingdom in The Tempest, refers to his ‘unsettled fancy’ as he turns his back on his magus ‘settler’ role. The condition is given its most succinct statement in Hamlet’s complaint, fired by a carpentry metaphor, that the time ‘is out of joint’ and he must ‘set it to right’. Both in the sense of psychological displacement and in the sense of colonial dispossession/departure, these registrations of being ‘unsettled’ make for powerful drama. But, as developments in political and sociological theory demonstrate, to be ‘unsettled’ is also a signature feature of the contemporary. In her study, Narratives of Unsettlement: Being Out-of-Joint as a Generative Human Condition (2023), Madina Tlostanova writes that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries represent the ‘age of unsettlement’, a phenomenon marked by ‘constant negotiation between belonging and non-belonging, rootedness and displacement, by a chronophobic fear of changes [and] … an inability to imagine a different world and start working for its implementation’.

This symposium argues that adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays world-wide engage actively with this ‘age of unsettlement’. It contends that such adaptations execute a vital role – and have a unique utility – in canvassing possibilities for global justice. Drawing on the combined interests of the organisers – Burnett (Shakespeare and World Cinema), McHugh (Marie Curie project, ‘Shakespeare and the Irish Actor’) and Mookherjee (British Academy/Newton International project, ‘Shakespeare, India, Diaspora’) – the symposium takes ideas of unsettledness and unsettlement as a point of departure. Papers explore the ways in which recent adaptations converse with the plays to debate the ‘unsettled’ condition, whether this expresses itself in the recuperative potentialities of theatre in conflict and post-conflict situations, the place of indigenous studies and the role of translation or in the effects of diaspora in Asia, India, Ireland, Europe and the US, the workings of gender, sexuality and race inside ‘unsettled’ ideologies, the movement of actors and, crucially, the transmission of the Shakespearean text. Throughout, and in keeping with recent discussion in adaptation studies, we will suggest that adaptations open spaces for the operation of healing work. As Tlostanova explains, ‘to regard unsettlement … as potentially … creatively rich … widening horizons … is an important task’. Marked, as they are, by the discontinuities and inconsistencies that characterise their contexts of production, ‘Unsettled Shakespeares’ might be read as aspiring to restorative visions and better dispensations today.

Plenary Lecture

‘Unsettling Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’

Professor Joyce Green MacDonald, University of Kentucky

Abstract

A play about empire, desire, and race, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra has long unsettled critical and theatrical responses.  Its vexed reception may well mirror the unsettled state of the play itself, where men are mistaken for women, the erotic blurs into the maternal, and Octavius – the final victor – remembers Antony, his greatest rival, as the engine that animated his own heartbeat.

In this plenary address, Professor Joyce Green MacDonald will discuss Antony and Cleopatra’s history and current responses to the play in terms of their treatment of its unsettled qualities.

Speaker Biography

Joyce Green MacDonald is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.  She is the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a crucial discussion of the links between women’s racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. 

MacDonald examines in this work the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. 

Professor MacDonald is also the author of Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World (Palgrave, 2020), which vitally argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women’s often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare’s world, and our own. 

Numerous other publications include, as editor, Race, Ethnicity and Power in the Renaissance (Associated University Press, 1996) and articles on race in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, women’s writing in the early modern period, and Shakespearean adaptation and performance.

Speakers

• Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast)
• Jessica Chiba (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
• Katherine Hennessey (Wenzhou-Kean University)
• Mark Houlahan (University of Waikato)
• Adele Lee (Emerson College)
• Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky)
• Emer McHugh (Queen’s University Belfast)
• Victor Huertas Martín (University of València)
• Taarini Mookherjee (Queen’s University Belfast)
• Anita Raychawdhuri (University of Houston-Downtown)
• Adrianna M. Santos (Texas A&M University-San Antonio)
• Christina Wald (University of Konstanz)

To view the Symposium Booklet containing the Schedule, Speaker Biographies and Abstracts, please click here.

Image credit: Noriko Eguchi as Miranda in Sado Tempest (dir. John Williams, 2012). Copyright: 100 Meter Films.