Date: Wednesday 17 June 2015
Time: 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Venue: Room 202A, Learning and Innovation Building (17), St Lucia campus
Enquiries: uqche@uq.edu.au
Speaker: Associate Professor Kathryn Prince, University of Ottawa
Early Modern Literature Forum
The Early Modern Literature Forum is an opportunity for those working in English and European literature and drama, 1500-1800, or in adjacent periods or fields, to share research and discuss texts and issues of common interest.
King Lear is considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, perpetually in competition with Hamlet for pole position, but for a play of this genre it is dramaturgically odd. With some attention to textual variations and to historical understandings of tragedy, and with support from the play’s performance history, I argue that aspects of King Lear are illuminated when it is considered in light of Elinor Fuchs’s notion of “landscape theatre,” a category normally associated with contemporary postdramatic theatre. Drawing on a long tradition of Christian, Aristotelian, and political readings of King Lear, as well as the newer body of criticism focusing on space and place in this play, I suggest that the repeated artistic failure captured in reviews of disappointing protagonists is inherent in King Lear, which seeks its tragedy elsewhere. If Hamlet dominated the long era of psychological realism on stage, King Lear, with its knowing landscape and its strangely unsatisfying tragedy, is a play for postdramatic times.
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Dr Kathryn Prince is a theatre historian with a particular interest in early modern emotions. Her current work focuses on the intersections of space, bodies, objects, and emotions in early modern performance, as well as “performance” in a broader sense relating to early modern accounts of cross-cultural contact. Her recent publications include the edited collections Performing Early Modern Drama Today and History, Memory, Performance as well as the monographs Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals and (forthcoming) Shakespeare in Practice: Space as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Shakespeare in performance from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa (Canada) in the Department of Theatre and in 2015 is an Early Career International Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Image: Hound Tor, Dartmoor, Phillip Capper. Image courtesy of Wiki Commons.