Image: courtesy National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Used with permission.
Date: Monday 20 April 2015
Time: 12-1pm (Honours/Postgrad Masterclass 1-2pm)
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building,The University of Sydney
Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au
All welcome
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Ewan Fernie argues that in literary history Shakespeare comes to mean freedom first and foremost because of a fundamental connection between personal liberty and what is widely acknowledged as his greatest achievement— his creation of dramatic characters more spirited and alive than any that have been created before or since. In his Aesthetics, the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel presented Shakespeare’s characters as ‘free artists of their own selves’, an insight which the contemporary critic Harold Bloom singles out as ‘the best critical passage on Shakespearean representation yet written’.
Fernie will revisit and explore Hegel’s proposition about Shakespearean freedom in relation to the insights of materialist criticism. He will argue that Shakespearean drama can’t ultimately be seen as a hymn to purely individual liberty. It’s true that we’re always concerned with character in the plays; but we are never concerned with just one character. Shakespearean freedom is never forged in isolation; it is always made in interaction. In short, it is always political
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.
Professor Fernie will be holding an honours and postgraduate masterclass directly after this talk, from 1-2pm, in the Woolley Building. For more information please contact: liam.semler@sydney.edu.au