Shakespearean Reverie Symposium

The 2011 Shakespeare in the Park Festival will see the introduction of an academic symposium to the annual format.

In the year that the Festival will focus on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it seems appropriate to reflect on the theme of 'reverie' in Shakespeare’s theatre. In our world, reverie captures the idea of being lost in thought, even daydreaming, and we get this sense of the word from the early moderns. But in many other senses in which the term reverie is now obsolete, the early moderns also understood it as something less fanciful. In its French origins, reverie denoted madness, wildness, uncontrollable rage or, for that matter, uncontrollable delight, revelry and absurdity. We welcome presentations that treat any of these aspects of early modern reverie in Shakespeare’s theatre, including, for example:

• revelry and the public theatre companies;
• representations of wildness, the grotesque, or supernatural;
• early modern cognition and dreaming;
• performance of the passions and the actor’s body; and
• a Shakespearean theatre of the absurd.

Confirmed keynote speakers for the symposium are:

• Mary Floyd-Wilson (North Carolina) - author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, and
• Paul Yachnin (McGill) - former President of the Shakespeare Association of America and author of The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (with Anthony Dawson) and Stage-wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value.

Symposium contact: Laurie Johnson 0402 120 356

Registration form (PDF, 286.4KB)

Dates:	6-8 October 2011
Venue:	Cobb & Co Museum, Lindsay Street, Toowoomba
Contact:	shakesymp@usq.edu.au

This project is proudly sponsored by the USQ Public Memory Research Cluster.