Continuing Professional Development Seminar - Shakespeare Unfinished
Continuing Professional Development Seminar
Shakespeare Unfinished
Wednesday, 23 May 2018
4.30-6pm, with afternoon tea from 4pm
Room 275, Global Change Institute (Building 20)
University of Queensland, St Lucia
Free. All welcome. Please RSVP by Monday 21 May to uqche@uq.edu.au.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was ambivalent about Shakespeare, citing what he felt was the haphazard or unfinished quality of the works: ‘His pieces give me the impression as of enormous sketches … as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything, so to speak.’ This sense of incompletion alarmed Wittgenstein, but for many readers, performers, and audiences it has been the essence of Shakespeare’s achievement: the poet John Keats, for example, praised Shakespeare for his ‘negative capability’—that is, his willingness to remain in moral and intellectual uncertainty. In this seminar, we will explore how effects of incompletion and uncertainty are central to Shakespeare’s approach to character and to the language of the plays and poems. We will also discuss the ways in which Shakespearean indeterminacy has been valued in the critical tradition.
Certificates of participation will be available for teachers of English and Drama.
Presenters:
Dr Nick Luke is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His monograph Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.
Professor Peter Holbrook is Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He is the author of several books about Shakespeare and related topics, including Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Xanthe Ashburner is Education and Outreach Officer with the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and holds an MPhil on modern poetry.
Image: Young Shakespeare Contemplating, Ted May, Melbourne, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.