See the programme for tomorrow’s conference – some tickets are still available!
Here are the speaker biographies followed by the concert programme. Booking for both at Eventbrite.
David Hawkes is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His publications span a huge variety of fields, from Milton and Shakespeare to Diego Maradona, sodomy, Darwinism, zombies, torture, Chomsky, magic, McCarthyism, Islam and Satan. The theme uniting all of his work is the impact of capital on the psyche, and especially the pernicious influence of usury. He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and his work has appeared in The Nation and In These Times as well as in academic venues like the Journal of the History of Ideas, English Literary History and Studies in English Literature.
David Hawkes is the author of Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680 (Palgrave, 2001), Ideology (Routledge, 1996, 2nd ed. 2003), The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (Palgrave, 2007), John Milton: A Hero of Our Time (Counterpoint, 2009) and The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (Palgrave, 2010) and he has edited Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. More recently, he has written Shakespeare and Economic Theory (Bloombury, 2015) and collaborated with Alan Rubin and the artist LG Williams on The Age Of The Image: LG Williams SoCal Mid-Rise Pictures 2015-16 (published in 2016). He is currently working on a book entitled The Death of the Soul. For more information, see davidhawkes.net.
Chris Fitter is Professor of English at Rutgers University and has written about politics in Shakespeare and representations of the natural world in Greek and Roman antiquity, the medieval period, the Bible, and the English Renaissance.
His first book, Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: 1995) discussed representations of the natural world from Homer to Milton in literature, art, and formal thought, and suggested some foundational sociological principles behind the conceptualization of nature as landscape. Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (Routledge: 2012) placed Shakespeare’s early plays within contexts of political opposition and debate normally overlooked in the field, arguing for the playwright’s alignment with popular sufferings and populist politics. His current book, nearly complete, is Activist Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Second Tetralogy and King Lear, which examines these dramas as further examples of Shakespeare’s risk-taking involvement in hot political topics of those years. He has published nearly twenty essays and book chapters, along with many reviews.
Gabriel Egan is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University and one of the four General Editors (with Gary Taylor, Terri Bourus, and John Jowett) of the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, of which the Modern Critical Edition appeared in October 2016 and the Critical Reference Edition and Authorship Companion will appear in early 2017. He co-edits the academic journals Theatre Notebook (for the Society for Theatre Research) and Shakespeare (for the British Shakespeare Association and Routledge).
He has written and edited several books: The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the Edinburgh Critical Guide to Shakespeare (2007), Green Shakespeare (2006), Shakespeare and Marx (2004), and an edition of Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s The Witches of Lancashire (2002). Most recently, he has written Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015). Professor Egan is currently editing Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona for the New Variorum Shakespeare series. For more information, see gabrielegan.com.
Christian Smith received his PhD in 2013 in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. From 2013 to 2016, he held a fixed-term post as a Teaching Fellow in this same department. He is living in Berlin researching and writing his first monograph: Shakespeare’s Influence on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism. He has recently written articles on Shakespeare, Marx and exchange value, and has a forthcoming article on Dorothea Tieck’s translations of Shakespeare. Christian is currently co-editing the “Karl Marx” special edition of Shakespeare with Hugh Grady. See also his research page: christianasmith.com.
Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Kingston University, London. He is also Co-director of The London Graduate School.
His recent publications include Deconstruction After 9/11(London: Routledge, 2008) and Roland Barthes, or, The Profession of Cultural Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He is the editor of The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (London: Pluto Press, 2007), Deconstruction Reading Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and The Origins of Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and is also series editor for ‘The Frontiers of Theory’ list published by Edinburgh University Press. He works in the spaces between literary theory, art theory, cultural studies and continental philosophy, and writes on the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Paul de Man. He is also an award-winning filmmaker and a frequent contributor to the higher education press in the UK.
Hugh Grady is Professor Emeritus of English at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania. He has authored several important books on Shakespeare and philosophy: The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical texts in a Material World (1991), Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (1996), Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (2002), and Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (2009). He is also the editor of Shakespeare and Modernity: From Early Modern to Millennium (2000) and co-editor, with Terence Hawkes, of Presentist Shakespeares (2007).
Furthermore, he has published more than 30 articles in journals and anthologies, co-edited Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century (2013), and edited and contributed to Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, Kott: Great Shakespeareans (2012), an anthology of critical essays focusing on Shakespeare’s reception by the major modern critics. Professor Grady is currently finishing a book (based on his 1978 dissertation) entitled John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
‘Music from the salons of Europe’
The London Abel Quartet
William Summers – Flute
Diane Moore – Violin
Diane Terry – Viola
Ibrahim Aziz – Cello
All instruments used are transitional between the Baroque and Classical or early Romantic periods, typical of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
Francois Devienne [1759 – 1803] – quartet in C opus 66 no. 3 [Paris, 1786]
Allegro Risoluto – Adagio – Rondo Allegretto –
Ludwig Beethoven [1770 – 1827] – Serenade in D opus 25 [1795-6]
Entrata, Allegro – Tempo ordinarie d’un Menuetto – Allegro Molto – Andante con Variazioni – Allegro scherzando e vivace – Adagio; Allegro vivace e disinvolto
INTERVAL
Jean-Baptiste Breval [1753 – 1823] – Air varie opus 9 no. 5 [London, c. 1782]
Felix Mendelssohn [1809 – 1847] – Praeludium [1841]
Giovanni Battista Viotti [1755 – 1824] – quartet in C minor opus 22 no. 2 [Paris, 1808]
Moderato ed espressivo – Presto – Allegro agitato e con fuoco
For further information about The London Abel Quartet, please see www.abelquartet.com and for further information about concerts of early music in Garrick’s Temple and in other local historic venues, please see www.lokimusic.co.uk
In her illumination of Shakespeare through Hegel, Jennifer Ann Bates reads the logic of measure from Hegel alongside Measure for Measure. Bates argues that each text is an initiation into the execution of the logic of measure with a focus on the hangman’s mystery as discussed by Abhorson and Pompey.
By discussing the German philosophers Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Paul A. Kottman proposes to see Shakespearean tragedy as the birth of a distinct art form. He argues that Shakespearean tragedy works through and makes sense of the loss of a given (such as nature, God, or fate), as well the loss of social bonds.
Shakespeare, poète national, est le plus souvent cité pour ses tirades à la gloire d’une Angleterre insulaire, forte de son indépendance. La plus célèbre, dans Richard II (1595) chante l’invulnérabilité de l’île: « Cette forteresse bâtie par la Nature pour elle-même / Contre la contagion et la main de la guerre/… Cette pierre précieuse sertie dans une mer d’argent/ Qui fait pour elle office de rempart » (II, 1, 44-48 ; trad. J.-M.Déprats) est naturellement protégée contre tout envahisseur. Et le 20 août 1940, c’est à Shakespeare que se réfère Winston Churchill pour célébrer les pilotes de la Bataille d’Angleterre en empruntant au vainqueur d’Azincourt, le roi Henry V, de mémorables accents patriotiques (Henry V, (1599), IV, 3, 59). 
