Theatre Cultures within Globalizing Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain

November 15-16, 2012

Convened by: Joachim Küpper, Leonie Pawlita, Madeline Ruëgg

The conference proceedings volume will be available at de Gruyter publishers as an Open Access publication:
Küpper, J., Pawlita, L. & Rüegg, M. (Eds.) (2018). Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires. Looking at Early Modern England and Spain. De Gruyter Mouton.

The first DramaNet conference, held one year into the project, explored Early Modern England and Spain. These two European countries represent the two competing imperial systems of the period, one on the ascendant and the latter on the decline. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both powers had managed to take dramatic culture to the masses and through public staging in stationary theatres for affordable prices reached a broad, socially diversified audience. Both England and Spain were globalizing Empires combining a wide-ranging cultural influence and growing multidimensional contacts with geographical spaces transcending Europe. 

The meeting addressed issues as to how and to what extent Early Modern English and Spanish theatre cultures are interrelated with one another and/or with other European cultures? How can these cultural connections be described in terms of theatre - taking into consideration the overarching transmissive impact of England and Spain on the spaces they conquered? What about the two-directional nature of this process and the floating back of dramatic and other cultural-ideological material to and within metropolitan Europe?

Conference Schedule

Thursday, 15 November 2012

10:15 - 10:30	Introduction and Welcome by Joachim Küpper (Freie Universität Berlin) Section 1: Transnational Aspects of European Drama Chair: Katja Gvozdeva (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet)
	Session A
10:30 - 11:15	M A Katritzky (The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK): Stefanelo Botarga and Pickelhering: Fishy Italian and English Stage Clowns in Spain and Germany
	Session B
11:15 - 12:00	Tatiana Korneeva (Freie Universität Berlin): Carlo Gozzi's La Principessa filosofa and his Comic Actors
12:00 - 12:15	Coffee Break
	Session C
12:15 - 13:00	Robert Henke (Washington University, St. Louis): From Augsburg to Edgar: The Transnational Beggar Book as Actor’s Repertoire
13:00 - 14:30	Lunch Break
	Section 2: Intercultural Connections between English and Spanish Drama Chair: Gautam Chakrabarti (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet)
	Session A
14:30 - 15:15	Leonie Pawlita (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet): Dream and Doubt: Scepticism in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Calderón's La vida es sueño
	Session B
15:15 - 16:00	Madeline Rüegg (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet): The Patient Griselda Myth and Marriage Anxieties on Early Modern English and Spanish Stages
16:00 - 16:30	Coffee Break
	Session C
16:30 - 17:15	Michael Armstrong-Roche (Wesleyan University, Connecticut): Lope de Vega, John Webster, and the Duchess of (A)malfi: Revisiting Comparative Narratives
	Session D
17:15 - 18:00	Susanne Wofford (New York University): Freedom and Constraint in Courtship across the Boundary of Rank: The "Jest Unseen" of Love Letters in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Lope de Vega's El Perro del Hortelano (Dog in a Manger)

Friday, 16 November 2012

	Section 3: Images of Spain on the English Stage Chair: Madeline Rüegg (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet)
	Session A
10:15 - 11:00	Ralf Haekel (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen): The Image of Spain in the Early Modern English Revenge Tragedy
	Session B
11:00 - 11:45	Marina S. Brownlee (Princeton University): Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage CANCELLED
11:45 - 12:00	Coffee Break
	Session C
12:00 - 12:45	Saugata Bhaduri (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi): Representations of Spain in Early Modern English Drama: A Study in Polycolonial Angst
12:45 - 14:15	Lunch Break
	Section 4: Between Europe and the Colonies Chair: Kirill Ospovat (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet)
	Session A
14:15 - 15:00	Barbara Ventarola (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg): Multi-Didaxis in the Drama of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
	Session B
15:00 - 15:45	Jonathan Gil Harris (George Washington University, Washington DC): Tamburlaine in Hindustan
15:45 - 16:15	Coffee Break
	Session C
16:15 - 17:00	Gautam Chakrabarti (Freie Universität Berlin/DramaNet): 'Eating the Yaban's Rice': Socio-Cultural Transactions on the Mid-Colonial Bengali Stage
	Session D
	Rajnish Kumar Mishra (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi): Indian Theatrical Experience in Globalising Empires: Recognition of Shakuntala in the Early Modern Europe  CANCELLED
17:00 - 17:30	Closing Remarks by Martin Puchner (Harvard University)

PARTICIPANTS

Michael Armstrong-Roche is Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Wesleyan University (Connecticut, USA). He is the author of Cervantes’ Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in Persiles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Earlier he was contributing author to the scholarly catalogue for an exhibition he helped organize called Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment,which could be seen at the Prado, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum in NYC (1988-1989). He is now at work on a book about Cervantes’ full-length plays, called Cervantes Plays: Ironies of History on the Early Modern Stage. His next project, on comparative narratives about early modern theater, has emerged from his long-standing participation in the Theater without Borders research collaborative. This research collaborative explores the international dimension of early modern theater, especially – but not exclusively – of England, Spain, Italy, and France.

Saugata Bhaduri is Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His areas of research interest include contemporary literary and cultural theory, classical Western and Indian philosophy, popular culture studies, translation and comparative literature, and British literature of the Renaissance and 18^th century, in all of which he has taught, guided and conducted research, and published extensively. His recent books include Literary Theory: An Introductory Reader (London, New York, New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2010), Perspectives on Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization (London, New York, New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2010), Translating Power (New Delhi: Katha, 2008), Negotiating ‘Glocalization’: Views from Language Literature and Culture Studies (London, New York, New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2008), and Les Yogasutras de Patañjali (Monaco: Editions Alphée, 2008).

Marina S. Brownlee is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Committee of Renaissance Studies. She writes on a variety of issues pertaining to medieval and early modern literature and theory. Her interests include periodization (and its discontents), cultural and linguistic translation, the literary representation of the senses, and the relationship of early tabloid literature to the 17th-century short story. She works primarily in Spanish, French, and Italian contexts. Her books include: The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); The Severed Word: Ovid’s Heroides and the ‘Novela Sentimental’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); The Status of the Reading Subject in the Libro de Buen Amor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); andThe Poetics of Literary Theory: Lope de Vega’s Novelas a Marcia Leonarda and their Cervantine Context (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1981). She has co-edited a number of volumes on medieval and early modern topics and most recently has edited a special issue of Duke’s Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies entitled Intricate Alliances: Early Modern Spain and England, and Renaissance Encounters. Greek East and Latin West (forthcoming with Brill).

Gautam Chakrabarti is finishing his PhD on “The Introduction of Early-Modern European Drama in India”, within the ERC-Project “DramaNet”, Freie Universität Berlin; he is also a Lehrbeauftragter in English and Comparative Literature there and at the Universität Potsdam. He has studied, researched in and taught English Literature and Culture Studies in Jadavpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and various colleges of the University of Delhi, India. He has been a Visiting Lecturer in English language, literature and culture and Hindi in a couple of universities and institutes in St Petersburg, Russia, in Autumn-Winter, 2008-9. He is also interested in Cold War Studies, Indic Studies, Jewish literary-cultural history and Ethnomusicology, themes on which he hopes to work in the future. He has also lectured in the University of Tartu (2006-7), the Moscow State University, the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Institute for Oriental Studies, Moscow, the University of Tartu, Estonia (2009), the Universitas Karolinas, Prague (2009), and the Jagellonian University, Kraków, (2011-12) on the above topics, Indian writing in English and Indian cultural history. His publications include “The ‘Bhadralok’ as Truth-Seeker: Towards a Social History of the Bengali Detective” (Kraków: Cracow Indological Series, 2012); “‘Koī to Zimmā le’: Sudeep Sen and the Translator’s Burden” (2012, forthcoming); “Noncommittal Involvements: Graham Greene’s Cold War Travelogues” (2007); and “Śabda as Sanskriti: Socio-Cultural Categories in the Arthaśāstra”, in: Sabda, text and interpretation in Indian thought. Festschrift for Professor Kapil Kapoor, ed. M. R. Paranjape and S. K. Sareen(New Delhi: Mantra Books, 2004).

Ralf Haekel is a Juniorprofessor of English Literature and Culture at Göttingen University. He is the author of Die Englischen Komödianten in Deutschland. Eine Einführung in die Ursprünge des deutschen Berufsschauspiels (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004); and a co-editor (with Markus Dauss) of Leib/Seele - Geist/Buchstabe. Dualismen in der Ästhetik und den Künsten um 1800 und 1900 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009); and earlier this year he finished his Habilitation entitled The Soul in British Romanticism. His recent publications also include “Towards the Soul. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion”, in: European Romantic Review 22 (2011); “Romantic Constructions of Poetry - Poetic Constructions of Romanticism”, in: Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings, ed. Christoph Reinfandt & Lars Eckstein (Trier: Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2009); “‘Talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar’. Romanticism, Materialism, and Neuroscience”, in: Romanticism Today - Selected Papers from the Tübingen Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, ed. Christoph Reinfandt & Lars Eckstein (Trier: Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2009).

Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English at George Washington University and associate editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, specializes in the drama and culture of early modern England, as well as European travel narratives about the early modern Orient and the Americas. He is interested in early modern understandings of globalization and the foreign, and how these have helped shape our knowledge and experiences of bodies, disease, commerce, travel, religious difference, material culture, and temporality. He is the author of five books, including (most recently) Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization, and the Waking Dream of Paradise (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2012). He has also edited several collections, including Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Professor Harris is currently at work on his next book project, The First Firangis: How to Become Authentically Indian, which considers the lives of foreign migrants to India from Europe, Africa and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Robert Henke is Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University, St. Louis, where he has been the Director of the Comparative Literature program and the Chair of the Performing Arts Department. He has received fellowships from Villa I Tatti, Fulbright, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997), Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and, with Eric Nicholson, co-edited Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). This fall he is completing a book entitled Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance, to be published with the University of Iowa Press. He is a resident scholar for Prison Performing Arts, a St. Louis-based program dedicated to creating and presenting the performing arts in prison.

M A Katritzky is the Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies in the English Department of The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, and a former Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Herzog August Library and NIAS (The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study). Current research topic: ‘Shakespeare’s Bottom’. Recent books include: Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); The Art of commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’arte 1560-1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006); and, co-authored with colleagues in The Open University English Department, The Handbook to Literary Research (London, New York: Routledge, 2010).

Tatiana Korneeva is a postdoctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied classical philology and comparative literature at Moscow’s Lomonosov State University, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the University of Lausanne. Her research interests include: fairy-tale studies, eighteenth-century theatre and literary theory, gender and cultural studies. She is author of ‘Alter et ipse’: identità e duplicità nel sistema dei personaggi della Tebaide di Stazio (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2011), and has published articles in journals such as Modern Language Notes, German Life and Letters, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Studi classici e orientali. Her recent publications include: “Law and Women’s Rights in Boccaccio’s Decameron: Madonna Filippa vs. Antigone”, in: Comparatio: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (in print); “Desire and Desirability in Leprince de Beaumont and Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast”, in: Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tales Studies, 28.2 Fall 2014 (in print); “Rival Sisters and Vengeance Motifs in the contes de fées by d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier and Perrault”, in: Modern Language Notes, French Issue 2012 (expected October 2012); “Cross-dressing Strategies in Benedikte Naubert’s Fairy-tale Novella Der kurze Mantel”, in: German Life and Letters, 65.3 (July 2012).

Joachim Küpper is Professor of Romance Philology and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-Project DramaNet (he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in 2009) and Director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2001 he was granted the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is the general editor of Poetica, and co-editor of Romanistisches Jahrbuch. He has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, and an invited Director of research ‘Directeur de recherche invité’ at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. He is a member of Leopoldina/ German National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. He sits on the Scientific Committee for the German Academies’ Research Programme, and on the Standing Committee on Research of the German University Presidents’ Conference (HRK). His focus is on Romance literatures, theory of literature and arts. His publications include: Ästhetik der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung und Evolution des Romans von der französischen Spätaufklärung bis zu Robbe-Grillet (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1987); Diskurs-Renovatio bei Lope de Vega und Calderón. Untersuchungen zum spanischen Barockdrama. Mit einer Skizze zur Evolution der Diskurse in Mittelalter, Renaissance und Manierismus (Tübingen: Narr, 1990); Petrarca. Das Schweigen der Veritas und die Worte des Dichters (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2002); Zum italienischen Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts. Foscolo, Manzoni, Verga, D’Annunzio (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002); “The Traditional Cosmos and the New World”, in: MLN 118 (2003).

Rajnish Kumar Mishra is an Assistant Professor of Sanskrit Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His fields of expertise are Sanskrit linguistics, philosophy of language, the Indian grammatical tradition, literary theory, comparative poetics and aesthetics, Kashmir Śaiva and Buddhist philosophy, among others. He has come to take a specialized interest in various theories of meaning and interpretation, both Indian and Western, in the prism of his broader academic pursuits to locate the interface domain of linguistics, literature and philosophy. He is the author of Buddhist Theory of Meaning and Literary Analysis (Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1999). His other publications include “Buddhist Theory of Meaning”, in: Signs and Signification, Vol. II (2000), and “Sthitpraj–asya kŒ bhŒ•Œ: What is Liberated/Decolonized Mind?”, in: Decolonization: A Search for Alternative, ed. Adesh Pal et al. (Delhi: Creative Books, 2000)

Leonie Pawlita is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the DramaNet project. She studied comparative literature and Spanish philology at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universidad de Granada (Spain), and completed her M.A. (Magistra Artium) at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2011. She is currently working on her PhD on Scepticism in early modern European drama.

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; winner of the Joe A. Callaway Award), Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006; winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award) and Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; 2011), as well as of numerous edited volumes and sourcebooks, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005). He is the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, third edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) and co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Drama (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

Madeline Rüegg is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the DramaNet project. She studied English, Spanish and French at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and obtained a Masters of Studies from the University of Oxford, UK in 2011. She is currently working on her PhD, entitled The Patient Griselda Myth in Early Modern European Drama, on early modern European theatrical adaptations of the story of Patient Griselda.

Barbara Ventarola is Associate Professor of Romance Literatures at the University of Würzburg. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cologne with a thesis on Francesco Petrarca’s Canzoniere, and is presently finishing her Habilitation developing a new trans-categorical theory of textuality. She is the author of Kairos und Seelenheil – Textspiele der Entzeitlichung in Francesco Petrarcas Canzoniere (Text und Kontext, 28; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008); editor of Literarische Stadtutopien zwischen totalitärer Gewalt und Ästhetisierung (München: Meidenbauer, 2011). Her publications also include: “Zwischen situationaler Repräsentation und Multiadressierung – Marcel Proust und Jorge Luis Borges als Paradigmen der Weltliterarizität”, in: Figuren des Globalen. Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, ed. Christian Moser and Linda Simonis (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2012, in print); “Weltliteratur(en) im Dialog – Zu einer möglichen Osmose zwischen Systemtheorie und postkolonialer Theorie”, in: Differenz(theorien). (Wie) können sich Postkoloniale Theorie und Systemtheorie beobachten?, ed. Mario Grizelj and Daniela Kirschstein (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012, in print); “‘fantástico pero no sobrenatural’ – Irrealisierung und Objektivität bei Jorge Luis Borges”, in: Objektivität und literarische Objektivierung seit 1750, ed. Niklas Bender and Steffen Schneider (Tübingen: Narr, 2010); “Passagen zu einer ethnographischen Semiologie – Roland Barthes: L’empire des signes”,in: Literaturtheorie und ‘sciences humaines’. Frankreichs Beitrag zur Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Rainer Zaiser (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008).

Susanne Wofford is Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and Professor of English. She is a founding member of the Theater without Borders research collective and a member of the group’s steering committee. She is the author of The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); co-editor of Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999); and editor of Shakespeare: The Late Tragedies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), and Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). She recently published “Foreign Emotions”, in: Theater without Borders’ first volume, Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008).