This year marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Many libraries, archives, colleges, and theater companies are marking this anniversary with talks, exhibits, and performances of Shakespeare’s plays. UNL Medieval and Renaissance Studies is proud to have Melissa Aaron, Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cal Poly Pomona, speaking on the business of early modern theater.
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Official abstract:
The works of Shakespeare have frequently been reduced to words on a page, which is the dominant form in which students encounter them. However, a dramatic work contains extra-textual elements. Ask anyone what they remember best about a performance of Phantom of the Opera and they will unhesitatingly respond, “the chandelier.” An economic reading is a core sample: it drills down through a tiny chronological slice of theater history without discrimination between important and unimportant detail to look at the specific conditions of performance, and in turn what that tells us about things we should know when producing Shakespeare. “Economic readings” focus on money and on stuff—actors’ bodies, physical space, costumes, props. At its most radical, it becomes Shakespeare without Shakespeare’s words, what Antonin Artaud called mise en scène rather than dialogue. And it looks at money, partly because money embarrasses academics more than sex and so it is fun to talk about, and also because Shakespeare’s works came into being and flourished at the same time as the beginning of capitalism and a credit economy.

This paper explicates and defends this methodology, and provides a demonstration of how it works in the context of one of Shakespeare’s plays.
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Co-sponsored by the Department of English, and the Johnny Carson School of Theatre & Film