Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Welcome to Visiting Scholar Professor Takayuki Katsuyama

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Professor Takayuki Katsuyama is a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall and St Catharine’s College, visiting us from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He tells us about his research below. If you are, or know, a Visiting Scholar who is interested in the Renaissance, get in touch.

Takayuki Katsuyama, Doshisha University, JapanSherley

For the last ten years I have been working on a project: “Shakespeare and English Cartography in the 16th and 17th Century.” The project has been partly sponsored by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan). The whole project was published last year in book form, titled “The English Cartography and Shakespeare’s Plays”. As I did this research on the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and English map-making, I found it was important to investigate how the Englishmen fashioned themselves as “cosmopolitans”, through foreign trade in the Mediterranean Sea. The encounters with the people of different cultures and religions, constituted as “Other” to them – Moroccans, Indians, Turks, Moors, Egyptians and Persians – must have exerted a great influence over the formation of “English” identities. I am sure that my time spent researching at Cambridge will help me a lot in developing and expanding my project on the English map to the Mediterranean map, so that I can complete my next book, which will be titled “Shakespeare and the Orient”.

TITLE-PAGE, anthony nixon, The three English brothers (lONDON, 1607)

 

The Halved Heart: Shakespeare and Friendship

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Shakespeare’s Globe, 17 – 18 April 2015wither

Registration is open for this two-day conference at Shakespeare’s Globe

The conference will look at the place of friendship in early modern drama and theatre culture, featuring keynote addresses by Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University) and Cedric Brown (University of Reading). Leading scholars will explore the Renaissance fascination with idealised friendship – imagined as the sharing of ‘one soul in two bodies’ – and ask how the model was conceived on stage. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were well aware that a potential friend could be ‘another self’ or a false flatterer. This complexity was a rich source of inspiration for early modern dramatists.

Speakers include:
Stefania Crowther (University of Warwick), Jennifer Edwards (Royal Holloway, University of London), Huw Griffiths (University of Sydney), Chloë Houston (University of Reading), Eric Langley (University College London), Penelope Meyers Usher (New York University), Gemma Miller (King’s College London), Cass Morris (American Shakespeare Centre), Murat Öğütcü (Hacettepe University), Steve Orman (Canterbury Christ Church University), David L. Orvis (Appalachian State University), Andrea Stevens (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The schedule is available here.

ILLUSTRATION XXXVII, IN GEORGE WITHER, ‘A COLLECTION OF EMBLEMES, ANCIENT AND MODERNE’ (1635), SIG.P3R.