Séance organisée par : Université Versailles St Quentin (Paris Saclay)

Lieu : Sorbonne Université, rue de la Sorbonne (75005), salle F671 (free – if you are planning to attend please send a message to our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, by 8 March: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr)

+ Zoom (free – to receive the link, please fill in the registration form by 8 March: https://forms.gle/kAwQTV7cDgbtbFFr9) 

There is still a widespread belief that towards the end of his career Shakespeare turned away from radical experiments with character (especially what is often called “inwardness”), adjusting his methods to privilege instead plot, action, and—as Anne Barton put it forty years ago—“the impersonal quality of a moment of dramatic time.” In this talk, I want to offer a reading of The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) that puts a new spin on the debate about the place of character in “late” Shakespeare, exploring the play’s role in the treatment of Shakespeare the author as a character in literary history. Focusing on notions of reproduction and retrospection, I suggest that the tragi-comedy is central to the historical and enduring characterisation of Shakespeare as an immortal father of literature whose “dead likeness”—in Paulina’s phrase, describing Hermione’s statue—can be found in his plays. Most significantly, The Winter’s Tale shaped the bookish staging of Shakespeare as a deceased author (“the late” Shakespeare) in the influential opening leaves of the volume whose 400th anniversary we are celebrating this year, the First Folio of 1623.

Harry Newman is a senior lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on theatre and book history, gender and sexuality, and the history of medicine and technology. His first monograph, Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he has edited special journal issues on “Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama” for Shakespeare Bulletin (vol. 36, no. 1, 2018; co-edited with Sarah Dustagheer) and on “Character Beyond Shakespeare” for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (vol. 21, no. 2, 2021). He is currently working on an alternative history of character in early modernity, and writing the introduction to the next Oxford World Classics edition of The Winter’s Tale.

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