Cosmopolitan Shakespeare
This panel will think through scholarly descriptions of a ‘Global Shakespeare’, in part by wondering whether the adjective ‘global’ is the most apt for Shakespeare’s accomplishment. Might we think of a ‘cosmopolitan’ Shakespeare, or a ‘worldly’ Shakespeare, instead? Unusually, this panel will think about the ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘worldly’ aspects of Shakespeare’s style, from diction to rhetoric to verse form. How was Shakespeare’s style informed by the world beyond England? And how much was Shakespeare a (consciously) cosmopolitan or worldly writer?
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, University of Neuchatel
‘all of one communitie’: intertextual and lexical ‘cosmopolites’
This paper introduces early modern notions of the ‘cosmopolite’ and proposes an application to Shakespeare. It argues that intertextual and lexical practices by Shakespeare and others, notably John Florio, evince features of the ‘cosmopolite’: openness towards strangers and their cultures and an attendant tendency to cross normative and proprietorial boundaries. The hospitality towards the language(s) and writings of past and contemporary others exemplified in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Florio’s Montaigne puts into question the production of boundaries of authorial ownership and an authoritative native vernacular. By contrast Ben Jonson’s Volpone asserts these boundaries and exposes to critique the ‘would-be’ ‘cosmopolite’.
Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University
‘Global Style and the Mediterranean Tragedy’
This paper argues that stylistic and rhetorical properties in the tragedies of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Peele exhibit what Cicero describes as the ‘Asiatic’ way of writing: verbal redundancy and lack of concision. This paper will contend that the (re-)emergence of ‘Asiatic’ style in Marlowe’s plays was motivated by the politics of the eastern, and especially Ottoman, Mediterranean. It will explore how George Peele imitates a Marlovian ‘Asiatic’ style in The Battle of Alcazar, and then how ‘Asiatic’ style is critiqued for excess and ostentation in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra (while at the same time being a source of pleasure for readers and audiences).
Robert Stagg, Texas A&M University
Shakespeare’s Worldly Style
This paper will wonder about the extra-European dimensions of Shakespeare’s style, from diction to meter to verse form. How might his sonnets have been inflected by the Arabic pre-history of sonnet form, and by contemporary Middle Eastern verse? How did the discussions of ‘Asiatic’ style in North’s Plutarch inform the ‘Egyptian’ style of Antony and Cleopatra? What could it mean for Rosalind to speak of ‘Ethiop words’ in As You Like It? Can we talk of Shakespeare’s ‘worldly’ style, in the double sense of it having been affected by the extra-European world and it having been conscious of, even cosmopolitan about, that world?