These are perennial questions. In both his plays and his lyrics, Shakespeare returns continually to the question of what difference poetry makes, from Orlando’s flawed love elegies in As You Like It to the murdered ‘bad’ poet of Julius Caesar. In so doing, he reflects an ongoing fissure in his society. Early modern writers vacillate between imagining poetry as worthless ‘balductum’ (if not downright sinful) and as an imitation of the fundamental order of the universe. Poetry’s force is represented sometimes as a wanton idle tickle and sometimes as the Orphic organizing principle that gave life to stones and laws to men (often by the same writer). As such, the puzzle of how Shakespeare understood the poetics discourse of his period opens out to questions of great interest from philosophy to ecology.
For Amanda Atkinson and Jessica Rosenberg, these concerned are best approached through the plays. Atkinson’s paper uses the metaphor of perspective in Midsummer Night’s Dream to connect a long line of thinking about early modern imitation with recent work on ‘error,’ showing how the ‘interstices between perspectives’ can be generative. Error has attracted a flurry of recent work within Shakespeare studies, as seen by two recent overflowing Shakespeare Association seminars and a flurry of publications. Jessica Rosenberg’s work revises the critical consensus on As You Like It, rereading the play’s arborial poetic activity as a representation of an urban poetic ecology, “part of a media network that reaches across city, forest, and stage.” Extending ideas in Rosenberg’s forthcoming book Botanical Publics, this paper also resonates with contemporary concerns about poetic circulation, remediation, and textuality. Eileen Sperry and Stephen Guy-Bray both turn to The Sonnets. Sperry looks to Shakespeare’s use of the couplet, while Guy-Bray theorizes Shakespearean repetition as “sequent toil.” Singled out by the committee as “gorgeous,” Sperry’s project is interested in the closing couplet as a test case for lyric theory’s attempts to think through poetic resolution or stagnation. Guy-Bray’s influence in early modern poetics and queer theory is well-known, and his key terms—repetition, sequence, and toil—run throughout writing on Shakespeare and poetry more generally.
Even from these brief summaries, we hope you will see the many lines of affiliation and connection that draw together these approaches. I would be glad to share these terrific abstracts on request.
The Shakespeare community at MLA is eager to see the results of putting these excellent scholars in dialogue. Our panel features four scholars from diverse places in their careers and the profession: graduate student, alt ac, and more established scholars. Each panelist will speak, and then a Q&A session will close the session.