PLENARY LECTURES
PLENARY 1: Thursday 10.00 - Auditorium: Gary Taylor: Hamlet, Macbeth and Nordic History
Chair: Richard Wilson
PLENARY 2: Friday 10.00 - Auditorium: Sirkku Aaltonen: Shakespeare and National Theatre
Chair: Nely Keinänen
PLENARY 3: Friday 14.00 - Auditorium: Lisbeth Wærp: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Drama
Chair: Stephen Unwin
PLENARY 4: Friday 19.00 - Hampton Church: Graham Holderness: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Fiction
Chair: Per Sivefors
PLENARY 5: Saturday 10.00 - Studio: Howard Caygill: Kiekegaard’s Shakespeare
Chair: Jon Cook
PLENARY 6: Sunday 10.00 - Auditorium: Eero Tarasti: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Music
Chair: Robert Layton
PLENARY 7: Sunday 16.30- Studio: Gunnar Sorelius: Shakespeare in Scandinavian Film and TV
Chair: Martin Regal
PANELS
PANEL 1: THE NORDIC HAMLET
(Thursday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Roy Eriksen)
Patricia Harris Gillies: Hamlet and its Scandinavian Sources: The Nature of Shamanistic Kingship
Régis Augustus Bars Closel: Anglo-Danish Reformation in Hamlet
Jón Viðar Jónsson: Requiem for a Passing Aristocracy: Shakespeare and the Icelandic Sagas
PANEL 2: BALTIC SHAKESPEARE ITINERARIES
(Thursday 11.30, Studio. Chair: Sonja Fielitz)
Eva Griffith: Early English playing abroad: Will Kemp, John Green and Roaming for Queen Anna
Ildiko Solti: 'Who's there?' or, Revolution in Theatre History at Kronborg
Kelly Hunter: Hamlet: Still Alive in Gdansk
PANEL 3: ROYAL PATRONS
(Thursday 14.00, Gallery. Chair: Edward Chaney)
June Schlueter and Dennis McCarthy: Shakespeare, Two Norths, and Anglo/Swedish Affairs
Sara Smart: The Palatine Wedding: Confessional Tension and Cultural Transfer
Neville Davies: Getting the Facts Straight: Play Performances for Christian IV during his 1606 Visit to England
PANEL 4: SHAKESPEAREAN AUTHORSHIP AND PRINT
(Thursday 14.00, Studio. Chair: Graham Holderness)
Terri Bourus: Shakespeare’s Earliest Hamlet
Sara Marie Westh: Shakespeare, Brahe, and Authorial Anxiety
Anna Swärdh: The 1904 Discovery of the Titus Andronicus First Quarto in Sweden: Negotiating Value
PANEL 5: THE ENGLISH IN DENMARK
(Thursday 16.00, Gallery. Chair: Frank Whately)
Sonja Fielitz: “Going over the wild world”: Will Kemp in Scandinavia
Edward Chaney: Inigo Jones in Denmark
Chantal Schutz: “I haue beene twice vnder sayle for Denmarke” – The Travails and Excuses of Iohn Dovvland Batcheler of Musick
PANEL 6: MISSION IN FINLAND
(Thursday 16.00, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Sirkku Aaltonen)
Jyrki Nummi: The Build-Up of Finnish Semiosphere: Historical Transfromations in J. F. Lagervall’s Ruunulinna
Eeva-Liisa Bastman: From Tragedy of Mind to Imagined History: The Scottish Play in Kalevalaic Guise
Erika Laamanen: Transforming Macbeth into Kalevalan metre
PANEL 7: SHAKESPEARE AND DANISH POST-ROMANTIC LITERATURE
(Friday 11.30, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Dominic Rainsford)
Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen: The Making of a Storyteller: Hans Christian Andersen and Family Reading in the Nineteenth-Century
Paul Binding: Andersen and Shakespeare’s Danish Translators
Jacob Bøggild: The influence of William Shakespeare upon Canonical Post-Romantic Danish Literature: Anxiety and the Imaginary in Blicher, Kierkegaard and Blixen
PANEL 8: COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE
(Friday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Delilah Brataas)
Joanne Greenwood with Kaarina Karjula: Shakespeare and Finnish theatre RTT
Kiki Lindell: Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance in Sweden: Method or Madness?
Gweno Williams: Beyond the ‘Balcony Scene’: Actively Engaging Norwegian Undergraduates and Teachers with the Fullest Range and Experience of Shakespeare’s Plays
PANEL 9: IBSEN AND STRINDBERG
(Friday 15.00, Gallery. Chair: Martin Regal)
Nataša Šofranac: Hamlet’s Scandinavian Descendants: Miss Julie and Nora
Per Sivefors: Dreams, Subjectivity and the Author: the Cases of Shakespeare and Strindberg
Víctor Grovas Hajj: Ibsen and Shakespeare in Mexican Theatre during the Nineteenth Century: A History of Two Rivals
PANEL 10: NATIONAL THEATRES
(Friday 15.00, Studio. Chair: Charles Lock)
Pirkko Koski: Shakespeare and the Finnish National Theatre in the 1970s & 1980s
Aleksandra Sakowska: Baltic Shakespeare: The Gdansk Theatre
Christina Sandhaugh: Girdle Round the Earth: Toralv Maurstad's Fifty Years as Puck
PANEL 11: THE VISIT OF KING CHRISTIAN VII
(Friday 18.10, Hampton Church. Chair: Frank Whately)
Richard Wilson: Christian VII and Garrick: The Visit of the Royal Playgoer
Anne Sophie Refskou: The Prince of Denmark in Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair
PANEL 12: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 1
(Saturday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: Ewan Fernie)
John Gillies with Dan Watts: A Dialogue at the Borders of Literature and Philosophy
PANEL 13: PROBLEM PLAYS
(Saturday 11.30, Studio. Chair: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen)
Riitta Pohjola-Skarp: Dramatic and Tragic Irony in Aleksis Kivi’s Drama Karkurit and in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Roy Eriksen: Reconfiguring Falstaff in Hans E. Kinck's tragedy Den sidste Gjest [The Final Guest] (1910)
Martin Humpál: Knut Hamsun’s Criticism of Shakespeare
PANEL 14: KIERKEGAARD AND SHAKESPEARE 2
(Saturday 14.00, Studio. Chair: Anne-Sophie Refskou)
Nina Sanderhoff Hansen: Hamlet the Ironist
Peter Kishore Saval: Demonic Despair and Timon of Athens
Ewan Fernie: Shakespeare’s God via Kierkegaard and Hegel
PANEL 15: CANONIZING SHAKESPEARE
(Saturday 14.00, Gallery. Chair: Lisa Hopkins)
Clas Zilliacus: Shakespeare for Stage and Family: Wilhelm Bolin
Pentti Paavolainen: Birth of a Tradition: Kaarlo Bergbom
Tony Pinkney: Hamlet in Iceland: Erik Magnusson
PANEL 16: THE MODERN HAMLET
(Saturday 16.00, Gallery Chair: John Gillies)
Annelis Kuhlmann: The Hecuba Discussion in Postwar Theatre in Denmark
Frank Brevik: Hamlet through a Presentist Lens
Timo Uotinen: Critique of Modernity in Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business
PANEL 17: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC FANTASY
(Saturday 16.00, Upper Circle Bar. Chair: Per Sivefors)
Lisa Hopkins: Hamlet, Dracula and Iceland
Sven-Arve Myklebost: The Organist Conspiracy: Shakespeare as Treasure Map
Anthony Johnson: The Journey to Melonia (Resan till Melonia, 1989): The Tempest as a Nordic Fantasy
ROUNDTABLE: TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE
(Saturday 17.30, Gallery: Chair: Dominique Goy-Blanquet)
Niels Brunse: Denmark
Þórarinn Eldjárn: Iceland
Alice Martin: Finland
Edvard Hoem: Norway
Eva Ström: Sweden
PANEL 18: SHAKESPEARE IN NORDIC MUSIC
(Sunday 11.30, Gallery. Chair: David Nice)
Michelle Assay and David Fanning: Carl Nielsen, Shakespeare and the Modern Breakthrough
Daniel Grimley: ‘Some heavenly music’?: Lateness in Sibelius’s Stormen
Annika Lindskog: How They Like It: Midsummer Night Dreams in Swedish Song
Elke Albrecht: The final challenge? Aulis Sallinen’s last opera King Lear
PANEL 19: ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE
(Sunday 14.30, Gallery. Chair: Christina Sandhaug)
Alice Martin: From Macbeth to Hamlet - A Ten-Year Learning Process in Editing and Translating Shakespeare
Jessica Allen Hanssen: “Which when he has a house, he'll deck withal”: Northern Norwegian Language and Cultural Translation in The Tempest
Delilah Brataas: The Shadow’s Shadow: The Chiaroscuro of Gendered Ambition in Svend Gade’s 1921 Hamlet
PANEL 20: FILM AND TV
(Sunday 14.30, Studio. Chair: Ken McMullen)
Susanne Greenhalgh: Venus and Adonis in Per Fly’s TV Forestillinger
Inmaculada N. Sánchez-García: Nothing, and Be Silent: Shakespeare in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
Dominic Rainsford: Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice: Shakespeare’s Swedish Apocalypse
ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
PANEL 1: THE NORDIC HAMLET
Patricia Harris Gillies: Hamlet and its Scandinavian Sources: the nature of shamanistic kingship
The Hamlet text often adverts to the natural world: firmament, promontory, sea, trees, whale, hawk and cloud. These sometimes enigmatic images are fundamental elements in the Scandinavian sources for the play. For example, Saxo Grammaticus’ Vita Amlethi features Amleth amid a complex of animal references. Other sources adverted, such as Saxo’s account of King Olaf of Denmark’s family and the Saga of Hrolf Kraki feature shifting animal and human identities in relation to the struggle over kingship. Clive Tolley’s recent book, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (2.vols.Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2009) suggests a thought-provoking framework in which to read kingship as a mediation between the community and the dangerous spaces of death, a mediation warranted by identification with the codes and configurations of the natural world. The advantage of this type of reading is that it implicates the play text more deeply with language and events in the Scandinavian sources that are often regarded as playful or atmospheric features.
Dr. Patricia Harris Stäblein Gillies teaches in the Department of Literature, film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex-Wivenhoe Park. She holds a Ph.D. in French Literature and Language from Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois. Her doctoral thesis featured a comparative study of heroism and kingship in Germanic, Latin and Romance literatures. She continues to research, publish and lecture in those domains.
Régis Augustus Bars Closel: Anglo-Danish Reformation in Hamlet
The Ghost in Hamlet prompts his son many times to remember him. Remembrance is present throughout the play, highlighting the importance of public memory. A historical approach to the play may make one wonder: “Which king is Hamlet asked to remember?” Hamlet was a play about a Danish prince performed to an English audience. If a foreign place is a site for discussing local problems, a mimetic model of the Ghost may be previous English and/or Danish kings. This paper proposes a connection between the Kings of England and Denmark, going back to an English King whose reign parallels a Danish one from the same period. The Danish Frederick I faced many of the same Reformation problems as Henry VIII. Both struggled against ecclesiastical law, confiscated monasteries, made jurisdictional changes, yet avoided drastic doctrinal measures. At the time of Hamlet, Henry VIII would have been the last King to provide an English avatar of the Ghost. And with the accession of James I, desires were awakened for a further Reformation among certain groups. Moreover, although plays about the Tudors did appear, their references to Reformation topics were usually more indirect. This paper will shed light on the connections between the Danish and English past through Hamlet in light of the dramatic remembrances of the Tudor past and Reformation.
Régis Augustus Bars Closel is currently finishing a PhD thesis at Universidade Estadual de Campinas about the play ‘Sir Thomas More’, involving its first translation into Portuguese and a study on Elizabethan/Jacobean drama and the English Reformation with a scholarship provided by FAPESP. He has recently concluded a one-year period as a visiting research student at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, also supported by FAPESP. He co-organized a book about Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (2010) and its followers and a book about Brazilian Shakespearean Studies (2015) and published many articles and book chapters. Closel's main interests are textual collaboration, historical drama and translation.
Jón Viðar Jónsson: Requiem for a Passing Aristocracy: Shakespeare and the Icelandic Sagas
With the exception of Hamlet, there has been very little research conducted on the correspondences between early Scandinavian Literature, especially the Icelandic Sagas, and Shakespeare's plays. This paper primarily examines Shakespeare’s apparent nostalgia for a disempowered aristocracy and similar sympathies evinced by the author of Njal’s Saga and evident in other sagas. For example, the manner in which Shakespeare treats tyranny, revenge and duplicity in the first Henriad, where Edward IV and then Richard of Gloucester aspire to absolute power through kingship, appears to parallel power struggles among the Icelandic chieftains and between them and their ostensible overlords, a line of Norwegian Kings. In both, individual noblemen/chieftains, and sometimes entire “houses,” are undermined and eventually destroyed to bolster the power of the throne. Similar sympathies may be seen in Richard II and Julius Caesar, where the act of regicide itself is condemned but where Shakespeare appears to sympathize with the noblemen who make a stand against tyranny. Indeed, like some of the most celebrated Icelandic sagas, certain of Shakespeare’s plays can be read as amounting to a requiem for a passing aristocracy, and one that is predominantly tragic in tone.
Jón Viðar Jónsson was Head of Radio Drama at RÚV from 1982-1991. After completing a DPhil in theatre studies at the University of Stockholm (1996), he first taught dramatic literature and theatre studies and then became a theatre critic. From 2003-11, he was Director of the Icelandic Theatre Museum. His main area of research has been fin de siècle Icelandic theatre and especially the works of Jóhann Sigurjónsson (1880-1920. He has published numerous articles and essays, both academic and in the popular press, and edited the complete plays of Jökul Jakobsson (1933-1978) and Guðmundur Steinsson (1926-1996), Icelandic two most important modern playwrights.
PANEL 2: BALTIC SHAKESPEARE ITINERARIES
Ildiko Solti: 'Who's there?' or, Revolution in Theatre History at Kronborg
Elsinore Castle had a formative impact on Shakespeare's Hamlet through the well-documented performance by actors of Shakespeare's acquaintance at the castle in 1587. Another performance by English players at Kronborg, Tyrone Guthrie's Hamlet with Laurence Olivier in the title role in 1937, has changed the course of theatre history, contributing to the development of the reconstructive movement and Original Practices of production. It is surprising why the startling insights of that performance that led eventually to the construction of theatres such as the Globe or Rose Kingston itself, have only patially materialised in these theatres, or indeed in productions at Kronborg today.
In this paper, I suggest that the significance of the Kronborg Hamlet of 1937 cannot be fully appreciated without theorising Original Practices (OP) as a process of Practice Research (PR, formerly PaR). I show through the Mousetrap scene that the Great Hall, rather than the courtyard, is the architectural environment that is more historically relevant to the play's production, and can therefore yield more discoveries about the composition to which it contributes. One of these discoveries, I propose, is that Kronborg's Holger the Dane may overturn completely the hitherto assumed dominant action pattern of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Ildiko is an actor-director, researcher and teacher. She trained in Dramatic Arts at Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA. Having returned to Hungary, she obtained her MA at Eotvos Lorand University, and was Artistic Director of an English language theatre company, The Phoenix, in Budapest. In 1999 she moved to London where she has been teaching and conducting research and experiment in performance, focusing on Elizabethan/Jacobean working theatre reconstructions through the method of research through practice in performance (PaR). She holds a PhD from Middlesex University.
Eva Griffith: Early English playing abroad: Will Kemp, John Green and Roaming for Queen Anna
Dr. Eva Griffith is a seventeenth-century theatre historian who has published extensively on the Earl of Worcester’s/Queen Anna’s men and the Red Bull playhouse. Work on this company is found in Richard Dutton's Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre and Huntington Library Quarterly as examples. Her book, ‘A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse: the Queen's Servants at the Red Bull Theatre c.1605-1619’ is published by Cambridge University Press. Acting as Durham University's AHRC Research Associate on ‘The Complete Works of James Shirley’ for OUP (2008-2012), she has written on Shirley in England and Ireland for The Times Literary Supplement and for Four Courts Press, also publishing on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the TLS. She is currently editing her performance history of Webster's ‘The White Devil’ for Bloomsbury-Arden and continues writing on James Shirley for a monograph with a theatre history twist. Eva spent twenty years as an actor before her BA, MA and PhD, all achieved at King’s College, London. When she was sixteen she performed the part of Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in two productions – with the second at the National Theatre. Michael Bryant was Gregers, Stephen Moore, Hjalmar, and Sir Ralph Richardson, Old Ekdal.