Early Modern Literature Forum
An EMSAH Research Seminar Series Event
- Date: Friday 30 August 2013
- Time: 2pm
- Location: UQ Art Museum, Mayne Centre, University Drive, St Lucia 4072
- Free and open to the public. Seating is limited so please RSVP by August 27 to email: uqche@uq.edu.au or phone (07 3365 4913.
Real Places in Imaginary Spaces
The architect Inigo Jones's settings for the fantastic masques he designed for the Stuart court often have a specific, recognizable topography, anchoring what Bacon called toys, Shakespeare called vanities, Shakespeare called vanities, Samuel Daniel called punctilos of dreams, in a very solid social and architectural reality. Increasingly, moreover, the masque faςades are buildings designed by Jones himself. The talk, illustrated with slides of Jones's architectural and stage designs, discusses the intersection of theatre and architecture at a critical moment in the development of the Renaissance stage.
About the Speaker: Stephen Orgel is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. His most recent books are Spectacular Performances (Manchester/Palgrave, 2011), Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2003), The Authentic Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002) and Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge, 1996). He has edited Ben Jonson's masques, Christopher Marlowe's poems and translations, the Oxford Authors John Milton, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in the Oxford Shakespeare, four plays and the Sonnets in the New Pelican Shakespeare, of which he is general editor, and novels by Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton in the Oxford World's Classics. He has also taught at Harvard, Berkeley and John Hopkins.
Aretino in Albion: Pietro Aretino in Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveler
This talk explores the interface of the works and figure of Pietro Aretino in Thomas Nashe's novel The Unfortunate Traveler, or The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594). Aretino exercised a strong fascination for English elites in the sixteenth century, and the public affirmation of Aretino's own vested interest in England was signaled in the dedication of the second volume of his Lettere to King Henry VIII in 1542. Nashe's novel is the most brilliant Elizabethan example of appropriation of Aretino's chameleon-like persona both in its exploitation of significant Aretine preoccupations and in its making Aretino into a major actor in the novel's narrative. Particular attention will be focused on the slippery notion of heresy in the period, contextualizing the connections effected in The Unfortunate Traveler through an examination of Aretino's relation to the reformist circle of Cardinals Contarini and Pole in Venice in the 1530s and a consideration of Nashe's religious agenda.
About the Speaker: Michael Wyatt is an independent scholar who works on the intersecting cultural histories of Italy, England, and France in the early modern period. He has taught at Stanford, Northwestern and Wesleyan Univerisities, the Università degli Studi di Trento, and served as the first Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. A former fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship, his first book, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. He is the co-editor (with Deanna Shemek) of Writing Relations, American Scholars in Italian Archives: Essays for Franca Nardelli Petrucci and Armando Petrucci (Olschki, 2008), and is the general editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (forthcoming, January 2014). Current projects involve a second monograph, John Florio and the Circulation of 'Stranger Cultures' in Early Stuart Britain; a critical edition of Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lord Michaell de Montaigne; and he is among the co-editors of The Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Marco Sgarbi, general editor).
The flyer can be downloaded here.