BSA 2023 Conference: ‘Re-locating Shakespeare’ (University of Liverpool, 25th – 28th July 2023)

17th June 2022

The British Shakespeare Association is delighted to announce that our next conference will take place at the University of Liverpool, Tuesday 25th – Friday 28th July 2023, organised by Dr Esme Miskimmin (University of Liverpool), Dr Katie Knowles (University of Liverpool) and Professor Elspeth Graham (Liverpool John Moores University).

In Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in the four hundred years since the relocation of his plays from stage to page in the First Folio, his work has had a sustained and varied life in multiple geographical and theoretical locations through print, performance, research and education. More importantly, perhaps, there has been a concomitant narrative of ‘relocation’ associated with Shakespeare. The physical journeys of his works and their performers, including the visits of Lord Strange’s Men to the Northwest in the late sixteenth-century, performers who used the plays for colonialist and imperialist purposes overseas, or the arrival of Ira Aldridge, the ‘Black Roscius’ at the Liverpool docks in 1824, attest to a constant geographical relocation of Shakespeare and his performers. There have also always been sustained theoretical re-locations of Shakespeare in relation to changing contexts and prevailing critical, socio-historical and theatrical perspectives. Most recently, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Knowsley has relocated performances and narratives of Shakespeare in the Northwest of England.

This conference explore the geographical, temporal and semantic ‘Re-locations’ of Shakespeare, looking again at the place(s) of his works and reassessing them through the wider contexts of performance, print, translation, teaching and research:

• Notions of location, locating and re-locating within Shakespeare, including explorations of travel, exile, pilgrimage and direction.
• Claiming and ‘owning’ locations, including colonial and postcolonial re/appropriations.
• The cartographies of Shakespeare – the mapping / remapping, navigation and ‘discovery’ of locations.
• Re-locating through the imagination and / or the virtual:  the movement from the ‘wooden O’ to the ‘vasty fields of France’ or the virtual Dover cliff; online performances.
• Re-locating through translation and adaptation, including dramatic, musical, operatic and fictional adaptations.
• Location / Re-location in the teaching of Shakespeare – where and how pupils and students experience Shakespeare.
• Voluntary and / or forced relocations – in Shakespeare’s texts, or for pedagogical or political uses.
• Re-locating perspectives (critical, pedagogical or performative) in relation to cultural and social changes, disability and LGBTQ+
• Relocating in times of pandemic (from the touring circuit outside of London during the plagues and beyond, to the internet during covid).
• ‘What do they in the North?’ (RIII 4.4.398): Implications / connotations arising from a specifically ‘northern’ Shakespeare.
• Re-locating Shakespeare’s work in understandings of literary / theatrical / critical canons, in the light of any of the above (or any other types of ‘re-locations’).

Submissions for the conference are now closed and the conference programme is currently in preparation.

Please visit https://www.britishshakespeare.ws/conference/ for further information about the event, provisional registration fees, news, and announcements.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Esme Miskimmin, Dr Katie Knowles, and Professor Elspeth Graham at the conference address:

british.shakespeare.conference[at]gmail.com

Please follow the BSA 2023 conference Twitter account for updates: @BSA_Conference