Shakespeare’s plays often change their resonance depending on when, where, and how they are performed. Henry V, for instance, a play that follows the English king’s campaign to conquer France, provided a script for patriotism when it was performed on the eve of the D-Day invasion during World War II, and then became a reflection on the high costs of war when it was remounted after the Vietnam War and the Falklands War. Coriolanus, the portrait of a Roman general and his downfall, was performed by Nazi Germany to justify the importance of a powerful military leader, and then reimagined in Soviet Russia as a call for popular control over the state. The Taming of the Shrew has been performed to prop up husbands’ control of wives and also to subvert patriarchal structures; Othello has been staged to reinforce anti-Black stereotypes and to critique them; The Tempest has been performed as a justification of a European magician’s civilizing mission and as a rebellion against colonial rule. The First Folio is, in many ways, both a memorial to performances that generated specific meanings for Shakespeare’s audiences before 1623 and a potential script for performances over the next four centuries that would radically alter those meanings. 

In “Shakespeare in Performance,” Prof. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner takes up the question: “Why perform The Merchant of Venice?” The fraught history of this troubling play has morphed from performing it as a comedy, championing young lovers who outwit the murderous plot of Shylock, a Jewish money-lender, to staging it as a tragedy of social prejudices and institutional injustices that spur inhumane actions. As the play has been cut, amended, restaged, and reimagined, its focus has shifted to encompass questions of gender and sexuality, race and economics, alongside the religious and ethnic dynamics that provide a shifting mirror for audiences’ fears and fantasies. This talk will interweave research in Shakespeare production history with performances by actors from theatre dybbuk, a Jewish theater company that will be in residence in Portland for its new production, The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad (for which Prof. Pollack-Pelzner is a consulting scholar).

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is Performance Scholar of Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023 and Visiting Scholar in English and Theater at Portland State University. He teaches and publishes on Shakespeare, performance, and contemporary theater and culture.

The printing of the First Folio in 1623 established a canon of Shakespearean plays that has endured, with very little alteration, for four centuries. Just as the name Shakespeare often evokes an almost mystical figure, the First Folio has drawn comparisons with the Bible because of widespread veneration for the plays. The magnitude of its importance is captured in the fact that the 1623 volume averted the loss of 18 plays that had never before been published. Without it, we would have no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Twelfth Night, no Julius Caesar. The singularity of the First Folio—as an embodiment of “Shakespeare” and as an unparalleled book in the history of literature—routinely conjures awe, reverence, and superlative praise.

Prof. Jonathan Walker will give a keynote address that considers the undeniably profound literary and cultural value of the First Folio, while also questioning a popular view of the book’s perfection and the related notion that it is therefore an unmitigated force of good. 70 years ago, for instance, Charlton Hinman challenged the idea that surviving copies of the First Folio are exactly alike: because of the Renaissance printing practice of “stop-press correction,” whereby the printing process continued while errors were located and corrected (sometimes repeatedly), each First Folio was randomly assembled from both corrected and uncorrected printed sheets. This means that, in all likelihood, no two First Folios have ever been identical to one another. From a cultural perspective, the language of Shakespeare’s plays has for centuries been glorified as “the quintessence of Englishness and a measure of humanity itself” (Loomba and Orkin 1), making it a cornerstone of liberal education, social refinement, and artistic aspiration. And yet in India, in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Africa, and in other nations, Shakespeare has been a tool of “colonial philanthropy,” to use Emma Smith’s phrase, a calculated deployment of the English language to eradicate indigenous cultures under the guise of civilization and Christian benevolence. As we will see, these and other histories are as inseparable from the First Folio as the story of what we would have lost had it never been published in 1623.

Jonathan Walker is Principal Investigator of Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023 and Professor of English at Portland State University. He teaches and publishes on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, gender and sexuality, and textual studies.

Music is ubiquitous in Shakespearean drama. Twelfth Night, Othello, The Tempest, and many other plays call for specific songs to be performed within their dramatic action. But incidental music, drums for martial scenes, trumpet fanfares to announce royalty, and other melodic episodes all indicate that music served as a social code as much as a mode of entertainment. Playing companies routinely employed consorts whose music was inseparable from the theatrical soundscapes that audiences experienced. That different instruments were typically associated with specific emotional states—and, by extension, with different personality types—meant that music conveyed levels of meaning that were not merely subjective but also part of a social language in which Shakespeare’s audience was fully literate. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example, Benedick laments Claudio’s startling transformation from a soldier to a lover: “I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife, and now had he rather hear the tabour and the pipe” (2.3.12–14).

Prof. Joseph M. Ortiz will deliver a talk titled “Pop Music in the Renaissance,” offering a musicological perspective on song both in the theater and in the culture more broadly. The talk will draw parallels between Renaissance and contemporary social practices in order to emphasize how music punctuates our lives, how it memorializes particular occasions, and how it furnishes a social medium—unconstrained by language barriers—to share emotion and express ideas.

Joseph M. Ortiz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, El Paso. He teaches and publishes on Shakespeare and the relation between music and literature in Renaissance Europe.

In the emergent field of food studies, scholars working in anthropology, environmental sciences, the culinary arts, and other disciplines explore the ways that food shapes human lives, examining its impact on the environment, its role as a marker of identity, and its economic, aesthetic, and ritualistic dimensions. Portland has itself become an emergent competitor on the national and even international food scenes: recently, for instance, Portland’s Stumptown Coffee and Blue Star Donuts have both opened shops in Japan. In Shakespeare’s plays, food and drink are pervasive: characters eat possets (a sweet pudding and also a warm drink), sallets (salads), Warden pies (small tarts), kickshaws (hors d’oeuvres), flapdragons (raisins set alight in brandy); they drink small beer, ale, canary, claret, sherry, rhenish, malmsey, muscadel, metheglin, and aqua-vitae; and they host banquets in The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and a rather grisly one in Titus Andronicus. In Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew Aguecheek doubts his intelligence because, he says, “I am a great eater of beef” (1.3.72–73), while in The Merry Wives of Windsor the corpulent Falstaff imagines himself a meal satisfying enough for two women: “Divide me like a bribed duck, each a haunch” (5.5.21).

Mr. John Tufts will give a talk titled “The Renaissance Kitchen and Foodie Culture,” which will explore the production and consumption of food in Shakespeare’s society and plays. The variety of Renaissance foods and the customs surrounding them will be irresistible to the Portland community of chefs, artisans, and diners, who prepare and support cuisine that is as thoughtful as it is delicious. 

John Tufts is author of Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table and an award-winning actor. He has performed in 22 Shakespearean plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he is an accomplished chef, and he has a YouTube cooking show titled Eatso-Facto.

To the original audiences of Shakespeare’s plays, food and drink held important meanings. Those meanings, however, are culturally bound: what is considered sophisticated or nutritious in one time and place might easily be seen as problematic or unhealthy in another. A dish of prunes, a handful of blackberries, or a cold leg of capon carried entirely different cultural ideas about health, flavor, and value in the English Renaissance than they do for us today. Melons, apples, cucumbers, and raw onions, for example, were all considered nutritionally void and potentially dangerous foods—a common urban legend even involved people dying from a surfeit of cantaloupe. The study of material culture shows that our ideas about things change our experience of those things, which helps us to explore how historical notions about food and drink shape the depiction of eating and drinking in literature. These ideas quickly take us beyond Shakespeare’s plays and into the manuscripts, dietaries, food markets, and cookhouses where foods were featured, exchanged, prepared, and consumed. Because of their domestic roles, women had considerable access to and influence over food, so we will necessarily be venturing into their manuscripts and cookhouses. We’ll also have the opportunity to sample an actual recipe prepared from one woman’s manuscript as we engage the questions of transcription, interpretation, and materiality that help us deepen our understanding of literary food.

Prof. Keri Behre will discuss food, drink, and consumption in Shakespeare’s time while exploring the occasionally surprising ways that food and language continue to intertwine as complex and nuanced modalities for the transmission of culture today.

Keri Behre is Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University. She teaches and publishes on food in Renaissance drama and women’s manuscripts.

Through a close look at versions of and emendations to Shakespeare’s Othello, this talk brings the practice and theory of textual editing into conversation with premodern critical race studies and explores the role of textual editing in the production and perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Beyond the homogenizing work that textual editors’ own homogenous demographics have and continue to effect, as a practice, textual editing employs strategic omissions and emendations, constructing a bibliographic architecture designed to preserve editorial thought and occlude the lived experience of readers. This practice privileges a long record of internal conversations amongst editors that gestures continually backward toward a (nonexistent) original moment when editors, texts, and authors were one, knowing each other fully. At the same time, it preserves the function and may redouble the effect of racist words, phrases, and ideas that appear in the text and editorial apparatus, words that function to “know” and identify others as different and lesser in the text, on the stage, and in the world.

In this talk, Prof. Patricia Akhimie seeks to demonstrate the race-making work of textual emendation and omission with the goal of empowering a more diverse set of readers and thinkers to engage with the text by engaging with the theory and practice of textual editing.

Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute, Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network, and Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She teaches and publishes on Shakespeare, race in the Renaissance, and women’s travel writing.

In a canon of 38 plays, only once does Shakespeare name a specific visual artist: an enigmatic allusion in The Winter’s Tale to Giulio Romano, an early 16th-century Italian painter and sculptor who was a pupil of Raphael. But characters routinely refer to pictorial art and the act of painting in all but 4 Shakespearean plays, which remarkably outnumber references to poets and poetry by a factor of 2. Portraits and paintings appear in Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, and Twelfth Night, while in Cymbeline Giacomo chronicles the pictures, carvings, tapestry, and decorative figures that ornament Innogen’s bedchamber. The Winter’s Tale features a painted, life-like statue of the long-dead Queen Hermione, which astonishingly springs to life. These references reveal an integral connection in Renaissance minds between the verbal and the visual. The classical comparisons of visual art and poetry—distilled in Horace’s pithy statement: “Ut pictura poesis,” “as is painting so is poetry” (Ars poetica, l. 361)—lead naturally to the theater, which marries the visual to the verbal while magnifying the effects of both.

Prof. Clark Hulse will speak on “Shakespeare and the Visual Arts,” which will explore how Shakespearean stories have inspired artistic creation over the last four centuries, garnered a wide international audience, and attracted artists working in a variety of media. Distant as their original theater performances may be, the Folio plays continue to thrive, to be reimagined, and to acquire new meanings within many forms of visual culture.

Clark Hulse is Professor Emeritus of English and Art History and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He publishes on Shakespeare, visual culture, and the artistic circle of Hans Holbein the Younger.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously writes that Shakespeare’s sister would never have been able to compose the sort of plays that have brought her brother such distinction, admitting that “it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius” (48). Mordantly playing upon a timeworn theme, Woolf argues that the cause for women’s under-representation in the canons of literature is not a deficiency of the female sex, but due rather to the social and material restrictions to which women have traditionally been confined. The greatest factor contributing to Renaissance women’s lack of self-representation, both in the world of letters and in most other public arenas, was a staggeringly low literacy rate. To be sure, literacy was also low among men in most social classes and occupations. But the lack of formal education among girls and women derived from a prevailing cultural belief that females simply lacked the intellectual and emotional aptitudes that males, it was thought, naturally possessed. Renaissance culture fortified these beliefs with longstanding legal restrictions, biblical injunctions about gender roles, and pseudo-medical doctrines that disproportionately pathologize the female body.

Prof. Heidi Brayman will discuss the women in Shakespeare’s plays who embody the female stereotypes perfectly and others who challenge Renaissance cultural assumptions about gender. To address Shakespeare’s women characters today will be to mark sharp historical differences between English Renaissance and contemporary American cultures, but also to recognize the stark continuities that stubbornly persist.

Heidi Brayman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She teaches and publishes on Shakespeare and on women’s writing and literacy within Renaissance culture.

Following a global pandemic that has altered human life in immeasurable ways, questions about scientific knowledge, public health, and the ethical obligations of individuals and governments alike still weigh heavily on our minds in 2023. Renaissance England did not experience a pandemic like Covid–19, but bubonic plague was an endemic disease, ravaging the European populace throughout the period; in our own state, in fact, the Oregon Health Authority has recorded 18 cases of bubonic plague since 1970. Although the discovery of microorganisms would not occur until the late 17th century and the invention of antibiotics would have to wait until the early 20th century, Shakespeare’s contemporaries understood that plague outbreaks increased during winter months and that gatherings in close quarters intensified infection rates.

For each of London’s 130 parishes, the Company of Parish Clerks published weekly “Bills of Mortality” that included deaths from bubonic plague. In 1603, under the new administration of King James I—who had to delay his formal processional entry into London by a full year because of a devastating outbreak—the Privy Council closed theaters if plague deaths in the city climbed above 30 per week. When the infected were discovered by health officers called “searchers,” authorities locked up the ill and the well together in their houses under quarantine. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet hinges on such practices: after the searchers indiscriminately lock up Friar John “in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign” (5.2.9–10), he is unable to reach Romeo to tell him that Juliet but feigns her death, which results in both lovers’ ill-timed suicides. After the pandemic, as after plague outbreaks, people will be drawn together once again to commiserate, to mourn, and to invent a new sense of normalcy. Focusing on these communal objectives in the distant past, a talk on “Science, Public Health, and the Theater” will provide one forum for pursuing these communal objectives after our own recent past.

Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She teaches and publishes on Shakespeare and on theater, medicine, and disease in Renaissance England.

The earliest known Shakespeare film was a short 1899 adaptation of King John, which consisted of four scenes from a theater production that would soon be staged at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Since that time, over 400 adaptations have appeared on television and the silver screen, making Shakespeare the most filmed author—in any language—in history. From classic productions like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) to radical departures such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Gil Junger’s Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), the modern screen has become a mirror for us to see ourselves cast into Shakespearean stories. The plays have been reimagined in modern media such as in Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–1994); they have echoed throughout new narratives such as West Side Story (1961), My Own Private Idaho (1991), and Deliver Us From Eva (2003); and they have provided material for fictional biographical dramas such as Shakespeare in Love (1999) and All Is True (2018).

Prof. Karin Magaldi will explore how the technology of film has transformed our relationship with Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes competing with the primacy of live theatrical productions and sometimes inspiring stage adaptations to experiment, innovate, and modernize.

Karin Magaldi is Director of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s translation of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure for Shakespeare’s First Folio: 1623–2023, and also Professor of Theater, Head of the Theater Program, and Associate Director of the School of Music + Theater at Portland State University. She has directed Shakespeare as well as contemporary productions at PSU, and has served as dramaturg and director at Portland Center Stage, Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland Playhouse, Third Rail Repertory, Milagro Theater, and CoHo Productions. Karin is also a playwright.

In Shakespeare’s plays, young love is plentiful as the conventional fare of comedies and some tragedies. But the plays showcase other forms of desire that often make young love appear scripted, naïve, and unacquainted with the vicissitudes of living. As one of the most celebrated bonds in the English Renaissance, male friendship frequently draws on the language of romantic love, which obscures the line between platonic and erotic relations between men. In Twelfth Night, for instance, Antonio confesses to Sebastian: “I could not stay behind you. My desire, / More sharp than filèd steel, did spur me forth” (3.3.4–5). Both Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet reflect on the unconventional nature of newfound love in older individuals. Rather tactlessly, Hamlet tells his newly married mother: “You cannot call it love, for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble” (3.4.67–68). On a few occasions, the plays represent interracial and ethnically mixed desire with indifference, but more frequently characters liken such attraction to bestiality—a form of desire literalized in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the drugged Titania falls in love with the ass-headed Bottom.

“A Shakespearean History of Sexuality” will examine how the Renaissance theater portrayed erotic desire in all its complexity, while also tracing the profound historical differences between the sex lives of Shakespeare’s characters and contemporary sexual identities.

Melissa Sanchez is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and Director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches and publishes on Shakespeare, feminism, queer theory, and sexuality in the English Renaissance.

Dr. Isabel Jaén Portillo is Professor of Spanish at Portland State University, where she teaches literature, film, and cognition. She holds PhDs from Purdue University and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Her research fields include early modern literature and psychology, cognitive literary studies, contemporary literature and film, historical memory, women studies, migration, and transatlantic studies.