Kingston Shakespeare Podcasts

Richard Wilson introduces the symposium and the first speaker David Hawkes. These are the recordings from the Shakespeare and Marx symposium organised by Kingston Shakespeare and held at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (Hampton, UK) on June 24, 2017. Recorded and edited by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

David Hawkes is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His publications span a huge variety of fields, from Milton and Shakespeare to Diego Maradona, sodomy, Darwinism, zombies, torture, Chomsky, magic, McCarthyism, Islam and Satan. The theme uniting all of his work is the impact of capital on the psyche, and especially the pernicious influence of usury. He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and his work has appeared in The Nation and In These Times as well as in academic venues like the Journal of the History of Ideas, English Literary History and Studies in English Literature. David Hawkes is the author of Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680 (Palgrave, 2001), Ideology (Routledge, 1996, 2nd ed. 2003), The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (Palgrave, 2007), John Milton: A Hero of Our Time (Counterpoint, 2009) and The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (Palgrave, 2010) and he has edited Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. More recently, he has written Shakespeare and Economic Theory (Bloombury, 2015) and collaborated with Alan Rubin and the artist LG Williams on The Age Of The Image: LG Williams SoCal Mid-Rise Pictures 2015-16 (published in 2016). He is currently working on a book entitled The Death of the Soul. For more information, see davidhawkes.net. These are the recordings from the Shakespeare and Marx symposium organised by Kingston Shakespeare and held at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (Hampton, UK) on June 24, 2017. Recorded and edited by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

Questions to David Hawkes. These are the recordings from the Shakespeare and Marx symposium organised by Kingston Shakespeare and held at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (Hampton, UK) on June 24, 2017. Recorded and edited by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen.

Robert O’Dowd opens the Marlowe and Shakespeare -conference held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. He is followed by Richard Wilson introducing Frank Whately (Kingston) who is giving the opening plenary with a lecture entitled Edward Alleyn and the Rose. More on the talk and speaker: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/frank-whately-edward-alleyn-and-the-rose-conference-introduction/ Recorded on November 17, 2017 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Audio recording and editing by Timo Uotinen.

Jean Howard (Columbia University) gives the third plenary lecture at the Marlowe and Shakespeare conference that is titled Playing History at the Rose. The session is introduced and chaired by Alison Findlay. More info on the talk and speaker:https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/jean-howard-playing-history-at-the-rose/ Recorded on November 17, 2017 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Audio recording by Anna Ilona Rajala and editing by Timo Uotinen.

In her illumination of Shakespeare through Hegel, Jennifer Ann Bates reads the logic of measure from Hegel alongside Measure for Measure. Bates argues that each text is an initiation into the execution of the logic of measure with a focus on the hangman’s mystery as discussed by Abhorson and Pompey. Jennifer Ann Bates is Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. She specializes in 19th century German philosophy with an emphasis on Hegel. Professor Bates established the Philosophy Duquesne-Heidelberg Exchange in 2013 and chaired it until 2016. She has served as a Heidelberg University Alumni Research Ambassador since 2013. Professor Bates is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (SUNY 2004), Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (SUNY 2010), and co-editor (with Richard Wilson) of Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). She has published numerous book chapters, as well as articles in the Wallace Stevens Journal, the Journal for Environmental Ethics, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Memoria di Shakespeare, Philosophy Compass, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. She is currently writing a chapter on Kant and Shakespeare for The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy, and a chapter on Kant, Hegel, Solger and Imagination for Cambridge University Press. More on Shakespeare at the Temple: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/about-2/kingston-shakespeare-seminar-at-garricks-temple/ Video soon available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNxT9bfns9lVmjQGjq_Y0Ww This talk is part of the Shakespeare and Hegel symposium, held at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (Hampton, London) on April 1, 2017. The session is chaired by Richard Wilson. Audio recorded and edited by Anna Ilona Rajala.

This talk is part of the Shakespeare and the Enlightenment symposium, held at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare(Hampton, London) in September 2016. The session is chaired by Richard Wilson. Paul A. Kottman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research, and Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts. He is a member of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department. He holds the Abilitazione, Professore Ordinario in Filosofia, Estetica (Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics) in Italy. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Tokyo; the Università degli studi di Verona; Instituto per gli studi filosofici, Naples; and the International Chair in Political Languages, Dipartimento di Politiche Pubbliche e Scelte Colletive (POLIS), Università del Piemonte Orientale. He has been awarded residential fellowships at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Institute for Research in the Humanities) and Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Universität zu Köln. Paul Kottman is the author of Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), A Politics of the Scene (Stanford University Press, 2008) and the editor of Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford University Press, 2009), and The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modernity (Fordham UP, forthcoming). His next book is tentatively entitled Love as Human Freedom. He is also the editor of a new book series at Stanford University Press, called Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities. The symposium was held on September 3, 2016. Audio recorded and edited by Anna Ilona Rajala. On Shakespeare at the Temple:https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/about-2/kingston-shakespeare-seminar-at-garricks-temple/

Professor Richard Wilson introduces the symposium on Shakespeare and the Enlightenment at Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare in Hampton, London. The symposium was held on September 3, 2016. Recorded and edited by Anna Ilona Rajala. On Shakespeare at the Temple: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/about-2/kingston-shakespeare-seminar-at-garricks-temple/

Sir Stanley Wells delivers the 2017 Rose Theatre Shakespeare Birthday Lecture. The lecture is entitled ‘The Genius of Shakespeare’. The session is chaired by Richard Wilson. The Shakespearean actor Andrew Jarvis receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Shakespeare Association on behalf of the great director John Barton. Sir Stanley Wells is Britain’s preeminent Shakespeare scholar and one of the world’s leading experts on the Elizabethan theatre. His many bestselling books on the Bard include Shakespeare, Sex and Love, Shakespeare & Co. and Shakespeare For All Time. He is the General Editor of both the Oxford and the Penguin Shakespeare editions, and President of Stratford’s Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Sir Stanley is also one of the best-loved lecturers on TV and radio and at literary festivals, and this recording of his 2017 Rose Theatre Birthday Lecture is a spell-binding display of all his talents as a Shakespeare interpreter, raconteur and performer. Recorded on April 27, 2017 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames. Recorded and edited by Anna Ilona Rajala.

Claudia Wedepohl is the Archivist of the Warburg Institute. She has studied Art History and Italian Literature in Göttingen and Hamburg, concluding her studies with a doctoral thesis on the Cappella del Perdono and Tempietto delle Muse in the Ducal Palace of Urbino (published as a book in 2009). She joined the staff of the Warburg Institute in 2000. Since 2006 she is responsible for the Archive. Her academic work focusses on fifteenth-century Italian art and architecture, and art historiography around 1900. She has published widely on the genesis of Aby Warburg’s ideas and key terms, with a special interest in his concept of myth and mythology. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Sprang argues for a progressiveness in Yates in regards to Shakespeare (that is not merely limited to the occult) in her understanding in the use of images, especially pertaining to memory. He re-evaluates Yates’ observation that the advent of Ramist thinking has had an effect on the way Shakespeare. He links this view to cognitive approaches to Shakespeare and images. Felix Sprang has worked mainly on the intersection of literature and the ‘arts and sciences’ in early modern England as well as on the connection between literature and science across all literary periods. He is also interested in the aesthetics of literary texts and the methods derived from the project “Kulturwissenschaft”, in particular the strand devised by Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer. Felix Sprang has studied English, Biology, Philosophy and Paedagogics at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Hamburg, and has received his PhD from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation that probes into literary reflections of scientific thought in early modern London. That book was largely conceived as Aby Warburg Scholar at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Having taught at the HU Berlin and the LMU Munich, he is now teaching English Literature at the University of Siegen. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Edward Chaney. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Margaret McGowan began teaching at the University of Strasbourg in 1955, moving on to the University of Glasgow in 1957, and then to the University of Sussex in 1964, where she was Professor of French, 1974–97, Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, 1992–97, and since 1997 has been a Research Professor. She was Vice President of the British Academy, 1996–98 and Chairman of the Review of the Warburg Institute, 2006–07. She was appointed FRSA in 1997, a Freeman of the City of Tours in 1986 and awarded Hon. DLitt Sussex, in 1999. Her publications include L’Art du Ballet de Cour, 1963; Montaigne’s Deceits, 1974; Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard, 1985; Louis XIII’s Court Ballets, 1989; Moy qui me voy: studies of the self, 1990; The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France, 2000; and Dance in the Renaissance: European fashion, French obsession, 2008 (Wolfson History Prize, 2008) . She was appointed CBE in 1998. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Peter Mack. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Through historiographical reassessment of the life of Frances Yates, Marjorie G. Jones seeks to expound an adventurous side to Frances Yates’ world view as an autodidact and an outsider to traditional academia. In contrast to views of Yates’ non-existent spiritual life, Jones builds an analogy with the daring spiritual adventures that Yates studied, Giordano Bruno in particular, and the life she lived—‘rising beyond dogma to a higher truth’, as Jones explains. Interested especially in women’s spiritual journeys, Marjorie G. Jones is the author of the first biography of British historian Frances Yates, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (Ibis Press, 2008, since translated into Japanese and Italian) and a recently published biography of Philadelphia Quaker Mary Vaux Walcott, The Life and Times of Mary Vaux Walcott (Schiffer Press, 2016), which has been nominated for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Mary Lynn Kotz award. A resident of Philadelphia, currently she teaches history for Villanova University’s college program at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. Before moving to Philadelphia, she taught history for twenty years at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY and for its college program at Sing Sing prison. A graduate of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, she is also a graduate of the Rutgers Law School and the Graduate Faculty of the New School in NYC, where she focused on Historical Studies. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Francesca Bugliani. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: www.kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com

Building on the work of Frances Yates, Sajed Chowdhury (National University of Ireland, Galway) proposes that hermetic writings (Hermes Trismegistus, in particular) were key influences on some renaissance women. He argues that hermetic writings, accessed via male contemporaries, informed the spiritual, medical and textual practices of women like Marguerite of Navarre, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, which are elucidated by a reading of their philosophical poetry. Chowdhury seeks to reintegrate significant strands of early modern intellectual and esoteric culture into intellectual history that has been lost due to a focus on a masculine geneology of knowledge. Sajed Chowdhury’s primary field of research is early modern literature, specializing in Renaissance poetry, early modern women’s writing, manuscript identities, and the history of sexuality. His doctoral thesis, Dissident Metaphysics in Renaissance Women’s Poetry (2013), was completed at the University of Sussex and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). He is currently based at RECIRC, NUI Galway (http://recirc.nuigalway.ie/). The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Francesca Bugliani. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Anne-Valérie Dulac examines Frances Yates’ reading of Alhazen’s (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham; c. 965 – c. 1040) optics as a possible source for the theory of sight in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Dulac prodes deeper into this bold suggestion and provides a reading of the play’s optics (also linking them to the Sonnets) as mirroring Alhazen – a combination of intromission and extramission, the eye receiving and emitting beams of light. Anne-Valérie Dulac is a senior lecturer in early modern literature at Université Paris 13 - Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is currently working on the forthcoming publication of her doctoral dissertation on Philip Sidney and visual culture, completed under the supervision of Professor François Laroque. Her research interests include Sir Philip Sidney’s works and correspondence, visual culture, limning and optics. The paper she will be presenting for this conference is adapted from a forthcoming chapter (“Shakespeare and Alhazen”) in a book edited by Sophie Chiari and Mickaël Popelard entitled Shakespeare and Science. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. The session was chaired by Patricia Gillies. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Dilwyn Knox is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London. His research currently focuses on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century philosophy, particularly cosmology. He is writing a book, a short one, with luck, entitled The Philosophy of Giordano Bruno. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Wordly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2016); Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage (2013); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2007); Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance (2004); and Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority (1993). His forthcoming book is a study of Shakespeare and the dictators: Modern Friends: Shakespeare’s Fellow Travellers. The conference Frances Yates: The Art of Memory was held on April 30, 2016 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Recorded by Anna Rajala and Timo Uotinen. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Listen to this KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) Work-in-Progress session with Dr Varsha Panjwani (Boston and York) and Koel Chatterjee (Royal Holloway), held on the 14th of April at the Rose Theatre Kingston, on Indian Shakespeares on Screen: Identity, Politics, Entertainment, chaired by Timo Uotinen. Find out more about their succesful conference and project at indianshakespearesonscreen.com. The recordings are divided into four parts: interview about the project, Varsha’s talk on 10 ml Love (adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Koel on Arshinagar (a Romeo and Juliet adaptation), and an open discussion about all the above. More at: https://kingstonshakespeareseminar.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/kissit-wip-indians-shakespeares-on-screen-podcast/

Where does life end, and death begin? Where does being end? What does ‘being’ mean anyway? What does it mean to be nothing? When Hamlet asks, ‘To be, or not to be’, he tries to imagine himself in a state of hypothetical annihilation. When Anthony botches his suicide in Anthony and Cleopatra, he is forced to recognise that though he can attempt to take himself to the threshold between life and death, it is not necessarily in his power to cross it. When Richard II says ‘whe’er I be / Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be please till he be eased / With being nothing’, he conceives a state of existence as nothing which is not the same as non-being. But being and non-being are not limited to life and death. Characters in plays have a sort of being that is not identical to the being of the actor, just as fictional characters have a sort of being that is not physical. This paper will examine the threshold between being and non-being in Shakespeare’s works by scrutinising the liminal moments between life and death, between play and audience, and between fiction and non-fiction. Bio: Jessica Chiba is a PhD Candidate supervised by Professor Kiernan Ryan and Professor Andrew Bowie at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is currently researching Shakespeare and ontology (the study of being). Her secondary interest is in Japanese translations of Shakespeare. This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Ildiko Solti. See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_zbw7PgoAQ

In 2004, the Financial Times critic Alastair Macaulay argued that the role of Othello had been “diminished” by the late twentieth century convention of having only black actors play the part. The threshold for Macaulay had been what he perceived to be another poor performance as Othello. Yet since Paul Robeson’s appearance as Othello at the Savoy Theatre in 1930, language has been a major weapon of critics and journalists opposing ethnic minority performers’ appearances in Shakespearean theatre. This paper examines critical responses by arts journalists and critics to these performances, helping to contextualize discriminatory casting patterns in contemporary theatre as part of a larger discourse guided by the media. Bio: Dr. Jami Rogers trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and holds an MA and a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham. Prior to obtaining her PhD Jami spent 10 years working for PBS, the American public service broadcast television network, first at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. and then for 8 years at WGBH/Boston working on Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!, where awards included a Primetime Emmy from the Academy of Arts and Television Sciences. Most recently she was Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded Multicultural Shakespeare project at the University of Warwick, where she was the lead researcher on the British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database. She was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton in the Drama Department and has taught at the Universities of Birmingham, Warwick and the British American Drama Academy. Jami has lectured on Shakespeare and American drama at the National Theatre in London and works regularly with director David Thacker at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton.

The symmetry and balance suggested by the title, Measure for Measure, sits oddly with a play that crosses the line in so many ways – generically (as a problem play), structurally (by muddling up the purpose of the main action as set in motion by the Duke), and emotionally/ethically (none of its characters are above the occasional unsavoury demeanour). Any of these features would frustrate audience expectations and behaviour, but their dominance appears to suggest that such frustration of ‘normal’ beahviour may actually be the purpose of the play. But why antagonise your audience in such a blatant way, or indeed why produce a play in which there is no feature that does not require some, or a lot of, ironing out? I suggest that the original conditions of production in the full light arena, casting the audience as the streetwise filth of Vienna, makes ‘crossing the line’ their basic function morally, formally (through their leading light, Lucio) and even existentially (as bystanders, they are implicated in a series of ethically compromising situations that are aesthetic as well as (in complete light) fundamentally social. Looking at Act 2 Scene 2 in detail, I will contrast key points in the action as they are realised in a full light amphitheatre and on a proscenium stage, showing how the spatial structure of the visible arena is used to engineer this intensely bizarre engagement which cajoles the audience to tackle, and even relish wrestling with, some quite uncomfortable and impossible-to-solve existential/philosophical problems. 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.

The encounter between the self and the other as understood through Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory set in the Hegelian dialectic will be explored using three instances of the word threshold in Shakespeare. Two instances occur in Coriolanus – between Virgilia and Martius and between Aufidius and Martius – and one occurs in The Merchant of Venice – between Antonio and Shylock. The circulation of libido across the threshold, and its distortion into the death-drive and the drive for the accumulation of profit will be explored in these scenes. The role of the threshold as the site for the implantation of enigmatic signifiers or the violent intromission of trauma will be explored for its role in the distortion of libido into death-drive and profit-drive. This is a preliminary experiment (for me) in thinking through Laplanchian psychoanalysis as theory in conversation with Marxism and set in the dialectic. Bio: Christian Smith is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His doctoral research looked at the influence that Shakespeare had on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists. In his postdoctoral work, he is investigating the possibility that the ground through this influence traveled may have been the historical development of the dialectic. This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Ildiko Solti. See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8kBXCK0Ks

Dr Kate Aughterson is currently Academic Programme Leader for Literature, Media and Screen at Brighton University. She is the author of Renaissance Woman (1995), The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Documents (1998), John Webster: The Tragedies (2001) Aphra Behn: The Comedies (2003), and most recently Shakespeare: The Late Plays (2013) as well as articles on Bacon, Middleton, Behn and Marston. This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwEv7mWSfv8

Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2015); Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage (2013); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2007); Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance (2004); and Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority (1993) This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLdVMppHeR0

Kelly Hunter is a highly accomplished actress on stage, film, TV and radio (www.kellyhunter.co.uk) as well as a director and author. She is also the artistic director of the Flute Theatre (www.flutetheatre.co.uk) and discusses her adaptation of Hamlet titled 'Hamlet, Who's There?' This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Timo Uotinen. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U3RjIofZaw