Kissing Spiders?
When Cristobulus kissed the son of Alcibiades, a beautiful boy, Socrates said he had done amisse and very dangerously: because, as certaine spiders, if they doe but touch men onely with their mouth, they put them to wonderful paine and make them madde: soe beautiful boyes by kissing doe sting and poure secretly in a kinde of poyson of incontinencie.
D. Rainolds, Anti Theatricalist
The Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599)
This international two-day conference aims to interrogate the
intellectual disciplines, literary genres, tropes and material
practices which surround various representations of femininity on
and off the early modern English stage, particularly those
considered within discourses of a transvestite theatre.
Topics of particular interest may include, but are not limited to:
| - Theories of
the female body - Female chastity and/or sexual availability - The female grotesque - Cross-dressing and ‘proto-feminism’ - Women and Cuckoldry - The poetics of homo-eroticism and the desirability of the ‘play-boy’ - The female body in the theatre of anatomy and the spectacle of human dissection |
On the evening of
Saturday 29th
delegates will be invited to a private viewing of an all-male
performance of Ben Jonson’s Epicœne
in the Theatre Studies Studio. The production will be by
Miscreants (in association with Unlimited
Theatre, Leeds) and will be
followed by a short de-brief, including a questions and answers
session with the full company.
Additional
Information:
The conference
organisers intend to edit and publish a selection of conference
proceedings and commissioned essays as a volume entitled: Kissing
Spiders? representing the female body on and off the early modern
English stage
Conference Speakers to date include:
| Dympna Callaghan Kate Chedgzoy Mark Dooley Richard Dutton Bridget Escolme Alison Findlay Melinda Gough Lisa Hopkins James Knowles Kate McLuskie Clare McManus Marion O’Connor Simon Shepherd Susanne Wofford |
(Syracuse
University) (University of Warwick) (Teeside University) (Lancaster University) (Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds) (Lancaster University) (Oklahoma State University) (Sheffield Hallam University) (to be confirmed) (Stirling University) (Southampton University) (Queen's University of Belfast) (University of Kent at Canterbury) (Goldsmiths' College, University of London) (University of Wisconsin-Madison) |
Panel Chairs to date
include:
| Christian
Billing Kate Chedgzoy Ronnie Mulryne Carol Chillington Rutter Margaret Shewring |
(University of
Warwick) (University of Warwick) (University of Warwick) (University of Warwick) (University of Warwick) |