Dear AIDEL members,
to celebrate the 400th year of Shakespeare’s death the Association AIDEL, the Department of Foreign Literatures and Languages and the Department of Law of the University of Verona will jointly organize a three-days conference on Shakespeare and the Law: “As You Law It. Negotiating Shakespeare”: 9-10-11 November 2016, Museo di Storia Naturale, Verona.
Shakespeare together with his fellow dramatists was fascinated by law and law permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. The legal situation does not appear to be a static but a mutable one that tries to cope with the new needs of the age. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In other words, we will better understand the nature of the early modern constitution if we appreciate Shakespeare’s description of it. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The conference aims at highlighting the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on Shakespeare’s legal aspects.
Invited guests so far: Jeanne Gaakeer, Francois Ost, Gary Watt, Paul Raffield, Bill MacNeil, Andrew Majeske, Virgina Lee Strain, Ian Ward.
Call for Papers: send an abstract of about 500 words by June 30th to dec 26, 2014 – Daniela.carpi@univr.it
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