Late Shakespeare: Texts and Afterlives
A two-day international conference, held at Trinity College Dublin on 5th & 6th December 2008, interrogating things recent, late, and belated in the study of Shakespearean drama.


Plenary Speakers

Professor Michael Hattaway, MA, PhD, FEA Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield.

Dr Martin Wiggins, MA, DPhil (Oxon) Senior Lecturer and Fellow, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Time & venue:

Fri. 5th Dec. 5.15pm-8pm, Uí Chadhain Theatre, Arts Building, TCD
Sat. 6th Dec. 9.30am-6pm, Uí Chadhain Theatre, Arts Building, TCD

Conference Organisers

Dr Andrew J. Power & Mr Rory V. Loughnane
Contact information: lateshakespeare@gmail.com

Posted by Mr Rory Loughnane &

Suggested Areas of Interest

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Many of the later quarto texts of Shakespeare's plays boast that they are copies of plays 'latelie Acted'. This conference proposes to investigate things recent, late, and belated in the work of Shakespeare and his later contemporaries. On one level the conference promotes new writing in the field of Shakespeare studies with the papers themselves being lately written. The conference also encourages an investigation of what it means for a work to be late, what happens to a text once the writing is finished, and what implications there are for an author who is writing late in his career or even who is 'late' (i.e. who is published posthumously).

To that end, the conference organisers would welcome papers that include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
The writing process; 'late' trends / events that influence a text or its production; late-authorship; the relationship between the author and the text after the writing is finished; textual ephemera, marginalia, or dedication; authorship and death; bardolatry; anxiety of influence; issues of time, decay, or time-keeping in texts; the afterlife of the text; representations of the afterlife in a text; lost, forgotten, or neglected texts; performance / textual history; the London stages at the end of Shakespeare’s career / after Shakespeare’s death; the closure of the theatres.