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A Stirling Conference (II)
Let me continue the tale of my Scottish exploits with a few words about my own panel. A four-person monstrosity wedged into a ninety-minute slot, where the usual frictions of spoken communication resulted in our running over into the break, to the point that there was only space for three questions, two of them to…
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A Stirling Conference (I)
I’ve just got back from the biannual meeting of the British Shakespeare Association (BSA) in Stirling, just outside Edinburgh. Hence the pun in my title, which even the Bard would blush at, despite its accuracy as a description of what was an immensely enjoyable few days in the beautiful scenery and agreeable warmth of a…
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On having your pencil ready
I have been reading Joseph Roach‘s Cities of the Dead recently. It’s amazing, and I’m learning a great deal. While there will probably be a blog post dedicated to the text in the near(ish) future, I wanted to write today about something else instead. It all begins with an innocuous pair of sentences about halfway…
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Update
I’ve let things languish here a little, but my excuse is that I am (still) writing a great deal elsewhere, and simply don’t have the time to put pen to paper (keyboard to blog?) these days. That said, this post is about all the other stuff I am writing, it’s specific aim and its larger…
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Commemorating Shakespeare
To join in the celebrations of Shakespeare’s birthday, here is a repost of something I wrote in 2012 for the Royal Shakesepare Company as part of their ‘Happy Birthday Shakespeare’ collection. The date of an author’s death is always more important than that of his birth. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be…
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Metaphors for writing
I’m busy writing the first draft of chapter one, and so have had neither time nor inclination to write much for this blog of late. That said, all my thesis-scribbling did inspire this post, for it occurred to me, as I sketched the umpteenth plan for spending this section’s allotted word count, that I now…
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The Doppelganger
I want to tell you today about a fear, common, I suspect, to every PhD student at one time or another. It is the worry that somewhere, out there in another university, another country, another continent, there is someone doing the same research as you. Your doppelganger. It may be even worse than this. It…
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Editors and Actors: Malone
This is the final, brief and incomplete summary of an editor whose works I am studying for the first chapter of my thesis. It’s taken me a long time to get here, Malone’s 1790 edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, since setting out from a summary of Rowe‘s attitudes to actors I…
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Charity and the end of an actress
Not too long ago, I took my family to the Ashmolean in Oxford, where I stumbled upon this remarkable painting (click to enlarge). Joshua Reynolds painted this image of Elizabeth Linley as Charity as part of a 1777 commission to provide designs for new glass in the chapel of New College, Oxford. This painting, only…
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Carpets
I have a document on my computer where I jot down ideas for blog posts. In this place, my thoughts about Benedict Cumberbatch, Love, Death, and talking about my research languished until recently. Now, I have just two topics left. One involves carpets, the other is about a Japanese anime film. For all those who…