The 1997 Ohio Shakespeare Conference invites paper and session proposals on any aspect of the business of the theater in Shakespeare's lifetime, from reexaminations of textual and editing problems, to the material and economic conditions within which dramatic scripts, texts and performances were produced and consumed in the many transactions that occured among the interested parties: consumer, player, patron, printing house, playhouse, playwright.
The conference seeks new research on, and new conceptualizations of, some of the oldest critical and historical questions concerning early modern theater: What economic, ideological, and phenomenological structures shaped and were shaped by the performance of dramatic and theatrical work? How do such structures affect textual and theatrical production and reproduction? What bearing do such concerns have on questions of topicality, influence, didacticism, patronage, or the evolution of dramatic tastes and genres?
While Shakespeare will undoubtedly figure prominently, the conference aims at somewhat broader coverage. Work on Shakespeare's contemporaries in the theater, therefore, as well on Shakespeare's collaborative work, is encouraged. Suitable panel and paper topics include, but are not limited to:
** acting as labor * "playhouse interpolations" and the production of meaning * textual variants and the economics of revision * sites and scenes of dramatic composition * collaborative authorship * acting as action * text v. work * work v. labor * work and play * script as work product * the cultural work of the theater * performance as artifact * employment contracts * entrepreneurship * contractual and theatrical performances * promises * wagers * joint stock companies and corporate personality * professional competence and incompetence * expertise and training * divisions of labor in theatrical practice, and in dramatic representation * material phenomenologies of the theater * represented time and the time it takes to represent it * acting, identity and alienation * consumption (e.g., playgoing) as work * dramatic representations of economic relationships * pirates and "dramatic piracy" * acting and ownership * censorship and economics * economics and/of influence **
For more information, or to submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations, or proposals for sessions (deadline: December 20, 1996), contact:
[JM, JW May 6 1996]