Healthy Reading Exhibition: 1590-1690

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Readin

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Exhibiting a healthy context for the first publisher’s blurb to a Shakespeare play “Honey-tongued” Shakespeare may have been known for his “sugred sonnets”, but this exhibition places Shakespeare’s “savoured salt of wit” and the readers’ “wits’ healths” – discussed in the unique 1609 preface to Troilus and Cressida – in the context of some culinary, medical, literary and religious texts published between 1590 and 1690.

Arts and Social Studies Library In SCOLAR, lower ground floor (until Wed Feb 16th).

Curator: Johann Gregory – with valuable assistance from Alison Harvey (Assistant Archivist) and Peter Keelan (Head of Special Collections and Archives).

Visit the Cardiff Shakespeare blog for further information.

Visiting speaker, 14 Dec 2010: Stuart Sillars on illustrated Shakespeare

Stuart Sillars will be presenting his paper, ‘Illustrated Shakespeare and the Limits of Interpretations’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 14 December 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Recent discussions of Shakespeare’s works as print documents have focused on scholarly editions, with illustrated editions still largely neglected, despite their far greater availability from the end of the eighteenth century. From Rowe’s edition of 1709, however, the nature, placing and frequency of illustrations had a major impact on the reading experience of the plays, being both innovative in the integrated narrative of word and image and offering important new ways of configuring the plays in terms wholly of the printed book. The paper will explore some of the operations of this complex identity, and make suggestions about how illustrated editions may be explored as an aesthetic form of parallel, yet quite distinct, identity to that of the plays in production.