The Department of English Language and Literature invites you to the following talk:
Dr. Robert Stagg (Shakespeare Institute / University of Oxford)
“Shakespeare’s Turkish Sonnets?”
Date: Wednesday, 7 February 2024, 17:30 (reception at 17:00)
Place: Room A-130
Abstract: If Shakespeare became the English ‘national poet’ in the eighteenth century, he has spent subsequent centuries as an international poet. Yet scholarship about a so-called ‘Global Shakespeare’ has had comparatively little to say about his sonnets, which have retained a residually ‘national’ character (scholars even refer to the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet interchangeably as the ‘English’ sonnet). This talk will poke at some of these problems, partly by examining the Arabic pre-history of sonnet form and partly by trying to establish how much Shakespeare could have known about the Middle Eastern verse forms that shaped and surrounded ‘Italian’ or ‘English’ sonnet form.
Bio: Robert Stagg is currently a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute (Stratford-upon-Avon) and an Associate Senior Member at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. His first book is titled Shakespeare’s Blank Verse: An Alternative History (Oxford University Press, 2022), and his work has appeared in venues such as Studies in Philology, Shakespeare Survey, The Review of English Studies, and others.