Speaker: Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford, U.K.)

Date: November 12, 2014 – Wednesday

Time: 18:00

Venue: West Hall, University Library, Songjiang Campus

Language: English

Summary: “Shakespeare on Page and Stage”- looking at how practical matters — the theatres, the actors, rehearsal practice etc. — affected the plays of Shakespeare

Speaker Biography: Professor Tiffany Stern graduated from Merton College, Oxford, and received her PhD from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton, Tiffany worked at Oxford Brookes University for four years. She is now back at Oxford University as Professor of Early Modern Drama (English Faculty), and Beaverbrook and Bouverie Fellow in English (University College).

She specialises in Shakespeare, theatre history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, book history and editing. Her work arises from an interest in the contexts that shaped the ways playwrights wrote and actors performed. Her first book was Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan; her second book, Making Shakespeare, focused on Shakespeare’s London, actors, theatres, props and music. Both books are used by theatre companies interested in experimenting with ‘original’ methods of Shakespearean production. Shakespeare in Parts, a book she co-wrote with fellow Oxford faculty member Simon Palfrey, concentrates on Shakespeare as a playwright and actor performing from, and writing for, 'parts' (the texts actors received, consisting of cues and speeches, nothing else). Combining Simon’s expertise as an interpreter and Tiffany’s as a theatre historian, it is a work that takes its interpretative momentum from archival research to discover not only a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but also a new Shakespeare. It is complemented by Documents of Performance in Shakespearean England, which considers the other papers of performance not examined in 'Parts': plot-scenarios, playbills, arguments, prologues, songs, scrolls and backstage-plots.