Gender and Otherness in the Humanities

Here is a selection of blog posts written in the last few months by GOTH members for other blogs, which may be of interest to readers of the GOTH blog.

From the English and Creative Writing blog:

Gender and Otherness in the Humanities by Peg Katritzky

From the Arts & Humanities in the time of COVID-19 blog:

Doomscrolling: COVID-19 and Crisis Reading during lockdown by Edmund King

Bibliotherapy Lessons from Lockdown by Sally Blackburn-Daniels

Reading and Wellbeing revisited: surviving the pandemic by Shaf Towheed

Social Analysis and the COVID-19 Crisis by Suman Gupta

Italian Literature and Pandemics part 1 and part 2 by Francesca Benatti

Pevsner and Lockdown by Clare Taylor

Greek Tragedy in Lockdown by Christine Plastow

by Chris Dobson, GOTH PhD Student

2020 started well for me. In January, I travelled down to Milton Keynes for an interview, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a PhD studentship at the Open University, which I eagerly accepted. Then, in February, I was offered a summer job at my local independent cinema in Edinburgh, where I was then living. I was so happy, I danced a little down Lothian Road – and I never dance.

At the same time, I started hearing more and more about a virus in China, but China felt so far away, so it didn’t trouble me much. Then the problem came closer to home, and I was horrified as the situation in Italy worsened. But, up until March, coronavirus still felt distant. Then, in the days following my 24^th birthday, everything changed and the UK went into lockdown. With my summer job out of the window, I left Edinburgh and moved back home. There were still many months to go until the start of my doctoral research, so the big question was: How can I keep my mind occupied over the course of the long months ahead? The seemingly endless televised press conferences were driving me to despair, so I turned to literature for solace. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; I am, after all, a literature student.

But where to start? My home is crammed with books I’ve been meaning to read but never had time for. Well, now I had all the time in the world. Perhaps inevitably, I was drawn towards Shakespeare. I had studied several of his plays and seen many more of them performed. Yet his poetry – in its raw, non-theatrical form – remained somewhat of a mystery to me. I was familiar with his most famous sonnets, but I’d never before dared tackle all 154 of them. It was now or never, I decided. But because I had all the time in the world, I would take it slowly: One poem a day, every day, until I’d read them all.

Why is it important to read Shakespeare’s sonnets as a whole, not just as individual works of literature? In my eyes, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle: Sure, each piece might tell a beautiful story, but it’s only once you put them all together that you see the full picture. These poems are significant because they provide a possible glimpse into the Bard’s own love life – with both men and women, it seems. The first 126 are addressed to the ‘fair youth’, whose beauty, according to Sonnet 101, ‘needs no praise’. The remaining 28 are dedicated to the mysterious ‘dark lady’ whose ‘eyes are nothing like the sun’, as Shakespeare famously put it in Sonnet 130. My favourite poem in the collection is an early one, Sonnet 29, in which Shakespeare declares that he would rather be poor and in love than ‘change my state with kings.’ Given Will’s own relatively humble origins, it’s a wonderful challenge to the snobbery of his more elitist contemporary writers, who in the case of Robert Greene looked down on the ‘upstart crow’ who would go on to become the greatest poet in the English language.

Much as I love English literature, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Shakespeare, for instance, drew on the works of many European writers for inspiration. You will have heard of Geoffrey Chaucer, no doubt, but what about Giovanni Boccaccio, who influenced both Shakespeare and Chaucer? Born in the Republic of Florence in 1313, Boccaccio is best known for his Decameron, a collection of 100 short stories with ten narrators: Seven women and three men. They have fled their native Florence because of the plague and, in the absence of Netflix, must recount their own stories to entertain themselves over the course of ten days. I studied a handful of these tales during my undergraduate degree and I’d always meant to read the whole thing, but at nearly nine hundred pages, it felt dauntingly long. During lockdown, I took the same approach as I had with the sonnets: One story a day, every day, until I finished.

Unsurprisingly, given that they were written in the 14^th century, a good number of these tales are problematic, particularly in their representation of gender and race. But Boccaccio also feels ahead of his time, with several strong female characters who, like in the plays of Shakespeare, cross-dress when necessary. There is Day 2 Story 3, for example, which features an abbot who is really the daughter of the king of England. Some tales are outrightly farcical (the opening and closing stories of Day 3, in particular), whilst others – especially those of Day 4 – are tragic in tone. All of the stories are standalone, with the exception of five (from the eighth and ninth days) which depict the exploits of Bruno and Buffalmacco, who enjoy playing pranks on their unwitting friends Calandrino and Master Simone.

Since all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and most of Boccaccio’s tales are quite short, they weren’t enough to keep me occupied during the long months of lockdown. I wanted to read something big, but with the pandemic still raging, it was hard to concentrate on a conventional novel. As a result, I ended up turning to The Walking Dead, the comic book (or, if you prefer, graphic novel) series that inspired the TV show of the same name. I’d watched the first few series of the show and enjoyed them, but I’d grown bored as the characters wandered aimlessly from episode to episode. I had known for a while about the comic series, but with over thirty volumes (consisting of nearly 200 issues in total!), I’d been wary of starting, in part because I knew it would be very expensive to buy them all in print. This summer, however, I was able to buy digital versions of the whole set relatively cheaply, and I quickly found myself addicted.

The Walking Dead centres on Rick Grimes, an American police officer who wakes up from a coma to discover that a zombie apocalypse has turned the world he knew upside down. Miraculously, he succeeds in finding his wife Lori and their son Carl in a camp outside Atlanta. Whilst at the beginning, the undead are the main threat to Rick and co’s survival, as the series (which ran from 2003 to 2019) develops, the focus shifts from the ‘walkers’ (that’s zombies to you and me) to the surviving humans in this part of the world. A zombie apocalypse might sound outlandish, and yet, reading this series in the time of COVID-19, I could empathise with the survivors’ attempts to adapt to a radically altered world. It was comforting, in a way, to tell myself: Well, at least things aren’t this bad in the real world. (Yet?)

I’m not a big fan of horror and occasionally the writer Robert Kirkman and the artists overdo the gore and violence for shock value, but the fact that the series is in black and white (in contrast to its TV show adaptation) helped to create a degree of distance, reminding me that it is just fiction. Like The Decameron, The Walking Dead is at times problematic, particularly in its early volumes: Most of the men take charge in defending the passive female characters, and non-white characters are few and far between. But over the course of the series, we get more diverse characters, including numerous gay or bisexual individuals. In addition, I was pleasantly surprised by how deep the series could be. Unlike the action-centred TV version, Kirkman’s The Walking Dead explores complex sociological and philosophical questions about society and human nature: Given the opportunity to completely remake society, where would we begin? And is there a limit to how much one person can endure?

It might not qualify as ‘high literature’, but I have no doubt that Kirkman’s magnum opus, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Boccaccio’s Decameron, will be read for many years to come, especially in times of adversity like now.

Let me know what you’ve been reading or watching in the comments below, or tweet me @EngLitScholar.

By Christine Plastow

Theatre, an art form and industry that has traditionally relied on the gathering of a (sometimes large) group of people in close quarters, has naturally been hit hard by the global coronavirus crisis. Not only productions but rehearsals and development sessions have had to be cancelled or postponed, and many theatre professionals are still out of work. There have been some benefits for audiences: for example, the National Theatre has been freely broadcasting a number of recordings from its back catalogue on YouTube. These recordings have opened up major productions to viewers who may otherwise never have seen them. But what about smaller theatres and companies, new work, and the ‘liveness’ that is, in many ways, intrinsic to the medium of theatre?

I’ve been a member of feminist theatre collective By Jove Theatre Company since 2011; in that time, we’ve developed several innovative productions that rework old stories (myths, legends, stories from the cultural canon) for modern audiences. When we realised that our audience was likely to be unable to attend in-person performances for a while, we decided to begin working with the possibilities that performing in the digital space offers. As is so often the case, we were drawn to Greek tragedy for our content. The narrative form of Greek tragedy deals with the moments of crisis in longer mythic narratives: each play tells a story almost in real-time, with characters forced to confront their own actions or those of others that have, almost always, led to death. This form seemed particularly apt for the moment of a global pandemic; indeed, Theatre of War’s digital Oedipus Project has already touched on that play’s backdrop of plague and pestilence as the most obvious touchstone for recent events.

In June and July we produced two digital performances, one live and one pre-recorded. Both dealt with powerful women from Greek mythology who commit acts of violence against their children; both evoke themes of community and isolation, the struggle for liberation and the consequences of women’s repression. The first was MEDEA LIVE, a new digital staging of playwright Wendy Haines’ retelling of Euripides’ Medea first performed by the company in 2017. Our digital staging saw the original performers reprise their roles—three actors performing three aspects of Medea—but perform live to webcam in their own homes in the middle of lockdown. This was more than a rehearsed reading, however: director David Bullen used the capabilities of the streaming platform Streamyard to move the Medeas around the screen, with blank screens appearing for the voices of Jason and other characters that are not embodied; the Medeas seemed to be circling, trapped in an inescapable situation and closing in on acts of terrible violence. Meanwhile, performers SJ Brady, Sinead Costelloe, and Rosa Whicker moved around their performance spaces, sometimes closer to the camera and sometimes further away, offering a tantalising glimpse into the private space of Medea’s unhappy home. The performance was followed by a post-show discussion with theatre and classics academics and practitioners; both are still available to view on YouTube (with closed captions available for both performance and discussion).

Brady, Whicker, and Costelloe performing Medea Live.

Our second production was HERE SHE COMES, a epic spoken word retelling of Euripides’ Bacchae from the perspective of Agave, written and performed by SJ Brady with music by Vivienne Youel. This production was generously funded by the Institute of Classical Studies Public Engagement Grant. The production was audio only, and so we opted to present a pre-prepared recording to ensure the best audio quality for listeners. The recording was premiered on YouTube, alongside a slideshow prepared by SJ Brady that complemented the poem and evoked its themes and settings. Although Bacchae is another work of Greek tragedy, Brady’s work is designed more closely to evoke the ancient oral poets who performed long tales such as the Iliad and Odyssey; Brady performs the text solo, from memory, focusing on Agave but giving voice to a range of characters and utilising repeated linguistic motifs that intertwine with Vivenne Youel’s hypnotic music. The show is available to listen to on YouTube and Soundcloud, with a recording of the live post-show discussion also available on YouTube; David Bullen (By Jove Co-artistic Director; Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway) and I also produced an educational podcast to accompany the production that is available on YouTube and Soundcloud. All YouTube versions have closed captions available.

You can keep up to date with By Jove on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The company receives no regular public funding, and so relies on supporters to help them make art, especially in these difficult times for the theatre industry. If you’re interested in supporting the company, you can become a regular patron on our Patreon, or if you enjoy the shows, please consider making a donation – we recommend £5, the price of a cheap theatre ticket.

By Peg Katritzky

Among all our other reasons for remembering 2020 as The Lost Year, those of us who enjoy presenting at conferences are enduring unprecedented upheaval. Finally, academic meetings are re-appearing. However, much like metropolitan buses, they seem awkwardly bunched, easily missed and virtually inaccessible to those lacking the latest tech skills, hardware and IT support. This blog shares some thoughts arising from two excellent meetings I attended this week.

The international research collaborative TWB (Theater Without Borders) rescheduled its 2020 Annual Workshop from a week of live presentations and performances in May (Madrid) to a Zoom Virtual conference (12 June): “Race and Empire in Early Modern Theater”. A day earlier, on 11 June, “Race Before Race” made an announcement, shared here with the permission of TWB member and GOTH Advisory Board Member Noémie Ndiaye.

Regarding the statement, Noémie writes:

“[In] this (short) Letter from the Executive Board of “Race Before Race” which was published this morning […] we call on our colleagues to rethink the editorial practices that have long kept race scholars, especially BIPOC scholars, from getting published in the journals we all read. Please read it […] share it, and join the conversation. Thinking race and racially-articulated power relations starts in our own (academic) backyard.”

Before joining the TWB meeting, I attended the two-day conference “Renaissance Academic Drama and the Popular Stage” (11-12 June 2020). Unlike myself, most presenters adapted to rescheduling to MS Teams. OK, so we could no longer enjoy the great pleasure of watching The Edward’s Boys perform live at the University of St Andrews (or of sneaking off to beaches or bars). But the switch to online, attracting 90+ delegates, was achieved in brilliant style by the organizers, St Andrews doctoral students Elena Spinelli and Jon Gardner. Through their individual quality and strong sense of coherence, the keynotes, presentations and performances made for an exceptional event. Highlights of particular interest to GOTH members include talks by St Andrews doctoral students Orlagh Davies (on boarding school girls on the seventeenth-century stage) and Isabel Dollar (on changeable bodies in Bellamy’s Iphis & Lyly’s Gallathea) and by Jillian Luke (University of Edinburgh) on Roman masculinity on the English stage, Elisabeth Dutton (Université de Fribourg) introducing her Oxford student screening of Narcissus (you can access this delightfully engaging romp on her EDOX website) and performance clips illuminatingly presented by The Edward’s Boys’ director, Perry Mills, including Elisabeth Dutton’s production of John Redford’s Wit and Science, the whole of which I and other 2019 SiTM Conference delegates immensely enjoyed live in the Sala del Minor Consiglio of Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale (happy days!).

At the TWB Zoom meeting, working together and in small break-out groups, 47 core TWB members and guests, from 5 continents, spent 3pm-10pm GMT intensively exchanging ideas on teaching and researching early modern race and empire, with reference to pre-circulated writings including Urvashi Chakravarty’s landmark article “The renaissance of race and the future of early modern race studies” (English Literary Renaissance, 2019) and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, on Blackness and Being (2016). After officially concluding with a celebration of new TWB publications, including the group’s third collaborative essay collection (M A Katritzky & Pavel Drábek (eds), Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre, Manchester University Press, 2020) several of us continued informal discussions over a glass of wine. Not quite the Madrid tapas bar we had hoped for, but still an appreciated opportunity to renew longstanding friendships and to congratulate TWB member Janie Cole on getting Africana Studies accepted as a formal Renaissance Society of America discipline. On 13 June, Janie wrote:

“as founding Discipline Representative for the newly-established Africana Studies, I am soliciting proposals for panels, roundtables or individual papers in any discipline that explore Africa-related themes centering on the histories, politics, representations, and cultures of peoples of African origin in both Africa and the African diaspora, and their contributions to the cultural, political, historical, economic, or social spheres of the early modern period.”

Proposals for individual papers for the next RSA Annual Meeting (2021 Dublin or online, see RSA website) should be sent to Dr. Janie Cole by no later than Monday 5 August 2020, with the following materials: Individual paper titles (max 15 words); A 150-word maximum paper abstract; A 300-word max 1 page CV in paragraph form; Keywords (general, not specific); AV requirements.

We’re very pleased to be able to congratulate Dr Clare Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Art History and a member of the GOTH Steering Committee, on her receipt of a prestigious Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellowship to work on her project ‘Gilt Leather Rooms: Decorating with Leather Hangings in Britain, c.1600–c.1800’. Clare describes the project’s scope as follows:

Embossed, gilt and painted leather is a material which both attracts and repels: on the one hand its glittering, tactile finish and complex and colourful patterns can be admired for their visual effects, on the other the idea of hanging animal skins on the wall seems at odds with twenty-first century environmental concerns. However, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gilt leather hangings were at the centre of a global trade, a trade which involved networks around design, making and hanging. The skills and products of specialist tradesmen enabled gilt leather to rival other costly wall treatments, as well as protecting the surfaces of furniture, covering screens and upholstering seating.

This innovative research project will uncover the key role of gilt leather hangings and related objects in relation to issues of status in the creation of ‘Gilt Leather Rooms’. It will also throw new light on inter-materiality in the interior and on the relationship between printed sources, architectural structures and other wall decorations. It will do this by conducting the first full investigation of the people, places and objects associated with gilt leather rooms across the British Isles including not just archival and museum sources, but extant schemes in a wide range of buildings from Edinburgh to Somerset, Dublin to Gwynedd.

Detail of gilt leather from the ‘Cleves’ Room, Preston Manor, Brighton

At GOTH one of our specific areas of interest is textiles and textile work, so we’re really looking forward to hearing more about Clare’s project at some of our future events. Check the Events page on our website and follow us @OU_GOTH on Twitter to keep up to date.

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2020 (8th March), our director Dr Peg Katritzky appeared in this video discussing ShAC, ‘Shakespeare AND Cavendish’, a research strand within GOTH that seeks to restore female dramatists of the early modern period to their rightful place in the canon alongside Shakespeare. Watch the video to learn more about ShAC and the importance of women playwrights like Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish for the history of British drama.

by Clare Taylor

**Please note that this blog post was written before the current global outbreak of COVID-19. Please check with individual museums and galleries before attempting to visit any of the exhibitions below**

GOTH holds an annual awayday. Last year we visited Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire to examine the contributions of Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (better known as ‘Bess of Hardwick’) through her architecture and design projects, textile work and correspondence. This year we are picking up the textiles theme again in relation to gender and otherness at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London’s South Kensington, examining the treatments of the wrapped body within different global traditions. We’ll be focusing on the upcoming exhibition ‘Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk’ (opens 29 Feb), with a Curator’s introduction before we view the show.

Together with Dr Ursula Rothe, Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies, we will also view representations of dress in classical sculpture, while I will be picking out examples in the museum’s fashion, British and South Asian galleries. If you want a sneak preview check out the Ossie Clark/Celia Birtwell garment I wrote about as one of the OU’s Academic Consultants for the ‘Secrets of the Museum’ interactive.

***UPDATE***: V&A Curator Anna Jackson has made a brilliant series of virtual curator tours of the Kimono exhibition, which are available to view on YouTube.

I’m also including a list of current/upcoming shows that might be of interest to GOTH readers:

London

Unbound: Visionary Women collecting Textiles until 19 April

If you don’t know it 2, Temple Place is a small treat close to Somerset House. And it’s free! This spring it’s housing a show foregrounding the work of women as textile collectors, including not only the pattern designer Enid Marx (whom I have written about for our Art History MA, A844), but also lesser-known women such as Olive Matthews, whose collection features in Chertsey Museum, Surrey.

Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media ends 26 April

Tucked away on Brunswick Square, The Foundling Museum’s exhibition (curated by Karen Hearn) probes the representation of the pregnant body through clothing, photography, painting and clothing.

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography: 20 February-17 May

Will examine complex representation of masculinity through film and photography from the 1960s to the present day.

Aubrey Beardsley, Tate Britain: 4 March-25 May

A rare chance to examine Beardsley’s work as a draughtsman and book illustrator. It’s the first major show of his work in the UK for 50 years, since the previous heyday of his popularity as part of the taste for Art Nouveau kicked off by the V&A show of 1966.

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, National Portrait Gallery, London: 12 March-7 June

Focuses on visual, literary and film culture in 1920s and 1930s – and a chance to view the NPG’s permanent collections (free) before it closes for 3 years from summer!

And outside London:

Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries, Pallant House, Chichester till 23 February

Pallant House is a stone’s throw from Chichester train station and has been carving out a niche re-evaluating modern British art and design in recent years. Their latest show focuses on the painter Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) and her and her contemporaries’ (such as Winifred Nicholson) links to modernist literature and radical politics.

Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy years 1982-94, Holburne, Bath till 25 May

Reach the Holburne by train to Bath, and reflect on Grayson Perry’s early work, radical both in subject matter and in his choice of painted ceramics and sculpture. If you miss the show in Bath it travels on to York Art Gallery (12 June to 20 September 2020) and then the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (October 2020 to February 2021).

Fabric: Touch and Identity, Compton Verney, Warwickshire 14 March-14 June

Based around the project ‘The Erotic Cloth’, this show will examine the role of dress and textiles in art, design, fashion, film and dance. While you are at Compton Verney you can also nip up to the top floor and see the folk art collected by Enid Marx with the historian Margaret Lambert.

On 30^th January 2020, GOTH held its first critical reading group and networking workshop in collaboration with the OU’s Health and Wellbeing PRA (Priority Research Area). The purpose of the day was to give members of GOTH and Health and Wellbeing an opportunity to meet each other and discuss current research, funding strategies, and recent publications, as well as joining in a critical discussion.

We began with a critical reading group on the subject of Feminism and Nationalism, led by GOTH Advisory Board member and Professor of Literature and Cultural History, Suman Gupta. Professor Gupta provided the group with two readings: Lois A. West’s chapter ‘Nation’ in the 2005 Blackwell Companion to Gender Studies, and the introduction to Sara R. Farris’ 2017 book In the Name of Women’s Rights: the Rise of Femonationalism. Discussion focused particularly on the latter contribution, as participants explored the intersections of feminist thought and anti-immigrant sentiment in additional contexts beyond those pointed out by Farris.

Workshop participants enjoying the networking lunch.

The reading group was followed by a networking lunch, where participants were able to meet each other informally and begin to learn about each other’s work. This was compounded in the session after lunch, a ‘lightning’ networking session during which each participant spoke for 2-3 minutes about their research interests and past and current work relevant to the group.

We then heard two short papers from GOTH members. The first speaker, Kim Pratt, a PhD student in Classical Studies, told us about her recent experience giving a talk about Classics in a prison in Staffordshire. Kim drew attention to the positive effect that such events, and studying in general, can have on prisoners. You can read more about Kim’s experience on the OU Classical Studies blog. The second speaker, Sally Blackburn-Daniels, a postdoctoral researcher in English, spoke to us about her work on Vernon Lee and a new production of Lee’s ‘Ballet of the Nations’, an allegorical satire about World War I. She also discussed Lee’s interest in anthropology and incorporation of element inspired by this interest in the original ballet.

Sally Blackburn-Daniels speaking about Vernon Lee.

The final session of the day was a panel on research funding, led by Dr Shaf Towheed of English and Gaynor Henry-Edwards of Health and Wellbeing. The panel presented useful information on approaches to funding and how to build a strategy around funding applications, as well as highlighting a number of funders that have current or open calls for applications for which participants in the workshop may be eligible to apply.

The workshop was a great opportunity for researchers from different areas of the university to get to know each other’s work and make useful connections for future projects. GOTH hopes to repeat these networking events on a yearly basis, in order to maintain a strong community of like-minded researchers across the OU and beyond.

On Thursday 24^th October, GOTH held its official launch event at Walton Hall. The event celebrated the foundation of GOTH with an afternoon of dramatic performances followed by a wine reception.

Peg Katritzky welcomes attendees to the GOTH Launch.

The GOTH Launch opened with comments from GOTH Director Peg Katritzky, who talked about her experiences throughout her career of being inspired by the funding successes of others and wanting to pursue such opportunities to support her own interests. She particularly noted the recent great work of the Baron Thyssen Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion, another OU research centre established in 2018 that proved motivational for Peg when setting up GOTH. It was great to hear about how GOTH got started, and we’re all grateful to Peg for her hard work in seeking and securing funding for the research centre!

After this, we watched the first of two performances. The first performance was of an extract from The Orestes Project by By Jove Theatre Company. The performance was introduced by Christine Plastow, GOTH Committee Member and Associate Director of By Jove, who spoke about the company’s work with myths and stories from the canon and their interest in themes of gender and otherness in presenting new versions of these stories. She then introduced the audience to The Orestes Project, an ongoing collaboration with Nancy Rabinowitz from Hamilton College, NY. From the GOTH Launch programme:

The project explores the relationships among the children of the house of Atreus: Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia, exploring how the traumas of their shared history play out after the mythic narrative is over. In particular, the project explores queer relationships: Orestes’ male ‘companion’ Pylades becomes his lover, Iphigenia explores her desire for her goddess rescuer Artemis, and Electra navigates her relationship with herself and her mother’s legacy. The performance is a work in progress, written and devised by the company, and combining text, music, movement, and other theatrical forms.

Performers from By Jove Theatre Company.

The afternoon’s second performance was presented by Pavel Drábek and student actors from the University of Hull. Prof Drábek introduced the performance, The Amazonians, which was an extract from Aphra Behn’s The Young King, or The Mistake presenting tragicomic scenes of female warriors and mistaken identities. From the GOTH Launch programme:

Pavel Drábek introduces the performance.

A selection of scenes adapted from Aphra Behn’s The Young King, or The Mistake (c1679), a Fletcherian tragicomedy inspired by La Calprenède’s Cléopâtre (1646), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (c1631). For this performance we have worked with Janet Todd’s edition from The Works of Aphra Behn (vol. 7; London: William Pickering, 1996). A longer version of this play will be performed at the University of Hull on 1–2 November 2019 by first year students as part of the Gulbenkian Careers and Employability Festival and as an outcome of the Approaches to Theatre 1 module.

Attendees commented on how much they enjoyed both performances: the first was comtemplative and intimate, while the second was funny and fast-paced. All the performers did a fantastic job with the material, especially in a small and unconventional performance space.

Performers from the University of Hull.

After the performances, we were visited by Ian Fribbance, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, who congratulated all involved on the launch of GOTH and commented on the necessity of research in the important areas of gender and otherness, particularly at the Open University with its large and diverse student and staff body. We then all enjoyed a celebratory drinks reception, and raised a glass to the success of GOTH!

Members of the GOTH Committee and Advisory Board with Ian Fribbance.

Thanks to all who attended the GOTH Launch. You can view the full programme from the event here.