'Speechless: Shakespeare, the Players and the Arts of Silence'

Abstract

Shakespeare’s plays are known for their verbal intricacy and aural richness, and for their capacity to create soundscapes in which relentlessly articulate speaking parts talk themselves into theatrical life. In the modern theatre, however, performers and audiences have become as accustomed to the signifying power of the spaces between the words as to the vitality and musicality of the words themselves.
Listening to the ways in which actors have shaped the gaps, breaks, pauses and silences that punctuate Shakespeare’s texts, this lecture- performance, devised in collaboration with Accidental Collective, explores how the orchestration of the said, the unsaid, and sometimes even the unspeakable, enables the making and the unmaking of ‘character’ on the contemporary stage. 

Professor Robert Shaughnessy

'Is Life Worth Living?'

Abstract

In the month of "Blue Monday" - the so-called "most depressing day of the year" - Professor Carrette uses his inaugural professorial lecture to consider what makes life worth living. The lecture will examine in detail an 1895 essay by the American, New York born, philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It will address both religious and non-religious meanings of life and seek to reveal James's appreciation of the vital element that keeps us alive and free from depression. As James argues, it is fear of life rather than death that is the problem of existence. The lecture will show how "not-knowing" is as important as knowing and that the poetic imagination is as important as scientific fact in the making of a philosophy of life. The lecture will lighten its subject matter by framing its four sections with film clips from Woody Allen's angst filled reflections on the meaning of life, showing there is some similarity between these two very different New Yorkers.

Jeremy Carrette