Call for Papers: Shakespeare/Movement (Arden Shakespeare Intersections)
Editors: Susan L. Anderson, Harry R. McCarthy, Eleanor Rycroft
“The want is but to put those powers in motion | That long to move.”
Movement is inevitable. Passively, actively, willingly or unwittingly, all things constantly move, from the quasiparticles of quantum vibration to the circulation of unfathomably large galactic clusters. Planets orbit; tides ebb and flow; blood circulates, horses are ridden, and balls are thrown. We inhabit bodies that move - walking, running, dancing, swimming, crawling, falling, hopping, skipping, jumping bodies – or bodies which, for whatever reason, cannot. Movement takes place on natural and constructed routes: along roads, rivers, across land, desert, and ocean. Movement also expresses thought, will, desire – the power to move is power itself.
Though the word does not appear anywhere in his collected works, ‘movement’ is central to Shakespeare. His plays demand embodied motion for their realisation; his poems trace physical action and muse upon the swift motions of time; his work moves us (and sometimes, moves us against it); and moves between mediums. Shakespeare, by turn, is frequently framed as central to ‘movements’ of various kinds, be they artistic, political, cross-cultural.
The editors of Shakespeare/Movement invite responses to both the possibilities and limitations of ‘movement’ - in its broadest conception - in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Given that performance is the artistic medium most profoundly invested in the meaning, materiality, and mechanics of movement, we anticipate contributions which engage with embodied motion in Shakespeare’s plays. While human mobility may not have fundamentally changed since the advent of bipedalism, its historical expression has (Bourdieu 1977; Bolens and Brazil 2018). We thus particularly welcome essays that consider how the movement of human bodies – real or imagined – engages concerns of their historical moment of production. This may involve investigation into the conceptual, semantic, and literary aspects of the body’s mobile capacities; however, and in keeping with the expansive remit of the ‘Arden Shakespeare Intersections’ series, we equally welcome contributions which think more capaciously about ‘movement’s’ significance to and for Shakespeare. Such approaches might include anything from his poetry’s potential to capture bodies in motion—including through its ability to mimic bodily rhythms (Smith 2013)—to the place of Shakespeare and his works in other forms of ‘movement’—temporal, artistic, political.
In line with the volume’s expansive approach to the topic, the editors are particularly concerned with the role of ‘movement’ in processes of identity formation and cultural change. We seek chapters which avoid individualised or exclusionary approaches to mobility, as well as the siloing of theoretical approaches, in the hope of developing new, intersectional frameworks which analyse the participation of Shakespearean movement in wider forms of identity construction, performativity, and stratification, including (but not limited to) along axes of class, age, gender, race, and dis/ability (e.g. Chess 2016; Korda 2011; Love 2018; Ndiaye 2022; Oh 2024; Schaap Williams 2021).
As well as literary and performance studies, we therefore welcome essays which engage with one or more of these fields:
Instructions for authors:
We are seeking contributions of 4000-7000 words. Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words to the editors by 31st May 2025: e.rycroft@bristol.ac.uk; h.r.mccarthy@exeter.ac.uk; DrSusanAnderson@outlook.com. We anticipate that final chapters will be due in September 2026.
References:
Guillemette Bolens and Sarah Brazil, “The Body,” A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age, edited by Sarah-Grace Heller, (Bloomsbury, 2018): 53-70
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977)
Simone Chess, Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016)
Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
Genevieve Love, Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018)
Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Elisa Oh, “Shakespeare, Race, and Movement,” in Patricia Akhimie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (Oxford UP, 2024): 306-24
Katherine Schaap Williams, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell UP, 2021)
Bruce R. Smith, “Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare’s Verse,” in Jonathan Post, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford UP, 2013): 323-39