Shakespeare, Sympathy, and Prejudice

Speaker: Marianne Novy
Discussant: Aparna Lanjewar

November 17, 2004 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

There is a long tradition of thinking of Shakespeare’s plays as showing universal sympathy. But his plays have also been read as exemplifying biases of his culture-sometimes with the claim that nobody in his time held the sympathetic views the other tradition credits him with. The talk will show, from other authors, that concepts such as religious freedom and equality for women were thinkable in Shakespeare’s time, even if valuing them was a minority view. The talk will demonstrate the interplay between sympathy and prejudice in Shakespeare’s plays with regard to such examples as The Merchant of Venice and Othello.

Marianne Novy is a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the first American feminist Shakespeare critics of the late twentieth century, she published ‘Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare’ with the University of North Carolina Press in 1984.  For the following ten years, working against then current critical tendencies to discuss Shakespeare only in relation to male writers and/ or to see his stature as an obstacle to women’s creativity, she wrote about women writers uses of Shakespeare in her own book, ‘Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and other Women Novelists’ (Georgia, 1994; rpt. Iowa, 1998), and edited three anthologies on related topics, namely, ‘Womens Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, George Eliot, and Others’ (Illinois, 1990); ‘Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Womens Re-Visions of Shakespeare’ (Illinois: 1993); and ‘Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Womens Re-Visions in Literature and Performance’(St. Martin’s Palgrave, 1999).

She has recently edited the first book-length exploration of representations of adoption in literature, ‘Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture ‘(Michigan, 2001), and her book treating adoption in literature from Sophocles to the late twentieth century, ‘Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama’, is forthcoming from Michigan in 2005. Her next writing project returns to her early interest in the representation of all kinds of outsiders in Shakespeare, and the shifts between prejudice and sympathy in his plays. She has recently been elected Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.