Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance

Looking at the violation of bodies in Shakespeare's tragedies, especially as revealed (or concealed) in performance on stage and screen, Pascale Aebischer discusses stage and screen performances of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Aebischer demonstrates how bodies virtually absent from playtexts and critical discussion (due to silence, disability, marginalization, racial otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production.

Pascale Aebischer is Associate Professor of Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. After a combined honours degree (English and French) at the University of Bern and a postgraduate diploma at the London Academy of Performing Arts, she moved to Lincoln College, Oxford, where she was the recipient of a Berrow Scholarship and where she completed her DPhil. From 1999 to 2002, Aebischer held a Research Fellowship, funded by the National Science Foundation (CH), at Darwin College, Cambridge. During those years, she taught in Cambridge, Oxford and for the British American Drama Academy in London. She took up a Lectureship in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester in 2002 and moved to the University of Exeter in 2004. She is author of Jacobean Drama (2010) and Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012). In spring 2013, Pascale Aebischer became General Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, the leading journal of early modern performance studies.