 "Shakespeare Now", a conference held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (9-10 April) and organised by the English Department of Alexandria University, appealed to both generalists and specialists, not least through its range of speakers. Catherine Belsey provided a poststructuralist reading in a paper entitled " King Lear and the Missing Salt", Julia Thomas analysed the shifting conventions in illustrations of Shakespeare's plays from the 18th and 19th centuries, Mohamed Enani gave a presentation on his experience translating Shakespeare and Kate McLuskie read a paper entitled "Enter the Ghost in his Night Gowne: the Corpus or Corpse of Shakespeare". Ismail Serageddin, director of the Bibliotheca, demonstrated the relevance of the Bard to such contemporary issues as women's and minorities' rights. At a roundtable discussion Essam Fatouh launched a postcolonial critique of humanist interpretations of the playwright before three outstanding undergraduate students of his -- Doa Abdel-Salam, Nadia Saad and Sherine Taraboulsi -- engaged the question "Why do Shakespeare's tragedies give pleasure?" Clockwise from top: Fuseli, Macbeth and Lady, 1774, reproduced from Stephen Orgel's The Authentic Shakespeare ; Lillie Langtry as Cleopatra, 1890, and Edmund Kean as Othello, 1814, both reproduced from Gamini Salgado's Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare : First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590-1890 parent page (13 - 19 April 2006, issue #790) |