School of Cultural Inquiry seminar

‘A numerous fleet of cormorants black, / That sailed insulting o‘er the wrack’: a history of greed in Shakespeare and others.

Date: Monday 29th April 
Time: 4:15pm
Location: School of Cultural Inquiry Conference Room, A.D. Hope Building (14)

Abstract for paper:
The cormorant is a ubiquitous yet much-maligned seabird that can be found from London to Canberra and anywhere in between. Beginning with Milton and working through Marvell and others, I trace the perhaps surprisingly complex pattern of early modern literary (and art-historical) representations of the cormorant, noting its reversible role as both Christ and Satan. I conclude with a reading of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice which takes the cormorant and its related/opposite/counterpart bird the pelican as the basis for a new understanding both of a key textual crux in the play and of the resolution of the pound-of-flesh scene. In the process, I reflect on the oblique yet generative relationship between the natural world and its literary and visual representation.

Speaker biography:
Gordon McMullan is Professor of English at King’s College London, a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. His publications include Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (2007), the Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VIII (2000), and The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994). He has edited four collections of essays, including Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, co-edited with David Matthews (2007), and he is currently editing two further collections: Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music, with Sam Smiles, and Women Making Shakespeare: Essays for Ann Thompson, with Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Vaughan. He has held a Leverhulme Fellowship (2002-3), a Research Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU (2006), and the Lloyd Davis Visiting Shakespeare Professorship at the University of Queensland (2008).