This is a time when the study of early literature is being cut in English departments across the anglophone world and when early literature and theoretical approaches are being pitted against each other. The University of Leicester in the United Kingdom moved in 2021 to cut the teaching of all medieval literature from its English department, claiming that that was the only way to decolonize its curriculum and make room for the study of “race, ethnicity, sexuality, and diversity.” In this environment, we’re especially proud to showcase the wonderful work our graduate students are doing on premodern literature. We think today’s range of papers shows that premodern literature remains vital to the study of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, empire, and political conflict in the modern world, and that the concepts and vocabulary and frameworks we use to understand our experiences have a deep history, one which we are drawn to revisit and interrogate as we try, both individually and collectively, to answer our most difficult questions.  

The symposium featured six English department graduate students. The first panel, “Adaptation, Performance, Audience,” consisted of papers by Jenna Giombetti, Bryanna Rodriguez, and Jordyn Cummings. Giombetti’s paper, “Religion, Generational Gaps, and Genre in The Danish History and Hamlet” considers Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an act of adaptation, examining its sources by Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest to illuminate Shakespeare’s subtle interventions in the narrative’s depiction of genre and vengeance, especially as they intersect with changing religious practices. Rodriguez’s paper, “Much Ado about Adaptation: Modern Engagements with Premodern Texts,” considers recent cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Taming of the Shrew, arguing that adaptations have far more dynamic effects in the adolescent classroom than that of bridging the difference between Shakespeare’s dialect(s) and our own. Cummings’s paper, “Clothed like a bride”: The Translated Soul of King Antiochus’s Daughter in the 2016 Stratford Production of The Adventures of Pericles,” examines Scott Wentworth’s 2016 Stratford production of The Adventures of Pericles, which Jordyn argues draws on both Shakespeare’s Pericles and George Wilkins’ The Painful Adventures of Pericles to depict King Antiochus’s daughter as a both a victim of her father’s incestuous desires as subtly resisting those desires through costuming and staging. 

The second panel, “Unruly Bodies, Unruly Voices,” featured papers by Summer Mohrmann, Jasmine Stout, and Justyna Staccio. Mohrmann’s paper, “Embodied Tradition: The Formal, Proto-Nationalistic Impulse of The Awntyrs off Arthur and Ywain and Gawain” argued that the Middle English poems The Awntyrs off Arthur and Ywain and Gawain, in their engagement with questions of power, oppression, Englishness, and translation/adaptation cannot be separated from their focus on textual and physical embodiment. Stout’s paper, “‘Her father’s resourcefulness and her mother’s confidence’: Marina as Feminist Icon in Pericles and The Porpoise” argues that a comparative reading of the character Angelica in Mark Haddon’s novel The Porpoise and Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles reveals that the roots of the strength of Haddon’s Angelica can be found in Shakespeare’s Marina. Finally, Staccio’s presentation, “Lead Us Not Into Kempe-tation: An exploration of Audience and Genre in The Book of Margery Kempe,” argued that the early version of autobiography in Kempe’s writing evolved from Kempe’s unusual engagement with existing genres, such as travel writing and hagiography. 

The symposium concluded with a response and keynote by Professor Jane Hwang Degenhardt. Prof. Degenhardt’s significant body of scholarship has been at center of recent conversations on empire, geography, and the complicated ways in which the early modern stage represented the power dynamics of a world of religious and territorial upheaval. In her first book, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh 2010), Prof. Degenhardt introduced a new way of seeing Renaissance drama by looking at the anxieties represented in so-called “Turk Plays” and how those worries permeated other theatrical explorations. She was one of the first early modern scholars to draw our attention to the profound intersections of gender, sexuality, geography, and religion. Her recent book, Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (2022), expands our understanding of the vocabulary of “fortune,” tracing its ancient and medieval mythologies into the commercial, imperial, and globalizing significance that word holds today. Her introduction also expands the very genre of academic writing, as she tells her own origin story as a Korean adoptee and the role of “fortune” in her life.  

In her keynote presentation for the Symposium, entitled “Speculating with Shakespeare: Beyond Knowledge, Reason, and Possibility,” Prof. Degenhardt took the “Worlds” and “Words” in our title as an inspiration to reflect on the speculative nature of early modern drama generally and Shakespearean plays more specifically. Turning to Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest, Prof. Degenhardt argued that while these plays reflect an earlier generation of scholarship’s interests in the “imperial” visions of Europe, they also cannot be reduced to such power dynamics. Rather, Shakespeare’s fictive view of “world” shares something significant with the speculative energies of contemporary theory and fiction. Her talk thus invited the participants in the Symposium to consider how “Premodern Worlds, Premodern Words” exist within a wider glossary of meanings that can be identified through our critical readings. As she concluded, “[…] ultimately, the value of Shakespeare’s plays depends on our capacity to stretch beyond what we deem to be possible, knowable or even dreamable to consider what else and how else a world could be.”