Shakespeare Symposium

Kantorowicz’s seminal The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology contains a well-known reading of Richard II, and, in particular, of the identity crisis with which Richard is faced as he is deposed, and divested of his ‘Body politic, which is more ample and large than the Body natural’. This pruning away of his Body politic is ‘both less and more than Death’. We consider two related but distinct philosophical models/lenses through which to see this process, on both of which the process issues in a being who is newly possessed of genuine self-consciousness. They differ in whether the King’s other body is to be seen as so ‘ample’ as to include the very trees and flowers of the realm. Both seem to have some purchase in the text.

Dr Amitavo Islam
Amitavo Islam studied mathematics and physics at ANU as an undergraduate.  He has a PhD from Sydney University in pure mathematics in the area of category theory, and a PhD in philosophy from UNSW, in the philosophy of language.  He has been an Associate Lecturer in mathematics at Sydney University (part-time) and at UNSW (full-time), and has taught courses in philosophy at UNSW.  Since 2008 he has been Lecturer in philosophy at Campion College.  His research interests lie in the areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics.

One of the few unambiguously favourable allusions to “philosophy” in the Shakespearean corpus occurs at a key moment in Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Laurence is seeking to bring a distraught Romeo to his senses. The ghostly father, whom we might expect to offer his youthful charge spiritual consolation, instead offers him the “armour” of philosophy, which he also calls “adversity’s sweet milk.” (He perhaps means this in the double sense of a specific against adversity and of adversity’s unexpectedly sweet teaching.) Moreover, unlike Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew and Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost, young men who profess a love of wisdom but abandon study upon falling in love, the aged celibate of Romeo and Juliet first comes to sight as a patient practitioner of natural philosophy who is prudently mistrustful of youthful passion. If we are interested in the topic of philosophy in Shakespeare, Friar Laurence therefore merits special attention. In this talk I will explore the character and conduct of the good friar from this perspective.

Dr Jeremy Bell
Jeremy completed a B.A., majoring in Jewish Studies, and an M.Phil in philosophy, both at the University of Sydney. In 2006 he was awarded a General Sir John Monash Award to support his doctoral studies with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He began teaching at Campion in 2015, several months before defending his doctoral dissertation on Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy of mind. His research interests are chiefly in ethics and Thomist philosophy.

‘Where is there a Shakespearean philosophy or intelligible ethics?’, asks George Steiner in his essay ‘A Reading against Shakespeare’ (1986), taking up from critics as distinguished as Dr Johnson and Tolstoy the exasperating issue of Shakespeare’s having nothing to say, no decipherable intellectual or moral purpose. If we confine ourselves to what criticism would once have called Shakespeare’s ‘point of view’, it hardly seems unreasonable to suggest that, independent of the dramatic moment, Shakespeare does not have one; that an intimate understanding of humanity in all its mental and motivational complexity undermined effective philosophical and ethical conviction: ‘here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale’ (Macbeth 2.3). This talk will question whether or not this reading of Shakespearean drama is a valid one and, if so, how far the durability of Shakespeare’s extraordinary reputation depends upon his having nothing to say.

Dr Julian Lamb
Emeritus Professor Will Christie was Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University from 2015 until his retirement in 2021, and before that Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney. He was founding President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (2010-2015) and elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2011. His publications include Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006), awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008, The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (2008), The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays (2016). Currently in press for release in 2025 are a collection of scholarly essays on The Emotions in Liberal Writing, 1790-1920 for Manchester University Press and four volumes for Routledge entitled Politics and Literary Criticism in the Periodical Press, 1800-1920, both edited with Jock Macleod and Peter Denney.

During Shakespeare's era books, which were once considered rare and sacred objects, became part of everyday life. This was accompanied by an imaginative revolution: because the book was part of lived experience, it became a more useful metaphor. Sermons and religious literature begin, for example, to refer to 'the book of conscience.' Did drama have any part to play in this revolution? My paper traces the extent to which Shakespeare's plays were responsible for imbuing the book with vividness and complexity as a metaphor for inner life.

Kate Flaherty
Kate Flaherty is a Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at ANU. Her scholarship explores how Shakespeare’s works play on the stage of public culture. In Ellen Terry, Shakespeare and Suffrage in Australia and New Zealand (CUP, 2025), she tells the neglected story of the actress's last great adventure. Other publications include Ours as We Play it: Australia Plays Shakespeare (2011) and articles and chapters on aspects of 19th century Shakespeare performance such as touring, education, and gender. She has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Shakespeare Survey, New Theatre Quarterly, The Guardian and The Conversation. Kate is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and 2019 winner of the ANU VC’s Award for Excellence in Education.

Ophelia calls Hamlet “Th’observed of all observers” (3. 1. 156). Ophelia’s line may mean that Hamlet is the most observed of all those who observe. Or it may mean that all observers observe him. But this remark interests me because of a phenomenological problem: that all observers are observed, even when they are alone. In fact, it is more precise to say that there is no such thing as observation at all, if by “observation” we mean a neutral, disinterested form of attention that does not partly constitute, and is not partly affected by, that upon which it attends.

This simultaneous capacity to affect and be affected is actually a kind of divergence that opens the observer in two. In Hamlet, observers are divided from themselves because they are tangible from where they touch, visible from where they see, and hearable from where they speak. Although these reversible dimensions of our experience necessarily envelop one another, they can never coincide with one another. In this regard, Hamlet has an unexpected affinity with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, whose entire later philosophy is dedicated to exploring “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.” In my talk, Merleau-Ponty reads Hamlet, and reversibly, Hamlet reads Merleau-Ponty, in order to explore what it means to make seeing visible.

Dr Kishore Saval
Kishore Saval received his J.D. in law from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University.  He has previously been Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and is currently Senior Lecturer in the Western Civilisation Program at Australia Catholic University.  He is the author of two books: Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy, and Shakespeare in Hate.

These might seem like odd bedfellows. In his seminal work on performative utterances, Austin famously excludes from consideration performatives which occur in a poem or on stage. The language he uses to describe such occurrences – “parasitic,” “etiolated,” “hollow” – has often been seen as disparaging of literature more generally. However, Austin’s frequent references to literature, especially Shakespeare, tell a different story, and should have us suspect that there is something more to this exclusion than meets the eye. This paper will consider the nature of Austin’s exclusion of literary performatives in relation to another, more subtle exclusion: infelicity. Infelicities are performatives which are adjudged as failing to enact what they intend or purport. I would like to suggest that Austin’s exclusion of both ought not be seen as dismissive of their philosophical significance, but as in fact acknowledging a significance that exceeds his philosophical project, and which intimates the complex and unexpected ways performatives are used in Shakespeare’s dramatic writing.

Julian Lamb
Julian Lamb is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Donne, Puttenham, and Erasmus in journals such as English Literary Renaissance and Shakespeare Quarterly, and is author of Rules of Use: Language and Instruction in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury: 2015). His current research interest is failed performatives in Shakespeare.

In this paper I will explore the ways Shakespeare experiments with dreams in his plays. Often used as vehicles of psychological revelation, such as Clarence’s moral epiphany in Richard III (“I trembling waked, and for a season after / Could not believe but that I was in hell,”) or Hermia’s foreboding dream about Lysander’s abandonment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Methought a serpent ate my heart away”), Shakespeare’s use of dreams as a dramatic device suggests a rich philosophy of mind. I will compare this with contemporary thought on the nature of the imagination and of dreams.

Dr Angela Schumann
Dr Angela Schumann is a graduate of Campion College and has a PhD in Literature from Monash University. Her thesis explored the Sacrament of Penance and self-deception in Shakespeare's plays. Angela teaches in Literary Studies at Monash, is internationally published, and speaks in schools on the topic, "Why do I have to study Shakespeare?".

As one of the leading modern-day successors and interpreters of both Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch pointed out in an important essay thirty years ago, “Life with the concept human being is very different from life with the concept member of the species Homo sapiens”. Cora Diamond has repeatedly and influentially argued that great works of literature “have a view of what valuing is (and of what it is to have valuing as an object of reflection) which is opposed to our familiar philosophical way of thinking”. Reading such works “is itself a revolutionary act” in the modern philosophical context. They tell us that “if we are engaged in reflecting about moral value, we need, as writers or as readers, to be exercising creative imagination”. Murdoch herself often turns to Shakespeare (and Tolstoy) in similar terms.

How might we apply some of these insights to Measure for Measure, and to Shakespeare more generally? If his delight in manifold modes of being is as Murdoch thought "the beginning of the modern world", then our failure to delight in them might be its end.

Prof Simon Haines
Educated in Iraq, England and Australia, Simon took a BA at the Australian National University and a DPhil in English literature at the University of Oxford. He worked as a banker in London and then as a diplomat and analyst with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Office of National Assessments. He led the OECD Budget Committee as Chairman from 1985-1987. Simon then taught English Literature at the Australian National University from 1990 to 2008, where he also served as Head of the School of Humanities. In 2009 he was appointed Chair Professor and Head of English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also served as Director of the Research Centre for Human Values. He is a founding member of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. In 2017 he was appointed CEO of the Ramsay Centre.

Simon is the author or editor of five books including the prizewinning Reader in European Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2010, 2nd paperback edition 2014) and Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). His most recent book is the edited volume Shakespeare and Value (Routledge, May 2018).