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SHAKESPEARE & THE ART OF LYING


SHAKESPEARE & THE ART OF LYING

What notions of falsehood, and, axiomatically, of truth, emerge from a reading of Shakespeare’s works? Does Shakespeare subscribe to the concept of absolute truth being attainable or of truth being contingent, relative? Polonius declares that he will find where truth is hid though it were hid indeed within the centre, and Hamlet in his letter to Ophelia declares, “Doubt truth to be a liar,/ But never doubt I love.” However, are we to take these statements at face value or enquire into their context and the nature of the person who speaks the lines? Does Shakespeare address the poststructuralist problem of language not being a mirror to reality or to truth? Is falsehood, degrees and variations of it, all we are to be content with? After all, Shakespeare himself confesses in Sonnet 110, “I have looked on truth/ Askance and strangely.”

The five-day workshop, jointly organized by the Shakespeare Society of India and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, to be held at the IIAS, Simla, from October 3 to October 7, 2009, will explore the many facets of lies, deception, truth and half-truth that feature so prominently in the Sonnets and the poems (“When my love swears that she is made of truth,/ I do believe her, though I know she lies”) the history and Roman plays, in the comedies, in the tragedies where falsehood has dire consequences, in the problem plays where distinctions are often blurred, and in the romances where, ostensibly, falsehood is defeated and truth is vindicated. Some attention should also be paid to the fact that there is an art to make falsehood resemble truth. One may recall that Othello claims that Iago is a “fellow…of exceeding honesty,” after Iago insinuates against Desdemona’s fidelity. Shakespeare is past master of the art of lying, he compares his art to that of a dyer, and he is also aware of the serious repercussions of this nimbleness in colouring the truth on the art-nature debate that raged in the Renaissance. Are truth and its representation inextricable or does the artistic representation of truth become in itself a kind of art of lying?

The organizers look forward to receiving papers not necessarily confined to an examination of Shakespeare’s works alone, but also to classical, Biblical and Renaissance notions of falsehood and truth. More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Bruno and other thinkers of the age have deeply influenced Shakespeare’s notions of falsehood and truth. Too, the workshop will entertain papers on Shakespearean criticism and on stage and film versions which focus on the representation of falsehood and truth. Papers may include a discussion of how contemporary political ideologies may colour the reinvention of Shakespeare’s works.

The aim of the workshop, to be held over five days, unlike that of a seminar, is not so much to arrive at firm conclusions but to raise questions that are exploratory in nature, to have an in-depth discussion on the variety and seriousness of Shakespeare’s thoughts on this issue and, in the process, to re-think a concern that can never be out-of-date.

SHAKESPEARE & THE ART OF LYING

SUGGESTED TOPICS

· Hypocrisy, Sincerity and Role Play in the History Plays

  • Issues of Gender and Falsehood
  • Cross-Dressing and Identity (As You Like It and Twelfth Night)
  • Bed Tricks in Shakespeare (All’s Well that End’s Well and Measure for Measure)
  • Issues of representation (The Winter’s Tale, the Sonnets, the long poems)
  • Truth Claims of Fiction
  • Lying and Creativity
  • The Play-within-a-play (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labours Lost, Merchant of Venice)
  • The Rhetoric of Lying (Othello, Macbeth, King Lear)
  • Nature, Art and Falsehood (the Sonnets, the long poems, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Titus Andronicus)
  • Truth, Falsehood and the Literary
  • Love and Romance in the Age of Falsehood
  • Jealousy Truth and Projection (Othello, The Winter’s Tale)
  • Self Delusion
  • Distortions of Truth
  • Appearance vs Reality
  • Lying as Self-Fashioning
  • Stage and Cinematic Representations of Lying in Shakespeare
  • Influence of the Contemporary Intellectual, Political and Historical Background on Shakespeare’s Concepts of Truth and Falsehood

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