Conferencia “Reconstructing Shakespeare’s voices” con Josefina Venegas

El día miércoles 28 de abril, a las 11:30 horas, se realizará la conferencia “Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Voices”  con Josefina Venegas Meza (Doctoranda en King’s College London), la actividad se enmarca dentro del Ongoing Seminar de Literatura Inglesa de la Facultad de Letras UC. Vía Zoom. Actividad abierta y gratuita previa inscripción en el link: https://forms.gle/HLcWkjX2v5DbiKZJ8

Ongoing Seminar 2021 Invitation

Title: Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Voices: Diversity and Wordplay in Early Modern Pronunciation

Description: What sound do you think of when you think of a Shakespearean play? How did these plays sound originally? “Modern readers or playgoers are auditorily misled by their experience of Shakespeare . . . . If we could be transported back to Elizabethan London and actually hear Shakespeare’s own speech, the experience would be totally different” (Lass 256-257). Since most of Shakespeare’s works belong to the dramatic genre, they were primarily meant to be performed on stage (not read in silence), which means that their oral aspect is fundamental in the construction of meaning. The phonology of Early Modern England—that is to say, the pronunciation system of that time—varies considerably from the way people speak English today. The evolution of pronunciation in the English language results in the loss of various elements of the plays, including puns, jokes, rhymes, and other types of wordplay when pronounced in Modern English. This talk will explore the ways in which Shakespeare represents pronunciation on the page, and how recovering these varied soundscapes not only allows us to bring to light meanings that have been lost, but also endorses diversity and inclusivity for modern actors and audiences.

Speaker biography: Josefina Venegas Meza completed her Master’s degree at Durham University and is currently finishing her PhD at King’s College London. Her research focuses on original pronunciation in Early Modern comedies, specifically how social, regional and historical dialectal variation constitute characters in Early Modern plays, as well as their incidence in the reconstruction of wordplay. Her research is funded by ANID Becas Chile. Josefina graduated from Letras Inglesas at Facultad de Letras.