Ovidean Echoes and Locative Memory in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale

press release: William E. Engel, the Nick B. Williams Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, will offer a public lecture sponsored by the Center for Early Modern Studies in association with the current First Folio! exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art.

Professor Engel will present the public lecture "Ovidean Echoes and Locative Memory in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale" on Thursday, December 8th at 7:00pm in L140, Conrad A. Elvehjem building.

The statue scene in The Winter’s Tale (5.3) is among the most celebrated episodes in Shakespeare. The stunning coup de théâtre involves staging the “Pygmalion Effect,” a theme Shakespeare took from Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, repurposing it to fit his dramaturgical ends. No study of the First Folio plays has yet focussed on the mnemotechnical model to which Shakespeare undoubtedly was indebted. Accordingly, this lecture highlights what Shakespeare remembered from Ovid coupled with treatises on the Memory Arts, which together enable us to recover and reconstruct the aesthetic and epistemological underpinnings of what the “statue scene” aims to represent and recall.  

William E. Engel is Nick B. Williams Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he specializes in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Roots of Western Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, as well as 19th century prose and poetry. His most recent books include: The Memory Arts in Renaissance England : A Critical Anthology (Cambridge Univ Press, 2016), Chiastic Designs in English Literature  from Sidney to Shakespeare  (Ashgate, 2009; Routledge, 2016); Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe (Ashgate, 2012; Routledge, 2016); Death & Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory (Oxford Univ Press, 2002).

Free and open to the public.