“Tempestuous Times” engages with the multiple ways in which Shakespeare’s The Tempest flags, constructs, and deconstructs multiple temporalities and topographies, thereby establishing a broad variety of different forms of literary and social, but above all temporal communities. While scholars have comprehensively discussed The Tempest’s wide range of references to contemporaneous textual cultures (travel writing, plays, humanist philosophy) and the classics (Greek novel, Virgil, Ovid), analysing the play’s ambiguous, colonial geographies, the various temporalities constructed by way of such references remain largely unexplored. Our workshop focuses on constructions of specific temporalities by way of allusions to specific texts, places, and artefacts and/or by way of meta-dramatic references to performance practices etc. We are also interested in the literary-aesthetic, socio-political, and ideological implications that arise as multiple temporalities interact. Moreover, papers explore the larger issue of periodisation brought into play by The Tempest’s ostensible construction of a Renaissance master-narrative through the showcasing of both contemporary Renaissance discourses and a concomitant recourse to the classics that seems to obscure the medieval.

Thursday, 4 November 2021

15:30   Andrew James Johnston and Lea von der Linde (FU Berlin)
Welcome Address
  
16:00  Wolfram Keller (FU Berlin)
Introduction: Tempestuous Temporalities
 

17:30  Sarah Lewis (King’s College London)
’[T]he present business | Which now’s upon’s’: Time and Tide in The Tempest 
 

 
18:30  Lauren Shohet (Villanova University):
Temporal Interface in The Tempest

Friday, 5 November 2021

14:00   Stephan Laqué (FU Berlin)
Prospero's kairotic magic
  
15:00  Philip Schwyzer (University of Exeter)
Prospero in the Graveyard: Proleptic Mourning and the Language of Epitaphs in The Tempest
  

16:30  Gordon McMullan (King’s College London)
The Tempest’s Colonial Chronologies
   
17:30   Peter Löffelbein (FU Berlin)
When is Prospero’s Island?
 

 
19:00  Timothy Arner (Grinnell College)
TBA
  
  

Saturday, 6 November 2021

 
14:00  Cathy Shrank (University of Sheffield)
Timely Counsel and Its Absence in Shakespeare’s Tempest
  
15:00  Marlene Dirschauer (FU Berlin)
Rich and Strange Afterlives: The Transformations of The Tempest in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
   

16:30  Claudia Olk (LMU München)
Tempestuous Endgames
   
17:30  Roundup