EVENT DETAILS

Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama

W. B. Worthen, Barnard College and Columbia University
Bruce R. Smith, USC
Matthew Smith, Azusa Pacific University
Julia Lupton, UCI

With or without words, face-to-face encounters can initiate love affairs, demand acknowledgment, refuse recognition, request forgiveness, offer obsequy, spawn rivalry, witness crime, or trigger shame. In each of these instances, facing another person is an embodied, spatially situated, and transactional event involving gesture and posture, orientation and disposition. Flattery, disguise and dissimulation test the plastic properties of the face in ways that bear directly on theater as an art. Face to face encounters afford the give and take of conversation, the affront of argument, and the miracle of the kiss, and are thus essential to the action of drama. In the age of the smart phone, understanding the special dynamism and essential elements of face to face exchange, including its mutations and migrations, is a matter of new interest and urgency, in the contexts of both university instruction and social life.