Silence is often connected to tragedy and noise with comedy, and the play uses noise to bizarre and complex effects. Characters attempt to outshout one another and are deaf to each other’s meanings. The cacophony jars viewers and suggests that its opposite, harmony, is elsewhere, always out of reach. The drums, fanfares, and verbose speeches have often annoyed audiences, but their sounds are the “white noise” of the war that hangs over the play. Laura Wright’s (Yale University) paper “‘After so many hours, lives, speeches spent…’: making noise and doing nothing in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida” spoke about the copious amount of noise in Troilus and Cressida. Making some noise in the Maori Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare’s Globe The way these colors were used showed the progression of the characters, their relationship, the music, and the presence of the supernatural. Green slime represented blood and was associated with Macbeth, while red was associated with witchcraft, madness, and Lady Macbeth. This innovative adaptation of Verdi’s opera received negative reviews, but Harker elaborated on how the production’s color scheme highlighted the composer’s score. Next up: Music and Noise! Karen Harker (The Shakespeare Institute) introduced us to David Pountney’s 2001 radical production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth. There is a difference between author and character, made all the more difficult to discern due to the fluidity of word and thought. Westh found this desire to be a natural attempt to connect with and understand another person, but it also distracts from character intentions. She noted that we tend to ignore textual instabilities and search for authorial intent, including Shakespeare’s. Sara Marie Westh (The Shakespeare Institute) passed out hexaflexagons with the words “author,” “intent,” and “character” for her talk “‘Words, words, words’: The Author, his Characters and interpreting Intent”. Both versions received reviews which seemed to have been based more on the performances (mostly positive for the National, less so for the Globe) than for their use of Q1. Shephard especially focused on Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 production at the National Theatre and Dominic Dromgoole’s 2011 production at the Globe.
Since 2000, several theatre companies have used its cuts in performances. Hamlet’s so-called “bad” first quarto, discovered in 1823, has gained some legitimacy in recent years. Scott Shephard (Royal Holloway, University of London) continued the discussion with his presentation “Q1 Hamlet at the National and the Globe Abstract”. It is no longer politically correct to call the first quarto of Hamlet the “bad quarto” However, Theobald frequently imitated Shakespeare’s writing and was accused of plagiarizing and falsifying multiple plays.
Some critics consider Double Falsehood to be the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio. Her paper “Lewis Theobald and Accusations of Plagiarism: A Reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Involvement in Double Falsehood” asserted that scholars have not sufficiently investigated accusations of Lewis Theobald’s plagiarism. Naseem Alotaibi (University of Liverpool) began Friday’s first student panel, Working with Texts. “How many falsehoods was Theobald involved in?” Shakespeare asks