Neurodiversity at Oxford’s final event of the year: Join us for a fascinating talk by academic and theatre maker, Avi Mendelson, on Shakespeare, madness and contemporary performance!
Come to Seminar Room 1 at St Anne’s College on 15 June at 3pm to hear Avi Mendelson discuss Shakespeare, mental illness and contemporary Shakespeare performance for Neurodiversity at Oxford's final event of the academic year! Avi will explore some of the representations of mental illness in Shakespeare's plays, how we might therefore use Shakespeare in the present, and there will be time to ask questions. Tea, coffee and soft drinks will also be provided.
Shakespeare’s fixation on madness and mental health throughout his plays is as perplexing as it is pervasive. Popular icons of psychic disturbance abound – Hamlet’s panicked antic disposition, Lear’s frenetic and enraged screeds, Lady Macbeth’s unhinged somnambulism and compulsive hand hygiene. And yet, in spite of the mobs of madmen and madwomen peopling his dramas – who display wildly to the audience incidents of personal mental aberrance – Shakespeare is keen to showcase how the experience of a mind diseased infects the typical, workaday worlds of the mentally well: seeing double is an inevitable madness in The Comedy of Errors; oneiric transport is a form of lunacy in the moonlit and dreamy A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the erotic melancholy that spurned passion inspires, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, is what morphs the Jailer’s Daughter into a frenzied chanteuse.
This talk about Shakespearean depictions of madness begins by exploring how madness is and is not racialised in Othello, and how it is and is not gendered in The Taming of the Shrew. Avi then discusses Shakespeare’s fascination, in The Tempest, with the link between his own artistic medium – the theatre – and mental health. Can a play, he begs, make the audience emotionally unstable if not mentally ill? And might this mind-alteration be a good thing? It ends by discussing examples of Shakespeare being performed nowadays in a mental health context, and by asking how we might use Shakespeare to foster community for those with mental health concerns and their allies.
If you wish to attend in person, please sign up to attend via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shakespeare-and-mad-activism-a-talk-with-avi-mendelson-tickets-354023863907
There are only 20 spaces for this event so please let us know and/or cancel your ticket via Eventbrite if you are unable to attend.
If Eventbrite is inaccessible for you, please email us at neurodiverseox@st-annes.ox.ac.uk and we will add you to the list of attendees.
Time: 3-4.30pm, 15 June (Week 8)
Venue: Seminar Room 1, 48 Woodstock Road, St Anne's College (entrance inside St Anne's - please ask at the Lodge for directions).
Remote access: If you cannot attend in person, you can attend remotely via Microsoft Teams. Please email us for the link to attend!
Avi Mendelson is an Angeleno turned Londoner who immigrated from Boston to the UK midway through his PhD at Brandeis University. His recently defended dissertation focuses on representations of madness in Shakespeare and early modern drama. Avi’s scholarship appears in the volume Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama, the BSA’s Teaching Shakespeare magazine, and SFSU’s Interpretations. In addition to his academic work, Avi is a theatre maker whose latest performance credits include The Pleasure of Your Bedlam (Arcola Theatre) and The Bacchae (Tower Theatre).
