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Screw You, Yorick!: Shakespearean Clown Control and the World's Most Famous Skull In-Person
The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute invites you to a lecture by Dr. Dan Moss, SMU Department of English, marking the 425th anniversary of William Shakespeare writing Hamlet. This is the first event in the 2025 Godbey Anniversary Lecture Series.
When the Gravedigger hands the jester Yorick's skull up to Hamlet, why does the prince address the relic of his childhood playmate with sardonic schadenfreude? Did Shakespeare hate clowns? Arguably, the Yorick speech—most famous of all meditations on mortality—emerges from a near-forgotten professional squabble: the Chamberlains' Men's annoyance at the most recent departure of their colleague, the celebrity clown Will Kemp (a.k.a. Falstaff), and the resulting disruption to company personnel. If so, the Yorick speech marks the triumphant culmination of long-simmering tensions between clown and playwright, and provdies a glimpse of Shakespeare as the consummate opportunist, turning a minor inconvenience into immortal theater.
Dr. Moss is an Associate Professor in the English Department at SMU, specializing in late 16th-century poetry and drama. His book, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan Poetry (Toronto, 2014), maps the wide-ranging effects of Ovid's pre-eminence as a source for imitation by the poets and playwrights of the 1590s. Dr. Moss's book in progress, Shakespeare and the Metatheatrics of Age: The King's Men and hte Apprentice Boy Actor, argues that Shakespeare and the companies for whom he wrote habituated audiences to identifying female characters with the apprentices who played them, enabling metatheatrically attuned audience members to simultaneously appreciate both the staged fiction and a provocative "backstage" shadow-play that sensationalized relationships among company personnel.
- Date:
- Thursday, February 13, 2025
- Time:
- 5:30pm - 7:15pm
- Time Zone:
- Central Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- Meadows Museum - Jones Great Hall
Join us for a reception in the Founder's Room of the Meadows Museum at 5:30 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6:00 p.m. in Jones Great Hall. Appetizers will be served.
Parking is free for museum visitors. More information about parking can be found at the museum's website.
For more information about the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, please visit our website.
Any person who requires a reasonable accommodation on the basis of a disability in order to participate in this program should contact the DCII at dcinterdisciplinaryinstitute@smu.edu at least one week prior to the event to arrange for the accommodation.
Speakers express their own views and not necessarily the views of the DCII or SMU.