Abstract: In this seminar paper James Loehlin analyzes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona . Largely ignored and rarely performed for centuries, the play was staged by Peter Hall in 1960, only to be found “gloomy, fussy, and unfunny” by critics. Loehlin compares the productions of Robin Phillips (1970), John Barton (1981), David Thacker (1991), Edward Hall (1998), and . The Shakespeare Association of America seminar on April 2, 2015, was led by Elizabeth Rivlin of Clemson University and Melissa Walter of the University of the Fraser Valley.
Abstract: James Loehlin presented this talk at the sixth Blackfriars Conference, “Shakespeare and Performance,” held in Staunton, Virginia, October 25–30, 2011. He considers the relationship between prose and poetry in Shakespeare’s plays from a performance point of view, highlighting scenes from As You Like It and Hamlet that feature exchanges that move into and out of verse. Loehlin asks us to tune in to the expressive rhythms of Shakespeare’s language as a key to understanding the interpersonal dynamics and rhetorical power struggles between characters. As he notes, the purpose of the talk is to call our attention to what he regarded as an understudied feature of Shakespearean performance studies and scholarship about the Elizabethan stage.
Abstract: James Loehlin delivered these remarks on Othello in September 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which featured a production of the play directed by Lisa Peterson. The talk, intended for a general audience, picks up on the critic G. Wilson Knight’s discussion of the “Othello music”—the unusually rich and evocative language spoken by the play’s protagonist. One of Loehlin’s aims here, it seems, is to encourage theatergoers to tune in to the play as a piece of poetry and to take note of the ways Shakespeare draws on the sonic affordances of language to enrich and complicate our response to the story and the characters.
Abstract: James Loehlin spoke on October 6, 2006, to the University of Texas British Studies Seminar (now British, Irish, and Empire Studies), a long-running public lecture series. In his presentation, Loehlin contends that Hamlet mirrors Western history’s transition from medievalism to modernism. “[W]riting in a changing world” that “would go on changing,” Shakespeare was perhaps inspired “to infuse Hamlet with some of the complexity and mystery that have kept us rediscovering it for four centuries.” This favorite play is a gift that keeps on giving, as Loehlin argues in this overview of its performance history.
Abstract: James Loehlin delivered this paper at his last presentation to the Shakespeare Association of America. Drawing on his deep knowledge of the stage history of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar , Loehlin focuses primarily on four recent productions in order to analyze their creative decision-making—acts of attunement that add topicality and surprise to this anything but predictable play.
