The sixth BSDN symposium

River Lee, Cork.

This time round, the symposium was co-arranged by Stuart Sillars from the University of Bergen and Goran Stanivukovic at the host institution: University College Cork.

The Distillery House, situated by the River Lee, was the location in which the delegates, who had travelled from the US, Norway, Canada, England, France and Hungary, met to present papers and discuss a variety of issues related to the topic of "sources" and "directions" in Shakespeare studies.

The presentations included an account by Catherine Belsey of folk ghost stories in Shakespeare's Macbeth; an exposition, by Tom Cartelli, of how Shakespeare "queered" the source for The Merchant of Venice, Fiorentino's Il Pecorone; an analysis of Marlowian traces and references in As You Like It, by Roy Eriksen; a look into how Realpolitik and diplomacy supplied realistic details for Hamlet, by Andras Kisery; an investigation, by Ivan Lupic, into how the topos of political counsel informs King Lear; an exposé of how Shakespeare's readers would endow their copies of the first Folios with annotations and comments, by Jean-Christophe Mayer; a presentation of Macbeth in various comic book guises, by Svenn-Arve Myklebost; a rethink of what might have been the geographical source for Love's Labour's Lost, by Liz Pentland; a study of the place of the visual, by way of the Wilton Diptych, in the compositional frames of Richard II, by Stuart Sillars; and an illustration of some thematic and artistic links between Shakespeare's sonnets and the burgeoning art of English portrait painting, by Goran Stanivukovic.

Two students from Bergen (one starting his MA, another having recently finished hers) supplied useful outsider perspectives, as it were. Mari Lysne reviewed and questioned the place and status of Shakespeare in literary histories (the book genre, that is) and Daniel Olsen very bravely and entertainingly communicated his experiences of reading Macbeth without prior knowledge of Shakespeare's texts or contexts.

Geza Kallay introduced the concluding plenary discussions with a paper on Shakespeare and Wittgenstein which posed some radical questions regarding what we mean by sources and directions. This sparked off two and half solid hours of debate (we did not go to lunch before we were thoroughly exhausted) on how we identify sources, what we use them for, and how they shape (or not) our understanding of what Shakespeare wrote.

The conference was broken up occasionally by nice meals and pleasant strolls around the centre of Cork city, and was concluded with a very congenial and sociable dinner at the Finn's Quay restaurant.

Also deserving of mention are the helpful, generous and wonderfully hospitable people at Garnish House, who helped to make the stay very agreeable indeed.