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Lunchtime work-in-progress seminar: Brid Phillips

Wednesday 27th July, 2016

13.00, room 2.17, Arts Two

The next work in progress seminar will take place on July 27 at 1pm in room 2.17, Arts Two. Brid Phillips (University of Western Australia) will give a paper titled: ‘“O well-painted passion!”: An analysis on the relationship between colour and emotions in Shakespeare’s Othello’. 

As usual, lunch will be available from 12.45 and all are welcome. Arts Two is number 35 on this campus map.

Abstract:

My project analyses and also demonstrates how colours were figured to express emotion in early modern drama, particularly in the works of William Shakespeare. On occasion Shakespeare uses colour references as a short hand to create emotional exchanges. Identifying and analyzing the employment and significance of colour in early modern literature and theatre uncovers the contemporary short hand embedded in these texts. Imaginatively, they provide a visual aid for the audience’s interpretations of the affective meanings and events in the play. Using contemporaneous ideologies embedded in rhetorical teachings, humoral theory, ideas concerning the body and its coverings, and the face and complexion, I investigate the relationship of colour to emotion. My work examines the nexus between the study of emotions and the use of colour in early modern drama which will tease out nuances of emotional expression hitherto untapped.

In my most recent research paper, “From Aaron to Othello: The changing emotional register of blackness in Shakespeare,” which I presented in Berlin, I discussed cultural exchange, blackness, and otherness in relation to Othello and Titus Andronicus. Building upon this work I am presenting a work-in-progress paper that arises from my concluding chapter which extends my analysis of Othello to incorporate the theories examined in the body of my research, namely, rhetorical learning, the humors, the body, and the complexion.