Join Shakespeare Centre London for our second London Shakespeare Seminar of the year, hosted at King's College London with Dr Richard Ashby (King's) and Professor Alison Shell (UCL).

Dr Richard Ashby, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow – Shylock and the Resentments of Jean Améry

Nothing could seem more ‘natural’ than a desire to overcome lingering resentments and achieve peace and understanding after a period of violent conflict. What about the victims, however, who refuse to be ‘pacified’, to ‘forgive and forget, to ‘move on’ and ‘leave the past in the past’? For many victims of conflict and injustice, reparation, reconciliation, and forgiveness can seem a burden, a form of ‘pressure’ which is brought to bear by a society that is all too eager to overcome its violent past, as opposed to properly reckoning with it. This paper sets out to consider that burden as it was suffered by Austrian Auschwitz survivor and essayist, Jean Améry. Améry defends his right to preserve his resentments about the past in his 1962 essay ‘Resentments’, where he critiques a dubious culture of forgiveness, reconciliation, and ‘overcoming’ in post-war Germany and Europe. This unforgiving defence of resentment caused Améry to identify with a Shakespearean figure that, in post-Holocaust culture, was profoundly taboo: Shylock. Twice in ‘Resentments’, Améry compares himself to Shylock. Shylock is something of a paradox for Améry. Améry saw in Shylock an antisemitic stereotype, the ‘archetypal’ unforgiving and resentful Jew. But remarkably, he embraces that stereotype and makes it his own. I will show that, by identifying with the resentful Shylock, Améry sets himself against shallow discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation prevalent in post-Holocaust culture. I will also show, however, that it is precisely by preserving his resentment that Améry sets the scene for an authentic reconciliation between perpetrator and victim, a reconciliation that has its basis in penal justice as a socially instituted form of ‘revenge’.

Professor Alison Shell, Professor of Early Modern Studies – Shakespeare and the Jesuits: Meditational Techniques in King Lear

Shakespeare's place within the religious landscape of his time is much written about, yet there remain striking gaps in scholarly coverage. This paper addresses one such: Shakespeare's creative response to Counter-Reformation modes of spiritual development. Meditational manuals, especially those produced and inspired by the Jesuit order, were part of Catholic underground culture in Elizabethan and Stuart England, and also became familiar to Protestants via a series of best-selling adaptations published in the mainstream. Such manuals contained guidance on systematically imagining heaven, hell and scenes from the Gospels, using techniques which, within some scenes in King Lear, Shakespeare transposes into secular drama. Though set in the pagan environment of ancient Britain, the play offers a nuanced and often startling commentary on the Jacobean religious landscape, in an age where the spiritual was the political.

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