The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to a talk by Dr. Michael Ullyot (Department of English, University of Calgary).
Abstract
Shakespeare’s romances demand our provisional faith. When Paulina commands viewers to “Awake your faith” before Hermione’s resurrection, she underscores how witnessing miracles requires belief before sight. These plays’ temporal leaps, geographical impossibilities, and divine interventions are all miracles that succeed only when the audience overlooks theatre’s representational imperfections, or what Prospero calls his “rough magic.” Theatre’s bounded space and visible machinery naturally acknowledge its artifice. Whereas film conceals it; hence Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) drowns in photorealistic effects, while film adaptations of Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline are nonexistent or forgettable.
Filmed theatre offers a third way, a hybrid medium that achieves cinematic fluidity while preserving theatre’s provisionality and situatedness. Two pandemic productions exemplify this hybridity: The National Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet (2021) and Theatre Royal Windsor’s Hamlet (2021) transform whole buildings into performance spaces, their cameras navigating lobbies, dressing rooms, and rehearsal halls. Like the three RSC romances this paper examines — The Tempest (2016), Cymbeline (2016), and The Winter’s Tale (2021) — these productions maintain what Aneta Mancewicz calls “intermedial stratigraphy,” making multiple representational layers visible simultaneously. This layered consciousness produces not theological certainty but theatrical agnosticism. Our wonder at romance arises from seeing both the miracle and the machinery at once.
About the Speaker
Michael Ullyot is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary. His teaching and research specialties are early modern literature and Shakespeare studies. Recent work includes articles and chapters on Shakespeare and virtual reality; on algorithms for detecting rhetorical figures; on a quantitative model of the English-language sonnet; and on archives and artificial intelligence. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2022).
