December 2, 2011: First Fridays Lecture Series presents "The Inside and Outside of the Theatrum Mundi: Meanings of Play in 'Love's Labour's Lost'" 
Join us for our final First Fridays event of 2011!
"The Inside and Outside of the Theatrum Mundi: Meanings of Play in Love's Labour's Lost"
Date: Friday, December 2, 2011
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: Hamilton Smith Hall, room 101
Presented by: Agnes Matuska, PhD
Fulbright Visiting Researcher University of Maryland, College Park
Senior Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of English University of Szeged, Hungary
The talk offers a reading of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost arguing that the play makes an attempt to systematically unveil the illusory quality of its three plays-within-the-play in order to test the potential reality of play in general, and test the validity of its own artifice as play in particular. The argument suggests that, by an original use of the theatrum mundi tradition, the play's main investment goes into overcoming its own boundaries as poetic illusion by including death into play, and by casting the audicence explicitly in the position of the authority endorsing (or potentially rejecting) theatrical play. A relatively recent cinematic adaptation of the play is used as framework of the discussion, in order to illustrate the way versions of the drama may or may not be successful experiments in overcoming their illusory qualities as works of poetic imagination.
You can learn more about Prof. Matuska's research interests via her University of Szeged website profile: http://szeged-english.hu/en/people/matuska-agnes
This event is free and open to the public. First Fridays lectures are presented with the support of the Edmund G. Miller Fund. For more information, please contact the UNH English Department: (603) 862-1313
