Call for Papers

Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal

Call for Papers

Pseudo-Silence in Early Modern Theatre

Editors:  Aoife Beville, University of Foggia aoife.beville@unifg.it, Beatrice Righetti, University of Verona beatrice.righetti@univr.it 

Silence, or seeming silence, on the early modern stage, often represents a complex nexus of performativity, pretence, secrecy and dissimulation. Female silences, particularly, evoke social anxieties which are reflected and refracted in the drama of the period. Thus, the growing presence of political and religious dissidents in Early Modern England reframed silence from a desirable linguistic practice, especially in women, to an “antisocial, multivalent and profoundly subversive [...] ‘inscrutable’ and thus potentially ungovernable” attitude (Luckyj 2002, 26). As Robert Burton noticed in the revised edition of his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651), “pauciloqui”, that is, being “of few words, and oftentimes wholly silent”, could also be a sign of repressed anger as much as aggressive speech (Aa3v). In this context, the early modern connotation of silence swings “from foolish impotence to forms of androgynous wisdom or dissent” (Montironi 2020, 40).

This special issue seeks to reconfigure the multifaceted role of performative silence in early modern European drama (16th–17th century), freeing it from its binary opposition with speech and unveiling its linguistic power as a deliberate choice to enact reticence, resistance, or dissimulation. Thus, this issue aims to unearth the dissimulative, subversive uses of pseudo-silence(s) — seeming silence(s) and silencing — in early modern drama. This special issue welcomes contributions that address silence from a synergic perspective, transcending its conventional interpretations and revealing its dramatic, performative, and linguistic functions.

 

As such, potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- Female Speech and Gender Studies: How does reticence function as a form of resistance or empowerment for female characters or authors in early modern drama? How do playwrights encode female silence as a response to or subversion of patriarchal linguistic structures?

- Political/Religious Discourse: How do political/religious figures employ silence as a means of control, manipulation, or protest within early modern plays? Is silence employed solely as an act of devotion and spiritual contemplation, or does it also constitute a form of subversion?

- Linguistic and Rhetorical Perspectives: How do early modern playwrights manipulate language to create moments of verbal absence that carry significant meaning? What linguistic patterns and practices highlight the pragmatic, stylistic, rhetorical and communicative functions of silence? How do certain linguistic behaviours, such as reticence or the silencing of others, contribute to characterisation?

- Digital Humanities: How do digital archives, databases, or editorial choices in digital projects repair or reveal “silences” in early modern plays? How might new digital tools or methodologies reintroduce or expose previously overlooked silences?

- Censorship and Editorial Silence: how do editorial practices, both historical and contemporary, “silence” texts (through non-publication or restricted circulation in manuscript form) or, indeed, how may editorial intervention give voice to previously overlooked textual silences? How may such editorial choices reflect broader social, political, or religious concerns (e.g. avoidance of censorship)?

- Adaptations, Translations and Transmediations: what is lost or transformed in the process of translation or adaptation of an early modern play? How are the elements of the sources and resources of a play silenced by the playwright? How does the absence of certain elements reshape the original?

- Performance History: how has silence been performed or reinterpreted on stage? What role does physical silence (such as pauses, gestures, or non-verbal cues) play in stagecraft, and how does it contribute to the meaning of drama?

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit a 300-word abstract along with a brief bio by 31/05/2026.

Submissions and inquiries should be sent to aoife.beville@unifg.it and beatrice.righetti@univr.it [please CC anglistica@unior.it].

Notification of acceptance: 30/06/2026

Deadline for full papers: 30/11/2026

 

We look forward to your contributions to this issue on the performative power of pseudo-silence in early modern theatre.

 

Select References:

Aebischer, Pascale. ‘Silence, Rape and Politics in “Measure for Measure”: Close Readings in Theatre History’. Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 4 (2008): 1–23.

Beville, Aoife. ‘Strategies of Silence in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure’. In Taboo Language and (Im)Politeness in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Fabio Ciambella, 79–102. Napoli: UniorPress, 2024. 

Bigliazzi, Silvia. ‘Linguistic Taboos and the “Unscene” of Fear in “Macbeth”’. Comparative Drama 52, no. 1/2 (2018): 55–84.

Continisio, Tommaso, and Bianca Del Villano, eds. Queens on Stage: Female Sovereignty, Power and Sexuality in Early Modern English Theatre. I edition. Scritture d’Oltremanica 17. Canterano (RM): Aracne Editrice, 2018.

Coussement-Boillot, Laetitia, and Christine Sukič, eds. ‘Silent Rhetoric’, ‘Dumb Eloquence’: The Rhetoric of Silence in Early Modern English Literature. Paris: Université Paris Diderot, 2007.

Hadfield, Andrew. ‘Literature and the Culture of Lying Before the Enlightenment’. Studia Neophilologica 85, no. 2 (2013): 133–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2013.850952.

Jaworski, Adam. Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter, Inc., 1997.

Kalpin Smith, Kathleen. “Women’s Speech in the Age of Shakespeare”. Literature Compass 10.3 (2013): 260–8.

Kamaralli, Anna. Shakespeare and the Shrew, Performing the Defiant Female Voice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Luckyj, Christina. ‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

———. ‘“A Moving Rhetoricke”: Women’s Silences and Renaissance Texts’. Renaissance Drama 24 (January 1993): 33–56. https://doi.org/10.1086/rd.24.41917294.

McGuire, Philip C. Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201243.003.0005.

Montironi, Maria Elisa. ‘“Silent, Not as a Foole”: William Shakespeare’s Roman Women and Early Modern Tropes of Feminine Silence’. In Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Domenico Lovascio, 59–78. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514203-004.

Righetti, Beatrice. ‘“Better a Shrew than a Sheep?”: Disobedience through Reticence in Shakespeare’s Contrasting Models of Femininity’. Linguæ & - Journal of Modern Languages and Cultures, 1 February 2024, 7-25. https://doi.org/10.14276/L.V24I2.3879.

Rovine, Harvey. Silence in Shakespeare: Drama, Power, and Gender. Theatre and Dramatic Studies, no. 45. Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1987.

Snyder, Jon R. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press, 2012.

Stucky, Nathan. ‘Interactional Silence: Pauses in Dramatic Performance’. Journal of Pragmatics 21, no. 2 (1994): 171–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(94)90018-3.

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Monstrous Bodies: Deviance, Transformation, and Belonging in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

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Pseudos: Fabrication, Fictionality and Vagueness in Texts and Textual Practices

Editors:  Michael Burke (Utrecht University, m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (University of Naples L'Orientale, bdelvillano@unior.it)

 

The volume aims to investigate the experience of pseudos (the quasi-thing) from philological-literary, philosophical, cultural, and linguistic perspectives, intending it as an element of trespassing and crossing textual practices, verbal behaviours, and representations of authorial subjectivity. Pseudos was first conceptualised in ancient Greece, its etymology including closelyrelated meanings such as ‘falsehood’, ‘lie’, ‘fiction’, and ‘illusion’. Beyond this primarily ‘negative’ connotation, in the history of Western thought, pseudos has also come to encompass semantic fields associated with the ‘undetermined’, the ‘changeable’, and the ‘ambiguous’. Accordingly, contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

1. The Linguistics of Lying

1. a)  The field of lying between pragmatics and argumentation (with reference to phenomena such as fallacy, paradox, and rhetorical figures).

2. b)  Literary, cinematographic and television representations of liars and deceivers.

3. c)  Pseudos and narration: mendacious storytelling, narrative creativity and lies, deception as a narrative tool.

2. Pseudonyms as a Practice and Tool of Relativisation

1. a)  The rhetorical-discursive implications of pseudonyms: the (de)construction of ‘truth’.

2. b)  Pseudonyms as a space for resistance and subversion: using falsity, ambiguity or paradox in textual, artistic and cultural practices to question norms and ideologies.

3. c)  Pseudos in the digital and media age: dynamics of falsehood and authenticity on digital platforms, including deepfakes, disinformation, pseudonyms and virtual identities, and discourse manipulation.

3. Liminal Forms of Textuality

1. a)  Hypotextuality and hypertextuality from a philological and theoretical perspective, and related case studies.

2. b)  Theoretical and methodological reflections on textual practices such as adaptation, translation, remediation, re-functionalisation.

3. c)  The relationship between subjectivity and textuality from a linguistic and literary point of view.

Submission of abstracts

Authors wishing to contribute are invited to send an abstract of their proposed article of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in MS Word format by 15th September 2025 to Michael Burke (m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (bdelvillano@unior) [CC anglistica@unior.it].

 

Important dates

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2025

Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2025

Deadline for completed of articles: January 15, 2026

For inquiries and submission details, please, contact Michael Burke (m.burke@ucr.nl) and Bianca Del Villano (bdelvillano@unior.it) [CC anglistica@unior.it].