Guest Lecture: Prof. Dr. Ina Habermann (University of Basel): “Roads to Redemption in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen”

Prof. Habermann's  paper revisits the debate about a religiously heterodox Shakespeare, arguing that Shakespeare had an investment in recusant culture. Thriving on clandestine activities and the resignification of spaces for Catholic worship, recusant culture was intrinsically theatrical, possibly suggesting to Shakespeare the 'as if' that transforms the stage into a complex space for the performance of eschatological geographies. In his comedies and romances, Shakespeare made the most of the malleable and interactive Catholic conception of space to stage roads to redemption. The woods as a sacred space with recusant resonances become a refuge for exiles, a destination for pilgrims and a setting for transformation and redemption. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare dramatizes, and celebrates the redemptive qualities of the alternative space of the woods. Potential suspicions about a recusant agenda are deflected by the fanciful fairy world and the appeal to the imagination. The play’s optimistic trajectory promises harmony and the healing of rifts and divisions. By 1613, however, in The Two Noble Kinsmen which revisits the Dream, the sacred woods have been superseded by sectarian battlefields, the enchantment has gone, and the road to redemption is lost from view.

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Ina Habermann is Professor of English literature at the University of Basel. Her publications include Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2003), Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) and Wartime Cinema, Englishness and Propaganda: Michael Powell and the ‘Pressburger Touch’ (Manchester UP 2025). She is co-editor, with Michelle Witen, of Shakespeare and Space. Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm(Palgrave Macmillan 2016), and her research focusses on early modern drama, middlebrow literature, gender, spatial studies and cultural topographies as well as Anglo-European Studies including Brexit. Her current research projects deal with early modern Anglo-Swiss relations and the British Mediterranean.

Contact: christian.krug@fau.de