Join Renaissances for a special lecture featuring Professor Robert Stagg (Texas A&M University). We are thrilled to host Professor Stagg’s talk, “Asiatic Style Revisited.” The abstract is provided below. RSVP for the Renaissances talk with Robert Stagg.

The first recorded reference to Shakespeare in print notoriously refers to his “bombast,” his being “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers.” This talk will revisit those pejorative descriptions through the notion of ‘Asiatic style,’ as it appears in Thomas North’s Plutarch (Shakespeare’s principal reading material as he developed and wrote several of his ‘Roman’ plays) and in classical rhetoric. The talk will take various routes along the way—the style/s of Antony and Cleopatra, featherwork, onstage turbans, early modern European depictions of the Ottomans—before concluding with a new suggestion as to what that early description of an early Shakespeare might mean.