Robert Stagg | Shakespeare's Middle Eastern Sonnets

Join us for the annual Kiparsky Seminar in Prosody with Robert Stagg (Texas A&M) on "Shakespeare's Middle Eastern Sonnets."

This seminar will try out some ways of thinking about prosody, verse form, and poetics cross-historically and cross-nationally. It will center on, without being bounded by, the circulated essay 'Shakespeare's Arabic Sonnets', which makes a new case for the worldly character of Shakespeare's sonnets — first by tracking the sonnet form to its possible origins in Arabic literature and then by asking whether Shakespeare could have known about Middle Eastern poetry.

About the Speaker

Robert Stagg is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the New Variorum Shakespeare at Texas A&M University which he joined in 2024 from previous posts at the Shakespeare Institute and the University of Oxford. His first book Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History was published by Oxford University Press and shortlisted for numerous awards. He has published or has articles forthcoming in such journals as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, The Review of English Studies and Studies in Philology, and is currently finishing a book about the ways in which Shakespeare's style was shaped by the world outside Europe. He is Consulting Editor across the new Folger Shakespeare Editions and recently served as one of the first three Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series Fellows.