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Siler Participates in Blackfriars Conference
(Posted: October 29, 2009) (Printable Version)
Dr. Dennis Siler of Van Buren represented the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith at the fifth Blackfriars Conference of the American Shakespeare Center, where he presented a paper and served as moderator of the Roundtable, “Music on the Early Modern Stage.”
Siler’s paper, “Gunpowder, Yew Trees, and Sheep’s Guts: an Unlikely Nexus for Musical Consort,” argued that the invention of practical military firearms in the 1520s led to the availability of materials which were necessary to the manufacture of stringed musical instruments employed in the burgeoning theatres of London during Shakespeare’s heyday.
Siler’s roundtable presentation included demonstrations of reproduction instruments from the period, illustrating their relative uses in the various indoor and outdoor playhouses of Elizabethan London.
In writing his paper, Siler drew on his 30-year experience as a luthier — or stringed instrument builder — and his academic research in the field of Elizabethan drama. This is Siler’s third presentation at the Blackfriars Conference, which takes place biennially at the world’s only reconstruction of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, a part of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.
Other presenters at the conference included Andrew Gurr, Tiffany Stern, Steven Booth, Patrick Spottiswoode and Ralph Alen Cohen. Conference attendees included representatives of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, with the United States and several foreign countries represented.
Siler, who is an assistant professor of English at UA Fort Smith, has a bachelor’s degree in English and honors interdisciplinary studies from the University of Central Arkansas, a master’s in English from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., a certificate of completion from England’s Oxford University Summer Programme in English Literature, and a doctorate in English from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
| Photo(s) by: Allyson Siler |
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