World Shakespeare Congress 2026, Verona
Find the congress’s website here.
Pre-registrations are open NOW until September 15, 2025. Pre-register here.
From the congress’s website: The 2026 World Shakespeare Congress will mark the International Shakespeare Association’s 50th anniversary. Let us celebrate together in fair Verona, Italy, where, from July 20th to 26th 2026, Shakespeareans will gather in this beautiful and historic city on the Adige River, a vital crossroads of ancient and early modern Europe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the setting for The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. The WSC will address questions related to the role of Shakespeare in connection with contemporary concerns about the destiny of our planet and human beings at a time when humanism has been deeply challenged. The Congress will foster discussion of the many ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived as ‘planetary’, reaching out to resonances with new cultural galaxies of enquiry, debate, and knowledge.
Planetary Shakespeares offers a way to tackle a whole range of issues beyond the present concern with Global Shakespeare and suggesting multifarious ways in which Shakespeare’s infinite variety and complexities can offer an entrance point to the humanities, enabling them to confront planetary crises and reconsider relations among nature, art and technology, as well as the need to reconfigure our sense of reality both socially and epistemologically. Now that we have moved into the digital, the virtual, the cyborg, and the posthuman ages, and the notion itself of reality has been challenged from different angles, including our experience of augmented reality, we have become aware of new turning points in history, and how they affect our perceptionof the contradictions embedded in our sense of the real. Theatre best captures such transformations and possible contradictions. “Planetary Shakespeares” offers convenient gateways into the most varied experiences of ‘the real’ via a plurality of interconnected issues.