This talk explores presentations of hospitality, greeting and welcome in Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds across the length of his career. Strikingly, this interest in crossing (and barring) the threshold is staged in whichever genre he chose to write: Cressida enquires of Troilus, ‘Will you walk in, my lord?’ Elsewhere, Duncan salutes Lady Macbeth, ‘See, see, our honour’d hostess!’ and Falstaff instructs Mistress Quickly in 1 Henry IV, ‘go, make ready breakfast; love thy husband, look to thy servants, cherish thy guests’. Hospitality extended at a local or a collective level, to the guest or to the stranger, has remained one of the ‘hardest’ undertakings to negotiate for life in human society throughout all ages. This recurring concern with receiving and excluding is a field which speaks equally powerfully to our own age as it did 450 years ago to audiences in The Globe and the Blackfriars Theatre. The practices of greeting, hosting, offering shelter, nourishment and asylum provide some of the most intimate insights into the ways in which we formulate our everyday lives and selves: Shakespeare’s writing accompanies us today as we negotiate the decision-making surrounding welcome, inclusion and exchange.
Andrew Hiscock is a Fulbright Scholar (2025-26) in the Department of English UCI. He is Professor of Early Modern Literature and a former Dean at Bangor University, Wales. He is a Fellow of the English Association, Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et Les Lumières, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry and a former European Marie Skŀodowska-Curie Research Fellow.
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