Shakespeare & Early Modern Proverbial Culture

This conference explores the prevalence, functions, and cultural significance of proverbs and proverbial wisdom in early modern literature and society. Proverbs saturated the everyday speech of early modern England and appear across a wide range of written forms. Yet, despite their centrality to early modern linguistic and literary practice, proverbs have received surprisingly little sustained critical attention. This major conference aims to reinvigorate scholarly interest in proverbial language and to open new conversations about its interpretive possibilities.

Bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines and methodological backgrounds, the conference seeks to develop new frameworks for studying proverbs and popular wisdom through multidisciplinary perspectives. How did proverbial language shape everyday, learned, and literary discourses in the period? In what ways did early modern authors draw creatively on proverbial forms? How were proverbs collected, transmitted, translated, and adapted across languages and cultures? How have phrases used by early modern writers – especially Shakespeare – become ‘proverbial’ through their textual and oral afterlives?

We welcome papers on any aspect of early modern proverbs, including but not limited to:

• Proverbs and/or commonplaces in literary and dramatic texts
• Rhetoric, pedagogy, and humanist education
• Classical sources and reception
• Biblical quotation, wisdom traditions, and moral instruction
• Oral cultures, literacy, and material forms of transmission
• Influence, imitation, and intertextuality
• Translation, multilingual proverbs, and cross-cultural encounters
• Digital approaches, databases, and corpus linguistics
• Shakespearean proverbs, quotations, and afterlives
• Presentist perspectives and contemporary reflections on proverbial wisdom

Plenary speakers will include:
Laura Estill (St Francis Xavier University)
Andrew Hui (National University of Singapore)
Jennifer Richards (University of Cambridge)
Neil Rhodes (University of St Andrews)

Submission details:
Abstracts (no more than 200 words) for 20-minute papers should be sent to proverbs@hull.ac.uk by 30 January 2026.