29/05/2026
Our penultimate plenary speaker announcement is the fantastic Dr. Kelsey Ridge. An alumni of the Shakespeare Institute, we’re so excited to be welcoming her back for BritGrad 2026!
Kelsey Ridge is an adjunct at Alvernia University. She earned her PhD in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare (Routledge 2021), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Shakespeare (Routledge 2025), and Shakespeare and Trauma Theory (Arden 2026).
Dr Ridge will be presenting a paper titled, “take no note of him, but let him go”: Unequal surveillance in Much Ado About Nothing
It is frequently observed that Much Ado is a play about noting. Characters are observed, remarked, and gossiped about. This noting acts as a form of surveillance. However, the whos and hows of this noting are not equally distributed. Don John, Borachio, and Conrade, despite their recent antagonism to the regime, are not to surveillance. Indeed, although Don John complains of curtailments on his liberty, he has remarkable ability to control if and how he is noted. In contrast, Beatrice and especially Hero are much marked by others. When Hero is accused of sexual infidelity, the status of the surveillance on her is repeatedly invoked by accusers and defenders. Adaptations have often steered into this noting/surveillance element in the text. How these characters are surveilled speaks to the nature of Messinan civil society and our society as readers and adapters.
