This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering Shakespeare alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, popular culture, and history, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
By Regula Trillini
February 09, 2018
Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights gained as a result of a major, ongoing&...
By Patricia Akhimie
January 24, 2018
Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to books on self-improvement - this book ...
By Jonathan Goossen
December 13, 2017
Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new understandings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s ...
By Kevin Gilvary
December 14, 2017
Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound; however, close scrutiny of the surviving records clearly show that there is insufficient material for a cradle to grave account of his life, that most of what is written about him cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean ...
Edited
By Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, Lisa Ulevich
November 30, 2017
"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture’s oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances ...
By Marlena Tronicke
November 28, 2017
Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare’s dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing...
By Laurie Johnson
September 15, 2017
The playhouse at Newington Butts has long remained on the fringes of histories of Shakespeare’s career and of the golden age of the theatre with which his name is associated. A mile outside London, and relatively disused by the time Shakespeare began his career in the theatre, this playhouse has ...
By Elizabeth Mazzola
July 11, 2017
Long before the economist Amartya Sen proposed that more than 100 million women were missing—lost to disease or neglect, kidnapping or forced marriage, denied the economic and political security of wages or membership in a larger social order—Shakespeare was interested in such women’s plight, how ...
By Claire Hansen
June 01, 2017
In this new monograph, Claire Hansen demonstrates how Shakespeare can be understood as a complex system, and how complexity theory can provide compelling and original readings of Shakespeare’s plays. The book utilises complexity theory to illuminate early modern theatrical practice, Shakespeare ...
By Elizabeth Gruber
June 08, 2017
The work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has often been the testing-ground for innovations in literary studies, but this has not been true of ecocriticism. This is partly because, until recently, most ecologically minded writers have located the origins of ecological crisis in the ...
Edited
By Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis
May 16, 2017
This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and ...
Edited
By Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, Poonam Trivedi
December 02, 2016
This volume gives Asia’s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical ...