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 Richard van Oort
December 30, 2024
Why are human societies hierarchical? How did centralized political authority originate? Anthropologists tell us that foraging societies are egalitarian compared to their agrarian and industrial successors. So what prompted our foraging ancestors to submit to the authority of big men, chiefs, and ...
By MacDonald P. Jackson
December 09, 2024
This book redirects attention to a truth largely ignored by recent criticism—that Shakespeare’s excellence as a playwright is inextricable from his excellence as a poet. It explores the diverse means by which Shakespeare’s poetry enriches his drama, illustrating how particular words in a particular...
By Amir Khan
December 06, 2024
This book is an intervention in Hamlet scholarship; it dramatically puts forward the death of Hamlet. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), Nietzsche famously posited the death of God, taken to mean the dissolution of all horizons within which human beings construct a plausible ontology that gives ...
By Edward Evans
September 26, 2024
Clear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of...
By Piotr Sadowski
September 18, 2024
According to psychological research on acting, the histrionic personality consists of a compulsive tendency to play-act, exaggerate emotions, succumb to illusions, to seek attention through speech, body language, and costume, to be seductive and impulsive. An original intervention in the critical ...
By Min Jiao
August 26, 2024
This volume takes a deep dive into the philosophical hermeneutics of Shakespearean tradition, providing insight into the foundations, theories, and methodologies of hermeneutics in Shakespeare. Central to this research, this volume investigates fundamental questions including: what is philosophical...
By H. Austin Whitver
August 26, 2024
Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume...
By Gül Kurtuluş
June 24, 2024
Shakespeare’s Unmuted Women explores women’s speeches in selected plays by Shakespeare, highlighting women’s discerning insight as a vital ingredient in these selected works. The book discusses the use of rhetoric in speeches by women as a cementing material that supports the casing of the ...
Edited
By Márta Minier, Maria Elisa Montironi, Cristina Paravano
June 21, 2024
Local/ Global Shakespeare and Advertising examines the local/ global and rhizomatic phenomenon of Shakespeare as advertised and Shakespeare as advertising. Starting from the importance and the awareness of advertising practices in the early modern period, the volume follows the evolution of the use...
By Chahra Beloufa
May 28, 2024
Speech Act Theory and Shakespeare delves deeper than linguistic ornamentation to illuminate the complex dynamics of thanking as a significant speech act in Shakespearean plays. The word “thanks” appears nearly 400 times in 37 Shakespearean plays, calling for a careful investigation of its veracity ...
By Caroline Wiesenthal Lion
May 27, 2024
Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of the Merchant critical history ...
By Kaye McLelland
May 27, 2024
Violent liminalities in Early Modern Culture is a methodologically innovative book combining the twin disciplines of queer theory and disability studies. It investigates the violence feared from, and directed at, inhabitants of the ‘betwixt and between’ spaces of early modern literature and culture...