TY - JOUR
AU1 - Young,, Jennifer
AU2 - Smith, Peter, J
AU3 - Parsons,, Elinor
AU4 - Tarantino,, Elisabetta
AU5 - Stelzer,, Emanuel
AU6 - Bell,, Shirley
AU7 - Haworth,, Ben
AU8 - Lim,, Vanessa
AU9 - O’Brien, Sheilagh, Ilona
AU1 - Wilkinson,, Kate
AB - Abstract This chapter has four sections: 1. Editions and Textual Studies; 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre; 3. Shakespeare on Screen; 4. Criticism. Section 1 is by Jennifer Young; section 2 is by Peter J. Smith; section 3 is by Elinor Parsons; section 4(a) is by Elisabetta Tarantino; section 4(b) is by Emanuel Stelzer; section 4(c) is by Shirley Bell; section 4(d) is by Ben Haworth; section 4(e) is by Vanessa Lim; section 4(f) is by Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien; section 4(g) is by Kate Wilkinson. 1. Editions and Textual Studies There were a number of excellent updates to well-known series of scholarly editions of Shakespeare released this year. The final offerings of the Arden Shakespeare third series provide some valuable additions and updates to this landmark series. Most notable is the excellent edition of All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox. This edition has everything in terms of an inspiring introduction and exact research that one would expect from these two scholars and an Arden edition. The text is edited to a high standard, with particular attention given to idiomatic language that will help readers new to this complex play. The introduction gives attention to updating research on dating the play as well as theories of authorship (this ongoing debate is given additional attention in the appendix). Topics in the introduction range from genre, themes, and language to performance. Unlike other updated Arden editions where performance is now given its own section(s), performance history in this edition is effectively integrated into relevant discussions of other topics. All the sections of the introduction are examples of the thoughtful gathering of existent research that also highlights some new areas of thinking: particularly noteworthy is the attention to the women characters of All’s Well That Ends Well in the section ‘Helen and the World of Women’. The editors remind readers that, for all its complications, this play stands as a rare example in Shakespeare’s writing of female solidarity that should be given more attention in discussions of gender. Helen also features in sections on family, the bed trick, and pilgrimage, drawing on the most recent research and providing numerous opportunities for consideration of this character in current scholarly debates. Also compelling was the attention to presenting the politics of the bed trick in the context of early modern marital expectations and norms. This section will be useful for students trying to come to terms with this element. Overall, an excellent addition to the Arden series that will no doubt inspire fresh attention to this play. Also new, published in 2017, is Sukanta Chaudhuri’s Arden 3 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaudhuri offers a comprehensive history of the play in performance, highlighting early modern staging and casting as well as performances from the Restoration through to the nineteenth century. The edition also gives attention to the vast catalogue of adaptations across various media and art forms that is a valuable reminder of how some of the greatest artists of the last few centuries have chosen to work with this play. A refreshing new section on the play, ‘Beyond Europe’, features production histories in Australia (with productions exploring colonial and Aboriginal connections), South Africa (where it featured in daring anti-apartheid-era productions of mixed-race casting), India (incorporating elements of dance and operatic traditions, multilingual production as well as political issues), and Japan (where Ninagawa’s Dream (Tokyo, 1994) set in a Buddhist stone garden brought together Western elements with sumo wrestling and Japanese Noh play). Chaudhuri’s rich collection of productions will challenge the perceptions of those familiar with the play and inspire the imaginations of new readers to better understand the staying power of this seemingly quaint play of lovers and fairies. A section on sources covers all the major influences needed to gain a substantive understanding of the various sources Shakespeare wove into this play. Similarly, a section on themes will provide readers with insight into the major recognized critical discussions: pastoral, dreamers and lovers, patriarchy, theatre, art, and illusion. In a final intriguing section on ‘The Comedy of Compromise’ Chaudhuri identifies A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an example of Shakespeare establishing several plots with significant implications that are ‘variously followed up but not brought to closure’ (p. 106) in a way not seen in other comedies. The result, Chaudhuri suggests, is a carefully balanced play that is never compromised by urgent resolution of problem or conflict. The text is edited to the high standard expected standard of the Arden series, with commentary notes giving detailed explanations of archaic phrases as well as details of myth and folklore connections, especially when attached to names. This Midsummer is a welcome addition to the Arden 3. This year also saw the release of a revised edition of Arden’s Titus Andronicus revised by its Arden 3 editor Jonathan Bate. Scholarly interest and the reputation of Titus have undergone significant change since the original Arden 3 published in 1995, and the section ‘Reconsiderations and Reinventions’ is an opportunity for Bate to examine key points of change in scholarship and performance. As a play that asks ‘perennially troubling questions about humankind’s capacity to commit acts of extreme cruelty’ (p. 122), Bate positions Titus as a play whose time has come. Significantly, Bate discusses what was the most contentious element of the original edition the question of Titus’s authorship. This revised edition argues for single authorship of Shakespeare—a position that was overturned in favour of the now generally accepted collaborative authorship of Shakespeare and George Peele. Addressing this change, Bate offers a candid moment of honest reflection that, in a world where it seems no one can ever change their opinion, is refreshing and sets an admirable example. Suggesting that in his efforts to present Titus as a play worthy of scholarly consideration ‘the case for excellence blurred into the case for authorship’ (p. 123), Bate offers valuable food for thought for how we as scholars put up defensive barriers around our specializations. Bate presents a detailed narrative of the research supporting the Shakespeare/Peele authorship that will be useful for anyone wishing to learn about the recent history of attribution studies and this early Shakespeare collaboration without getting bogged down in the often impenetrable computations of stylometric analysis. Not content to focus on the past, Bate also lays the groundwork for future research by asking compelling questions about the nature of this collaboration. The other significant addition is a discussion of major recent productions of Titus on stage and screen, giving attention to a number of global productions that spoke to late twentieth-century concerns of post-Second World War reconstruction, the fall of communism, and post-apartheid South Africa. Bate provides descriptions of production and acting choices that show actors and directors eager to capitalize on the symbolism of the play as a way to comment on their current political time. A section devoted to Julie Taymor’s Titus [1999] examines the development of this paradigm-changing Shakespeare film. These timely and informative additions, combined with an updated bibliography, sufficiently refresh this edition to the expected high standard of the third Arden series. A number of selections from the Arden Performance Editions series were also published in 2017 and 2018. This series is aimed specifically at actors as a rehearsal text and for students whose approach is interested in text as a guide to performance. The texts in this series are based on existing texts from the Arden 3 series, but pared of much of the silent editorial intervention of scholarly editions. This series aims to represent the play text as a source of choices by highlighting textual variants, stage directions, and lineation. Given this focus, a small selection of ‘standard’ tragedies and comedies have been chosen as the initial set for this series, though the series focus on highlighting performance history and choices might be equally helpful in less frequently performed plays. Paul Prescott’s edition of Othello for the Arden Performance Edition is strong evidence of the viability of the series’ approach. The introduction follows the format for this series, beginning with sections on ‘first texts’ and ‘this text’. These sections are prime locations for inducting readers into the idea of textual instability. What is really interesting about this approach is that the editors, in their interest in performance, do not try to diminish the importance of the text as source for performance. The result is a refreshing balance of stage and page that actually makes these texts potentially useful for classroom study of poetics and textual scholarship as well. Focus on actors is most visible in discussions of language that range over decorum, metre, and usage of ‘you’ and ‘thou’. This is also the kind of focused discussion with examples that an undergraduate student new to the play or early modern drama more generally would also benefit from. But the discussions in Prescott’s edition are detailed enough to also reconnect the reader who is interested in the technicalities of verse to its role in the play. It’s possible to see even the discussion of possible acting choices as helping a student to free up their readings to create a virtual performance in their mind. The gloss notes helpfully refer readers back to relevant sections of the introduction, creating a flow in this edition between text and apparatus, and development of themes from the introduction will be recognized by readers as they progress through the text. Abigail Rokison-Woodall contributes two editions to this compelling new series. The edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (released in 2017) is based on the Arden 2 text edited by Harold F. Brooks (the new Arden 3 is reviewed above). This Performance Edition begins with discussion of textual origins, highlighting the potential influence of a promptbook as the source for differences between Q2 and F and also perhaps linked to performance changes from Shakespeare or members of his acting company. Rokison-Woodall is concise, but engages fully with the instability of the text, bringing readers and actors into the creation process. The introduction follows the subsections also seen in Othello (above) but the format is really suited to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rokison-Woodall creates space for an engaging and accessible discussion of Shakespeare’s use of a range of verse forms for the magical characters and the performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisby’. Here is where these editions really show the strength of their niche as they take readers efficiently through how the verse shifts from heroic stanza to alexandrine to ‘clunky’ (p. xxxiv) iambic pentameter. Especially noteworthy is the discussion of the ‘magical’ language, which is energetic and engaging without watering down the complexity of the poetics. While I understand that the editors probably didn’t want to impose specific interpretations on their readers—the modus operandi of the series is choice after all—I still found myself wishing this section had been expanded a bit to help readers to connect the verse shifts to the qualities of specific characters like Puck who use them. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of examples here to demonstrate the poetic diversity of this play to readers. Similar attention in the ‘Thou and You’ section is effective because it produces a breakdown of the shifting alliances amongst the various couples (noble, royal, and magical). Textual notes give significant attention to archaic language and complex images that might need unpacking for the reader new to early modern imagery. Overall, this a highly informative and accessible edition for stage and classroom. Rokison-Woodall is also the editor of the edition of Hamlet for this series (published in 2017). For a play with a complex textual history like Hamlet, the particular readership of this series will benefit especially from the concise discussion of the origins of the variant texts. A section on ‘major textual differences’ might be the more useful section as it contextualizes major textual variations within performance history. Similarly, the earlier placement of ‘To be or not to be’ in Q1 than in Q2 and F is one of the moments that must have been in the minds of the series editors when they developed this series. Rokinson-Woodall guides the reader through the possible origins and authority of the change, and by offering an extended list of productions that have opted for the Q1 placement encourages readers to consider the use of both placements as interesting performance choices. Other textual differences are also usefully situated in performance choices, such as the age of Hamlet, how moments of extreme anxiety are often conveyed in ambiguous metrical connections of short verse lines, and how use of ‘you/thou’ can expand the discussion of relationships between Hamlet and Gertrude, and Hamlet and Ophelia. There is a lovely balance of detail and explication throughout the introduction that informs without bogging the reader down. In terms of textual notes, Hamlet editions have become ever more compendious as literary and textual scholarship becomes more nuanced, but Rokinson-Woodall offers a light touch that stays true to the ethos of the Arden Performance Editions. You actually could read all the notes in this edition and still get sufficient glossing to follow the action as well as an in-depth tutorial on the metre of the play. It is not an easy thing to bring a new edition of Hamlet into the field, but this edition is a compelling text that knows its niche market and attends to it with care while still challenging it to engage meaningfully with Shakespeare’s play. The Arden Performance Edition of Romeo and Juliet is edited by Paul Menzer (published in 2017). It uses as its base the Arden 3 [2012] text edited by René Weis. The opening textual narrative for this edition is a discussion of the descriptive stage directions in Q1 that focuses on performance and character choice rather than questions of authorship and intention that are given consideration in the Arden 3 edition. Because there are thousands of textual variants between Q1, Q2, and F, Menzer astutely chooses to focus readers’ attention on examples of each from famous passages—reiterating the series’ primary goal of presenting all performances as a collection of choices. A really sparkling part of Menzer’s introduction is the detailed analysis of verse and prose in the play. Menzer’s careful depiction of the changes between blank verse and prose at key moments of violence or affection makes the nuance of such interpretation accessible for readers grappling with the poetics. Performance choice is at the forefront of topics throughout the introduction, offering readers context for choices like the age of Juliet, and how to develop the romance of Romeo and Juliet via the cues from their use of ‘thou’ and ‘you’. Menzer also invites readers to explore the challenge of staging some of the play’s most iconic scenes by devoting a whole section to details of ‘key scenes’ in order to unpack possible choices for the ‘balcony scene’ and Juliet’s awakening in the Capulet tomb. The text is glossed very lightly in places, with the most attention given to paraphrasing; there is also a very useful interplay between information in the commentary notes that is clearly linked back to discussions initiated in the introduction: a feature of this series that serves the reader particularly well in this edition. The final publication from the series this year is Much Ado About Nothing edited by Anna Kamaralli. This is only the second comedy to be edited for the series. It uses as its base Claire McEachern’s edited text from the Arden 3 (published in 2006). Much Ado might not seem an obvious choice in such a selective series, but Kamaralli’s thoughtful approach to the introduction soon convinces you that it needs to be here. Instead of beginning with a section on the variant texts, as is the convention of this series, Kamaralli begins by praising this play, to which ‘every beloved screwball comedy owes a debt’ (p. xxxiii). More importantly, Kamaralli asserts that this is a play that ‘treasures women’s voices’ (p. xxxiii) and features a male protagonist whose central act is ‘giving his support to women when they are humiliated and disbelieved’ (p. xxxiii). With a few sentences Kamaralli takes a play that professes to be about little of significance and positions it within the heart of the #MeToo movement with a straightforward clarity one cannot ignore: ‘when there are people who are working so hard … to move the conversation surrounding men’s violence against women away from policing women’s behaviour and towards getting men to support women’s voices, this moment in theatre is startingly apt’ (p. xxxiii) Under Kamaralli’s thoughtful guidance, Much Ado goes from a quaint comedy of feuding couples and misadventures in love to something a bit darker and more relevant. The textual variants of this play are few and not particularly remarkable, so the introduction gives more time to language and characterization. Readers confront a series of categories of ‘ambiguity’ in the make-up of the play. Ambiguous metrical connections are discussed in other editions in this series, but Kamaralli also adds sections on ambiguous speech prefixes and entrances as well as a consideration of the ‘ghost character’ of Hero’s mother Innogen as additional moments of performance and readerly choice. The introduction is rounded out by other sections unique to this edition that highlight well-known features (masques, social rank) as well as other areas of research interest (public and private spaces). Admirably, Kamaralli doesn’t pull away from addressing the difficulties of putting on early modern comedy by offering alternative cuts of lines with racist implications. These are more quick shots of information that would require further study in the classroom, but they accomplish the important task of making readers aware of a diverse range of approaches/issues in the play in a short space. The playtext is glossed with the same intentions of the rest of the series: to help clarify language, especially metaphors and imagery, and to guide the non-specialist reader through shifts and accents in metre, all of which makes this edition a worthy addition to this series. In a world where there are already plenty of editions of Shakespeare’s plays fighting for attention, it is reasonable to consider whether another is really necessary. The editors of the Arden Performance Editions make a convincing argument in favour of their series through the functionality, accessibility, rigour, and energy of their editions, which will certainly appeal to their target readership. Grace Ioppolo’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the only new Shakespeare edition from the Norton Critical Editions series this year. The edition contains the wide variety of information and sources expected of a Norton Critical Edition, including seven source texts for the play. The criticism section includes recognized extracts from Meres to Wilson Knight to C.L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. A welcome addition is the inclusion of a handful of women scholars: an excerpt from Margo Hendricks’s ‘“Obscured by dreams”: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (SQ 47[1996] 37–60) is especially welcome to instructors wishing to engage in discussions inspired by the #RaceB4Race discussions in recent conferences and on the internet. There is a small number of illustrations: the most recent being from Peter Brook’s 1970s production. Brook’s production stands as the touchstone for the rest of the introduction, which begins with Brook’s re-envisioning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented as a seminal moment in the play’s performance history. Ioppolo notes that it is hard to find a review of a production since Brook’s that does not mention his work, arguing that while productions and times will always produce new renditions none will ever be as new as Brook’s was in that moment. Beyond Brook’s contribution, the introduction provides a detailed overview of the play’s early origins and its success in early modern performance and print. Ioppolo brings her extensive knowledge of theatrical practice to this section, leading readers though engaging narratives of casting and performance that are supplemented by contemporary anecdotes from audience members. The introduction gives ample attention to printing history, including the play’s publication with a false date by Thomas Pavier and some interesting points about its adaption in the Restoration and beyond. The introduction also benefits from extended discussions of criticism, with particular attention to characterization and gender dynamics that are explored through modern contexts, beginning with the 1970s first wave of feminism and continuing up to the present day. As in other recently published editions, a focus on how the female voice negotiates the rules of patriarchal and male-dominated language structures in order to articulate their own experiences is warmly welcomed and will engage students equally interested in issues of gender and identity. The only difficulty, as is the case with editions in this format, is that the sections are all collected under a general heading of ‘Introduction’ making it less enticing for a student to dip in and out or for an instructor to easily assign a section. The text is clearly presented and edited to aid readers, with glosses largely defining individual words and including key references to cultural points of relevance such as the Greek mythology that is less well known to today’s classroom readers. The New Cambridge Shakespeare published three revised editions of Shakespeare’s plays this year. Norman Sanders’s edition of Othello is now accompanied by a fresh new introduction by Christina Luckyj. Othello remains a key play for discussing a variety of important issues, and Luckyj has produced an introduction that will sufficiently inform students but not overwhelm them. There are many notable sections, but in particular Luckyj’s section on ‘Strangers as Allies: Early Modern Contexts for Othello’ feels especially pertinent in the current global political climate. Luckyj quickly engages the reader by pointing out that Roderigo’s opening description of Othello as a stranger of ‘here and everywhere’ overlooks the fact that Roderigo is a Spanish name, suggesting that in Venice he too is a stranger. This key moment not only presents striking parallels to modern political commentary, but will prompt readers to critique the credentials of who is in actuality a ‘stranger’ in this play. This section also benefits from concise historical background as to early modern cultural values and identity through focused portraits on individual characters. For example, Desdemona’s actions are read as representations (and rejections) of various cultural norms, reiterating the complexity of identifying a character by a singular cultural identity. The section ‘Shakespeare’s Dramaturgy in Othello: Repetition and Variation, Parallel and Contrast’ invites readers to consider Shakespeare’s practice of pairing characters to act as mirrors and foils to one another as an effective dramatic tool for revealing a character’s inner workings. The section that will probably be most often consulted is the one that introduces readers to traditions and recent scholarly criticism. As Luckyj notes, criticism of this play has exploded in the last thirty years. Rather than provide a slim overview of the vast research available, the editor has chosen to focus on the changing critical responses to race and gender, providing a valuable example of shifts in scholarship while also giving readers a more detailed discussion of two important issues that are intertwined in the play. Here Othello is framed as being about ‘the struggle for interpretation’ (p. 43) highlighting past and recent critical approaches to Othello that range from scepticism to timely narratives of colonialism and inherent racial bias. Luckyj’s approach is honest with readers and does not smooth over the challenges of engaging with issues of racial stereotyping and prejudice. It is informative and admirable in its efforts to educate and inspire new scholars to ask difficult questions of this play and our interpretations of it. The text of the play benefits from revised extensive commentary notes that will provide readers with plenty of support for substantive engagement with its language and ideas. The New Cambridge edition of The Merchant of Venice features the text originally edited by M.M. Mahood and the original introduction supplemented by a section on ‘Recent Criticism, Performance, and Adaptation’ by Tom Lockwood. Lockwood provides an overview of recent criticism highlighting developments in the study of religion and identity, gender and relationships, and the law, with particular attention to language as the building block of these complex interactions. Attention is also given to recognizing the emergence of a strong branch of material culture studies surrounding this play. Lockwood also provides an informative and concise discussion of the Merchant’s performance history. Examining how the play fitted into the broader scene of early modern theatre offers readers valuable historical cultural context and provides a vital foundation for the study of modern performance that rounds out Lockwood’s contribution. Perhaps one of the most important innovations of this edition, these final discussions will provide useful support for readers who may encounter this play in recordings of many of these recent productions. A similar treatment is given to the latest edition of the New Cambridge Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The third edition of F.H. Mares’s edited text and introduction is supplemented with an update on ‘Recent Performance and Critical Interpretations’ by Travis D. Williams. Williams reminds us of the particular diversity of screen adaptations of this play in the last thirty years and how they have inspired a range of critical interpretations. Central to Williams’s argument is of course Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film, which establishes Shakespeare as a profitable cinematic property and introduces a cinematic style that becomes identified with both Branagh and modern Shakespeare on film. The ‘Branagh phenomenon’ (p. 49) or at least subsequent responses to Branagh’s work, Williams argues, can be seen across film and stage productions to the present day. One fact that stands out from these productions is the variety of their settings. Williams’s discussion includes striking examples such as the Indian setting of Iqbal Khan’s 2012 RSC production featuring an entire British Asian cast that situated the soldiers returning from the war as UN peacekeeping forces. Williams’s overview of recent productions includes a wealth of examples enjoyable to read for those who saw them but also offers students and non-specialist readers new to them the chance to consider the range of possibilities for production of a single play in terms of setting, casting, and approaches to issues of gender and cultural and ethnic diversity. In short, this is a valuable and fresh contribution to the third edition. The two monographs published in 2018 demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research to maintaining textual studies as a dynamic field of scholarship. Emma Depledge’s Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700 focuses on a period often overlooked, being seen as a time of little development between the first printed editions of Shakespeare in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the rise of ‘modern editing’. Arguing that ‘Shakespeare’s canonization was by no means inevitable and it did not follow a neat, linear trajectory’ (p. 1), Depledge combines book and theatre history to reassess Shakespeare’s reputation and dissemination in both the Interregnum and the Restoration. Depledge begins with two chapters covering Shakespeare’s presence on stage and page from the English Civil War to the Restoration. These foundational chapters are an informative look at Shakespeare’s popularity during the Interregnum. They reveal how, when the theatres closed, Shakespeare remained in the public conscience through rewritings of his work in play-ballads, in short plays, and in even shorter extracts in commonplace books and anthologies. Depledge then turns to the Exclusion Crisis (1678): the political controversy over royal succession that, Depledge argues, is a key moment in the canonization of Shakespeare. Depledge’s assertion is convincingly demonstrated in the detailed case studies in the chapters that follow. Chapter 3 investigates the popular interest in Shakespeare’s history plays from 1678 to 1682. Here, theatres working to meet audience demand for plays engaging with current political events caused a surge in interest in Richard II and the Henry VI plays, transforming Shakespeare’s plays into the most frequently altered drama of this period. Chapter 4 examines in more detail how these altered plays engaged with the issues of the crisis. In this historical context these plays were appropriated to promote the rule of primogeniture and the succession of the duke of York. Most distressing is the trend of introducing new scenes of rape and attempted rape into King Lear, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline in order to demonize ‘illegitimate’ characters, further emphasizing the need for patriarchal protection via strong male power. We often remember adaptations from this period for their comical additions, but Depledge provides a timely new view of violence and domination, giving a harsher, darker side to this chapter of Shakespeare’s afterlife and the decidedly problematic sexual politics of the time. Chapter 5 takes a more book-history approach, examining paratextual representations in these altered texts—another area often overlooked for its lack of direct connection to Shakespeare. However, focusing on Shakespeare’s development as a canonical writer, Depledge unravels a nuanced story of marketing momentum and censorship. This well-synthesized study reveals fascinating, contradictory strands of Shakespeare’s development: on the stage a reverence for his writing emerges, while on the page Shakespeare is presented as second to his Restoration successors. There is an interesting discussion of agency in the relationship between Shakespeare and the playwrights altering his plays, as well as a compelling discussion of playbills from the time that presents a contradiction between representations of Shakespeare on the stage and page at the time that is worth further consideration. The final chapter looks ahead to Shakespeare’s reputation after the crisis. Having navigated the turbulent political culture of 1778–1782, Shakespeare’s plays re-emerged in their pre-Interregnum forms, enjoying a boost in print and a return to court (this time of James II). It is not simply the recognition, but the manner in which Shakespeare was presented and received by this audience that Depledge astutely highlights as responsible for Shakespeare’s canonization. This is an important book that fills a vital gap in the development of Shakespeare as canonical writer and is necessary reading for understanding the full narrative of Shakespeare in print. Jean-Christophe Mayer’s Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590–1800 is also interested in the ways that Shakespeare’s canon is shaped by consumers. Seeking to identify and address the ‘moment’ ‘when Shakespeare’s works began to permeate the public sphere both in London and elsewhere’ (p. 1), Mayer focuses on how the engagement of readers who ‘handed down, transformed, disseminated and appraised’ Shakespeare’s plays and poems (p. 1) influenced canon formation before educational reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enshrined Shakespeare as a cultural icon. The study is a fascinating look at the major reasons why and how early readers engaged with Shakespeare. Chapter 1, ‘Literacy and the Circulation of Plays’, offers an overview of current understandings of early modern literacy and the ownership and readership of plays. A significant feature of this monograph is that it adds to the known examples of early readers, buyers, and collectors, especially highlighting more social diversity amongst owners than previously considered, and giving particular attention to middle-class, working-class, and women owners. Making sure to emphasize the variety in these conditions (ownership does not, for example, equal readership and vice versa), Mayer credits Shakespeare’s work as a key player in the shift from oral to print culture across class, gender, and geography in early modern England. Subsequent chapters are then organized around the material sources of these engagements: ‘Life in the Archives’ illuminates a range of ‘graffiti’ in Shakespeare editions and offers historical evidence of how reading Shakespeare fitted into individual early modern lives. Chapter 3 examines issues of textual authority. Situating the practices of readers alongside eighteenth-century editorial practice, Mayer reveals ‘the development of genuine personal interests in the text of Shakespeare on the part of readers who claimed their authority through textual editing’ (p. 75). The chapter offers insightful examples of eighteenth-century readers navigating early printing through marginal annotations, and often befuddled responses to printing inconsistencies or perplexing points of dramatic action. Mayer’s careful scrutiny and analysis of reader practices shifts focus to theatrical annotators and transcribers in chapter 4 and then to commonplacing in chapter 5, offering a satisfying range of evidence. The study ends by looking across the collected evidence to consider what early readers thought of Shakespeare as an artist. Here Mayer asserts that readers shared the playwright’s interest in and affinity for character, emotion, and gesture in service of the idea of play as political commentary. Overall, Mayer’s work is a substantive textual study that adds new evidence to increase our understanding of the impact of early readers on Shakespeare’s legacy. Edited collections this year approached their subjects comprehensively, covering their topics across methodologies and historical moments from the early modern to the present, making for a handful of substantial collections. Interesting collections draw attention to topics we often take for granted, and cast fresh light on the scope of their influence. Shakespeare and Quotation, edited by Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold, offers a wide-ranging yet relevant approach to a fundamental feature that shapes Shakespeare’s place in the literary world. The collection aims to present quotation as a ‘new reception history’ by positioning it as ‘an evolving, living and global activity’ (p. 4). To emphasize the scope of this topic, the essays are arranged in three sections: ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Quotation’, ‘Quoting Shakespeare 1700–2000’, and ‘Quoting Shakespeare Now’. Maxwell and Rumbold lay the foundation for this new field by providing readers with a general introduction that provides a concise but informative overview of the range of Shakespeare scholarship that has engaged with quotation in various forms—a useful warm-up for the many ways scholars engage with this topic in the essays that follow. This introduction also includes a useful and compelling section defining ‘quotation’ and ‘allusion’, giving the editors a chance to reassess the definition in light of the new research presented by contributors. Maxwell and Rumbold expertly move us from the copying of direct quotation to the creative potential of deliberate misquotation—it quickly becomes clear that this is creative work that will appeal to lovers of textual detail and wordplay. The editors also provide introductions to each section, providing more specialized background as well as opportunities to challenge archaic perceptions that are deconstructed further by the essays that follow. The first essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Early Modern Culture of Quotation’ by James P. Bednarz (pp. 31–45), starts with the earliest example of misquotation: the infamous ‘tiger’s hart wrapt in a players hide’ from Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. Bednarz traces how this initially negative response is quickly overshadowed by quotes from professional writers and in private commonplacing to reveal an emerging fascination with the eloquence of Shakespeare’s language. A highlight of Bednarz’s compelling essay is the entertaining series of satirical misquotes of Shakespeare embedded in the plays of his contemporaries—clearly they were paying attention to his plays and the language within them. The essay concludes by giving Shakespeare the final say. By suggesting that Shakespeare’s ‘prologue armed’ in Troilus and Cressida is a response to Jonson’s ‘armed prologue’ in his Poetaster, Bednarz represents quotation as an act of confidence that Shakespeare used to define his role within the literary and dramatic culture of his time. Kevin Petersen’s ‘Shakespeare and Sententiae: The Use of Quotation in Lucrece’ (pp. 46–59) revisits the impact and function of the sententiae markers in Q1 of Shakespeare’s long poem. Peterson acknowledges the collective agency of writer and printing-house agents in the production of texts that is the conventional wisdom of current scholarship, but chooses to focus on an implicit intention that Shakespeare as writer would have brought to the text. In particular Petersen examines what he sees as Shakespeare’s decision to include the marks as ‘signalling quotes’ which, in the tradition of such commonplace markers would compel readers to extend the reach and legacy of the poem by including Shakespeare’s suggested quotes in their commonplace books. Petersen delves deeper into this intention, suggesting that, beyond simple quotation, Shakespeare’s choices, as well as the ways in which characters such as Lucrece engage with commonplaces in the poem, are part of a larger interest Shakespeare had in critiquing the pedagogical benefits of the practice itself. Quoting is authoritative, but, as Beatrice Groves convincingly argues in her meticulous and enjoyable essay ‘“The ears of profiting”: Listening to Falstaff’s Biblical Quotations’ (pp. 60–71), quoting the Bible carries the greatest amount of credit, making Falstaff’s use of quotation all the more worthy of study. Falstaff’s knowledge of religious texts and sentiment is not a new discovery, but Grove’s skilled close reading of numerous examples from 1 Henry IV, particularly Falstaff’s use of the ‘proof text’ as an argumentative strategy, illuminates his creative mastery—a skill, Groves tactfully reminds us, that is not shared by the royal characters in the play. As a result, Falstaff’s skill in biblical quotation serves as a demonstration of wit as well as a subversion of the convention as a tool for righteous argument. Douglas Bruster’s thought-provoking essay ‘Quoting Hamlet’ (pp. 72–86) uses the variety of quotation in Shakespeare’s great tragedy to consider the role of quotation in Shakespeare’s writing more broadly. Particularly interesting is how quotations can both extend and collapse the distance between language and the reader/audience (p. 75). Bruster also calls attention to a set of nuanced categories of quotation that reveal the rich variety of quotation at work in the play. The essay then looks beyond Hamlet to quotation across Shakespeare’s plays, highlighting a striking correlation between Shakespeare’s high-quotation plays of the late 1590s and his rise to literary prominence. Part II, ‘Quoting Shakespeare 1700–2000’, turns the focus to those who quote Shakespeare in their own work, and to what end. In ‘“Shakespeare says…”: The Anthology and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ (pp. 95–107), Kate Rumbold suggests that quoting Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel led to the demise of the very anthologies and quotation books that often served as the novel-writer’s key resource for Shakespeare. Rumbold presents three case studies of novelists and the source books they incorporated into their fictive worlds: Samuel Richardson and Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry [1702]; William Dodd’s failed novel The Sisters [1754] and his successful anthology Beauties of Shakespeare [1752]—the first collection dedicated to Shakespeare; and Jane Austen and Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts [1789]. This carefully articulated and interesting study clearly shows how novelists’ portrayal of characters and the readings they produce from their quotation books actually undermines the genre. Rumbold’s essay is an intriguing study of how the novel helped build up Shakespeare’s reputation, as it brought on the decline of the commonplace tradition that had previously contributed in significant ways to Shakespeare’s legacy. ‘Pope’s Shakespeare and Poetic Quotation in the Early Eighteenth Century’ by Brean Hammond (pp. 108–19) examines the ways Pope quotes from and alludes to Shakespeare in his original verse in order to suggest ways in which Shakespeare influenced poetry of the time. Pope, Hammond argues, relied on the Shakespeare he already had in his head, so his engagement, described by Hammond as ‘phrasal memorial reconstruction’ (p. 111), is largely on the level of character names and the odd word or phrase. As a result, connections between the writing of Pope and Shakespeare are ambiguous at best. Nevertheless, Hammond creates an intricate web of connections that offer glimpses of how Pope continued the legacy of Shakespeare quotation, in a way more devoted to the sentiment than the reality of the text. The relationship between Pope and the canon changed after he edited Shakespeare. Hammond ascribes particular credit to Pope’s extensive index that established the phenomenon of ‘detachable Shakespeare’ (p. 115), where quotes exist independent of the text by virtue of their individual beauty. Hammond closes with a look at Pope’s fascination with Falstaff, the character who receives the most extensive entry in the index. Here, quotations and allusions infiltrate Pope’s writing in a more definite way, but they still inhabit the poet’s imagination organically—slipping into phrases and images like a gentle presence. For Pope, quoting Shakespeare was a way to see the world rather than an act of conscription. Similarly, ‘Quotation in the Romantic Age’ by Fiona Ritchie and R.S. White (pp. 120–35) uses the act of quotation as evidence of the intense and intimate relationship many Romantic writers had with the idea of Shakespeare and his work. An engaging section on ‘Quotation and Sociability’ (p. 125) takes the practice of quoting Shakespeare into the realm of interpersonal discourse as Shakespeare provides images for parliamentary speeches amongst colleagues and letters between family members. Ritchie and White provide intriguing mini-portraits of Byron’s, Wordsworth’s, Blake’s, and Shelley’s use of Shakespeare that are as varied as the writers themselves. There is also a provocative section at the end that highlights a number of women writers who also regularly quoted Shakespeare—one hopes to read more about them in the near future. Another very interesting sub-section, on ‘Quotation as Interpretation’, positions the Romantics’ quoting practices as ‘anticipating’ modern literary analysis (p. 132). The use of quotations by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and others reveals a combination of admiration and intellectual commentary as they seek to uncover the thinking genius of Shakespeare in the imagery of his plays and poems. Again, Ritchie and White construct a compelling narrative of connections that makes the reader want to learn more. In ‘Quoting Shakespeare in the British Novel from Dickens to Wodehouse’ Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (pp. 136–55) takes the reader up to the beginnings of mass access to Shakespeare. With the rise of touring productions outside London, the emergence of ‘cheap print’ editions, and the continued circulation of Shakespeare in anthology, as well as the 1870 Education Act’s requirement that schoolchildren recite Shakespeare in their exams, Shakespeare at this point in history infiltrated culture on a national scale, ‘effectively turning the act of speaking English into the practice of Quoting Shakespeare’ (p. 137). Pollack-Pelzner’s highly readable essay presents examples of Victorian novelists’ engagement with the dominating presence of Shakespeare. Dickens’s ‘Hem! Shakespeare’ reveals the tension between the use of Shakespeare and the sense that quotation does not equate to authority. There are also interesting sections on Thomas Hardy and P.G. Wodehouse. But Pollack-Pelzner’s discussion of George Eliot is a provocative examination of textual authority. Eliot’s interjection of non-narrative thought into her novels has often been described as Shakespearean, if he had written novels (p. 141). Beyond the difficulties of being ‘Shakespeare-like’, Eliot is particular in her representation of Shakespeare in her work as she is careful to distinguish her characters’ inept use of Shakespeare from her own narrative voice. ‘The power to quote and be quoted successfully’, Pollack-Pelzner observes, ‘is Eliot’s alone’ (p. 144). Chapter 9, ‘Pedagogy and Propaganda the Uses of Quotation, 1750–1945’ (pp. 156–77), draws together three case studies featuring contexts of quotation (politics, education, and war). While there is no attempt to link the studies together within the chapter, making connections between the studies tentative, there are still interesting facts and ideas to observe. Frans De Bruyn examines the subtexts of quoting Shakespeare in parliamentary debate (pp. 156–62), where the ability to cite Shakespeare identified one as a member of a community and even a keeper of the language. What remains most striking is the diversity of positions, from loyalist to Chartist, that Shakespeare was employed to signify. Gail Marshall highlights the presence of Shakespeare in the development of a national system of education (pp. 162–70). Shakespeare is appropriated into Victorian textbooks not simply as an example of good writing, but as a source of exemplars or commonplaces to instruct students in aesthetic taste and morality. Marshall offers insightful interpretations of how quotations taken out of context and regrouped could, in the hands of Victorian editors, give a sanitized image of Shakespeare far removed from the subversion of the source text. Ton Hoenselaars concludes the case studies with practices of quotation during the First and Second World Wars (pp. 170–7) by tracking how an existing culture of quoting Shakespeare across Europe shaped the way parties on both sides expressed their positions. Of particular interest was Hoenselaars’s observation of how the First World War, which he suggests strengthened the culture of quotation generally, overlapped with the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. The result of this fascinating convergence was the production of book-length anthologies of Shakespeare quotations that affirmed England’s affinity with Shakespeare while also reflecting concerns regarding growing hostilities on the Continent. This notable case study brings attention to a variety of less well-known examples that help to contextualize Shakespeare within the very human experiences of global conflict. Also noteworthy is Craig Raine’s fascinating essay, ‘The Impossibility of Quotation: Twentieth-Century Literature’ (pp. 178–93), which draws together examples of twentieth-century writers quoting Shakespeare in order to critique the practice in modern literature. Recognizing quotation as a technique that takes its material far from its source and original meaning, Raine nevertheless asserts that quotation can in fact be original. Energetically written and well argued, this essay assembles a collection of rich examples from Stoppard, Auden, Kipling, and Eliot and weaves them into a narrative that persuades as it revels in the richness of its evidence and the distance travelled from its Shakespearean sources. Moving from literature to film, Toby Malone examines how practices of quotation changed when used for cinematic storytelling. ‘Quoting Shakespeare in Twentieth-Century Film’ (pp. 194–214) takes as its context the world-building that is a key feature of film. If we consider film as ‘remaking’ what is already known or recognized by an audience as Malone suggests, quotation of someone as well-known and oft-quoted as Shakespeare becomes a logical ingredient for adding ‘production value’. The final section, Part III, ‘Quoting Shakespeare Now’, addresses particularly twenty-first-century developments in creative quotation of Shakespeare that also provides a space to consider the issue of quotation within some of the key questions of our time. Julie Maxwell begins the section with a fascinating study of how Shakespeare is being quoted in modern creative writing teaching and practice in her essay ‘Creative Writing: Quoting Shakespeare in Theory and Practice’ (pp. 215–30). How is the work of one of the writers most associated with genius or ‘natural’ talent employed in the project of authorizing the idea of formalized writing instruction? Maxwell organizes this essay to focus first on classroom theory and practice and then in a study of the work of writers who graduated from these creative-writing programmes—Sorry [2007] by Gail Jones and Ian McEwan’s Saturday [2011]—offering a fascinating look at how pedagogy evolves into practice while also examining how writers use Shakespeare to engage with the concerns of the post-9/11 world. In ‘Quoting Shakespeare in Contemporary Poetry and Prose’ (pp. 231–46), Christy Desmet examines ‘the dynamics of semantic possession’ (p. 231), or who lays claim to the authority of a quote and what is the relationship revealed by the appropriation. Desmet thoughtfully presents the subtle negotiations of appropriation in contemporary poetry. (The names of some of the forms (mirror, erasure) also offer fascinating interpretations of the relationship between Shakespeare and the new poet.) Desmet’s faithful attention to process also introduces another agent into the creative practice in many of these works—the computer and the software that Shakespeare’s writing is ‘run through’—which prompts additional, fascinating questions of the future relationship between artist and source. This is a wide-ranging yet satisfyingly detailed study of clear new strategies for quotation that remain embedded in contemporary concerns with power and agency dynamics. Peter Kirwan’s ‘Mis/Quotation in Constrained Writing’ (pp. 247–59) considers the creative freedom found within the limits of quotation by examining two examples of Oulipian literature, a school of writing that seeks to explore creativity by applying restrictions. An example from this essay is Paul Griffiths’s let me tell you [2008], a work of fiction created from Ophelia’s point of view and using only the 483 words Shakespeare gives her in Hamlet. In such examples, Kirwan asserts, words used by Shakespeare are released from their original order and context and reconfigured into new stories. However, these new stories still retain connections to their original Shakespearean context—as we have seen repeatedly in this collection, appropriation does not equal complete independence from the source. In fact, in spite of the modern desire to get away from the past, these texts seem to rely heavily on recognition of their Shakespeare source to be fully realized. Kirwan provides a skilful close reading that clearly conveys the nuanced relationship between quotation and originality. In a world in which Shakespeare seems to be used by nearly every medium as cultural credit, Graham Holderness’s essay ‘“Beauty too rich for use”? Shakespeare and Advertising’ (pp. 260–74) feels particularly relevant. Focusing on Romeo and Juliet, Holderness examines the use of Shakespeare quotes in advertising, arguing that such cultural appropriations indicate a broadening of access and ownership of Shakespeare that scholars would be well advised to include in their studies of Shakespeare’s cultural capital. The final essay of this collection contains two sub-sections under the title ‘Digital Technology and the Future of Reception History’ (pp. 275–94). Stephen O’Neill’s ‘Quoting Shakespeare in Digital Culture’ (pp. 275–85) addresses the broad access touched upon in Holderness’s earlier essay, but through the ways in which Shakespeare is repeatedly appropriated and shared on social media. A key feature of O’Neill’s focus is the agency of the user to continue the circulation of Shakespeare quotations through sharing, cutting and pasting within and across platforms and contexts. Balz Engler and Regula Hohl Trillini’s ‘Back to the Future: Digital Quotation Research’ (pp. 285–94) ends the collection with a look towards the ways ‘new’ digital databases like EEBO and ECCO are already reshaping the way we collect and analyse quotations, and includes a brief overview of how such research and its results will develop the study of quotations in the future. Overall, Shakespeare and Quotation is an extensive collection that compels us to reconsider not only the broader implications of quotation and what it can tell us about Shakespeare; its wide-ranging results compel us to consider what other overlooked practices of literary culture would benefit from a closer look. The other collection published this year was Shakespeare and Authority: Citations, Conceptions and Constructions, edited by Katie Halsey and Angus Vine. Taking a similar approach to Shakespeare and Quotation reviewed above, the editors of the collection gather essays that explore issues and ideas of authority in connection with Shakespeare and his texts from a multitude of perspectives. Issues of authority (textual and otherwise) have been a source of energetic discourse across many facets of Shakespeare studies for a long time. What is intriguing about this collection on first inspection is seeing them gathered together in one place, and the potential for reading across ‘authority studies’ that the collection encourages. It begins with an extensive introduction to this broad topic, ‘“Dressed in a little brief authority”: Authority Before, During, and After Shakespeare’s Plays’ (pp. 1–30). Written by editors Halsey and Vine, it provides a valuable overview of ideas of authority concerning Shakespeare, from his own time to current scholarly debates and topics. This essay also introduces readers to issues of authority in art forms and media beyond stage and page that are considered in more depth in subsequent chapters. Part I of the collection, ‘Defining and Redefining Authority’, explores ideas and definitions of authority in a number of research areas. In ‘Shakespeare’s Authorities’ (pp. 31–54) Colin Burrow considers how early modern definitions of ‘authority’ (defined here as a power devolved or conferred by another) can help us to revisit ideas of authority in various source texts. Key to Burrow’s compelling argument is what he highlights as a duality within this transaction: power transferred creates a problematic connection between those who bestow and the newly authorized. Burrow demonstrates how applying this thinking to source texts (which he suggests are better described as authorities) opens up understandings of the interplay between texts beyond a single stream of connection to more dynamic textual interaction across language types and social, theatrical, and political contexts. Broader, more varied authority within so-called source study is considered by John Drakakis as an approach that will also offer new insights into the creative practices of the playwright. ‘Inside the Elephant’s Graveyard: Revising Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’ (pp. 55–78) examines some of the intriguing contradictions of authority that emerge when individual creativity and innovation are grounded in Renaissance traditions of imitatio. Can Shakespeare be the source of ‘truth’ if his truths originated elsewhere? To examine this question, Drakakis uses a case study of Hamlet and the idea of ‘authorities’ to demonstrate that, when the true complexity and fluidity of authority is considered, the idea of a clear route of connection or hierarchy of sources becomes problematic, begging reconsideration of the term. Shakespeare’s role as literary authority in the Oxford English Dictionary is the subject of Giles Goodland’s ‘Author and Authority in the OED: Nashe v. Shakespeare’ (pp. 79–111). Tracking changes to the OED’s approach to first citations, Goodland reveals how the shift from dating citations by first performance of the source play to the publication date reduces the number of first citations attributed to Shakespeare, challenging the extent of the playwright’s authority as the dominant coiner of words and phrases in the period, an adjustment that also sheds light on the extensive original contributions made by Thomas Nashe. Goodland’s argument is compelling, providing a very interesting demonstration of how choices concerning the way we represent data shape (and misshape) perceptions of authority. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton shifts focus to the perception of shared ownership of the English language in ‘“The King’s English” “Our English”? Shakespeare and Linguistic Ownership’ (pp. 113–33). Here analysis of the trope ‘the King’s English’ shows how efforts to appropriate the national vernacular reveal a variety of political and social ambitions. Positioning the phrase as an extension of James I’s political project of trying to unify England and Scotland, Tudeau-Clayton then creates a striking contrast with usage of the terms ‘our English tongue’ and ‘our English’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Eric Heinze’s noteworthy essay ‘Foundations of Sovereign Authority: The Example of Shakespearean Political Drama’ (pp. 135–54) takes us into the realm of legal authority via engagement with hereditary right and sovereign authority in the history plays. Heinze introduces us to two ‘bases’ of authority: ‘peremptory’ (a sense of right or duty that originates in a claim such as the will of God that cancels out other claims from the get go) and ‘normative’ authority, which can situate authority either in positive normativity or the law as it stands. Heinze then uses these key terms to highlight subtle but key differences amongst Shakespeare’s kings in the two tetralogies. The result is a fresh critique of Shakespeare’s representations of the pursuit of power across the genre. The second part of the collection, ‘Shakespearean Authority’, addresses more traditional discussions of authority by examining the issue within key texts. Angus Vine’s ‘A Trim Reckoning’: Accountability and Authority in 1 and 2 Henry IV’ (pp. 157–78) examines connections between the language of finance, particularly debt and reckoning, and morality across the two parts of Henry IV. Through nuanced close reading, Vine uses multifaceted themes like ‘reckoning’ to create satisfying parallels between the sacred and secular in the linguistic repertoires of Hal, the King, and Falstaff. The analysis also situates Shakespeare’s interest in this particular lexicon in a broader early modern engagement with fiscal and spiritual accounts and accountability in a number of contemporary religious commentaries. Perhaps the most interesting part of an already interesting essay is the application of this approach to the transformed Hal when he debates the responsibility of a king to his subjects and of subjects to the king on the eve of the battle of Agincourt in Henry V (IV.i), offering an illuminating fiscal context for Henry’s discussion of duty and accountability. Joseph Sterrett explores authority through two facets of trust: trust in a king and trust between lovers, in his interesting essay ‘The King’s Ring: A Matter of Trust’ (pp. 179–94). Sterrett focuses on these types of trust through a prominent use of rings as symbols of trust in Henry VIII or All Is True, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline. The key distinction between trust of a king and indeed other bonds of trust, Sterrett argues, is sovereignty, and this power also sustains unique and powerful networks of allegiance. Authority is linked to constancy in the thought-provoking ‘Constant in Any Undertaking’: Writing the Lipsian State in Measure for Measure’ (pp. 195–212). Constancy, Daniel Cadman asserts, ‘has an intimate relationship with ideas of governance’ (p. 196) and is central to the Duke’s project of reasserting his authority in Vienna. Cadman uses the writings of the Flemish philosopher and political theorist Justus Lipsius, whose writings were translated into English in 1594, to bring additional weight to the connections between constancy and political pragmatism in the Duke’s attempts to inspire his subjects to virtue while maintaining control. Addressing a gap in the study of this play that reveals interesting philosophical insights into one of Shakespeare’s most political plays, Cadman’s compelling essay also demonstrates the substantive knowledge to be gained by approaching sources as authorities, as is advocated in this collection. Systems of authority move from the state to the household: in particular the precarious role of the steward in Eleanor Lowe’s excellent ‘Duty and Authority: Malvolio, Stewardship and Montague’s Household Book’ (pp. 213–29). In this fascinating essay, Lowe teases out the key dynamics of social aspiration and social condemnation represented in Malvolio’s desire and pursuit of upward mobility. For context, Lowe chooses Viscount Montague’s Household Book from 1595. Montague’s book contains among other things a record of orders and rules for running an early modern household comparable to Olivia’s, and a record of the duties of a steward that gives special attention to the steward’s authority. What is revealed is, surprisingly, a more equitable, shared service where servers and served co-operatively contribute to the success of a household in which the steward stands as the link between upper- and lower-status members. The role of the steward in the early modern household is then applied to Shakespeare’s representation of Malvolio. In revealing the extent of his power within the household and his actions in the context of Montague’s portrait of a sober and reliable steward, Lowe puts the often ridiculed Malvolio in a somewhat better light. Through Lowe’s compelling research and thoughtful analysis, Twelfth Night becomes a reflection as well as a critique of authority and authorities within the early modern noble household. The final contribution to this section on Shakespearean authority is ‘Poetic Authority in Julius Caesar: The Triumph of the Poet-Playwright-Actor’ by Laetitia Sansonetti (pp. 231–46). In depriving poets of authority in Julius Caesar, Sansonetti argues, Shakespeare can examine questions central to his artistic interests: ‘naming and identity, oratory and persuasion, the function of repetition, and the importance of good timing’ (p. 233). Tightly focused and well written, Sansonetti’s study of the misadventures of Cinna the poet provides a detailed and compelling reading of how this single character’s engagement with language and its related authority can act as a touchstone for identifying key moments of authority, language, and timing throughout the rest of the play. The final part of the collection, Part III, ‘Shakespeare as Authority’, considers the legacy of Shakespeare’s authority beyond the early modern period. In ‘Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth Century’ (pp. 249–64) James Harriman-Smith examines how Shakespeare’s legacy as great the portrayer of emotions influenced how actors constructed their own dramatic authority. Harriman-Smith highlights two strategies actors used to define their authority to perform Shakespeare: ‘succession’ and ‘resurrection’. For example, Thomas Betterton grounded his portrayals in textual study, granting the actor a kind of literary-critical authority that enabled him to ‘step into a part’ as performed by his predecessors (p. 251). Claiming that these early performances were originally informed by Shakespeare’s intentions, the actor becomes a link in a chain that preserves the play as Shakespeare intended it. The rise of David Garrick denotes a move away from this legacy of replication and preservation and towards a kind of reader-response approach where the actor develops their own interpretation via personal engagement with the text. Emphasis on individual development required a different approach to authority, resulting in Garrick’s ‘resurrection’: portraying himself as the hereditary heir of Shakespeare. Moving us out of the literary, Andrew Rudd’s ‘Shakespeare, Rule-Breaking and Artistic Genius: The Case of Sir John Soane’ (pp. 265–80) invites us to visualize Shakespeare’s influence beyond stage and page. By Soane’s time, Shakespeare was perceived as a transgressor of classical tenets that straddled affiliations with both Gothic and Romantic aesthetics. Rudd focuses on the influence of Shakespeare on the architect Sir John Soane. Presenting as a classicist in his professional discourses, Soane was also a Shakespeare enthusiast, and in the spirit of this collection Rudd suggests that Shakespeare’s authority is present in a multifaceted dialogue with Soane’s work that is central to understanding Soane’s ‘unique brand of ambidextrousness’ (p. 266). The image of Shakespeare as a challenger to stylistic rules, for example, provided a role model for Soane that empowered him to take an eclectic approach to his thinking and engagement with art and artists throughout his life. Rudd collects an interesting combination of Soane’s lectures on architecture, the design of his home, and the contents of his home library to create a portrait of one man’s life-long engagement with Shakespeare the writer and the symbol. This essay is a creative, informative, and sometimes refreshingly humorous examination of the subtle and not so subtle shades of meaning one imaginative mind gleaned from Shakespeare’s reputation as rebel genius. Shakespeare’s identity as the ‘Gothic Bard’ is examined in connection to national identity in Benedicte Seynhaeve and Raphaël Ingelbien’s compelling essay ‘Whose Gothic Bard? Charles Robert Maturin and Contestations of Shakespearean Authority in British/Irish Romantic Culture’ (pp. 281–300). Seynhaeve and Ingelbien examine the literary career of and critical response to the Irish clergyman turned Romantic novelist, Charles Robert Maturin. Maturin’s aesthetic mix of appropriating Shakespeare into the Gothic novel genre (we are introduced to the subgenre of ‘true Shakespearean terror literature’, p. 284) and the violent and bloody narratives of his Irish heritage challenges traditional narratives of Shakespeare’s authority being associated with Britishness or Englishness. Intriguingly, critics of Maturin’s work also draw on Shakespeare’s authority to critique what they perceive as the un-Shakespearean (i.e. not British or English) excesses of Maturin’s work, presenting a striking instance of Shakespeare’s authority being used to reject work outside the establishment. Fred Ribkoff and Paul Tyndall’s ‘Authority, Instrumental Reason and the Fault Lines of Modern Civilization in Peter Brook’s Cinematic Rendering of Shakespeare’s King Lear’ (pp. 301–16) makes a clear connection between the intertextual engagement with sources explored in Part I of the collection and the dynamic artistic appropriation that created Peter Brook’s staging, and especially his film production, of King Lear [1971]. The extent to which Brook integrates Shakespeare’s play into a larger field of influences is encapsulated in Ribkoff and Tyndall’s description of his project as ‘an appropriation of the Lear myth’ (p. 302). In Brook’s collection of sources Shakespeare is just one of many, and as such Brook is free to truly adapt and appropriate the parts of Shakespeare that serve his post-war vision. The result, Ribkoff and Tyndall suggest, is Paul Scofield’s performance of the title character in Brook’s Lear—an assertion of calculated authority that situates Shakespeare’s play within narratives of modern civilization’s demise. Shakespeare has a continual presence in the visual arts, from early pencil drawings of Titus Andronicus to Manga Shakespeare. Jane Partner’s essay ‘Will Power: Visualising Shakespeare’s Authority in Contemporary Culture’ (pp. 317–35) ends the collection with a look at ways the visual arts engage with Shakespeare (the life and the work) as cultural icon. Partner focuses on three points of engagement with Shakespearean authority: how artists visualize Shakespeare the author, how they respond to famous moments in his plays, and how they engage with Shakespeare’s language. This final essay, with its descriptions of some of the most dynamic and dramatic representations of Shakespeare, is especially interesting as it points to a future in which the intertextual exchange between Shakespearean authority and new methods of creativity will continue to construct images of Shakespeare and his authority we have yet to conceive of. Thus, the Shakespeare and Authority collection is a valuable resource of discovery and reference point for students and scholars interested in Shakespeare’s textual and cultural authority. Articles and essays on textual issues continue to employ traditional and technology-based approaches to their study of Shakespeare’s writing and its place in the larger canon of early modern drama. Frederick Kiefer’s ‘Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print’ (in Hirschfeld, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, pp. 395–410) elegantly articulates the multitude of connections between ‘print’ and comedy. In this instance, printed texts are broadly understood both as an Elizabethan process and product and as the material objects of printed books, handwritten letters, and images and the metaphors of printing and books that appear throughout Shakespeare’s comedies. Divided into a series of subsections—‘Books, Pro and Con’, ‘Writing and Wooing’, ‘The Limits of Love Letters’, and ‘Reading and Writing as Metaphors’—the chapter offers a variety of compelling foundations for discovering dialogues between print and comedy that will inspire additional thinking and research on the subject. Amanda Watson’s ‘Shakespeare, Memory and Print Culture’ (in Hiscock and Wilder, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, pp. 22–33) situates print in the collection’s topic as externalized memory that can now be viewed and reproduced. Watson examines how print culture functioned as a vehicle for remembering Shakespeare and how varied editions and representations of Shakespeare’s plays in print shape these memories. Focusing on nineteenth-century American readers of Shakespeare, Watson offers a different look at the intersection between Shakespeare studies and history of the book than the early modern perspective usually expected in such collections. After an overview of the foundational ideas of the sociology of texts that is clear and concise, Watson constructs a cogent examination of anthologies, school books, and commonplace books from the time, highlighting how these texts both represent as they preserve Shakespeare, offering a thoughtful narrative of the social construction of the Shakespeare canon. ‘Folios in Context: Collecting Shakespeare at the University of London’ by Karen Attar (Library 19[2018] 39–62) examines the development of the Shakespeare collection at the University of London Senate House Library—a collection that gained national attention in 2013 when it was announced that it would sell a set of its Shakespeare Folios—a decision that was abandoned after public outcry. Attar tracks the development of the library’s antiquarian Shakespeare holdings from modest beginnings of German and Welsh translations of Hamlet, showing how the library expanded its collection in response to the cultural adoption of Shakespeare as English icon and academic status symbol. For those familiar with the library, the article is a compelling look into the origins of its Shakespeare-related holdings. The article is also a history of collectors, offering insights into the privileged individuals who collected antiquarian texts. Overall, it is a fascinating tale of the many stories behind this valued collection. Attention to orthography and typography offers new insights into meaning-making for early readers of Hamlet in Erika Boeckeler’s engaging article ‘The Hamlet First Quarto (1603) & the Play of Typography’ (EarT 21:i[2018] 59–86). Showing how homographic words like ‘do/due/doo/doe’ create semantic fields across texts that are only perceived in reading, Boeckeler creates a nuanced argument of how the visual presentation of words in Q1 can support the broader thematic concerns of the play. Boeckeler’s argument provides attentive and creative readings that revel in the wordplay that early modern writers and readers were fond of and the typographical details that print historians and textual critics enjoy, making the detailed readings insightful and enjoyable. The approach is effectively applied to Q1’s presentation of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, where Boeckeler contextualizes the ‘I’ in the well-known variant ‘I there’s the point’ within a series of earlier affirmative ‘I’s to show how the variant visually highlights Hamlet’s divided sense of self in this poignant moment. This article deftly demonstrates the value of paying close attention to orthographic details and the visual semantics of early modern playtexts. The value of revisiting contemporary sources is highlighted in Minoru Mihara’s study of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a ballad collection that is often used to authorize readings of ballads like ‘Willow, Willow, Willow’ in Othello. In ‘Shakespearean Ballads in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Transition from Oral Songs to Printed Historical Documents’ (TC 10:ii[2018] 107–25) Mihara examines the influence of Reliques on George Steevens’s and Edmund Malone’s emendations of Shakespeare’s texts. Mihara highlights the interaction between plays and ballads as a scholarly practice that was abandoned as eighteenth-century scholarship shifted its focus to printing culture, including collections like Reliques. The result was that both the play and the ballad collection lost their orality, becoming recognized only as literature on the page. The heart of Mihara’s study is the more contentious and overlooked fact that Percy’s editing of his collection establishes certain types of ballads as worth study—choices that are then absorbed by editors into their editions of Shakespeare. Connecting ballads from Reliques to Romeo and Juliet and Othello, the essay then builds on a hypothesis that Edward Capell, whose edition does not mention Reliques at all, is actually influenced by Percy’s approach. This is a fascinating article that must be considered by anyone drawing on Reliques or other printed sources as evidence for oral traditions. Emma Smith’s ‘A New Corrected Proof Sheet from Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623)’ (Library 19[2018] 69–72) reveals a sixth corrected proof sheet found in The Queen’s College Library in a copy of the Folio that once belonged to David Garrick. The page (rr2(r)) joins other known corrected sheets from King Lear quire rr, the only quire with more than one extant corrected proof sheet (though Smith notes that there is little additional evidence to identify a single hand across them all). The sheet’s corrections show attention to mechanical errors as well as a clear intention to correct ‘hot-blooded France’—a standard reading in most editions—to ‘hot-bloodied France’. Brian Vickers continues to examine issues of attribution between Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare. In ‘Kyd’s Authorship of King Leir’ (SP 115[2018] 433–71) Vickers argues for Thomas Kyd as the author of the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters [1605]. Vickers applies two approaches to the task. The first, an analysis of similarities in structure and characterization between Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Leir, draws attention to shared interest in an ‘intriguer’ character who hires an assassin who is himself doomed to death once he has fulfilled his contract, a vengeful woman, and the use of comedic elements in the context of imminent death. The second approach focuses on the two plays’ use of feminine endings, pause patterns, and idiosyncratic rhyme forms identified through the use of anti-plagiarism software. In ‘Verbal Repetition in Arden of Faversham: Shakespeare or Kyd’ (N&Q 65[2018] 498–502), Vickers challenges attribution of scene 8 from Arden to Shakespeare. By citing rhetorical patterns involving ‘love’ from the earlier Kyd plays The Spanish Tragedy and The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda as evidence for Kyd’s hand over Shakespeare’s, Vickers urges scholars using databases for gathering evidence to also consider the context of these sequences within the action of the plays in which they occur. Stylistic analysis remains an active practice for attribution studies related to Shakespeare. In ‘Authorship Attribution Using Diversity Profiles’ (QLing 25[2018] 142–55) Michael Grabchak, Lijuan Cao, and Zhiyi Zhang propose a new method for testing whether two writing samples are by the same author. Observing that it is ‘essentially impossible to estimate the frequencies of rare word types accurately’ (p. 143), the authors circumvent traditional analysis of the author’s ‘word type distribution’ that focuses on determining the frequency with which an author has used a word and instead apply their stylistic analysis to summarizing word-type distribution via a measure of lexical richness. Validating their approach with a number of poems whose authorship is known (they include Shakespeare ‘poems’ embedded in plays like Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labours Lost, and The Phoenix and the Turtle), as well as four randomly chosen sonnets from Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sequence and, rather unusually, Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’, they turn their attention to ‘Shall I Die?’, a poem sometimes attributed to Shakespeare. Their conclusions are refreshingly measured, suggesting that the author of ‘Shall I Die?’ shares stylistic similarities to Shakespeare. While the mathematical discussions are tricky to visualize for the non-specialist, the thoughtful and careful readings drawn from their results offer an additional stylistic approach to authorship attribution that should be trialled further and on a larger scale. Thomas Merriam offers two short looks at stylometric analysis for authorship attribution. In ‘Henry VIII, All Is True?’ (N&Q 65[2018] 84–8) he considers the finding of the New Oxford Shakespeare that John Fletcher is the dominant author in Two Noble Kinsmen, putting forth additional passages using an additional analysis program (R Stylo). In ‘Who Did Not Compose the Original Text of Sir Thomas More?’ (N&Q 65:i[2018] 51–3) Merriam questions research attributing the primary writing of More to Thomas Munday and Henry Chettle. Hartmut Ilsemann’s ‘More News on Sir Thomas More’ (DSH 33[2018] 46–58) also challenges the received theory that Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle were the main hands in the text of More. Using Rolling Delta and Rolling Classify from the R Stylo programming suite, Ilsemann analysed W.W. Greg’s 1911 edition of the play and argues that the results eliminate Munday and Chettle as candidates in favour of Samuel Rowley and Shakespeare. In ‘What Is Lost of Shakespearean Plays, Besides a Few Titles?’ (N&Q 65[2018] 88–97), Andrew Gurr asks us to consider our knowledge of surviving plays versus lost ones by examining how we construct ‘lost plays’ from titles and existing scraps of information. With nearly one-third of plays mentioned in records surviving only in titles, the inferences we draw from these bits of information have a significant impact on our perceptions of the canon of early modern drama as a whole. Gurr encourages us to question a number of assumptions, such as that the ‘best-quality’ plays survived and only plays of poor quality were not preserved in print, cautioning against the tendency to try to connect lost plays to known ones. Gurr’s study of titles draws attention to the weight we put on word choice, reminding us that early modern members of the theatrical world were less consistent with their word choice when it came to titles—for example, between Henslowe’s Diary and references used amongst members of the Admiral’s Men. Gurr highlights a fascinating area of important work, reminding scholars of the need to carry on their enquiries with a ‘healthy scepticism’ (p. 92). From the lost to the misdated: Emma Depledge’s fascinating and carefully researched article ‘False Dating: The Case of the 1676 Hamlet Quartos’ (PBSA 112[2018] 183–99) reveals a new instance of false dating for a quarto of Hamlet. Conventionally known as Q7 and often referred to as William Davenant’s or Thomas Betterton’s Hamlet because they are believed responsible for the cuts to this text, this quarto bears the date 1676. Using a combination of evidence from the late seventeenth century book trade, including typography and watermarks, Depledge convincingly argues that the quarto actually dates from 1683–4. This positions it enticingly as the first Shakespeare publication of Jacob Tonson. Beyond these revelations, the article is also valuable for its discussion of the circumstances that led to the use of the false date. A lapse and then reinstatement of the Licensing Act seems to have created a bit of a scramble to claim authority over texts. Noting how the preliminaries of the quarto are printed on a different paper than the rest of the play, Depledge suggests that the change was a tactical move to separate this text from another edition currently in circulation—a jockeying for position that suggests Hamlet was a popular and profitable commodity in the book market at the time. The research is meticulously carried out and convincingly and clearly conveyed, offering an additional example of the wealth of knowledge of the book trade to be gained from this era of Shakespeare in print. 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre Indira Ghose’s Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Writing balances an easy-going critical style with some real perspicacity. Her discussion is precise and concise, and she deftly provides the cultural context required in order to make sense of now outmoded behavioural codes such as early modern notions of honour, masculine supremacy, or sprezzatura, codes which inform performative interpretations at every stage. Ghose separates the spoken registers of Beatrice and Benedick from that of the courtiers and so suggests that they are dislocated from the prevailing superficiality of Messina: ‘The play presents a world of glittering surfaces and exquisite social performances in a society that clearly sets great store by style and fashion’ (p. 142). In spite of the ubiquity of this atmosphere of triviality, Ghose is keen to draw her reader’s attention to the seriousness of failing to comply with codes of honour. She notes throughout a language associated with ‘ensnaring birds and beasts’ (p. 93), hunting, fishing, and predation. This, she argues, is articulated in relation to the patriarchal norms of early modern society, and she is unflinching in her condemnation of Claudio’s misogynistic world-view, according to which, ‘women are inherently deceitful temptresses who threaten the true ties of male friendship’ (p. 104). The exceptionalism of Benedick suggests to Ghose that his abandonment of the homosociality offered by Claudio and Don Pedro is ‘the most courageous stance against the dominant code of honour offered by the play’ (p. 134). Indeed, the usual casting of Benedick as middle-aged and Claudio as a younger man underlines the degree to which Benedick is taking on an adversary who is more than well equipped to make mincemeat of him. Callow and easily influenced Claudio may be, but he is (in most productions) physically in a position to defeat his older challenger with ease. Ghose draws our attention to the apparently aleatoric nature of Messina, in which deceptions happen almost incidentally: ‘For no clear reason, when wooing Hero for Claudio, Don Pedro pretends he is Claudio; for no clear reason, when approached by Don John and Borachio, Claudio pretends to be Benedick; for no clear reason, Don John pretends to Claudio and his brother that Hero is disloyal’ (p. 142). There is, in this description of the play’s randomness, a sense of the play-world’s urgent and arbitrary spite. Indeed, as Ghose points out, its obsession with gossip, rumour, and jealousy links Much Ado with the altogether darker Othello and The Winter’s Tale. Ghose’s pithy monograph finishes with a nimble discussion of metatheatricality. Incisively, she notes that what the Dons John and Pedro share is ‘a pleasure in deploying theatrical devices as a tool of power’ (p. 148). Suffused into the texture of the play are a number of metatheatrical double-takes, such as when Beatrice prompts Claudio: ‘Speak, Count, ’tis your cue’ (II.i.286) or when Benedick fills the Prince’s silence following the revelation that Claudio is in love, ‘With who? Now that is your grace’s part’ (I.i.199). The effect of these moments, as well as the entire masque scene, is to highlight ‘the fact that we are in the theatre watching a play’ (p. 154). This is an elegant and engaging monograph. Robert Shaughnessy’s tidy monograph, As You Like It: Shakespeare in Performance, is conscious of the challenges of theatre history, and his closing chapter is a recognition of the immersion of the performance specialist in his/her scholarship. With idiosyncratic specificity, Shaughnessy recounts a visit (on Thursday, 3 September 2015) to the Southwark Globe to see As You Like It. But his account of the production, which he describes as ‘routine and unexceptional’ (p. 204), is of secondary importance to his thick description of the experience as a whole—meeting his friend Amy, bumping into his friend Paul, an account of his attire, and even of eating his sandwiches! The paradox of theatre history is its illusion of objectivity in spite of the immanence of the scholar in the very process of recording and evaluating the theatre work in question. It is an immanence both ineluctable and inescapable, and while the content of Shaughnessy’s lunch is less than interesting, his inclusion of its being eaten underlines the subjectivity of the discipline: as he puts it in his introduction, ‘This story, at the end of the day, is mine’ (p. 8). Reviewers can only record impressions, and theirs is an opinion no more reliable or ‘truthful’ (whatever that means) than that of the person sitting (or standing at the Globe) next to them. The other long recognized but stubbornly unsolvable problem facing the theatre historian is the absence of the work itself. While Shaughnessy has done his best to revisit long-vanished productions via recordings held in archives, he readily confesses that theatrical access to these productions is long gone and the traces left by programmes, reviews, prompt books, and so on, while always inadequate, are sometimes the best we can do. In the case of productions from a pre-digital age, the theatre historian is stymied by the inaccessibility of the performance; in a digital age, on the contrary, the sheer tidal wave of material threatens to overwhelm the reviewer: ‘a vast, dispersed repository of traces of performance remediated, recirculated and restaged on a diversity of platforms’ (p. 96). Shaughnessy goes on to suggest that a full study of a production ought to examine ‘the wider conversations that it has initiated and participated in, the views and reactions of those among the communities of users whose views are minimally sampled here, the educational resources that it has generated, and the ancillary workshop activities that have accompanied it’ (p. 96). One reasonable response to all this might be that life is just too short. While it is true that members of an audience can take to the airwaves (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to express opinions without even waiting for the show to end, is it really the case that all of these squibs need to be taken into account? Is more always better? These methodological questions have not evaded Shaughnessy but answers to them—unsurprisingly—have. In spite of Shaughnessy’s eloquent discussion of these theoretical problems, the book is, in the main, a traditionally chronological account of fifteen productions from that in Stratford, directed by Nigel Playfair in 1919, to 2015’s Globe production, directed by Blanche McIntyre. Along the way the film and TV versions (from that of Paul Czinner (Inter-Allied Film, 1936) to Kenneth Branagh’s (BBC/HBO, 2006)) are also analysed. Obviously some performances get more airtime than others and there are particularly detailed accounts of Vanessa Redgrave’s Rosalind (directed by Michael Elliot in 1962–3) and Richard Pasco’s Jaques (directed by Buzz Goodbody in 1973). Shaughnessy includes astute accounts of two all-male stage versions: that directed in 1967–9 by Clifford Williams for the National and Cheek by Jowl’s production of 1991 (reprised in 1994–5) directed by Declan Donnellan. Shaughnessy is especially good on the awkwardnesses of the National version’s sexuality, interpreting the reviewers’ indifference to the production’s eroticism as an inhibition more to do with their own cultural place than the production’s neutrality though, rightly, he adds the caveat: ‘It is not for me to challenge the testimony of the reviewers (they were there; I was not), but…’ (p. 140). Again, the complexity of the performance historian’s task is foregrounded. Of the Cheek by Jowl production, Shaughnessy notes how confusions of sex and gender were intensified by a racial dimension: ‘The reviewers’ challenges were exacerbated by the casting of [Adrian] Lester; a black male actor, in what to date had in the UK been an exclusively white woman’s role. Lester’s Rosalind was a key moment in the history of colour-blind casting’ (p. 151). Shaughnessy has written an engaging and incisive volume. It comprises more a series of detailed close readings than any overarching thesis, though obvious themes—sexuality, setting, rural poverty—reappear. But it is through his constant self-awareness as a spectator of but also as a participant in the viewing/re-viewing/reviewing process that he raises the most interesting, abiding, and complicated questions. Shaughnessy’s anxiety about the volume of online reviewing and ancillary material which, he maintains, needs to be taken into account, pales into insignificance compared to the concerns, ethical and even legal, raised by Erin Sullivan in her account of two productions staged through social media. ‘Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere: Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 64–79) recounts the ‘social media re-imaginings’ (p. 64) of Romeo [2010] and Dream [2013], the former over Twitter and the latter over site-specific performances with pictures and video uploaded onto Google+. The various digital exchanges that followed included the invention of new characters such as Mrs Snug, Bottom’s Mum, and a Dancing Bear, though Sullivan has to concede of the latter that ‘The point of the Bear was that there was no point’ (p. 75). Predictably, perhaps, theatre critics were less than hospitable. Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian described the project: ‘persons of little wit and scant information clogging up your life with a constant stream of misspelt inanity’ (cited on p. 67). Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph: ‘Bard rigid and wondering what the Puck was going on’ (cited on p. 70). Sullivan, however, is less hostile: ‘Despite criticism from its more established theatre reviewers, for many audience members the project was an intriguing and welcome endeavour’ (p. 68). But Sullivan is also rightly cautious about the ethical difficulties raised by such audience interaction. She notes that Mercutio’s tweets included references to ‘Big breasted nympho’s [sic]’ (p. 67)—touching that she felt it necessary to point out the misplaced apostrophe. Elsewhere Romeo and Mercutio played a game of ‘hashtag uploadthatload’ in which ‘they challenged audience members and one another to snap pictures of women’s cleavage without their knowledge’ (p. 76). At this point Sullivan draws the line, noting that the production/game had ‘entered the very real world of online bullying and sexual harassment’ (p. 76). The projects, both co-produced by the RSC, may appeal to a wider, younger, and more ethnically diverse audience but the risks are not insignificant and, as Sullivan concludes, a little disappointedly perhaps, ‘at some point we have to accept that the actors act, and the spectators spectate’ (p. 76). Hear, hear! In ‘Translating Shakespeare into Postwar French Culture: The Origins of the Avignon Festival’ (ShakS 46[2018] 59–69), Florence March demonstrates the centrality of the festival’s founding director, Jean Vilar (1912–71), and the manner in which he ‘turned to Shakespeare to question the theatrical medium, his own artistic practice, and his project for Avignon’ (p. 67). Like the French Shakespeare Society (founded in 1919 by Firmin Gémier), the festival was, in part, a vehicle through which Anglo-French relations would be reinforced. Whereas the society arose in response to the Great War, the festival followed hot on the heels of the Second World War, producing its first season in 1947 with Vilar’s own production of Richard II. March notes the appropriateness of this choice of play for the following reasons: it had never been produced in France before (so Vilar was able to commission a new translation), likewise the Pope’s Palace was being used for the first time, and ‘the play’s epic dimension appropriately matched the monumental venue’ (p. 60). Furthermore, the play, replete with chivalric language and gesture, ‘served Vilar’s intention to ritualize the theatre’ (p. 60) and develop a new relationship with his audience. Vilar’s instincts were proved correct and Richard II was produced again in 1948, 1949, and 1953. Indeed, March argues, ‘Over the years, Richard II has become the play through which the development of the Vilarian project for Avignon is regularly assessed’ (p. 61). Intriguingly, March goes on to show Vilar’s dislike of Hamlet and his reluctance to stage it, citing his own purported self-mocking epitaph: ‘Here lies the only French director that never staged Hamlet’ (p. 63). But it was staged, in Maurice Claudel’s adaptation, La Terrasse de midi, and March concludes her engaging essay with a sense of the production’s historical importance: ‘By negotiating with two Shakespearean texts in its first iteration, the Avignon Festival hinged its ambitious project on cultural translation as a key contribution to a new socio-political order in postwar France’ (p. 68). Jean Vilar also appears in Janice Valls-Russell’s account of the cultural revivification of post-Second World War France and the culture populaire, the residual influence of which remains in stark contrast to the UK’s legacy of austerity, left in the wake of Thatcherism, and the continued cultural vandalism of successive Conservative governments. In ‘Footsbarn: Relocating Shakespeare in Molière’s France’ (CahiersE 96[2018] 117–30) Valls-Russell charts the emigration of the company from its native Cornwall to the Massif Central in the early 1980s. Gallic cultural politics ‘favoured Footsbarn’s move’ (p. 118) and the company ethos, which welcomes travel (with multi-national casts), theatrical experimentation, and egalitarianism (productions have no director), was heavily influenced by the École Internationale de Mime et de Théâtre of Jacques Lecoq. Valls-Russell enthuses about Footsbarn’s achievements in ‘seeking to convey emotion in a celebration of togetherness, onstage and off, that implied embracing all art forms, an approach reinforced through touring and adapting to new audiences’ (p. 119). Perhaps ironically, France’s Ministry of Culture subsidized Footsbarn’s English tour in 1991, though the critics were less than welcoming. Valls-Russell suggests that the episode marked ‘the divide between the cultural establishments’ of the UK and the rest of the Continent. ‘France’, she concludes, ‘henceforth, was really home’ (p. 121). This is an excellent and important essay which seeks to chart the comparative cultural impoverishment of the UK against more enlightened environments: Footsbarn and its audiences ‘reject the idea that [a] globalized, market economy should dictate their cultural fare and believe that, more than ever, Europe needs travelling players to help counter inward-looking ideologies’ (p. 127). As we head towards the cultural wilderness of post-Brexit and hostile-environment Britain, we would do well to mark Valls-Russell’s words. Holger Schott Syme voices his reservations about the capacity of theatrical reconstructions to reproduce the effects of an early modern performance. His ‘Pastiche or Archetype? The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the Project of Theatrical Reconstruction’ (ShS 71[2018] 135–46) rejects the possibility that such reconstructions can close the gap between ‘400-year-old plays’ (p. 135) and a twenty-first-century audience. Rhetorically he asks, ‘can we distance ourselves from our modern responses to what we are witnessing in this theatre sufficiently to gain a sense of how those same effects might have affected an early modern audience?’ (p. 145). His argument relies upon two principles—first that the drawings of Inigo Jones’s Blackfriars Theatre (resident at Worcester College, Oxford) are neither by Jones nor of the Blackfriars but are likely to be those of John Webb and, in any case, to date from the late 1640s, possibly even the Restoration. Moreover, ‘the drawings did not depict a structure that could have been built as drawn’ (p. 139, emphasis in original). Syme demonstrates that Jacobean playhouses were much larger than the Wanamaker playhouse so that ‘in a space nearly twice the size of the Wanamaker lights would surely have quite different effects’ (p. 142). Acoustics, music, blocking, etc. would also be subject to the same reservations. Secondly, based on the four productions Syme has seen in the space, he concludes that modern acting styles and deployment of the stage took advantage of the theatre’s performance space: ‘In other words, all four used the Wanamaker as the Wanamaker (not as an archetype of a 400-year-old mode of indoor theatre), approaching the venue from the perspective of contemporary performers rather than that of participants in an experiment in reconstruction’ (p. 143, emphasis in original). While Syme is positively glowing about the aesthetics of the Wanamaker—‘obviously a gorgeous theatre’ (p. 136)—it is so in its own right rather than as a pastiche or archetype of a Jacobean theatre: ‘in observing performances at the Wanamaker, how can we know that something we find remarkable is not just a feature of the Wanamaker?’ (p. 145, emphasis in original). Those who fetishize original practices and the certainties of theatrical archaeology would do well to read this persuasive essay. Another theatrical reconstruction is the focus of Michiko Suematsu’s account of touring Shakespeare productions to the Japanese capital. ‘A Catalyst for Theatrical Reinvention: Contemporary Travelling Companies at the Tokyo Globe Theatre’ (ShS 71[2018] 46–50) documents the arrival of touring Shakespeare between the opening of the Tokyo Globe in 1988 and its demise in 2002, when its main sponsor, Panasonic, withdrew support following the economic stagnation of Japan in the 1990s. British theatre companies that repeatedly visited the Globe included the RSC, the National, Renaissance, Compass, Cheek by Jowl, Watermill, Nottingham Playhouse, and Shared Experience. Paradoxically, this inundation allowed Japanese audiences to witness a variety of production styles which served to liberate ‘the Japanese from the century-long servitude to the authority and authenticity of the West’ (p. 49). Indeed, the construction of the theatre itself had ‘challenged cultural assumptions regarding the West’s ownership of Shakespeare’ (p. 49). Suematsu’s opening sentence is ‘Travelling companies are culturally out-of-place’ (p. 46), but it was this very deracination that, she argues, served to open up Shakespeare’s plurality to Japanese audiences, ‘not exclusive to cultural elites but open to the general public’ (p. 49). Thus, she concludes, ‘travelling companies at the Tokyo Globe Theatre collectively allowed Japanese Shakespeare finally to break away from its servitude to the authority of Western models and the illusion of homogeneous British Shakespeare or any one culture’s Shakespeare’ (p. 50). Andrew Hartley’s impassioned account of his residence as ‘live-in dramaturg’ (p. 65) with student theatre in North Carolina raises some intriguing questions. ‘Mixing Memory with Desire: Staging Hamlet Q1’ (ShS 71[2018] 65–73) recounts the 2015 production of the ‘bad’ quarto and the ways in which assumptions about its inferiority measured up to what Lawrence Toppman (a local journalist) calls the ‘version we know’ (p. 65). Hartley states: ‘we chose Q1 because we thought it would be easier for undergraduate actors, less cluttered, less obscure in its references, and less weighed down by intimidating cultural baggage’ (p. 71). Without missing a beat, he continues, ‘We were wrong in every respect.’ Q1 is obviously shorter and more simple than the other Hamlets but, argues Hartley, its narrative lacunae and its rough prosody present different kinds of difficulty. Rather, Hartley opines, what makes Q1 work in performance is precisely its lack of Hamletic qualities—overly pensive interior monologues, extensive philosophizing, and so on. Indeed, this sense of rapidity renders it particularly suitable to young adult actors: ‘The text of Q1, like its protagonist and our adolescent actors, is confused, impetuous, passionate and absolute’ (p. 72). Hartley is pleasantly surprised by the challenge to his assumptions about Shakespeare’s most culturally embedded play: ‘the staging of the Q1 text takes Shakespeare’s standing, his genius, and troubles it in the most immediate and visceral way, unravelling much of the narrative tapestry of artistic greatness and the ambient glow in which some of the cultural elite are pleased to bask’ (p. 73). Therefore, he concludes, the ‘staging of “bad” quartos is a political act, like the telling of stories from outside the canon or productions that challenge the canon from the perspectives of those marginalised by it’. For all Hartley’s insider knowledge of the processes and effects of amateur staging, I’m not convinced by this last claim. After all, Q1 is still Shakespearean in reputation (whether or not the playwright actually authored all of it or not) so its theatrical promulgation is not really usurping the canonical centrality of the Bard. This is a thoughtful and refreshingly empirical essay but, perhaps, in its claim to Q1’s subversive promise, Hartley is protesting too much. Hartley’s essay is followed in the same volume by another account of an American ‘take’ on Shakespeare in Carla Della Gatta’s ‘Shakespeare, Race and “Other” Englishes: The Q Brothers’ Othello: the Remix’ (ShS 71[2018] 74–87). ‘Hip hop is aural and visual, and it is racially charged. So, what then is hip hop Shakespeare?’ (p. 77). By way of answering that question Della Gatta documents the appearance of the Q Brothers’ adaptation of Othello at the Globe to Globe Festival in 2012. She points out that the hip-hop version shared a good number of theatrical features with the performances of early modern England: ‘its use of a stylized, fast-paced, contemporary English, dozens of current cultural references, a remaking of an older tale, actors in multiple roles, men (though not boys) playing women, audience address, pre-show musical entertainment, a short rehearsal time, a collaborative playwrighting style, and more than enough bawdiness to keep the groundlings entertained’ (p. 78). The production raised some awkward questions—for instance, about the masculinity of hip hop, which went largely unchallenged as the Desdemona character never appeared but was heard from off-stage: ‘The absent Desdemona and the “sassy” Latina Bianca proved problematic for some viewers due to the fraternal aspect of the Q Brothers’ performance and hip hop’s history as a male-dominated genre’ (p. 81). Perhaps most notable is the degree to which hip hop is self-reflexive, pondering its own cultural position and political potentialities: ‘Othello: The Remix was an internationally commissioned production that told a Shakespearian story through hip hop in order to perform the history of the commodification of hip hop’ (p. 84). Not so much hip hop as meta-hip hop, a self-consciousness that makes it more than passingly Shakespearean. ‘[E]arly modern drama is always “metatheatrical” to some extent’ (p. 19), advances Stephen Purcell in an essay which goes on usefully to complicate this apparently self-evident truth. ‘Are Shakespeare’s Plays Always Metatheatrical?’ (ShakB 36[2018] 19–35) produces some sensible and intelligible principles such as, ‘Shakespeare’s characters know they are in a play: they could not talk to us if they did not’ (p. 21). This self-awareness distinguishes them from other more naturalistic characters who—nonetheless—have frequent recourse to the metaphor of the theatre (Purcell uses the counter-example of Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, for instance). Purcell notes the audience’s capacity to see both performer and performed character simultaneously: ‘for the duration of the performance … the stage figure is perceptible as both Hamlet and Olivier at once’ (p. 23). The fictional world of the play (that of Hamlet) Purcell, drawing on the vocabulary of Arthur Koestler, calls the ‘Then and There’, while the actual performance/performer occupies the ‘Now and Here’. Self-conscious metatheatrical moments are those at which these two planes intersect in ‘bisociative collisions’ (p. 29). In this way the metatheatrical stage figure is characterized by ‘liminality’ (p. 31). The deployment of technical vocabulary (as the above account demonstrates) is occasionally a little heavy-handed. Much better is when Purcell, with his characteristic lively eye on performance details, outlines an example. He cites the box tree scene from Twelfth Night: ‘We enjoy the scene for its audacity in openly stretching our credulity, extending the play of the “Here and Now” while pushing the “Then and There” further and further towards a breaking point at which the fiction will collapse into nonsense’ (p. 30). Purcell is also rightly adamant about the degree to which such metatheatrical moments necessitate the presence of an audience in this ‘imaginative game’ (p. 19), and his essay concludes by insisting on the collaborative spirit in which such a game needs to be played: ‘Metatheatre is a game that is, in many cases, invited by the text, but one that can be played only in performance’ (p. 33). Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin contribute more of a note than an article to Shakespeare Survey. Their ‘Arab Shakespeares at the World Shakespeare Congress’ (ShS 71[2018] 35–8) is a mere four pages, but, importantly, it sets on record the current state of play (as at 2016’s Congress) in Arab Shakespeare studies—a field that takes as its point of origin the Arab Shakespeare seminar at Brisbane’s WSC in 2006, which Litvin chaired. The study of Arab Shakespeare offers, the authors argue, ‘Western scholars and audiences a way to understand Arab artists’ work as well as their lives’ (p. 37). Still in its comparative infancy, Arab Shakespeare studies provides ‘the opportunity to shape, intervene in, and contribute to a swiftly expanding field’ (p. 38). Evelyn Tribble’s field of study is not geographically but temporally distant. She insists that the past is a different country and that while theatrical archaeology and original practices might hint at performance choices of the past, modern acting styles militate against ‘unseemly, overly external or demonstrative’ (p. 147) acting. Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body [2017] considers gesture, stage combat, and dancing as constituents of a ‘kinesic intelligence’ (p. 11), now lost along with Elizabethan social norms, history, and habitus. The book is part of a contemporary rethinking of the body as historically implicated rather than ahistorically essential or merely biological. In the case of dance, for instance, Tribble writes: ‘The kinesic intelligence honed by training in dance was tightly linked to that fostered through the mastery of gesture, horsemanship and fencing, a kind of conduit of mindful movement encompassing mind, body and environment’ (p. 102). Tribble cites Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir John Davies as authorities for the dance as symbolic of harmony and humanist illumination, and there is a good deal of force to her suggestion that dance ‘is a way of being in the world, a way of social coordination and movement through space’ (p. 115). Similar claims are made for the language of gesture, which she describes as a ‘distinctively kinesic intelligence brought to bear by the actor upon his part’ (p. 29). Occasionally her vocabulary and expression become theoretically top-heavy: ‘different ecologies of skill’ (p. 148), ‘the kinaesthetic melody of walking is often outside of focal awareness, or pre-noetic’ (p. 48), the practice of gesturing ‘is in fact embedded, embodied and extended; it is a complex cognitive intersubjective act that imaginatively constitutes an audience’ (p. 33). But in general this is a persuasive thesis which demonstrates the degree to which apparently neutral and ostensibly natural bodily practices, especially when staged, are actually encompassed round about by social and historical contingencies. The implication of this is that modern reconstructions of Elizabethan performance practice are little more than best guesses and, indeed, Tribble doesn’t pull her punches: ‘collisions (sometimes productive, sometimes less so) occur between contemporary practices, assumptions and habits and the past practices that are invoked or imitated’ (p. 149). They do do things differently there. Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir John Davies also figure in Andrew Hiscock’s superb account of the historical context surrounding the pros (philosophical, humanist, harmonious) and cons (lascivious, subversive, licentious) of the Elizabethan dance. ‘“Come, now a roundel and a fairy song”: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Early Modern Invitation to the Dance’ (CahiersE 97[2018] 39–68), like Tribble’s study above, focuses on the dance but the discussion here is much more historically concerned than Tribble’s and considers the dance’s dramatic effect on Shakespeare’s rural comedy: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws more variously upon the resources of dance than any of its counterparts in the Shakespearean canon’ (p. 54). Hiscock describes the metaphysical significance of harmonious movement and the manner in which it serves as ‘a ritualized agency that exists beyond the realm of the spoken word’ (p. 41). Its semiotics are not straightforward, and he shows how they are invested with a signification which is almost talismanic: ‘dance may offer an alternative mode of communication and exchange to the written or printed script’ (p. 43). But Hiscock is also alert to the rabidly dance-phobic discourse of the period, ‘often much influenced by the sermons of Calvin’ (p. 49). Typical here is Phillip Stubbes: ‘Euery leap or skip in dance, is a leap toward hel’ (cited on p. 59). This Manichaean attitude towards the dance remains unresolved in the play and so, Hiscock suggests, ‘Shakespeare’s comedy urges audiences again and again to consider the ways in which dance might enhance, challenge and/or thwart social exchange in a dramatic world subject to a host of contrary motions’ (p. 53). This is a thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully fluent essay. Graham Bradshaw’s tantalizing title is unfortunately never adequately addressed. ‘Why Is Shakespeare the World’s Most-Performed Dramatist?’ (ShIntY 17[2018] 17–33) involves an account of the Nazi deployment of The Merchant of Venice as well as a contextualization of the legal definitions of incest in the Elizabethan period (in order to determine Gertrude’s culpability). Bradshaw eliminates the poetic achievements of Shakespeare as an explanation of his popularity and settles instead for a moral neutrality which keeps his audience guessing: ‘Shakespeare constantly “frames” and complicates the issues that excite us, without taking sides or offering gestures of authorial solidarity’ (p. 21). This is—although he is not mentioned—really just another articulation of Keats’s insistence on Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’. Perceptively, Bradshaw does note how critics’ insistence on plucking out the heart of Shakespeare’s mystery goes completely against the grain of the playwright’s creative imagination: ‘the plays are orchestrating the very debates that critics then want to resolve’ (p. 22, emphases in original). But the lack of coherence throughout and a missing conclusion suggest that this essay is work in progress. It poses an enormous and important question but never adequately gets round to answering it. The Merchant of Venice also forms the focus of Boika Sokolova’s moving and thoroughly researched essay at the end of which she encapsulates the moral imperative of performance histories of this particular play in a post-Holocaust world: ‘Too many figures in the European carpet look like skulls, too much history pushes under the masks of our civilization, and productions reverberate with these tensions’ (p. 102). ‘“Mingled Yarn”: The Merchant of Venice East of Berlin and the Legacy of “Eastern Europe”’ (ShS 71[2018] 88–102) considers the degree to which the play was virtually non-existent in communist regimes following the Second World War. In Russia, for instance, ‘Stalinist terror, along with the lightly veiled anti-Semitism of the regime, made the play toxic, and theatres avoided it long after Stalin’s death’ (pp. 89–90). Between 1920 and 1991 there were no Russian productions at all. However, during ‘the last twenty-five years, the play has experienced something of a performance renaissance’ (p. 91). Sokolova considers productions from Sofia (dir. Zdravko Mitkov, 1992); Budapest (dir. Robert Alföldi, 1998); Moscow (dir. Andrey Zhitinkin, 1999; dir. Robert Sturua, 2000); Yugoslavia (dir. Egon Savin, 2004) and Poland (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski, 2011). Some of these, notably the last, are complete rewrites while others (such as Sturua’s) are surrealist adaptations. Throughout, Sokolova is not only an assiduously detailed observer and reporter of stage action but she is alert to the contextual implications of particular staging decisions and the complicated relationships between such decisions and their wider cultural situation. For instance, Zhitinkin’s production was staged in the context of ‘the malaise of ingrained Russian xenophobia vis-à-vis the current ethnic conflicts in Russia’ (p. 96). Warlikowski’s production ‘entered another debate: the national soul-searching related to Poland’s relationship with its Jews during the Holocaust’ (p. 99). Alföldi’s production ‘embraced the abrasive theatricality typical of the 1990s. Aggressive and discomforting on many levels, his production provocatively drew the audience into moments of complicity with the onstage acts of anti-Semitism’ (p. 94). Sokolova’s superb essay reminds us that the scholar, as well as the director, is responsible for promulgating readings of these plays which continue to influence and be influenced by their cultural, political, and social situations. We should be grateful to her for such a powerfully articulated instance of these responsibilities. In ‘Wonder and Nostalgia in Hamlet’ (SEL 58[2018] 353–72), Judith H. Anderson examines the linked occurrences of both emotions throughout the play but notably at its beginning and ending. The word nostalgia, while it does not appear in the play, is nonetheless, she argues, a powerful idea. The term derives from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘a return homeward’, and Anderson suggests that Hamlet’s nostalgic affection is articulated towards his alma mater rather than Denmark. She describes how nostalgia figures at the centre of a number of debates in contemporary journalism, classical studies, and psychological theory. (Not all of this material, it must be said, is of immediate relevance to Hamlet.) Intriguingly she goes on to note that the word hamlet, meaning ‘a small settlement or village’, is current in Elizabethan as well as modern English and so ‘Hamlet’s name has a clear connection to a living place, a home’ (p. 361). Anderson’s other key term, wonder, is recognized from ancient times as ‘the motivation for understanding’ (p. 357). Hamlet’s curiosity is instrumental in its ubiquity throughout the play. This is a delicately poised essay and Anderson is a sensitive commentator on the play’s instabilities: ‘Nothing in Hamlet or in the developing play that bears his name is simple or remains unqualified for long’ (p. 365). In ‘Playing Judge: The End-Games of King Lear’ (ShJE 154[2018] 74–91), Elizabeth Hodgson demonstrates how the apocalyptic tone of the play is implicated in its fascination with trial, judgement, and punishment. Hodgson explains that ‘By emphasizing that humans will be judged by God in the future based on their current actions, apocalyptic narratives thus force their hearers both to feel and to behave in response to this uncertain but definitive future’ (p. 77). Hodgson describes how John Northbrooke, Stephen Gosson, Thomas Beard, Thomas Lodge, and other anti-theatricalists argued that apocalyptic language acted as a pollutant on its audiences, seducing and corrupting spectators into bogus sympathy for the suffering protagonists. Hodgson insists that the theatre is analogous to the courtroom and that ‘in both a central authority observes performances, weighs evidence and determines the actors’ fates’ (p. 82). Shakespeare’s play allows the audience not only more awareness than any of the characters within its own narrative but an awareness of that awareness. In this way, the ‘theatre of judgement is at the core of King Lear, and its display focuses on the central question of how real the feelings are that the actors claim, generating at several key moments a meta-dramatic scepticism about how the artifice of the stage could possibly generate spontaneous audience sympathy or corrupt susceptible viewers. These minor betrayals and errors are the ethical failures which both define and are defined by the play’s doomsday scenery’ (p. 85). This is a powerful and intriguing article which explores the ethical and intellectual weight of the play’s ‘theatrical opacity’ (p. 84). 3. Shakespeare on Screen It has been a quiet year, with the publication of just one edited collection alongside a modest number of journal articles examining Shakespeare on screen. Stephen O’Neill’s Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change across Media is a collection of essays examining older media (such as radio and television) and newer media (such as YouTube) and considering how the connections ‘reflect the condition of the contemporary mediascape as comprising a variety of coexisting media technologies and platforms that remediate aspects of each other and perform their social functions’ (p. 3). O’Neill introduces the volume by signalling a wish to engage with a second understanding of ‘broadcast’, which is to ‘sow by scattering’. The agricultural term ‘establishes a key dynamic about the relation between the human user and media’ (p. 4) in order to raise questions about the production and consumption of Shakespeare. Fundamentally ‘Broadcast’ is presented as ‘a conceptual tool and critical paradigm that understands Shakespeare as a complex, multifaceted dynamic comprising texts, users and media’ (p. 22). The volume is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Part I focuses on ‘The Politics of Broadcast(ing) Shakespeare’ and begins with Darlena Ciraulo’s article: ‘Broadcasting Censorship: Hollywood’s Production Code and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (pp. 27–45). The ‘dynamic’ emphasized here is one which involves ‘the cinematic medium, industry, regulators and of course Shakespeare’ (p. 45). Ciraulo details the ways in which Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1935] needed to conform to the Production Code developed by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America under the leadership of Will Hays. A year earlier Warner Brothers Studio had illustrated ‘Shakespeare’s marketability’ (p. 34) in a twenty-minute short, Shake, Mr Shakespeare [1934]. That piece celebrated motion pictures and chimed with the way that censorship of the industry signalled ‘film’s powerful ability to shape viewpoints and mould thought and behaviour’ (p. 54). Ciraulo identifies objections that were raised to the film of Dream and grants significant space to Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood, a play which was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and premiered in America in 2003, and the analysis points out the puzzling detail that the PCA’s ‘objections were eventually lifted without explanation’ (p. 39). Accordingly, greatest space is granted in Ciraulo’s argument to the film’s ‘critique of artistic and political oppression’ (p. 45) so that a recognition of movies as ‘a vehicle for innovative, state-of-the-art communication’ coexists with an ‘ability to provide global amusement’ (p. 45). In Part II, ‘Genre and Audience’, Christy Desmet examines ‘Emo Hamlet: Locating Shakespearean Affect in Social Media’ (pp. 107–22). Context for the ‘emo Hamlet’s swings between explosive emotion and silent withdrawal’ is provided with the performance tradition spanning from Garrick to Olivier. Desmet argues that the theatrical tradition coheres in ‘the sullen teen prince’ of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet [2000]: ‘Ethan Hawke’s prince epitomises the awkward moody adolescent of emo culture’ (p. 108). Desmet’s focus, however, is on the ways that the role features in social media in 2016, and her frame of reference ranges across DeviantArt, Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook. The suggestion is that ‘Disaffected, disconnected, disenchanted, emo Hamlet reflects the state of social media in the age of platform proliferation’ (p. 114). More positively, the social media phenomenon of emo Hamlet ‘points us towards the transformation of emotion (as the possession of individuals) into affect (feeling distributed socially along webs and networks) in the new media’ (p. 114). Desmet develops her argument by considering theorists of affect on social media in order to suggest that the ‘“in-between” character of affect that moves between minds and bodies like music is particularly applicable to the ethos of emo culture, in that its participants, despite their stance of social alienation, congregate in groups’ (p. 118). The argument culminates with attention to versions of music videos that evoke emo culture, and detailed analysis is given of a range of parodies of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ and of Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ (p. 120), and concludes in suggesting that ‘emo Hamlet has become the emblem for Shakespeare in the age of social media, as both an object of mourning and satire’ (p. 122). The opening article in Part II, ‘Broadcast the Self: Celebrity and Identity’, identifies a shift in the dominant form for adapting Shakespeare: ‘Vlogging the Bard: Serialization, Social Media, Shakespeare’ (pp. 185–206). One of its priorities is ‘the distinctiveness of media effects’ (p. 22), and it seeks to prompt its readers to ‘arrive at a productive understanding of Shakespeare as a mutable process rather than something static’ (p. 23). Douglas Lanier notes the shift from the popularity of the teen Shakespeare film at the beginning of the twenty-first century to the current boom area of the Shakespeare web series where, in 2015, Shakespeare became the ‘single most popular source for literary web series’ (p. 188). These video blogs adapt Shakespeare’s texts across multiple media channels at once (such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr). A key element of many of these series is the interactive opportunities that they offer viewers. Lanier’s interest lies in the ways that the Shakespearean narrative is drawn ‘more fully into the social dynamics of online teen culture’ (p. 190). Connections with television practices are drawn, but there is also a pragmatic reason noted for the tendency towards serialization: ‘The reigning measure of popularity and thus success on YouTube is number of views’ (p. 192). In considering the style of the vlogs, Lanier observes that ‘the characters of these series understand the camera not just as a recording device but as a vehicle for social relations’ (p. 195). In conclusion Lanier considers the “reality effect” of the blog format (p. 199), which gives ‘this adaptation format a particular cultural authority’ (p. 200). The article celebrates the form as ‘a new mode of Shakespearean storytelling’ (p. 202). A number of journal articles embrace novelty in their consideration of films that have received very little critical attention. Kinga Földváry examines the influence of Hamlet on Miklós Jancsó’s 1981 film: ‘The Tyrant’s Heart: Hungarian Pseudo-History in a Pseudo-Shakespearean Adaptation’ (JAFP 11[2018] 153–64). The film’s subtitle is Boccaccio in Hungary, and the connection with Boccaccio is shown to be multi-layered; further levels are added when considering the way Hamlet resonates with engagement with the ancient Greek mythological story of Electra. Another strand in Földváry’s argument is in unpicking the ‘vague and confusing references to Hungarian history’ (p. 157). The article is framed by an interest in Jancsó as an auteur and, as the title signals, Földváry’s film typifies the way that Jancsó ‘adapts, modifies and rewrites his sources to create a whole that is so much his own that it easily eludes the grasp of the literal-minded viewer’ (p. 161). Földváry develops this point to consider evasion of the censor, and it is the film’s political message that has particular weight. Agnieszka Rasmus examines Justin Kurzel’s 2015 Macbeth by placing it alongside Roman Polanski’s 1971 film: ‘What Bloody Film Is This? Macbeth For Our Time’ (MultSh 18[2018] 115–28). The analysis makes use of images from the recent Macbeth set alongside other mainstream films in order to show how, through ‘its subtle visual allusion to the imagery we have come to associate with the Middle East, it is a painful reminder that what we watch is … a conflict that touches us all’ (p. 121). The universalism of Rasmus’s article contrasts with the geographical specificity of Su Mei Kok’s analysis: ‘Malaysian Moors: Ethnicity, Speech, and Identity in Jarum Halus (2008)’ (ShakB 36[2018] 225–50). The Malaysian context for Mark Tan’s film is one in which Shakespeare has little popular appeal, in part because of an association with colonial rule. The updated adaptation has some similarities with the only other Malay-language Shakespearean film, Gedebe (Nam Ron, 2002), a recreation of Julius Caesar. Kok’s article focuses on the ways in which the later film is ‘questioning the bases of ethnic identification in Malaysia and resisting the pluralist discourse of the state’ (p. 232). The choice of text resonates because, like ‘Othello, Jarum Halus responds to ethic discourses of its time and repudiates them’ (p. 232). Kok considers characterization, social interactions, faith, and language and highlights that the film raises ‘vital questions about ethnic identification’ in twenty-first-century Kuala Lumpur (p. 245). In considering the status of the live theatre broadcast Lauren Hitchman positions the form as adaptation which provides a ‘fusion’ of stage and screen (p. 172) in ‘From Page to Stage to Screen: The Live Theatre Broadcast as a New Medium’ (Adaptation 11[2018] 171–85). Hitchman’s focus on NTLive means that the argument focuses primarily on the context of London theatre, and she notes that ‘theatre is increasingly staging dramatisations of films in order to attract audiences’ (p. 173) but that the ‘live theatre broadcast appropriates, refashions, and indeed adapts, the techniques, forms, and social significance of both film and theatre for artistic as well as economic purposes’ (p. 173). Hitchman’s analysis develops to consider the symbolic capital of liveness with specific reference to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘aura’ and Philip Auslander’s work. A connection between publications this year can be made when Hitchman looks closely at the significance of the term ‘broadcast’ in order to ‘help to elucidate the importance of collective experience’ (p. 176). Hitchman develops the argument to consider distinctions in the viewing experience, and several examples—including the NT Live broadcasts of King Lear in 2014 and As You Like It in 2016—support the argument that the cinematization of the live production results in ‘diminished autonomy of the audience’ (p. 182). The article concludes with some caution about the ways in which this ‘medium … has the potential to change our theatrical landscape’ (p. 184). 4. Criticism (a) General Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, by Patricia Akhimie, ‘reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world’ by reading Shakespeare’s plays against the background of early modern conduct literature (introductory blurb; the reviewer consulted the e-book edition and could not therefore supply page numbers). The book shows that personal improvement involved the stigmatization of certain types of difference. It consists of one chapter each on Othello, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. The introduction begins with a discussion of the casket episode in The Merchant of Venice as the culmination of a process in which the ‘relative worth’ of representatives of different races and nations is evaluated. Akhimie’s argument, which is by no means limited to blackness, is based on the simultaneous fixity and fluidity of social identity in the early modern period, whereby certain exterior marks were taken to indicate the ability to improve, and others a lack thereof. As a minor point, I would not necessarily consider the emblem of washing the blackamoor in Whitney as indicating the undesirability of the black body: as Akhimie herself states, there is no information to this effect in Whitney, while a common, parallel saying concerning ‘washing coals’ makes it clear that the focus was not on the undesirability or otherwise of the trait in question but on the difficulty, and in some cases foolhardiness, of man’s striving against nature, and above all on nature’s resilience. In Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy J.F. Bernard discusses how Shakespeare, and early modern literature in general, blend together the humoral theory of Galen, on the one hand, and Aristotle’s linking of melancholy with creativity on the other. Overviews of the history of melancholy, comedy, melancholy in early modern English comedy, and the ‘Melancomic in Shakespeare Criticism’ can be found in chapter 1 (though we could have done without the actually ‘vile phrase’ that Bernard coins for the occasion). The subsequent four chapters examine nine works from the early and mature comedies and late plays in order to illustrate ‘the mutual transformation of comedy and melancholy that Shakespeare develops’ (p. 45). The concluding chapter considers ‘the afterlives of Shakespearean comic melancholy in terms of psychoanalysis, performance theory and affect theory so as to chart out previously unacknowledged interplay between the modern concept of melancholia and the humour’s comic heritage’ (p. 214). In getting to know a new language, the words of everyday domesticity are the most likely to slip through the net as one concentrates on discussing loftier themes. Alongside common and resonant words like the names of family relations, the Arden dictionary on Shakespeare and Domestic Life by the series editor Sandra Clark offers explications on practical items such as food and clothing (‘aglet’, ‘inkle’, anyone?). At the start of the brief but insightful introduction Clark highlights the connotative importance and pathos that can be attached to simple items, such as Lear’s button: indeed, it is revealing that all the plays mentioned in this paragraph are tragedies. Clark further points out that the OED is not correct in ascribing to Cymbeline the first use of ‘domestic’ in the sense of pertaining to the household, and discusses how her subject can help trace changing social relationships in Shakespeare’s time. As per the series format, entries make ample reference to the appearance of the words in Shakespeare’s works, and these can be traced through the index at the back of the book. The text is also complemented by a wordlist and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. (Another regular Arden series, Shakespeare and Theory, saw the publication of Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory, whose author, Karen Raber, is billed to produce a forthcoming ‘dictionary’ of Shakespeare and animals.) A very different kind of domesticity is addressed in Julia Reinhard Lupton’s theoretically sophisticated discussion of shelter spaces. Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life focuses on two tragedies (Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth) and three romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale). Readers might have expected a chapter on King Lear, since it is ‘an astounding exploration of the tensions between abstract and lived space’ (p. 19), as well as being, of course, the classical locus of Shakespeare’s own reflection on the extent to which the nature of humanity may be determined by its physical needs, such as that for shelter. The book discusses aspects of Gloucester’s experience, but on the whole passes on the opportunity to address ‘the sacrificial extremities of Lear’ (p. 152) and how they relate to the topic under discussion. This may be because Lupton eschews an exclusively human-centred approach, finding instead that ‘Shakespeare’s plays enlist setting as a player on the stage, itself a taskscape and mediascape’ (p. 5). Unsurprisingly, articles in Shakespeare 14:ii[2018], a special issue on Shakespeare and the Karl Marx bicentennial guest-edited by Christian Smith and Hugh Grady, tend to focus on social and economic issues in Shakespeare’s times and our own. David Hawkes discusses ‘Shakespeare and the Performative Sign: Towards an Ethics of Representation’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 106–18), drawing parallels between Shakespeare’s perception of the sign–thing hiatus and modern-day ‘financialization’ and the rise of ‘financial signs’ such as ‘derivatives’, while in ‘Pleasure Enclosure’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 119–37) Donald Hedrick attempts a Marxist interpretation of Shakespearean theatre in which ‘pleasure’ takes the place of ‘ideology’. To these we might add an article from another journal: John Drakakis, ‘Shakespeare, Reciprocity and Exchange’ (CS 30:iii[2018] 1–19). In the final 2018 issue of Shakespeare, Annemie Brams and Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘“I loved my books”: Shakespeare and the Modernity of Loving Literature’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 326–40) look for the emergence of a ‘love’ for literature in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest, and Camilla Caporicci writes on ‘Black But Yet Fair: The Topos of the Black Beloved from Song of Songs in Shakespeare’s Work’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 360–73) with special reference to 1 Henry VI, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Antony and Cleopatra, and the sonnets, and to analogues from Italy and England. The Shakespearean essays in the volume Queens on Stage: Female Sovereignty, Power and Sexuality in Early Modern English Theatre, edited by Tommaso Continisio and Bianca Del Villano, focus, unsurprisingly, on the histories. However, in the final essay (before an ‘Afterword’ in which Carlo M. Bajetta reproduces a brief unpublished letter in Spanish from Queen Elizabeth to Maria, wife of Maximilian II and daughter of Charles V), Roger Holdsworth writes about ‘Uncertain Creatures: Playing the Quean in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama’ (pp. 163–85). Holdsworth shows how the popular queen/quean pun spoke to the subversion of social roles implicit in early modern drama. He concludes by listing several uses of ‘queen’ in Shakespeare where bearing in mind the possibility that the pun is intended will greatly enhance our understanding of the passage in question. The 2018 issue of Shakespeare Jahrbuch draws its inspiration from the fifth centenary of the Protestant Reformation. Janet Clare’s ‘Reform and Order on the Elizabethan Stage: Sir Thomas More to Hamlet’ (ShJE 154[2018] 11–30) shows how theatre censorship could be part of the government’s confessionalization programme. As a result, according to Clare, ‘in Hamlet we see a reformation once imposed from above now arising from individual conscience’ (p. 29). Two wide-ranging essays are offered in German with English summary: Cornel Zwierlein, ‘Tyrannenmord, Majestätsverbrechen und Herrscherwechsel bei Shakespeare: Resonanzen konfessioneller Polarisierung um 1600’ (ShJE 154[2018] 31–53), who links Shakespeare’s depiction of kings and tyrants with the clash between political authority and religious belief following the Reformation, and Stephan Laqué, ‘“Like birds i’th’ cage”: Shakespeare und die Frage der Hoffnung’ (ShJE 154[2018] 54–74), who deals with the question of theological hope in Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. Several more articles in English or German address individual plays: King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen’s Literary History of Reconciliation: Power, Remorse and the Limits of Forgiveness includes a substantial Shakespearean essay: chapter 3, ‘“Ask Her Forgiveness?”: Reconciliation, Power and Grace in Shakespeare’ (e-book version consulted). Van Dijkhuizen argues that ‘Shakespeare was fascinated by the relations between reconciliation, power and grace’, and that ‘Shakespeare imagines reconciliation in deeply religious terms’. The chapter also illustrates a central idea of this study, ‘that forgiveness hovers on the edge of literary representation, and therefore marks its limits’. The plays taken especially into consideration are Measure for Measure, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England, edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, asks how Shakespeare’s plays reflect questions of biblical hermeneutics, which are assumed to have been ‘lively and familiar’ in the minds of early modern English audiences (e-book, introduction), not least through the extremely successful genre of sermons and thanks to the tendency towards typological readings. The first two chapters deal with the diffusion of the biblical text in early modern Europe and England respectively, while the remaining ten chapters discuss a number of Shakespearean plays: Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, the romances, Sir Thomas More, and, especially, the histories. In her ‘Afterword’, Julia Reinhard Lupton asks ‘what are Shakespeare’s biblical virtues?’ She identifies these as ‘learning, belonging, respect, performance, and wisdom’, to each of which she devotes a short discussion. On a related subject, Mary Jo Kietzman, The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare, traces allusions in Shakespeare’s works to covenant stories from the Bible, in view of the importance that this idea took on with the Reformation. Kietzman points out how in both the Bible and the Reformation the idea of the covenant emerges as a resistance strategy against ‘a hierarchical church’ (p. 13). An understanding of such allusions throws light on elusive aspects of the plays such as ‘Aaron’s conversion by his infant son, Shylock’s power to elicit sympathy, Falstaff’s iteration of scripture, and the madness of kingship’ (p. vii). Ultimately, the presence of biblical covenants in Shakespeare’s plays serves as a forerunner for the formation of a secular society. Chapter 2 focuses on Abraham’s ordeal and its influence on Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and King John, while the subsequent four chapters are on The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, the figure of Falstaff, and Macbeth respectively. The ‘Epilogue’ addresses Shakespeare’s and Milton’s ‘grappling with kingship’, with special reference to The Tempest. I blame the blue-sky-thinking style of teaching and corporate training exercises for what happens in Claire McEachern, Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing—and not only there, alas, among the books reviewed in this section. You take one word, jot down onto a flipchart everything that comes to your mind in connection with that word and Shakespeare, and then assemble a book that brings together all those circles and bullet points. This book contrasts post-Reformation suspense, viewed as ‘when are the characters going to find out what we know’ (the work could have done with being structured more clearly around this crucial audience/actants distinction), with Catholic ‘what is going to happen’ suspense. It takes in Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, suspected cuckoldry, the figure of Oedipus in Greek, Latin, and Elizabethan drama, ‘dramatic cognition and its emotional involvements’ (p. 79), and believable characters, plots, and settings. The book’s main argument is that the rise of the notion of predestination changed the nature of suspense and dramatic irony as embodied in Shakespeare’s plays. Whether or not the reader finds the theoretical aspects of this book helpful depends on their willingness (and ability) to engage with statements like the following, which sums up several aspects of this book: ‘As with experimental inquiry, what we crave is recognition and confirmation of our conjectures, fulfillment of our expectations, proofs of our hypotheses. While such contact of minds arrives when a character comes to recognize what we know, it also feels to us like we have been recognized. In another word, elect’ (pp. 99–100; emphasis in the original). That the problem lies with a (currently fashionable) method rather than with the quality of the research itself is demonstrated by an excellent chapter on the links between soteriology (exemplified by William Perkins) and experimentalism (as in Francis Bacon). The stipulation that doubt, in this new theologico-scientific epistemology, could be a good thing, that it ‘did not erode belief but worked to thicken and substantiate it in ways that were both affectively positive and empirically positive’ (p. 23), is an interesting thought. But is this really the point of view of Macbeth, Othello, or indeed Hamlet, or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus? Othello, together with Much Ado, is discussed at length in this work: I shall leave the reader to judge whether the positivity of doubt has been demonstrated in the context of these two plays. Part III focuses on the history plays, King Lear, and The Tempest. A great deal of this book consists in the author’s varied and lively reflections, both with and without detailed reference to the plays, so that at times this reads more like a work of popular philosophy than of literary history or criticism. John S. Garrison’s Shakespeare and the Afterlife arose out of his teaching, and maintains its generalist and conversational pace. It draws in an unassumingly insightful way on Shakespearean texts and performances, on the one hand, and theories of mourning and the afterlife on the other. Sometimes these interconnections come full circle, as when, on page 7, Garrison mentions the relevance to a 2003 cinematic portrayal of Twelfth Night’s mournful Olivia of Freud’s essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholy’, which in turn illustrates some of its points with reference to Hamlet. The chapters are organized into stages, from ‘Contemplating Death’s Approach’ to ‘Achieving Immortality’, and discuss works across the canon, including the poems. John Kerrigan’s volume based on the 2016 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures addresses Shakespeare’s Originality by approaching the issue of ‘sources’ from widely different angles. According to Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s literary borrowings did not substantially differ from the common practice of his time, and the dramatist could generally rely on his audience to recognize those allusions. The introduction contains an invaluable review of the history of Shakespearean source studies. At times Kerrigan is too harsh on those early scholars, from the eighteenth century to Geoffrey Bullough, who gathered together the information about Shakespeare’s literary materials that still forms the bulk of our knowledge on this subject, though those early writers did tend to condemn an author’s lack of originality rather than praise his intertextual practices. After tracing the origin of the idea of originality, and discussing the ‘upstart Crow’ controversy and whether Shakespeare was really being accused of plagiarism, chapter 1 focuses on Much Ado About Nothing, which Gerard Langbaine first linked to both Ariosto and Spenser back in 1691. Kerrigan points out that ‘the loose ends, staggered reports, and misconstructions’ in the Hero and Claudio plot (p. 28) are consistent with Shakespeare having used more than one of the several existing versions of this story. The critic focuses on the Margaret-as-Hero episode, including a discussion of the use of clothes in the window scene in light of Elizabethan views on ‘fashion’ and sumptuary laws. Chapter 2 looks at contemporary and modern performance practices as a kind of source, and focuses on ‘footwork’ in Richard III and As You Like It in order to show how ‘adherence to an original can be innovative in stage effect’ (p. 47; see also p. 53: ‘walking is one powerful way in which As You Like It achieves the originality apparently denied by its debts to Lodge’), before discussing Shakespeare’s additions in Macbeth that are linked with this topic. In chapter 3 Kerrigan describes how the Gloucester plot in King Lear goes back not only to Sidney’s Arcadia but also to the Latin and Greek tragic elements with which Sidney had already infused his romance. Kerrigan focuses in particular on the Thebais and on Sophocles’ Oedipus. He draws a parallel between ‘Shakespeare’s drive back to tragic origins and King Lear’s seeking out of the origins of nature and culture’ (p. 65). Chapter 4 ostensibly looks at versions of The Tempest from Dryden, and his claim that his and Davenant’s The Enchanted Island ‘was originally Shakespear’s’, to Garrick’s 1756 opera, but is in fact a discussion of sources. While several of the essays in Shakespeare and Authority, edited by Katie Halsey and Angus Vine, deal with ‘Shakespeare as an authority figure’, a few, besides the editors’ introductory chapter (‘“Dressed in a little brief authority”: Authority Before, During, and After Shakespeare’s Plays’, pp. 1–27), ‘explore conceptions of authority in and for Shakespeare’ (p. 11), either in relation to individual plays or in a more general sense. Among the latter articles, Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare’s Authorities’ (pp. 31–53), remarks ‘that several of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are prone to clutch desperately at textual authorities when their own practical authority is thwarted and checked’ (p. 32). Above all, Burrow is concerned with a redefinition of the idea of a ‘source’ in Shakespeare. He makes a case for including in this category non-fictional ‘texts that clearly played a part in developing the arguments and thought-structures of Shakespeare’s plays’ (p. 34) and for replacing the term ‘sources’ with ‘authorities’. Burrow supports both arguments by pointing to new connections between the Henry IV plays and the Ad Herennium, and between Hamlet on the one hand and, on the other, a mix of authorities, starting with Cicero’s De Oratore, as well as to a similar mixture of classical texts in Lear’s seemingly unmediated rage. John Drakakis, ‘Inside the Elephant’s Graveyard: Revising Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’ (pp. 55–78), in fact deals with a range of critics who have sought to (re)define the idea of a source before homing in on Hamlet as a ‘palimpsest’. Like Burrow, Drakakis would like to see the word ‘source’ replaced with something else: in his case, with the term ‘resource’. On this subject, elsewhere Silvia Bigliazzi, in ‘Romeo before Romeo: Notes on Shakespeare Source Study’ (MemSh 5[2018]), also argues for the need for non-linear views of source transmission. (And for two more recent contributions to the debate on the concept of a source in early modern English drama see Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ShS 68[2015] 15–31 and YWES 96[2017] 410, and an essay by the present reviewer in Shakespeare Survey 72 [2019].) In Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval Lindsay Ann Reid goes over ‘a selection of Shakespearean moments that have been widely classified in contemporary scholarship as “Ovidian”’ (p. 2) in order to bring to the fore how Chaucer and Gower contributed to the shaping of these moments. Reid’s focus is on Shakespeare’s early works, including The Rape of Lucrece, though she also discusses Twelfth Night. The four ‘case studies’ (p. 7) based on individual works are complemented by an introductory chapter on the 1672 anonymous work Chaucer’s Ghoast and a concluding study of a Latin copy of the Metamorphoses that was for some time believed to have belonged to Shakespeare. According to Charlotte Scott, The Child in Shakespeare, ‘the child represents the single most powerful relationship in Shakespeare’s drama’ (p. 1). The first chapter functions as an introduction and touches on a variety of topics, including child actors and their relationship with adult players; the fact that the idea of children’s innocence was not anachronistic at the time; how children tended to appear in Shakespeare’s plays at times when the main children’s companies were otherwise unemployed; how some girls would have been played by a child actor (Juliet and Marina) and others by an older boy (Miranda and Perdita); children’s perspicacity in Shakespeare as exemplified by the boy soldier in Henry V; the status of children in early modern England. Scott describes her book as differing from Carol Rutter’s Child’s Play in that it focuses on ‘the individual figure of the child’ rather than on ‘the performance of childhood’ (p. 21). The subsequent four chapters (followed by a brief conclusive one) look at the distinctive ways in which children are represented in the histories (as symbols of political failure), tragedies (as victims of parental failure), comedies (childhood as memory), and late plays. Scott points to a shift in the way in which the child was portrayed: ‘Until the mid-sixteenth century children are rarely represented as themselves in literature … [they] tend to function symbolically, as moral examples of individual or collective failure. With the development of sixteenth-century theatre, however, children take on a powerfully visual role in the growth of early modern drama’ (p. 11). There may be a problem in the definition of this shift across the book (even if we assume that the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth century is meant): throughout the Shakespeare canon (plays ranging from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear and The Two Noble Kinsmen are mentioned) the focus is still said to be not ‘the child as a small person … but the child as a marker of human success or failure’ (p. 22). The late plays are said to ‘mark a clear shift in their preoccupation with the figure of the child’ (p. 30), but on page 136 we still read that ‘children become symbolic registers of failure as well as hope’, and this reader was unable to find a definition of this shift in the ‘late plays’ chapter—unless it be the stipulation that The Winter’s Tale ‘comes the closest to imagining a stage we might call childhood, and for valuing that stage as unique in the human life cycle’ (p. 141). Substantial parts of the book exploit the ambiguity of the word ‘child’ in English and focus instead on parent–child (especially father–daughter) relationships. This may be linked (though only partially) to the claim that what matters more than the children’s age is their relationship with their environment, the fact that they ‘belong to a counter-narrative’ (p. 29). The first issue of Shakespeare Bulletin for 2018, with which Kathryn Prince takes over the general editorship from Pascale Aebischer, is on metatheatre, or self-reflexivity. In ‘Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama’ (ShakB 36[2018] 3–18) the issue’s guest editors, Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman, recall how the term ‘metatheatre’ was first used by Lionel Abel in the early 1960s with special reference to Hamlet, and they provide an overview of subsequent developments in this field. (If I may be allowed this tribute, fifteen years ago almost to the day as I am writing this, we lost the great Italian scholar and teacher of Shakespearean metatheatre, Agostino Lombardo, the original founder of the journal Memoria di Shakespeare.) The issue does not impose a specific definition of metatheatre. The article of most general import is by Stephen Purcell, who asks ‘Are Shakespeare’s Plays Always Metatheatrical?’ (ShakB 36[2018] 19–35). Purcell upholds a modified model of metatheatre based on Arthur Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’, which focuses on the pleasurable feelings associated with taking in fiction and reality simultaneously, as opposed to Brechtian alienation. Ultimately, Purcell gives an ambivalent answer to his title question: on the one hand, Shakespeare’s characters always ‘know’ that they are in a play; on the other hand, actual metatheatre requires a shift to happen that allows the bisociation to be suddenly perceived. Purcell adduces fascinating instances of metatheatricality that occur, scripted or unscripted, in performance, and concludes that ‘[m]etatheatre is a game that is, in many cases, invited by the text, but one that can be played only in performance’ (p. 33). Shakespeare Studies 46[2018] offers several essays of interest to reception studies (see below) and four short essays that were selected for the SAA’s 2017 ‘Next Generation Plenary’. In terms of ‘general’ articles, Adam Rzepka, ‘“How like a god”: Shakespeare and Early Modern Apprehension’ (ShakS 46[2018] 211–35), focuses on the term ‘apprehension’ as used by Hamlet and Theseus (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in relation to its contemporary usage in a psychological and theological context, which also involves distinguishing between this term and ‘cognition’. We mention here more briefly two works that pertain to the reception of Shakespeare in later periods. New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity, edited by Paul Edmondson and Ewan Fernie, consists in twelve essays that deal with different ‘forms of engaging with Shakespeare that might take place on the streets or other civic spaces’ (ebook Preface), with a focus on Britain, Europe and North America; and Antipodal Shakespeare. Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 brings together five chapters written by Gordon McMullan, Philip Mead, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Mark Houlahan, and Kate Flaherty. Shakespeare reception, or Shakespeare as ‘Presider’ over cultural products as different as the works of John Keats and online reference tool Wikipedia, bookends the 2018 issue of Memoria di Shakespeare, with articles respectively by the journal’s editor, Maria Valentini, ‘Shakespeare the Presider’ (MemSh[2018]), and Jacob Blakesley, ‘The Global Popularity of William Shakespeare in 303 Wikipedias’ (MemSh[2018]). If readers would like to try and guess which play received the most pageviews in Wikipedias across the world in 2017, they will find the answer on pages 155–6 in Blakesley’s pdf. In terms of Shakespeare reception, the 2018 issue of Shakespeare Studies (p. 46) opens with a ‘Forum’ entitled ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Translation’, which covers a wide range: from theoretical discussions of adaptation as practice, through translations both in the current and previous centuries and both for the page and the stage, to cinematic adaptations from the French nouvelle vague to Bollywood. In addition, the actual article section features a major contribution by Michael Ingham and Richard Ingham, ‘“Now no way can I stray”: Interpreting Syntactic and Semantic Role Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse with Non-Native Performers and Readers’ (ShakS 46[2018] 163–84). Shakespeare Survey 71 is the last volume to be edited by Peter Holland, after nineteen years. It follows on from the previous issue in making available articles from the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress. Its remit is ‘Re-Creating Shakespeare’ and consequently all its articles fall under the category of reception and re-elaboration of the plays, mostly in the Far East. On this subject, see also Hussein A. Alhawamdeh, ‘“Shakespeare Had the Passion of an Arab”: The Appropriation of Shakespeare in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep’ (CS 30:iv[2018] 1–21). In the same issue of Critical Survey, Adam Hansen’s ‘Shakespeare and Extremism’ (CS 30:iv[2018] 95–113) asks what it means to read Shakespeare in light of the UK government’s ‘Prevent’ strategy, with special reference to Sulayman Al Bassam’s renderings of the playwright’s work. In a similar way, CahiersE 96[2018] is a special issue on Europe’s Shakespeare(s), edited by Nicoleta Cinpoeş and Janice Valls-Russell. Last but not least, Lindsay Ann Reid, ‘Resurrecting Shakespeare’s Ghost Plays’ (English 67[2018] 262–83), discusses four novels that form a specific microgenre: that of fictional works based on the search for a lost Shakespeare play. Critical Survey 30:i[Spring 2018] will be covered next year together with Shakespeare Survey 72, with which it shares the theme of ‘Shakespeare and War’. (b) Problem Plays This year’s only publication to consider the ‘problem comedies’ as a group is Oliver Arnold’s ‘Problem Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well’ (in Hirschfeld, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, pp. 537–54). Arnold responds to the common dissatisfaction with the category ‘problem plays’ by suggesting a new definition: they are ‘“comedies of rule”, in which young lovers seeking romantic felicity share the stage with rulers seeking power’ (p. 538), and who secure it ‘at the expense of their subjects’ happiness and freedom’ (p. 540). While this may hold true for Duke Vincentio, the cases made for Agamemnon, Priam, and the King of France are more tenuous. On the other hand, Arnold contradicts himself when he concludes that Measure for Measure ‘is a dystopian comedy of tyranny rather than a comedy of rule’ (p. 548). However, the observations made on the satirical mode in Troilus and Cressida as reactivating Old Comedy deserve scholarly attention. On the other hand, Robert Miola’s essay in the same book (‘Encountering the Past I: Shakespeare’s Reception of Classical Comedy’, pp. 36–53) magisterially considers the influence and reception of classical heritage from the point of view of Shakespeare’s refiguration of rage, prostitution, and rape as found in New Comedy in many of his plays, including All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and especially Troilus and Cressida. There, prostitution ‘becomes a central and pervasive metaphor for the human condition’ (p. 38), and Miola reconsiders Shakespeare’s ‘refashion[ing]’ (p. 46) of two scenes in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, Palaestrio’s trickery, and the group beating of Pyrgopolynices (p. 47). In All’s Well, Bertram slanders Diana ‘as meretrix’, but ‘Shakespeare transfers the tricks and functions of the New Comedic courtesan to a woman conspicuously and defiantly chaste’ (p. 45). In the same play, but also in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare ‘re-channels’ the rape-plot device of Eunuchus ‘to disempower the men and empower the women’ (p. 48). Hopefully, Miola will expand the paragraph in which he refers to the Italian commedia erudita (p. 53) as seminal for the Renaissance recasting and rethinking of the Plautine and Terentian originals. Curiously, whereas last year’s essays on All’s Well were mainly focused on authorship and collaboration questions, 2018 has not dealt with these issues at all. Eric Langley’s chapter, ‘Shakespeare’s Pharmacy: Bittersweet Sympathies / Sweetbitter Antipathies’ (in his book Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications, pp. 102–51), explores, alongside Cymbeline, the paradoxical function of communication as pharmakon in All’s Well. Langley’s focus is on the relationship between Bertram and Parolles: Bertram proves ‘a frustratingly insubstantial figure who breaks his word, tainting himself with’ empty ‘parole’, ‘a lip-serving simulacrum’ (p. 146); the two characters are cured ‘[o]beying a Paracelsian logic’: the use of foreign and made-up languages force Parolles into ‘a moment of simple verbal integrity’ which leads Bertram to understand his companion’s verbal corruption (p. 150). Julie Sanders, ‘Water Memory and the Art of Preserving: Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Cultures of Remembrance’ (in Hirschfeld, ed., pp. 208–19), takes stock of Wendy Wall’s 2015 book Recipes for Thought and sees comedies such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well as prefiguring the romances in their interest in remembrance and preservation using the discourse of household seasoning. While Wall had fully covered this theme as concerns All’s Well, Sanders adds that ‘the discourse of seasoning is here also linked to a maturation process that effectively melds the language of memory and education by experience the comedies enact’ (p. 210). Jamey E. Graham, in ‘Mimesis, Economy, and Civilization in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well’ (MP 116[2018] 20–44), claims that, by focusing on practices of imitatio, ‘All’s Well illuminates an underexamined source of the economic and geopolitical implications of mimesis in modernity’ (p. 22), since, at the end, Bertram and Helena become ‘master and mistress of a mimetic household in the heartland of the mimetic West’ (p. 23) by demoting inferiors (Parolles) and mimicking otherness (the Muscovites). The essay may not be fully convincing but it offers an inventive colonial perspective on the play. Daniel Derrin’s insightful article, ‘Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare’s Laughter at War’ (CS 30:i[2018] 81–97), disagrees with the tendency to interpret the gulling of Parolles either as mere comic relief or as a way to comically undercut military ideals. Instead, ‘Bertram’s shocked laughter at Parolles becomes a potential agent in his own self-realization, in so far as it invites him towards a more balanced approach to war’ (p. 92). Derrin’s article can be appreciated also by reading another article which is featured in the same special number of Critical Survey on Shakespeare and war: Franziska Quabeck’s ‘Shakespeare’s Unjust Wars’ (CS 30:i[2018] 67–80). Quabeck considers the debate on Shakespeare’s war ethics building on Paola Pugliatti’s 2010 book Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition. She argues that ‘Troilus and Cressida confronts us with a war whose cost is egregiously disproportionate to its cause’ (p. 75), hence, ‘tragedy unfolds, and … these actions are necessarily held to be morally blameworthy’ (p. 78). Colin Burrow’s illuminating essay on the meanings of ‘epic’ in the English Renaissance, ‘Shakespeare and Epic’ (in Macintosh, McConnell, Harrison, and Kenward, eds., Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, pp. 32–45) casts light also on Troilus and Cressida, and his observations are bound to deserve recognition. ‘Troilus and Cressida is a rhetorical experiment in multivocal theatrical epic … “Epic” in Troilus is therefore not one thing. It diffuses outwards into several different forms and voices’ (p. 44). Specifically, in the play there ‘is a dialogue between different versions of the high, epic style, distinct aspects of which are associated with different characters in the play’ (p. 43). In the same book, Claire Kenward’s very interesting ‘“Of arms and the man”: Thersites and Early Modern English Drama’ (pp. 421–38) analyses the ‘peculiarly English, and explicitly metatheatrical’ tradition of staging Thersites in plays and interludes and the early modern horizon of expectations concerning him even before the Iliad became easily accessible. Eric Langley’s chapter ‘Communicating Sympathies: Shakespearean Anxieties of Influence’ (in his book Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies, pp. 51–88) devotes a few pages to the topic of intersubjectivity in Troilus and Cressida: the environment enacted in the play, dominated by slander, gossip, and public evaluation as well as the discourse of disease, necessarily contaminates the identity of the dramatis personae, and the ‘impulse to contrast a Troilus with a Paris, a Helen with a Cressida’ and so on ‘is shown to be neurotically compulsive’ (p. 75). The essay covers familiar ground but is knowledgeable and well written. Finally, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 has published a valuable article by the late Candy B.K. Schille, ‘Why Did John Dryden Rehabilitate Cressida?’ (SEL 58[2018] 543–68), which, as the title suggests, is about Dryden’s revision of Troilus and Cressida as concerns gender. According to Schille, Dryden chose to represent and ‘stress[ed] Andromache’s struggle for self-definition’ and ‘extend[ed] Shakespeare’s critique of masculine heroic behavior’ (p. 544), so that he could ‘explor[e] the consequences of the function of the role of woman as man’s magnifying mirror’ (p. 563). This year’s scholarship on Measure for Measure has been generous—even the proceedings of a mock-trial based on the play have been published: Lorenzo Zucca and Lord Judge’s ‘Measure for Measure On Trial—A Shakespearean Mock Trial’ (JIDS 9[2018] 123–43). Daniel Cadman, in ‘“Constant in any undertaking”: Writing the Lipsian State in Measure for Measure’ (in Halsey and Vine, eds., pp. 195–212), suggests Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia and Politica as influences on ‘the vexed relationship between constancy and political pragmatism’ (p. 196) which can be appreciated in the Duke’s speeches that do seem redolent of ‘prudentia mixta’, by which ‘dissimulation on the part of the sovereign [proves] not only necessary, but also virtuous’ (p. 201). Cadman’s essay is thus a partial answer to a question asked by Arthur F. Kinney in 2002: ‘How can we not be tempted to think that Shakespeare would know so great an authority of his day as Justus Lipsius?’ (‘Some Conjectures on the Composition of King Lear’, ShS 33[2002] 13–26: 22). Amanda Bailey’s interpretation of the impulse-driven economic environment of the play, ‘Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Marketplace: Sympathetic Economies’ (in Hirschfeld, ed., pp. 122–34), is striking: ‘Measure for Measure anticipates recent discussions of free-market capitalism that see potential in the economic actor who hovers in a state of “non-conscious sub-threshold latency”’ (p. 123). Hers is a culturally informed reading which proves the play’s relevance without striving for presentism at all costs. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900’s special issue ‘After Sovereignty’ features two relevant articles. Julia Reinhard Lupton’s ‘After Sovereignty/After Virtue’ (SEL 58[2018] 205–17) argues that Measure for Measure invites the reader/spectator to consider virtue ‘as a resource for humanistic education’ (p. 206). More rewardingly, Lupton considers the discourse of respect: in this play, respect is ‘no longer purely aristocratic, since [it] is increasingly exchanged among persons of different ranks and extended to creaturely life’ (p. 215). In the other article, Daniel Juan Gil’s ‘Sovereignty, Communitarianism, and the Shakespeare Option’ (SEL 58[2018] 77–94), an interesting case is made that characters of Measure for Measure ‘neither flee from sovereign power nor mount a frontal attack on it, but rather use the power of sovereignty against itself … to energize social and interpersonal formations’ (p. 88). Unfortunately, the author devotes only two paragraphs to an analysis of these aspects of the play. Carla Beatriz Rosell has written a stimulating article: ‘Illicit Sex and Slander in Measure for Measure’ (SEL 58[2018] 373–98). She develops a 2003 essay by the late Mariangela Tempera (as well as Lindsay Kaplan’s better-known 1997 book) and considers illicit sex and slander not as being in a process of ‘continual displacement of the former unto the latter’ but as ‘structurally similar’ (p. 374): at the end of the play, the Duke understands that ‘illicit sex and slander must each be punished precisely because either can engender the other’ (p. 375). The religious dimension, curiously absent from this year’s other publications, is at the centre of Matthew J. Smith’s article, ‘“At war ’twixt will and will not”: On Shakespeare’s Idea of Religious Experience in Measure for Measure’ (Religions 9[2018] 1–18). According to Smith, ‘Shakespeare uses law to synthetize certain aspects of religious experience from divergent corners’ (p. 1), uniting characters by means of ‘a shared experience of religion as a desire for salvation beyond the law’ (p. 2). Smith’s article is well written, but, ultimately, an argument supporting a representation of religious experience as universally shared across denominations seems highly unlikely for the early modern episteme. Joining a political reading with a religiously inflected one, Anna Muenchrath, in ‘Decapitation, Pregnancy, and the Tongue: The Body as Political Metaphor in Measure for Measure’ (EMLS 20:i[2018] 1–19), tackles the controversial application of the topic of the king’s two bodies to the play. Muenchrath argues that in the play there is an ‘ironic manifestation’ (p. 3) of this doctrine, because ‘its use of various bodies—pregnant, beheaded, and otherwise’ critiques the concept ‘by showing that the metaphors … are always already incoherent’ (p. 2). This astute interpretation, however, goes hand in hand with the argumentation that in Measure for Measure ‘[t]he female body is always purely carnal, never political’ (p. 13) and Isabella’s final silence signals ‘her complete incorporation into the body of the Duke’ (p. 19)—one feels that the portrayal of women in the play is more complex than this. In their article, ‘Settling for “something less”: J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and the Shakespearean Bed-Trick Motif’ (ES 99[2018] 554–65), Matthijs Baarspul and Paul Franssen investigate Coetzee’s adaptation of Measure for Measure’s bed-trick in an episode of this 2003 novel. They revisit Zoë Wicomb’s 2009 discussion of this intertextual link and argue that this set of allusions is not simply metafictional, ‘but also relate[s] to the book’s ethical concerns’ (p. 557) and ‘deconstructs the modern equivalent of that very ideal [i.e. bourgeois marriage]’ (p. 558). However, their reading of Romeo and Juliet as the antithetical ‘epitom[e of] the bourgeois ideal’ (p. 561) is problematic. From a textual perspective, Julian Lamb, ‘Finding the Remedy: Measure for Measure, Puns, Rules’ (SQ 68[2017] 374–92), suggests that in Measure for Measure there may be a pun on ‘remedy’ (it is the Shakespeare play which contains more occurrences of the word). ‘Due to the recognized difficulty of minting coins … a small tolerance was allowed: the tolerance of weight was known as the remedy at the shear, and tolerance for fineness as the remedy at the assay’ (p. 388). Whereas the discourse of money is paramount in the play (consider for example the coins known as ‘angels’ and the character’s name Angelo), the OED shows that the term, while ancient, seems to occur only in specialized texts. We also have two notes on this play. Adrian Streete, ‘Sejanus, Measure for Measure, and Rats Bane’ (N&Q 65[2018] 75–6), makes the interesting suggestion that in Measure for Measure I.ii.120–2 there may be a verbal echo (‘in typically imaginative fashion’, p. 76) of a passage involving rats in Jonson’s Sejanus. Nicholas Taylor-Collins, ‘The Duke’s Hospitable Return in Measure for Measure’ (N&Q 65[2018] 538–9), believes that ‘the psycho-geographic importance of the city gates’ (p. 538) in the play has not been duly emphasized in previous scholarship, but fails to take his argument further. (c) Poetry The year 2018 has been another extremely popular one for scholarly work on Shakespeare’s sonnets. In her article, ‘The Failure of Shame in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (RES 69[2018] 237–58), Jane Kingsley Smith begins by outlining Aristotle’s definition of shame, which is fundamental to our understanding of the way it is exhibited in the sonnets as this is the definition which would have informed Shakespeare’s understanding of the term. Smith notes that what was particularly interesting for an early modern readership were the two extremes of shame—shamelessness and extreme shamefastness—and explains how these extremes are demonstrated in the sonnets. Smith then highlights how these depictions of shame inform the characterization of Rosamond and Fred Vincy in George Eliot’s nineteenth-century novel Middlemarch, as the two characters exhibit shame in conflicting ways. In his note ‘Significant Numerology in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1609, and a Possible Alternate Emendation to Line Seven of Sonnet 76’ (N&Q 65[2018] 511–18), B.J. Sokol explores the allusions and puns on numbering present in the sonnet sequence. In emphasizing Sonnet 76 as the halfway point in Shakespeare’s sequence of 152 sonnets, and line 7 of Sonnet 76 as the absolute centre point, Sokol suggests that the centre line of this sonnet has a special significance. The line claims that the verses ‘almost’ identify the poet’s authorship and the line immediately following line 7 has its first and last words beginning with the digraphs ‘Sh’ and ‘pr’. Sokol notes that if we accept the standard editorial emendation of ‘fel’ to ‘tell’ in line 7, this may be a potential hidden reference to Shakespeare’s own name. Whereas two epigrams by the fifth-century ad poet Marianus have been previously acknowledged as source material for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154, Dieter Fuchs, in his note ‘Undiscovered Intertextuality: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154 and Eunapius’s Lives of Philosophers’ (N&Q 65[2018] 518–21), suggests that the sonnet may have been inspired by an even earlier text. Fuchs outlines the similarities between Shakespeare’s sonnet and Eunapius’s Lives of Philosophers (fourth century ad), the most notable point of comparison being the reference to hot baths as a treatment for lovesickness. Although the healing bath is referred to by Marianus, one detail that is not included in Marianus’s writing is its location. Shakespeare specifies that the bath is to be found in the Syrian city of Gadara, which is only mentioned in Eunapius’s text. In his article, ‘Love Merchandized: Money in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (CS 30:iii[2018] 57–66), Manfred Pfister reveals the ways in which the information presented in Karl Marx’s ‘The Power of Money’ in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts can be applied to the sonnets. Shakespeare frequently uses terminology related to banking and commerce in his sonnets and intertwines the financial language with love metaphors, presenting love as an economic transaction. Pfister also notes that the link between love and money can even be extended to the writing of the sonnets. He demonstrates that the act of producing sonnets to be bought and sold turns expressions of love into a capitalist act, rather than them being used as a way of privately articulating genuine feelings of love. Alexander Shurbanov investigates numerous attempts made to translate the sonnets into European languages and the difficulties faced by translators, in his article ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets in European Translation: Overcoming the Challenges’ (CahiersE 96[2018] 131–46). Shurbanov surveys a multitude of translation cases that have suffered from issues including the need to respond to syllabic constraints, having to adhere to explicit rhyme schemes, and being required to maintain the correct stanza length, to challenges in recreating the moments when Shakespeare uses specific terms which have double meanings in English but not in other languages, and specifying the gender identity of the speaker and addressee when this information is not always clear from Shakespeare’s words. As well as pointing out the struggles, Shurbanov evidences the many ways in which translators have managed to find adequate solutions to these problems, such as utilizing the poetic technique of enjambement and removing restrictive rhyming patterns by making use of blank verse. Also related to translation, in his article, ‘From Phonetics to Philosophy: Pasternak’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73’ (SEEJ 62[2018] 401–18), Maxwell Parlin examines the similarities and differences between two versions of the same sonnet. Although Pasternak has been widely criticized for his many flaws, omissions, and additions in translations of other texts, Parlin demonstrates that the translator preserves two fundamental features of the original Sonnet 73—phonetics and philosophy—as well as maintaining specific words and phrases in his interpretation, such as his direct translation of the phrase ‘seals up’ to ‘opechatyvaet’, which has been overlooked by all of the previous translators of the sonnet. Parlin argues that whereas Pasternak does not translate Sonnet 73 word for word as Shakespeare intended it, readers should be wary of dismissing this translation based on previous work as it does bear a decent resemblance to the original. Ekaterina Yu Khrisonopulo’s linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s use of two common function words in the sonnets is documented in the report, ‘The Cognitive Factors for Using the English Function Words “like” and “as” as Markers of Comparison in the Sonnets of W. Shakespeare’ (RULB 13[2018] 3–6). Khrisonopulo investigates each instance of the preposition ‘like’ and the conjunction ‘as’ as components of similes within the sonnets to determine the factors that prompt their usage and examines the effect of each function word within the text. In his article ‘Refiguring the Donna Angelica and Rewriting Petrarch in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (ES 99[2018] 255–79), A.D. Cousins argues that the speaker of the sonnets interprets the Petrarchan concept of love anew and refigures it, presenting, in the first 126 sonnets of the sequence, a male depiction of the Donna Angelica, a figure frequently alluded to in Italian poetry symbolizing female purity, grace, and morality. However, for the subsequent sonnets, Cousins claims that Shakespeare presents the ‘dark lady’ as a more negative impersonation of the Donna Angelica with questionable morals, associated with sexual desire and a lack of restraint. Like Cousins, Malvern Van Wyk Smith regards the ‘fair youth’ sonnets and the ‘dark lady’ sonnets as two halves of a dichotomic allegory between categories including love and lust and innocence and experience, in his article ‘“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair”: The Drama and Architecture of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (ShSA 31[2018] 25–36). Smith focuses on Sonnets 18, 30, 116, and 129 in particular, as he believes that they supply an accurate picture of the sonnet sequence as a whole, and likens them to stand-alone extracts from Shakespeare’s plays, similar to soliloquys and other contemplative dramatic moments within them. Charis Charalampous interprets the fair youth as a mirror image of the dark lady and vice versa, and examines the effect of both identities on the speaker of the sonnets, in the article ‘The Mirror and the Lover’s “I” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poet’s Process of Individuation’ (EMLS 20:i[2018] 1–21). Charalampous argues that the image of the dark lady was intended as a mirror image of the fair youth to make him aware of his flaws to prevent him from becoming as troublesome and tainted as her, but when this fails, it instead serves to make the speaker more knowledgeable about his own identity, and prompts a fairly modern interpretation of individuation in that when an individual recognizes himself or herself in a mirror, the identity of the person is distorted and splits into two—the physical person and the image in the mirror. In his chapter ‘Art and History Then: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146’ (in Bates, ed., A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, pp. 303–13), Christopher Warley’s stance on how the sonnets should be read is placed within an ongoing debate surrounding the uncertainty of whether they should be treated as art or history. In following the work of Stephen Booth, who asserts that there is no tension between reading the sonnets as art or as history, Warley demonstrates how Sonnet 146, most significantly the final ‘then’ of the piece, embodies elements of both conceptions, and claims that there is no need to strive to make a judgement over which is the more prominent as the sonnet is “caught in the midst of a regime change … between poetry and human experience’ (p. 304). This has also been a very popular year for scholarship on The Rape of Lucrece. ‘Passionate Uprisings in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 205–15) by Ann Kaegi focuses on passionate reactions, particularly outpourings of grief caused by violent actions and how responses to these actions are likely motivators of rebellion. Using The Rape of Lucrece to illustrate her point, Kaegi argues that this poem is just one of a number of Shakespeare’s works which suggest that passionate emotions, including grief, are powerful enough to prompt political protest and, in turn, have the potential to lead to eventual political transformation. Pragyan Rath investigates Shakespeare’s use of the creative technique of ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece in her article, ‘Empowerment through Communication in Shakespeare’s Lucrece: Transitioning from Economic to Artistic Transactions’ (JHV 24[2018] 223–31). Rath states that the use of ekphrasis, the method of using an extant image or myth of the past to comment on the present without explicitly mentioning the present, allows Shakespeare to comment metaphorically on the troubles of his own society through the depiction of a Graeco-Roman subject. In his article ‘Confusion of Tears: The Deadened Oedipal Couple and Predatory Identifications in The Rape of Lucrece’ (AI 75[2018] 489–515), Christopher W.T. Miller draws on Freud’s Oedipus Complex theory, which claims that children go through a series of psychosexual stages during which they are said to express feelings of sexual desire towards their opposite-sex parent and rivalry towards the same-sex parent, based on the Greek tragedy in which Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Miller theorizes that, in Shakespeare’s poem, Tarquin is effectively the child and Collatine and Lucrece are the ‘parental couple’ whose relationship Tarquin is excluded from. His intense sexual desire for Lucrece and jealousy of Collatine stirs in him an Oedipal predatory instinct to destroy the perfect couple and fulfil his desire. Harvey Wiltshire compares the references to the graphic imagery of bloodstains in two narratives of the tragedy of Lucrece in his article, ‘“Ere she with blood had stained her stained excuse”: Graphic Stains in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece’ (EEp 33[2018] paras 1–43). In examining the ways that bloodstains and blots expose Lucrece’s brutal rape and intensify her violent suicide, he argues that these graphic images present an overlap between Lucrece’s physical body and the image generated by the words of the printed text. Wiltshire also demonstrates how Middleton’s adaptation of the Lucrece narrative magnifies the image of the bloodstained victim as a ghost after death. In her article ‘Petrarchism Demonised: Defiling Chastity in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus’ (ShSA 31[2018] 37–46), Kirsten Dey explores Shakespeare’s exploitation of the poetry of Petrarch. Originating as a collection of sonnets detailing deep emotion, Petrarch’s poetry was later deemed to be formed of a simple poetic formula which could be adapted mechanically to suit any male character in love, as long as the character intensely idealizes his lover by describing her using extended metaphorical language, posits her in relation to heavenly phenomena, and has his romantic advances rejected by her. Dey argues that, by using the aforementioned formula, Shakespeare demonizes the figure of the Petrarchan lover by creating scenarios in which the seemingly harmless wallowing in one’s unrequited love can lead to potentially violent and sexually invasive outcomes, including rape and attempted rape. Claire Bardelmann likewise analyses The Rape of Lucrece in relation to Titus Andronicus in the chapter ‘Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus’ (in her book Eros and Music in Early Modern Literature and Culture, pp. 193–214). Bardelmann demonstrates how the image of the feminine Eros is concealed within the narratives of Shakespeare’s poem and play through his characterization of the two ravished females, Lucrece and Lavinia. Shakespeare draws on the Ovidian myth of Philomel as palimpsest to emphasize the many layers of her character, particularly her significance as an emblematic figure of music. Bardelmann observes that three characteristics—the distressed physical state, the metaphorical imagery of tears, and allusions to melancholy birdsong, similar to that in descriptions of Philomel’s rape—form Lavinia’s expression of unspeakable anguish, and Lucrece’s faultless loss of innocence is illustrated by animal imagery, suggesting that her attack deprives her of her humanity. Bardelmann ends the chapter by drawing the reader’s attention to Philomel’s significance as a failed version of Orpheus, with Lavinia as a female depiction of Orpheus in that her voice has the ability to tame monsters and beasts, and notes that Lucrece’s tears are so potent that they drown out Orpheus’s powerful music. Bardelmann, furthermore, discusses the presence of Eros in Venus and Adonis in the following chapter, ‘Specularity or Speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis’ of the same book (pp. 215–237). She not only states that it is the mythological appropriation of Eros that permeates the epyllion, but also points out that, amongst others, philosophical, rhetorical, and allegorical traditions can be identified. Only a minority of these perspectives, however, demonstrate a significant link between Eros and the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus. Bardelmann details how the myths of Echo and Eros inform Venus and Adonis, and how the relationship between the Ovidian figure, Echo, and the acoustic echo is manifested throughout the poem as the two are perpetually interconnected and illustrated using various linguistic practices, including Venus’s anguish over the death of Adonis, which is presented through the repetition technique of epanalepsis. In the second of only two critical works on Venus and Adonis published this year, Camilla Caporicci explores the influence of the biblical Song of Songs on Shakespeare’s epyllion in her note ‘A Reference to the Song of Songs in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (229–240)’ (N&Q 65[2018] 50–1). Caporicci acknowledges the work of Noam Flinker, the only other scholar to have noticed the connection between the two texts, who pays particular attention to the similar imagery used in the descriptions of feelings and actions of the lover and loved, including the references to kisses as seals of love and desire as fiery coals. Caporicci adds that it is not just these descriptions that suggest a link to the influential work—lines 229–240 of Shakespeare’s poem also bear a striking resemblance to a significant image in the Song of Songs which does not feature in Ovid’s tale of Venus and Adonis or in any other of the potential sources for the poem, in which the beloved is compared to a deer and the woman is depicted as a closed garden. (d) Histories Nicoletta Caputo’s Richard III as a Romantic Icon: Textual, Cultural and Theatrical Appropriations traces the complicated cultural representations and attitudes towards Richard III from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, both as a historical figure and in his depiction in Shakespeare’s Richard III. What is refreshing about this study is its multifaceted approach to the subject, not limited simply by the theoretical perspectives of the literati and academics throughout the Romantic era but also considering aspects of dramaturgy and their subsequent critical reactions. It is in Caputo’s exposition of the somewhat mercurial and equivocal positions taken by scholars and writers in the eighteenth century that she teases out the sympathetic fascination with this historical figure and his dramatic representations. Of particular import is Caputo’s approach to the notion of hybridity, the heterogeneity of sources and social elements that serve to complicate Richard on the stage. Far from being ideologically non-aligned, she avers that ‘the transgressive merging of highbrow and lowbrow forms in the contemporary cultural, literary and, above all, theatrical landscape was considered socially destabilizing and politically dangerous by conservative observers’. The ‘contamination between history and fiction’, coupled with the emergent pantomime portrayals of Richard on the stage, are presented as a form of political extremism, a hybrid fusion of high and low culture that challenged late nineteenth-century Tory ideals. It is not often that a new source for Shakespeare’s texts emerges, and Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter’s ‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays is a welcome addition. Their rediscovery of George North’s hitherto relatively unknown and unpublished document is a significant contribution to uncovering a host of Shakespearean references. Originally published in 1576, ‘Discourse’ has sat undisturbed in the British Library’s Portland Papers, yet contains the key to the origin of numerous allusions previously attributed to Shakespeare’s seemingly limitless invention. Using modern, intuitive computer-aided methods, ironically, programs specifically designed to hunt down plagiarists, McCarthy and Schlueter compared Shakespeare’s complete works with North’s ‘Discourse’, revealing countless ‘shared words, phrases, word groupings, and analogous lines describing the same metaphor’. In particular, the transcript contains valuable footnotes that highlight the origins of specific lines in Jack Cade and Alexander Iden’s confrontation in the latter’s garden, Richard III’s reference to his deformity and Machiavellian predisposition, Macbeth’s comparison of dogs and men, the citizen rebellion in Coriolanus, and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hierarchical order of bees from Henry V. A colour facsimile of the original manuscript is a superfluous but nevertheless welcome addition in this volume, which conveys the writers’ enthusiasm and respect for the discovery. On the theme of Shakespeare’s response to the Reformation, Shakespeare Relocated: Studies in Historical Psychology is a collection of Hugh Macrae Richmond’s previously published essays. Richmond’s attempt to plot the development of classical, medieval, and early modern literature through a critical lens he calls ‘syncretic criticism’. This somewhat nebulous approach, claimed by Richmond to surpass New Historicism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and New Criticism, is in reality a confusing amalgamation of all these theories. Richmond argues that the combination of close reading and a variety of literary theories is passé, advocating the ‘restoration of psychological, social, political, ethical, and metaphysical dimensions to academic literary criticism’. Yet in the application of his syncretic critical approach to Shakespeare, Richmond’s essays read in much the same manner as cultural materialists and new historicists through the past forty years, with careful attention to historical, sociopolitical and religious contextualization, and an imaginative flair for close reading. One such example is Richmond’s attention to parallels between Richard III and medieval morality plays that complicate the role of the Vice. He notes Shakespeare’s anti-hero as displaying signs of Calvinist ‘self-indictment’ and ‘damning self-awareness’ that associate the fifteenth-century king with proto-Puritan beliefs of universal weakness. While the collection of essays claims to ‘relocate’ Shakespeare, this publication is more a case of ‘locating Richmond’ within the six decades of his academic endeavour. With the third series of its critical editions now thoroughly in its prime, it was only a matter of time before the more obscure and under-appreciated plays received the Arden treatment. Jesse M. Lander and J.J.M. Tobin’s King John immediately arrests the reader’s attention by selling the play as ‘arguably Shakespeare’s most political play’ and ‘the history play that is most self-conscious about its status as a play’ that raises questions about the very process of remembering history. There is particular attention given to more recent criticism of the play that explores notions of England as an isolated territory, a combination of ‘polity, people and place’ that is at odds with ideas of a king being the embodiment of a country and raises questions over what constitutes ‘Englishness’. So too is the topic of the Reformation and anti-papal sentiment addressed in recent arguments over whether John is a proto-Protestant. What emerges from Lander and Tobin’s appraisal is that the themes of commodity versus conscience, legitimacy versus legitimation, and the making and breaking of oaths lie at the root of the play, with much of it devoted to elaborate rhetorical debate around these tropes. As with Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s King John conveys Elizabethan historiographical anxieties over truth, with a ‘deep awareness of its status as a “chosen truth”, a selection from the vast storehouse of available episodes that might be depicted’. In contrasting and comparing the earlier Troublesome Reign of King John [1591] and Shakespeare’s play with Holinshed’s accounts, Lander and Tobin demonstrate not only the complications that arise from reducing historical events to five acts, but the issues that occur at the very heart of remembering and re-enacting history. As far as offerings from journals specifically related to Shakespeare’s histories, 2018 was something of a lean year. Andrew Shifflett’s, ‘Shakespeare’s Histories of Forgiveness’ (ELH 85[2018] 33–55) offered an speculative twist on the subject of mercy, with Shifflett identifying certain academics’ tendency to conflate forgiveness with pardon. He asserts that the Christian quality of charitable compassion has been tangled with the more politically motivated idea of diplomatic or ritual clemency; but also that these two manifestations of mercy have an uneasy relationship on the stage. Shifflett claims that ‘Shakespeare’s histories of forgiveness are at odds not only with current theory but current practice’, claiming the theatre presented a contrast to the state. Richard II is shown to have both the traits of forgiveness and of monarchical clemency but that, due to his being a ‘weak king’, his acts of moderation and leniency in judgement are undermined by his softening of Bolingbroke’s sentence, complicating the act of forgiveness. Bolingbroke too manages to exhibit a bewildering attitude between severitas and clementia that is finally resolved in the Senecan principle of prudent autocratic power winning over human weakness, the latter incorporating traits such as forgiveness. This pattern is repeated in 1 Henry IV, where peace through pardon is sustained until the final acts. The king’s pardon can only be accepted if Hotspur and Worcester choose to forgive the slights against them, such actions urged by Blunt. Shifflett identifies Worcester, Cleopatra, and Richard of York as the only characters in Shakespeare’s plays that refuse pardon, each recognizing it comes with caveats they are unprepared to live with. In Henry V, the idea of forgetting is espoused by France’s king—that what is forgotten does not need to be forgiven, a strange contrast with Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech on the morning of battle that encourages his soldiers to remember that day, a complication that Shifflett fails to pick up on and that would actually shore up his argument of Shakespeare’s complicated depiction of forgiveness. Whether by accident or design, the theme of sovereignty and national identity proved to be strikingly relevant in global news. Though neither Michael Gadaleto nor David Glimp mentioned the impending severing of Britain from the European Union, nor the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, their subject matter proved demonstrably current. David Glimp’s ‘Sovereignty after Taxes in Shakespeare’s History Plays’ (SEL 58[2018] 23–50) highlights that the concept of sovereignty is fraught with ambiguity, as it must take into consideration the myriad processes and institutional structures that enable yet also limit its power. This article’s chief focus is on the way in which the act of taxation as an administrative reality is expressed and enacted within Shakespeare’s histories and the way fiscal policy conditions and constrains expressions of sovereignty. Drawing on terms outlined by Peter Sloterdijk, Glimp points out that ‘taxes create rage’, a communal burden that fosters indignation, dissatisfaction, and even rebellion—all desirable motifs for creating tension and friction in the theatre. The playwright’s depiction of King John as ‘hungry’ for the wealth in England’s monasteries cannot be justified as simply funding war as it precedes any conflict with France. So too is the act of taxing a person linked with killing them—the resultant outrage undermining the sovereignty taxation seeks to establish and opening the way for ‘the countersovereign claims of others’. Fiscal management, or often mismanagement, surrounds the fiasco of Henry VI’s expensive wedding, fuels Jack Cade’s rebellion, and prevents Hotspur claiming the rightful ransom for his captives, each example reinforcing that the dreams of sovereign supremacy are constantly subject to the realities of economic administration. One of the more insightful associations Glimp makes is in the prelude to the Archbishop of Canterbury encouraging Henry V to seek the French throne. Knowing the new king will tax the Church heavily, he instead proposes to ‘gift’ a certain amount of wealth should Henry go to war. Knowing this act will lesson public ill will against a line of monarchs who have had their hands in the public pockets, as well as ultimately increase the wealth of the Church, it is often overlooked that taxes rest at the crux of this plot. Continuing along the theme of problematizing sovereignty, Michael Gadaleto argues that King John explores Elizabethan anxieties over defining, delineating, and differentiating Englishness from other cultures. In ‘Shakespeare’s Bastard Nation: Skepticism and the English Isle in King John’ (SQ 69[2018] 3–34), Gadaleto attempts to avoid Vaughan and Maley’s previous assertions that, far from establishing or affirming a national identity, King John exposes such an ideological concept as a ‘tenuous, artificial construction’. Rather, he avers that the play is an early attempt at finding a historical backdrop to explore and establish English nationhood. The initial Plantagenet union of Anglo-French lands is a confusing amalgamation of kingdoms and principalities with ambiguous borders that form the subject of the conflict before the walls of Angers, whose citizens are unable to decide their true allegiance. Gadaleto suggests that, by the play’s close, these lines of contestation and identity have been simplified to a centrally governed and straightforward sacred sea-lined boundary that would in time constitute the ‘sceptred isle’ and ‘fortress built by nature’ referred to in Richard II. He goes on to suggest that the existential scepticism or radical doubt Shakespeare addresses on the road to English identity within King John follows a proto-Cartesian methodology. The play’s themes of bastardy (its very hero a bastard) toy with and destabilize typical associations of illegitimacy, ‘moral pollution, social disruption, and general errancy’ to display England, not as a bastard product of France, but celebrated as dynamic, independent, and ‘free from cultural constraints’. Finally, Ezra Horbury’s ‘The Unprodigal Prince Defining Prodigality in the Henry IVs’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 312–25), challenges John Dover Wilson’s assertion that Prince Hal is a ‘prodigal prince’ in the Lukan sense. Rather, Horbury asserts that the early modern understanding of prodigality is far more complex than the biblical parable of profligacy and rebellion followed by repentance and reformation, and that both Hal and Falstaff feature in a highly nuanced prodigal plot. He states that in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lexicons there is no element of ‘the arc of stray and return’ associated with Luke’s allegory. What’s more, there is a strong argument that the excesses and extravagances related to prodigal wastefulness are activities characteristic of Falstaff and not Hal. Horbury cites Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a source and model for the two types of prodigal behaviour in the Henry IVs—youthful excess and immoral self-indulgence associated with age. While Falstaff falls easily into the latter category, Hal is somewhat harder to place as he at times financially supports the ageing knight but for the most part remains apart from his actions and is himself not prone to ‘engage in financial excesses for his own needs’. This is further complicated in his open mockery and condemnation of Falstaff’s dissolution, and that Hal has little prodigality to reform; he must only abandon his ‘white-bearded Satan’. However, Horbury does note that there are certain prodigal traits that Hal does exhibit, most notably the denial of his heritage and rejection of his father’s court, earning him the title of ‘degenerate’ from his father, and that the Lukan paradigm sees a measure of fulfilment not in Hal’s rejection of prodigality, but rather in his denunciation of Falstaff’s prodigality. (e) Tragedies Discussions of the tragedies featured in two monographs on Shakespeare and religion. Chapter 4 of Mary Jo Kietzman’s The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare, titled ‘Hamlet, Judge of Denmark in a Time “Out of Joint”’ (pp. 127–61), demonstrates how ‘key images in the stories Hamlet hears and creates allude implicitly to important narrative images’ from the biblical book of Judges, not only ‘giving us an entrée into his psyche’, but also granting the play ‘an intellectual, artistic, and imaginative coherence’ that is said to be ‘deeper than the linear continuities of plot’ (p. 128). Kietzman identifies three such images, namely Jephthah’s vow (which ‘becomes Polonius’s use of Ophelia’), Jael’s murder of Sisera (which ‘becomes Gertrude’s “murder” of Old Hamlet’), and Gideon’s response to the call to deliver Israel (which ‘becomes Hamlet’s hesitant response to the ghost’s revenge command’) (p. 128). In closing, Kietzman also further explores Hamlet’s affinities with the figure of Samson, contending that the two characters are alike in that ‘at the end of their stories, they submit utterly to bondage and, by doing so, experience the inner encouragement necessary to enact revenge’ (p. 153). In chapter 6, ‘Tragic Monarchy: Saul and Macbeth’ (pp. 201–34), Kietzman argues that Shakespeare ‘braids Saul’s tragedy with that of Macbeth in order to imagine the assassination of God (the good Duncan) provoked by prophecy and the establishment of a tragic political theology that stresses the magical virtues of kingship’ (p. 201). Kietzman reads the play not only in close contrast to biblical material, but also to James I’s use of such history in his own writings: Shakespeare, Kietzman suggests, deploys the story of Saul as ‘an allusive subtext for Macbeth’ so as to caution the monarch ‘by issuing strong yet subtle criticism of his political theology’ (p. 205). Alfred Thomas explores three tragedies in Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages. In chapter 4, ‘Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet’ (pp. 113–47), Thomas argues that the play is ‘very much about the epistemological crisis of Protestantism’, in which it has ‘not entirely usurped Catholicism, but continues to vie with it in the hearts and minds of English men and women’ (p. 115). Focusing on the play’s relationship between revenge and remembrance as ‘interrelated categories’, Thomas suggests that the play assumes ‘an internalized form of religious resistance to the amnesia of the Protestant state’, in which ‘memory becomes revenge by other means’ (p. 116). The dialectic between the two, Thomas further contends, not only ‘coexisted’ in the play’s medieval sources, but also in the Middle English analogues listed in the chapter’s title. Chapter 5, ‘Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr’ (pp. 147–89), reconstructs several medieval motifs in the play to explore how a Catholic audience might have responded to it. Cordelia’s ‘refusal to comply with her father’s absolute demands’, for instance, is said to follow the ‘virgin martyr’ narrative, thus echoing ‘the defiance of many recusant women during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James’ (p. 154). The final scene of the play, in which Lear carries the murdered Cordelia, could also have reminded Catholics in the audience of the Pietà, ‘the tableau in which the Virgin Mary mourns the dead Christ’ (p. 176). Recusants, Thomas contends, ‘might have been mindful of the similar fate of their family members and coreligionists in the ruthless world of Tudor absolutism, not a world from which God had absconded, but rather one from which all human pity had been eradicated’ (p. 178). In chapter 6, ‘“Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth’ (pp. 191–215), Thomas moves away from examining how Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew upon non-theatrical medieval genres and adapted them to the dramatic needs of the secular theatre. His analysis of Macbeth instead traces the ‘continuity, as well as the differences, between the late medieval religious drama and the theatre of Shakespeare’s time’ (p. 191). In the ‘knocking’ episode of Act II, scene iii, for instance, Thomas identifies a debt to the medieval mystery-play tradition, as well as allusions to contemporary events such as the Gunpowder Plot. The influence of medieval drama on Macbeth, Thomas suggests, should not be seen as ‘mere remnants or vestiges of a forgotten past’, but rather as ‘providing a veiled means of articulating dissent among Catholic spectators in the audience’ (p. 215). This interest in religion is continued in The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage, a collection of essays edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole which ‘seeks to integrate the study of Shakespeare’s plays with the vital history of practices of biblical interpretation that arose from the English Reformation’ (p. 11). Poole’s chapter 4, ‘Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics’ (pp. 69–86), suggests that Hamlet’s wordplay is ‘not simply a personal foible or a character’s speech habit’, but rather ‘shares in a linguistic vogue driven by the period’s popularized concern with the structures of biblical text’ (p. 74). Poole situates several moments in the play (such as Hamlet’s exchange with Polonius in Act II, scene ii) against a model of Protestant hermeneutics characterized by ‘compacted polysemy’, ‘a compression of figurative and allegorical meanings into a single surface’ (p. 79). Hamlet, Poole contends, does not only appear to ‘sometimes speak and think through the type of Protestant allegory that was popularized in exegetical literature of the 1590s’, but also ‘presents himself as the embodiment of this semiotic structure, and seems to demand a corresponding hermeneutic response from his audience and interlocutors’ (p. 86). Adrian Streete turns his attention to an earlier tragedy in chapter 7’s ‘Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation’ (pp. 121–39). Streete’s interest is in ‘the generative interplay between the Roman rhetoric of oratory and the biblical rhetoric of lament’ that takes place in the play: Shakespeare, he argues, ‘translates the often competing ethical and rhetorical provocations found in classical and Christian exegetical literature into the very stuff of dramatic conflict’ (p. 122). Streete situates Act III, scene i, closely against this context, contending that the scene would have been understood as ‘a syncretic set-piece that explores competing cultural attitudes towards lamentation’, thus exemplifying ‘a kind of theatrical cognitive dissonance’, in which ‘Classical and Judeo-Christian ethical assumptions sometimes work together, sometimes against each other’ (p. 139). The volume returns to Hamlet with its penultimate chapter 11, Jesse M. Lander’s ‘Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet’ (pp. 188–203). Lander suggests that, by ‘[tracing] out the relationship of the particular rites of death, and Hamlet’s invocation of Matthew 10:29’, we will be able to see not only ‘the ways in which rites and Bible inform each other through the play’, but also ‘the subtle way that the biblical text’s providentialism compensates for the play’s truncated or inadequate rituals’ (p. 191). Each chapter of David Schalkwyk’s Shakespeare, Love, and Language ‘focuses on a particular theory of eros—historical or contemporary—that illuminates especially well love’s representation and deployment in a cognate cluster of [Shakespeare’s] plays or poems’ (p. 12). The second half of Schwalkyk’s chapter 2, ‘Love’s Troubled Consummations’ (pp. 102–25), reads Othello against Stanley Cavell’s arguments about Shakespearean tragedy as ‘scepticism eroticized’ (p. 106) and Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘attempt to circumvent the problem of scepticism through his erotic reduction’ in his work The Erotic Phenomenon (p. 125). Othello, Schwalkyk contends, ‘[pushes] Marion’s aporia as far as [it] will go’, showing that ‘the finitude of love may well, under certain conditions, turn out to be unbearable’ (p. 125). Romeo and Juliet similarly occupies the second half of Schwalkyk’s chapter 4, titled ‘The “Finality of the You” (pp. 183–209). Romeo and Juliet’s predicament at the end of the play, Schwalkyk observes, ‘speaks of the fact that however much love wishes to rid itself of the proper name, to focus purely on the you, such complete freedom is impossible’ (p. 209). As ‘subjects of their society’ and ‘individuals to each other’, the deaths of the titular characters ‘speak of the ineradicably social nature of desire’, and how ‘in the midst of the social, it is love that makes individuals of us all’ (p. 209). Antony and Cleopatra is the play examined extensively in chapter 5, ‘Is Love an Emotion?’ (pp. 220–40). The play, Schwalkyk suggests, ‘demonstrates the degree to which love is constituted nostalgically, as something discovered only afterwards, in a backwards glance’ (pp. 239–40). In Antony and Cleopatra, Schwalkyk contends, Shakespeare ‘reiterates what Derrida calls “the impossible … theatre of double survival” by which each lives on in the other as part of their pledge of love’ (p. 240). In Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character, Nicolas Luke argues that Shakespeare’s major tragic characters are ‘born before our eyes’, a ‘radical sense of creation’ that distinguishes the playwright from others (p. 5). Situating several tragedies against thinkers such as Badiou, Žižek, Bergson, Whitehead, and Latour, Luke argues that character ‘is not a given but is produced anew in specific dramatic moments’, ‘perilous, eventual and leaping’ (p. 12). Chapter 1, ‘Thinking Arrivals: Rupture, Event, Subject’ (pp. 13–37), addresses the nature of the ‘Shakespearean arrivals’ posited in the book’s title, looking to a number of critics and thinkers who develop ‘ideas of becoming, transformation and creativity’ (p. 13). Luke traverses a wide range, beginning with Hegel and A.C. Bradley, who ‘both raise and contain the question of arrivals’, before examining ‘process-oriented thinkers who stress becoming over substance’ such as Latour (p. 13). Luke then examines to what he calls an ‘eventual’ or ‘adventist’ Christian tradition, before turning to Badiou, who is said to take up ‘elements of this tradition in his theory of the eventual subject’ (p. 13). Having theorized concepts of ‘arrival’, ‘event’, and ‘subject’, Luke moves to an analysis of the tragedies, beginning with chapter 2’s ‘The Subject of Love in Romeo and Juliet’ (pp. 38–70). Shakespeare’s lovers, Luke argues, ‘only arrive as ‘themselves’ through the event of love that punctures this situation and allows them to become “Romeo and Juliet”’ (p. 38). In chapter 3, ‘Love’s Late Arrival: Wonder and Terror in Othello’s High-Wrought Flood’ (pp. 71–102), Luke begins by showing how Shakespeare constructs Othello ‘through a peculiarly enclosed way of speaking about, and seeing the world’, and how Desdemona is given ‘the dramatic impetus to interrupt Othello’s self-sustaining tale and propel a new vulnerable subject into being’ (p. 71). It is also in Cyprus that Othello ‘belatedly experiences love as an event’, Luke further contends, opening ‘a new horizon of possibility’, ‘soon betrayed but powerfully evoked’, that provides the play’s eponymous character with his tragic dimension (p. 71). The first part of Luke’s chapter 4, ‘The Ghostly Event(s) of Hamlet’ (pp. 103–40), shows how ‘Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and hero are permeated with the eventual and the spectral’, while its second part aims to strongly delineate the gulf between Hamlet and Montaigne by examining the prince’s voyage to England (p. 103). Hamlet’s transformation, Luke argues, ‘stems from a cross-pollinating combination of his journey across the seas, the materiality of the graveyard, his movement towards final action and, above all, his recounting of the rashness that overcame him and secured his return’ (p. 121). Chapter 5, ‘Macbeth: The Arrival of Evil’ (pp. 141–72), posits that, unlike almost every other character, Macbeth ‘does arrive’, and he does so ‘through his rapturous, even wondrous, embrace of the dark and mysterious realm opened by the weird sisters’ (p. 141). With chapter 6, ‘The Cordelia Event: Seizing the Vanished in King Lear’ (pp. 173–204), Luke posits that the ‘diffused subjectivity of Lear trails into the very different “arrivals” of Shakespeare’s late plays’ (p. 173). Cordelia’s silent love, Luke argues, is the play’s ‘point of emergence’, in that it ‘dismantles the static, mechanistic worldview that underpins Lear’s love-test and unleashes the creative energy of the void’, but this energy ‘arrives only to vanish’, reappearing ‘fleetingly in disparate and unpredictable subject points’ (p. 173). R.S. White’s Ambivalent Macbeth is a significant expansion of White’s earlier work on the play, published in 1995 as part of the Horizon Studies in Literature. This revised and expanded work opens by considering Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and the way in which it ‘builds ambivalence upon ambivalence’ (p. 9). This, White contends, similarly characterizes Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘another play resting on issues of temptation and fall, reprobates and penitents, the sinner as hero … predestination and free will, good and evil counsellors, apparitions, equivocations, and meditations on hell and heaven’ (p. 9). Each of White’s subsequent chapters seeks to demonstrate the radical ambivalence that Macbeth is built on, beginning with chapter 1, titled ‘Contexts of Ambiguity: Text, Sources, and History’ (pp. 13–32). Here, White reconstructs some of the textual and editorial problems surrounding the text, and examines some of the sources for Shakespeare’s play. The ambivalence between the ‘pro- and anti- monarchical aspects’ of Macbeth, White suggests here, reflects the ‘tensions’ in Shakespeare’s sources (p. 30). Shakespeare, White argues, is ‘presenting as historical destiny two rival views of kingship which could apply as well, with variations, to the political debates concerning monarchy and parliamentary rule in Stuart Britain, as to analogous conflicts in early Scotland’ (p. 31). Chapter 2, ‘“Fair is foul and foul is fair”: The Radical Ambivalence of Macbeth’ (pp. 33–58), reiterates how the book aims to demonstrate that Macbeth is ‘multi-vocal’ and that ‘an important part of its overall significance is generated by paradoxes and discordances within its overall register’ (p. 34). White demonstrates how such a ‘plurality of readings’ was ‘implicit in educational practices and literary theories of Shakespeare’s time’ (p. 45) by reconstructing aspects of rhetorical, dialectical, and mathematical training, and closes the chapter with a brief consideration of power and monarchy, focusing particularly on the idea of a ‘ruler-in-waiting’. With chapter 3, ‘“Nothing is but what is not”: Emotional Worlds of Characters in Macbeth’ (pp. 59–100), White’s analysis turns to a consideration of ‘the circles of characters “around” the central ones’ (p. 62), such as Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, and the Weird Sisters. The ‘more limited parts’ of these characters ‘show in microcosm aspects of the fuller picture given of Macbeth as a play in which nothing is certain, and where events and people often seem what they are not’ (p. 63). The next chapter, ‘“The seeds of time” and the Macbeths’ (pp. 101–16), examines to the play’s main characters, considering both the ‘state of existential uncertainty’ (p. 108) that Macbeth is plunged into at the beginning of the play and how his attitude towards time differs from Lady Macbeth’s. Tying together ideas about the ‘history’ and the ‘present’ of the play, White offers a reading that is sensitive to the implications of the decisions Macbeth makes throughout. Towards the end of the play, White argues, Macbeth ‘now understands that he has been merely an insignificant agent in a play drawn from historical sources recording events which lie in the past, his words written by another as a script rather than expressing his own thoughts, and that now there is no more need for his existence’ (p. 115). In chapter 5, ‘“Palter with us in a double sense”: Leading Ideas — Temptation, Equivocation, Evil’ (pp. 117–42), White shifts his attention to the ideas referenced in the chapter’s title. Reading the play against both modern and early modern conceptions of these ideas, White suggests that Macbeth is not just a ‘moral test’ for its characters but also its readers and audiences (p. 118). The play ‘invites us to understand how otherwise exemplary people can be driven through strength of feelings in certain situations to commit evil acts’, and also ‘constitutes a meditation on the power of time, apprehended subjectively through the feelings it inspires as well as an objective imperative, guiding and haunting the actions of human agents’ (p. 118). As its title suggests, chapter 6, ‘“This is the very painting of your fear”: Imagery and the Emotional World of Macbeth’ (pp. 143–66), considers how the play is ‘built upon imagery, real and imagined, in its enhanced atmosphere and emotional expressiveness’ (p. 144). White’s analysis encompasses the prevalence of metalepsis, the recurrent imagery of drunkenness, and the frequent appearance of the word ‘blood’ in the play. In a play like Macbeth, White suggests, imagery can ‘establish atmosphere, colour our judgement of the action in ways that go beyond rational analysis, and suggest states of mind and feelings not confined to the expression of thought or attitudes alone’ (p. 166). White’s final chapter, ‘Macbeth on Stage and Screen’ (pp. 167–98), draws out the implications of the book’s arguments for the performance of the play. Ambivalence, White observes, marks the performance history of the play because of the ‘open questions concerning Macbeth’s motivation and culpability and the uniquely problematical role of Lady Macbeth’ (p. 169). Suparna Roychoudhury dedicates a chapter each to King Lear and Macbeth in Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science, namely chapter 4, ‘Seeming to See: King Lear’s Mental Optics’ (pp. 110–36), and chapter 5, ‘Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: The Pathologies of Macbeth’ (pp. 137–64). Unfortunately, a review copy of Roychoudhury’s work was not made available, nor was it readily accessible for this reviewer, who nonetheless still hopes to be able to include it in next year’s discussion. Edited by Tzachi Zamir, Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives is the first instalment of the Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature series. The essays in the volume have no pretensions to compatibility: ‘while all of them address Hamlet and philosophy, they differ not only in the philosophical insights being attributed to the play, but also with regard to what the very act of locating philosophy in literature means’ (p. 7). Readers are thereby invited to consider what this plurality implies. In chapter 1, ‘On (Not) Making Oneself Known’ (pp. 17–45), John Gibson suggests that the play engages with the problem of literary knowledge in two ways. While it ‘produces content that is of philosophical significance’ (which Gibson identifies as the nature of the self and self-knowledge), its mode of presentation also ‘raises questions about the nature of literary meaning itself’ (p. 20). Paul Woodruff’s chapter 2, ‘Staging Wisdom in Hamlet’ (pp. 46–71), explores two ‘hard’ questions, namely, how we can ‘grow wiser through an experience of theatre’ (and more specifically Hamlet), and how a playwright ‘could learn from the practice of theatre itself what to do in order to make this possible’ (which Woodruff also more specifically poses in terms of Shakespeare and Hamlet) (p. 48). David Woodruff opens chapter 3, ‘Philosophical Sex’ (pp. 72–104), with the invitation for us to ‘[i]magine Hamlet having sex’ (p. 72). Hillman suggests that we might gain different kinds of knowledge about Hamlet’s internal life and the play as a whole by considering the dimension of sexuality. Chapter 4 is Paul A. Kottman’s ‘Self-Uncertainty as Self-Realization’ (pp. 105–29). The play, Kottman contends, is ‘framed by the historical breakdown of the social bonds … on which the protagonists depend for the meaning and worth of their lives together’ (p. 109). At the same time, the play also ‘shows how the meaning of a life as individually lived is perhaps best gauged by the way it “bears up” under the collapse of traditional, inherited ways of life’ (p. 110). In chapter 5, ‘Hamlet’s “Now” of Inward Being’ (pp. 130–53), Sanford Budick argues that Hamlet’s revenge is ‘purely secondary to his disclosure, to himself, in meditation, of the presentness or now of his inward self’ (p. 130). On this reading, Hamlet is not ‘merely thinking of how to expose misdeeds’, but also ‘of the mirror and function from of his verbal acts of theatricalization’ (p. 131). Joshua Landy’s chapter 6, ‘To Thine Own Selves Be True-ish: Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Formal Model’ (pp. 154–87), suggests that Shakespeare is not offering the ‘potted aphorism “to thine own self be true” as a lesson to be learned, but as an invitation to think hard’ about how exactly we can be who we are (p. 155). In chapter 7, ‘“Unpacking the Heart”: Why it is Impossible to Say “I Love You” in Hamlet’s Elsinore’ (pp. 188–221), David Schalkwyk posits that Hamlet’s ‘radical uncertainty’ reveals the ‘rottenness of his society’: the ‘degree to which it has made it impossible to know, to recognize, to identify what love is, even in oneself’ (p. 208). Sarah Beckwith argues in chapter 8, ‘Hamlet’s Ethics’ (pp. 222–46), that the depth of the play as a work of moral philosophy ‘will only emerge if we shift the terrain of moral discussion away from the naked choosing will and towards what [Beckwith articulates] as the responsibilities of response’ (p. 223). In the volume’s closing chapter 9, ‘Interpreting Hamlet: The Early German Reception’ (pp. 247–72) Kristin Gjesdal discusses the ‘philosophical impact of Shakespeare’s work in the period from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69), via Johann Gottfried Herder’s work in the 1770s and 1780s, to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s 1808 Vienna lectures on dramatic art’ (p. 248). Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama, a collection edited by A.D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin, contains two chapters on Shakespeare’s tragedies. The first is Cousins’s own chapter 7, ‘Hamlet and Of Truth: Humanism and the Disingenuous Soliloquy’ (pp. 93–104). The chapter draws parallels between Hamlet’s first soliloquy and Francis Bacon’s essay Of Truth, contending that ‘[t]o explore the affinities between these texts is to appreciate more clearly how each is an exercise in fiction-making’ (p. 93). While Hamlet ‘seeks to establish—to his own satisfaction—the truth of his newly and radically defamiliarized circumstances’, Bacon’s speaker ‘seeks to establish his position and potentially reposition his readers within a world described as admiring truth but loving and delighting in falsehood’ (p. 93). Cousins argues that each ‘disingenuously uses a technique at the heart of Humanist pedagogy, the deployment of classical or otherwise ancient authority, to do so’ and ‘thereby emphasizes how malleable and equivocal that technique is’ (p. 93). In the next chapter, ‘Choosing between Shame and Guilt: Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear’ (pp. 105–18), Patrick Gray contends that the eponymous characters of these tragedies ‘find themselves torn between what Nietzsche would describe as “master” and “slave” morality’ (p. 105). Reading the soliloquies of these characters against the more neutral terms of ‘shame culture’ and ‘guilt culture’, Gray posits that the game for Shakespeare’s audience in watching these speeches is to ‘spot the various missteps by which his protagonists lead themselves astray’ in choosing the former over the latter (p. 109). Shakespeare’s soliloquies are also the subject of Neil Corcoran’s Arden Shakespeare volume, Reading Shakespeare’s Soliloquies: Text, Theatre, Film. Unsurprisingly, the tragedies are discussed extensively throughout Corcoran’s work, which he intends to be useful for a general, as well as a university-level and drama-school readership. Part IV in particular offers close readings of the soliloquies in Romeo and Juliet and Othello. The Queenship and Power series, edited by Charles Beem and Carole Levin, published two works this year with extensive discussions of the tragedies. The first of these is Sandra Logan’s Shakespeare’s Foreign Queens: Drama, Politics, and the Enemy Within. Titled ‘Strange Bedfellows: Friend, Enemy, and the Commonweal in Titus Andronicus’ (pp. 159–208), Logan’s fourth chapter focuses on ‘how the play responds to tyranny as a political problem’, and on ‘the role of Tamora as an internal friend and enemy of the state, a proponent of absolutism, and the perceived disrupter of political and moral order’ (p. 159). In her extensive reading of the play, Logan focuses on Shakespeare’s engagement with ‘concerns about abusive sovereignty and the role of the foreign queen in that dynamic’, as well as how the play connects ‘Tamora’s identity and actions to the transformation of Titus, Marcus, and Lucius, from devoted subjects into rebels against the Roman sovereigns’ (p. 159). Logan also engages with a number of political questions raised by the play, such as the justifiability of rebellion and the potential dangers of embodied sovereignty. The second offering from the Queenship and Power series, The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, edited by Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte, contains several chapters on queens in the tragedies. In chapter 5, ‘Cordelia, Foreign Queenship, and the Commonweal’ (pp. 69–85), Sandra Logan argues that King Lear is a play that is ‘intensely cynical about embodied sovereignty and its negative potential’ (p. 69). Logan extends Ernst Kantorowicz’s arguments about ‘the king’s two bodies’ to the play, contending that King Lear not only depicts ‘the negative effects of the body natural on the body politic’, but also demonstrates that ‘the state is unable to recover on its own from the extreme emergency this disruption creates’ (p. 70). Situating the play against early modern views on tyranny and the justifiability of intervention through foreign invasion, Logan argues that though Cordelia’s return as a foreign queen is ‘an acceptable expedient to restabilize and restore appropriate political order through the scourging of tyranny’ (p. 71), her efforts fail to achieve their ‘intended restoration of Lear’s sovereignty and the stabilization of the commonweal’ (p. 80). In chapter 7, ‘“To Beare the Name of a Quéene”. Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and Lady Macbeth: Queenship and Motherhood’ (pp. 107–26), Sally Fisher contends that Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is developed from his earlier characterization of Eleanor, and that depictions of the two women are informed by the intersecting themes of queenship and motherhood. Shakespeare, Fisher suggests, expands on how the women are portrayed in Holinshed’s Chronicles ‘to explore the effects of their desire for queenship upon the authority and masculinity of Gloucester and Macbeth’ (p. 119). This is followed by chapter 8, ‘Womb Rhetoric: The Marital Maternity of Volumnia, Tamora, and Elizabeth I’ (pp. 127–44), in which Lauren J. Rogener ‘rejects the model of reading female characters against male characters and patriarchal power’, opting instead to explore ‘the diverse political potential of motherhood’ (p. 127). By reading Volumnia, Tamora, and Elizabeth I as ‘models of martial maternity, reaching from the physical womb through abstraction to the realm of pure rhetoric’, Rogener finds ‘an intertextual inroad into the complex potential of writing about and staging maternity as an early modern political state and early modern politics in the context of motherhood’ (p. 128). In chapter 12, ‘Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as Meta-Theatrical Monarch’ (pp. 203–24), Shildaditya Sen argues that Antony and Cleopatra ‘provides a multifaceted exploration of the nature of theatricality and performance, one that simultaneously recognizes its beauties and its negatives, its potential for spiritually uplifting and morally corrupting, and its reliance on both the actor and spectator’ (p. 220). Sen draws our attention to the metatheatrical elements of the play (both through a comparison with Henry V and a reading of Cleopatra’s self-presentation as a performing queen), suggesting that Antony and Cleopatra ‘explores the dangers inherent in performance … displaying the power that audiences (especially hostile or critical ones) possess over the performing actor, however skilled the latter’ (p. 205). Cleopatra is once again the focus of chapter 22, titled ‘“A Gap in Nature”: Rewriting Cleopatra through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology’ (pp. 413–29). Here, Livia Sacchetti argues that Shakespeare ‘deconstructs all previous images of Cleopatra’: by ‘slowly evoking her voice’ and ‘rupturing the Roman verses that trapped her’, he ‘generates and cements the infinitely varied power that constituted her queenship, giving audiences across time a new archetype of feminine power, while liberating it from the need to be measured in relation to a male counterpart’ (p. 413). The play, Sacchetti contends, is ‘[b]uilt around an absence—a “gap in nature”— that generates the state of longing that is the cornerstone of its cosmology’, thereby [subtracting] the very image of Cleopatra that it consistently creates’ (p. 414). Amy Kenny also tackles Antony and Cleopatra in the volume’s closing chapter 26, ‘The “Squeaking Cleopatra Boy”: Performance of the Queen’s Two Bodies on the Early Modern Stage’ (pp. 503–18). Kenny explores ‘the mechanics of performing queenship on the early modern stage by tracing the physical appearance of boy players’, and in doing so draws our attention to ‘the fragile embodiment of femaleness when portraying monarchy’ in the play (p. 504). Kenny contends that the ‘tension’ between the body of the boy actor and that of Cleopatra ‘offers a parallelism of liminality for the body politic and body natural when examined through gendered semiotics’ (p. 504). In ‘drawing attention to the gap between illusory and physical bodies’, Kenny argues, ‘the play asks the audience to consider how the semiotics of performance undermines gendered distinction and behaviour’ (p. 515). Several chapters on the tragedies appear in Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare, an Arden collection edited by Lauren Shohet. Shohet’s own contribution, ‘Allusion, Temporality and Genre in Troilus and Cressida and Pericles’ (pp. 97–120), argues that the ‘strangeness’ of both plays ‘derives from their shared interest in how to stage—and live with—plots inherited from the literary past’ (p. 97). Shohet reads both plays in relation to their sources (Homeric epic in the case of Troilus and Cressida and Gower’s Confessio Amantis in the case of Pericles) and demonstrates how their ‘different responses to precedent stem from their genres’ relations to allusive prehistory’ (p. 104). Restoration performances of both plays, Shohet further contends, ‘illuminate affordances of forms for timing and times for forming’, a suggestion explored through the 1661 revival of Pericles and Dryden’s 1679 adaptation of Troilus and Cressida and Truth Found Too Late. In ‘Time, Tragedy and the Text of Antony and Cleopatra’ (pp. 157–70), Rebecca Bushnell examines how ‘the play’s editors have themselves attempted to control the play’s temporality by modifying spelling and imposing act and scene divisions’ (p. 157). By examining the interventions made by a range of editors (from Nicholas Rowe to Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen), Bushnell suggests that the text of the play has been ‘Romanized’ or ‘classicized’ over time to ‘define a different kind of tragedy in which time is under control, and where time is shaped, measured and understood’ (p. 170). This stands in contrast to the ‘temporal oscillation’ of the play, which ‘frames the characters’ differing relationships to the past, present and the future’, boundaries which Bushnell contends only Cleopatra manages to dissolve (p.159). While Bushnell acknowledges that such editorial interventions are now an inescapably standard practice, we must nevertheless be aware of ‘what is at stake when we submit to them’ (p. 170). William C. Carroll’s ‘“The Death of Fathers”: Succession and Diachronic Time in Shakespearean Tragedy’ (pp. 173–88) argues that Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth are plays which focus on ‘the necessity of the death of the father, real or symbolic’, and with each work ‘bring[ing] its central tragic figure to confront his place in diachronic time’ (p. 175). Carroll offers a close reading of Hamlet, a work in which the concept of ‘succession’ functions on ‘structural, chronological, familial, psychological and dynastic’ levels (p. 181). Reflecting on the three tragedies once again, Carroll concludes that these plays ‘represent the significant structural divisions of history as produced by generational change’ (p. 187). In ‘Future Histories in King Lear’ (pp. 205–20), Meredith Beales offers a reading of the play in which ‘characters gesture towards a future that never quite comes into focus’ (p. 206). The ‘future of Lear’s kingdom’ and the ‘dynastic links necessary to lead to early Stuart England’, Beales argues, are ‘forestalled by the events of Shakespeare’s tragedy’, and the ‘anticipated future can never quite come to pass’ (p. 207). Titus Andronicus and Macbeth are each given a chapter in Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence, a collection edited by Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters. Laura Seymour’s chapter 8, ‘Exchanging Hands in Titus Andronicus’ (pp. 155–69), focuses on how handclasps function in the play. Seymour offers a reading informed by ‘the shared stakes of cognitive theory and early modern stagecraft’ (p. 158), focusing on Titus’s gory handshake with Aaron in Act III, scene i of the play, and introducing a comparison with the fatal touch of Laertes’ sword in the final duel of Hamlet. The ‘subverted handshake’ in Titus Andronicus, Seymour contends, is ‘shocking not just because it is horrific and painful’, but also because ‘it crudely reduces the usual rich metaphoric life of the handshake as an interaction of two agents (where hearts, hands, mind, thoughts, loves, friendships are in lively interaction) to a crude bargain’ (p. 166). In the following chapter, ‘“Cabin’d, Cribb’d, Confin’d”: Images of Thwarted Motion in Macbeth’ (pp. 171–88), Mary Thomas Crane argues that ‘the imagery of smothering, choking and balking’ is pervasive throughout the play (p. 174). It not only ‘precedes and contributes to causing Macbeth’s ambitious overleaping’, but may also ‘work to elicit a sympathetic identification with Macbeth that critics may repress as they focus on condemnation of him’ (p. 174). Crane’s reading attends to many dimensions of the play, such as its political world and the power of the Weird Sisters, and concludes by considering how ‘readers tend not to be conscious of (or apply conscious analysis to) the pattern of imagery’ traced in the chapter (p. 181). This further points to how ‘[a]ttention to kinesis may help us to understand more fully the force of poetic language in ways that we have not previously been able to notice’ (p. 184). Edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700 contains two chapters on the tragedies. Lander Johnson’s own contribution appears as chapter 9, ‘Blood, Milk, Poison: Romeo and Juliet’s Tragedy of “Green” Desire and Corrupted Blood’ (pp. 134–48). Lander Johnson suggests that the play is concerned with an ‘early modern perception of green’ that draws on the belief that ‘humans were only ever partially removed from the rest of the created world and would eventually return (bodily) to the earth’ (p. 136). The play’s concern with ‘bad weaning (explicit in Juliet’s narrative and implicit in the characterization of Romeo’, Lander Johnson argues, ‘describes the lovers’ errant appetitive formation at adolescence as a direct result of their failure to successfully make it through the crucial infant stages of blood, milk, and food nourishment’, as informed by Galenic and early modern understandings of the process (p. 136). In that light, the titular characters’ demise ‘in the bloody “womb” of the earth, sucking on the poison they believe is their last source of comfort’ is said to be ‘the inevitable but tragic conclusion of their early appetitive corruption, of their greensickness’ (p. 137). In chapter 12, ‘Macbeth and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Blood and Belief in Early English Stagecraft’ (pp. 183–97), Elisabeth Dutton discusses blood as ‘proof’ in the late fifteenth-century Play of the Sacrament, demonstrating that this use, alongside ‘its exploitation of the possibilities of stage blood’ and ‘its attention to bloodied cloths and bloodied limbs’ can be said to ‘anticipate what scholars have found remarkable about blood a century later in the early modern playhouse’ (p. 185). Dutton then illustrates how Macbeth may be illuminated by being read alongside this play, drawing out several interesting implications for the Macbeths’ stained hands. A chapter on Titus Andronicus appears in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, and Miles P. Grier. In chapter 7, ‘“Is Black so Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ (pp. 137–56), David Sterling Brown reads the play in the light of the Black Lives Matter agenda and ‘the various forms of racism that have become hypervisible in recent years since the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin’ (p. 138). Brown makes a case for the ‘contemporary resonances’ of the play’s ‘social framework’ (p. 138), reading Aaron’s ‘black pride and firm resistance’ as a ‘precursor’ to movements that ‘highlight the dire matters of black life’ (p. 139). Patricia Akhimie explores Othello in the first chapter of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, titled ‘Othello, Blackness and the Process of Marking’ (pp. 49–82). Akhimie situates the play against treatises on the ars apodemica, which present travel ‘as a cultivating process with the power to increase one’s potential to be trusted’ and ‘one’s value in the culture of credit’ (p. 55). Travel, Akhimie argues, ‘presents a double bind’ in the play, in that its eponymous character is ‘both valiant hero and vagabond’ (p. 59). Othello is a ‘traveler’ who ‘simply seeks to gain and maintain a good reputation, and who submits wholeheartedly to the local conduct system with its arbitrary rules about behaviour and its intolerance for foreign customs’ (p. 59). At the same time, his ‘earnest conformity’ makes ‘the limitations of the conduct system clear’: while travel is ‘an acknowledged cultivating strategy, travelers cannot be trusted, with the burden of suspicion falling even more heavily on non-elites including cultural others, working folk, and women’ (p. 59). Othello, Akhimie contends, is “marked” in two senses: as a ‘returned traveler’, he is suspect, and ‘as a foreigner living within Venetian society, he signifies visibly and somatically his difference’ (p. 76). Rebecca Lemon explores Othello in a chapter of Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. In chapter 4, ‘Addiction and Possession in Othello’ (pp. 103–35), Lemon contends that the play ‘engages the early modern conception of addiction as a form of possessive devotion that overcomes the consenting subject’ (p. 103). Lemon suggests that the ‘extraordinary devotional capacity of Othello—his predisposition as an addict—proves, in a corrupt environment, his undoing’, and the play ‘heightens Othello’s drama by staging Cassio’s earlier on’ (p. 105). Lemon situates Cassio’s intoxication early in the play against conceptions of drunken responsibility in early modern English criminal law, suggesting that it is through ‘unexpected discussions of the origins of drunken habit’ that Othello ‘investigates the tangled relation of addiction to responsibility and capacity posed in [its] more dominant plotline’ (p. 105). A chapter on Othello appears in Patricia Parker’s Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. In chapter 5, ‘What’s in a Name? Brabant and the Global Contexts of Othello’ (pp. 210–72), Parker draws our attention to the significance of Brabantio’s name, which evokes a duchy in the Low Countries, laying out ‘a series of associations’ that such an evocation might summon, ‘as part of the wider global context of Othello as a whole’ (p. 211). Parker’s rich and sprawling analysis examines the play’s ‘preoccupation not only with “country matters” but also with a simultaneously sexual and territorial “occupation”’, issues of cash and credit, ‘multiple interconnections’ between Brabant and England, parallels drawn by contemporaries between London and Antwerp (one of Brabant’s quarters), as well as the duchy’s significance to the ‘theoric’ of the new military science, English military involvement in the Low Countries, and campaigns against the Turk in the Mediterranean and beyond (p. 211). To suggest that Brabant is evoked by the character’s name and contributes ‘in multiple ways to deepening the texture of this play’, Parker argues, is to suggest that the place is ‘part of the play’s wider global context, without any need for a one-to-one correspondence between the character of Brabantio and what was known for so long in England to be part of engagements that included the Low Countries, Cyprus, and the Turk’ (p. 271). Three tragedies are specifically discussed in the third chapter of Charlotte Scott’s The Child in Shakespeare, a work which ‘explores the agency and role of the child within the terms of the play-worlds they inhabit’ (p. 21). In ‘The End of the Beginning: Shakespeare’s Tragic Children’ (pp. 70–102), Scott examines ‘the children of Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear, showing how they evolve from victims to agents of tragedy’ (p. 70). Focusing on the youth of the play’s eponymous characters, Scott observes that while adulthood looms in Romeo and Juliet ‘both as a punishment and a reward, defined as it is by marriage and sexuality’, ‘no young person in this play lives to marry, or even to grow up’ (p. 83). Scott’s reading of Titus Andronicus examines parent–child dynamics, positing that central to an understanding of the play is ‘not a vision of childhood, or even the individual role of the children themselves, but the impact of the child on the parent’ (p. 85). The interest in this theme is extended to King Lear. While there is ‘no sense of childishness or childhood’ in the play as Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Edmund, and Edgar are adults, their status as ‘children’ is nevertheless essential for Scott’s account: nowhere, she suggests, ‘does Shakespeare explore paternal love more devastatingly than in King Lear’ (p. 91). Julius Caesar is examined in Shakespeare and Authority, edited by Katie Halsey and Angus Vine. Laetitia Sansonetti’s chapter 11, ‘Poetic Authority in Julius Caesar: The Triumph of the Poet-Playwright-Actor’ (pp. 231–46), suggests that the death of Cinna (and the eviction of the camp poet) in the play constitutes Shakespeare’s ‘apology for actors’. ‘Staging poets deprived of authority’, Sansonetti argues, ‘serves to tackle questions crucial to [Shakespeare’s] dramatic art in general and to this play in particular’, such as those surrounding ‘naming and identity, oratory and persuasion, the function of repetition, and the importance of good timing’ (p. 233). Taken in the context of the play as a whole, Sansonetti suggests, its two scenes featuring poets ‘appear to be caught in a network of repetition in which what matters is to have the last word’ (p. 241). Benjamin Bertram dedicates a chapter to Hamlet in his Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England. In chapter 5, ‘Bestial Oblivion in Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ (pp. 164–202), Bertram proposes that the ‘problem of action’ in the play is ‘worth revisiting now that ecocriticism, actor-network theory, and posthumanism have taught us to be more sceptical about the stability of the human as an ontological category’ (p. 164). The chapter closely reads the speech referenced in the book and chapter title, where Hamlet compares his plan to murder Claudius to Fortinbras’s plan for military conquest (Q2, Act IV, scene iv), as well as the interaction between Hamlet and the gravedigger (Act V, scene i). Bertram focuses on the play’s engagement with warfare, situating it against military manuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and considers how the experience of war binds together human and non-human agents. Hamlet, Bertram contends, is ‘thinking’ in both scenes analysed in the chapter, but ‘the assemblage of the graveyard enables him to break free of the more orthodox humanist thinking we find in his speech on Fortinbras’s army’ (p. 194). Here in the graveyard, Bertram suggests, a ‘different kind of reflection takes place, one that engages with (sym)poesis and might itself be described as metapoesis’ (p. 194). Douglas Bruster’s ‘Quoting Hamlet’ (chapter 4 of Maxwell and Rumbold, eds., Shakespeare and Quotation, pp. 72–86) takes the play as ‘a representative example of Shakespeare’s practice of quotation’ in order to trace its role in the ‘complexity and success of his writing’ (p. 72). The chapter presents a typology of quotations from the play, divided into categories such as reported speech and self-quotation. Using these examples, Bruster contends that quotation ‘functions as a metaphor for the full range of acts connected to the theatre: imagining and writing scripts for performance, executing these scripts, hearing them and relaying their words’ (p. 81). Moving beyond Hamlet, Bruster further observes that the intensive use of quotation in plays that were composed and/or printed between 1597 and 1600 corresponds to Shakespeare’s ascendancy as a playwright during this time. The ‘linguistic aptitude’ displayed in the quotations of these dramatic works, Bruster suggests, were a means by which Shakespeare ‘described the “literary” nature of his writing and asserted its claims to literary status’ (p. 86). Edited by Alison Gibbons and Andrea Macrae, Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language is a volume that seeks to advance ‘understanding of the role of pronouns in literary contexts’ (p. 1). To that end, Katie Wales’s chapter 2, ‘“I Am Thy Father’s Spirit”: The First-Person Pronoun and the Rhetoric of Identity in Hamlet’ (pp. 15–32), seeks to ‘tease out the relationship between I and its rhetorical function as a sign of prosopopoeia in drama’. Examining scenes involving the Ghost in Act I, Wales demonstrates how ‘the use of the pronouns thou, he and it both enrich[es] the character of the Ghost yet at the same time problematise[s] it’ (pp. 29–30). At the same time, the ‘prosopopoeic-I is tantalisingly delayed until scene v, and in consequence also the Ghost’s claim to his true identity’ (p. 29). A chapter on Hamlet (pp. 91–135) appears in Bianca Del Villano’s Using the Devil with Courtesy: Shakespeare and the Language of (Im)Politeness. Del Villano explores the play’s representation of impoliteness in terms of routine courtesy (which involves the use of formal courtesy conventions), strategic politeness (a form of ambitious courtesy, which concerns the way courtiers use politeness to fulfil their social and individual ambitions), and strategic (im)politeness as ‘off-recordness’, which is said to characterize Hamlet’s speeches (p. 91). Del Villano’s textual analysis attempts to show how ‘strategies of impoliteness in a micro-exchange at a local level relate to the Renaissance courtesy culture at a macro-level’ (p. 91). Two scholarly essays on the tragedies submitted in 2017 to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference were published in this year’s Renaissance Papers. Tony Perrello’s ‘Old Black Rams and Mortal Engines: Transhumanist Discourse in Othello’ (RenP 2017[2018] 65–72) suggests that the play is ‘preoccupied with the language of animalism and the fluidity of being between human and animal’, seeking to ‘probe, if not answer, the question of where such boundaries lie and what may push us toward them’ (p. 68). Perrello draws parallels to how cybernetics also ‘concerns itself with the ways that both human and non-human systems maintain or lose their stability’ (p. 68). Susan C. Staub’s ‘Botany and the Maternal Body in Titus Andronicus’ (RenP 2017[2018] 139–54) is also interested in the non-human, arguing that the play is ‘consumed with the palpable slippage between humans and the lower elements in the cosmic order, both animal and vegetable’ (p. 140). Nature in the play, Staub argues, is ‘exceedingly complex’ in his interrogation of human nature, monarchical and patriarchal power, as well as female bodies and procreation (p. 140). In ‘Embodying the Catholic Ruines of Rome in Titus Andronicus: Du Bellay, Spenser, Peele, and Shakespeare’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 319–48), Ryan J. Croft proposes to explain the play’s ‘extreme violence’ and ‘anachronistic monastery’ by reading it through Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence The Ruines of Rome [1591], which is in turn a translation of Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome [1558] (p. 321). Croft argues that by ‘transforming the bodies of his characters into the shattered religious monuments of the Henrician dissolution’, Shakespeare ‘circles back to the Catholic starting point of du Bellay’ in Titus Andronicus, thus subverting the ‘Protestant poetics’ of Spenser and the supposed co-author of the play, George Peele (p. 340). Shakespeare’s ‘bold re-reading of du Bellay’s and Spenser’s ruin poetics’ as well as his ‘firm rejection of Peele’s anti-Catholicism’ are said to demonstrate that his early ‘emotions and aesthetic instincts were very profoundly Catholic before he wrote Hamlet’, and that his ‘dramatic art was inspired early on by the English Catholic experience’ (p. 341). Deanna Smid’s ‘Sans Tongue, Sans Hands, Sans Music? Violence and Musical Bodies in Titus Andronicus’ (Shakespeare 15[2018] 398–409) reads the play against early modern metaphors which use music and musical instruments to describe and understand the body. Paying attention to Lavinia’s body ‘as a potential source of music, and perhaps even meaningful music’ (p. 398), Smid explores how the play raises and answers questions about the interaction between music and violence, how music can affect or be manifested by the incomplete body, and whether or not ‘the metaphorical music of the body [can] be performed on the Shakespearean and modern stage’ (pp. 399–400). Smid’s account draws on early modern examples such as the Guidonian Hand (a mnemonic device that uses the joints and segments of the hand to aid in memorizing the gamut musical scale) to illustrate how ‘music was commonly associated with the body, and that the body was a site of musical memory’ (p. 400). On Smid’s reading, the music of the mute and mutilated Lavinia ‘has been stolen and destroyed’, but her body ‘still has the capacity to communicate by means of that music’ (p. 408), with manifold opportunities for performance. Misha Teramura’s ‘Black Comedy: Shakespeare, Terence, and Titus Andronicus’ (ELH 85[2018] 877–908) is an important assessment of the play and its relationship to the Renaissance reception of Terence’s biography. While early modern humanists found in Terence’s works ‘the most important corpus of dramatic writing and linguistic eloquence in the Latin canon’, Teramura suggests that the classical playwright’s identity as a Moor was at the same time ‘unpalatable enough’ for these humanists to also ‘undertake the project of whitewashing the historical Terence or discounting the possibility of his authorship altogether’ (p. 890). Shakespeare’s own response to Terence’s identity as a black African, Teramura argues, can be found in Titus Andronicus. In ‘[aligning] race, writing, and genre in the person of Aaron’, the play is said to invoke ‘not only the conventions of Terentian comedy and the narrative of Terence’s Eunuchus, but the identity of Terence himself’, forcing the audience ‘to acknowledge the crucial contribution of an African slave to the very canon of Latin literature that humanists strove to recover’ (p. 899). Titus Andronicus, then, ‘complicates any assessment of Renaissance drama—and of Shakespeare’s work in particular—as part of an ethnically self-contained European tradition’ (p. 900). As Teramura puts it, the play ‘makes a powerful claim that challenges our assumptions about the Western literary tradition: Shakespeare’s Shakespeare was black’ (p. 900). Six articles on Shakespeare’s tragedies appeared in various issues of Notes and Queries this year. I begin with Romeo and Juliet, whose horticultural imagery has frequently been commented upon. Lisa Hopkins’s ‘Herb Paris, Romeo and Juliet, and Thomas Hesketh’ (N&Q 65[2018] 530–3) further observes that Paris is also ‘imaged in floral terms’: as the Nurse remarks in Act I, scene i, ‘he’s a flower, in faith, a very flower’ (p. 530). An Elizabethan playgoer, Hopkins tells us, would have recognized the allusion to herb paris, the English truelove plant, a reference which not only underscores the central love theme of the play but might also suggest where Shakespeare gleaned the botanical knowledge he displays in this play and in others. Hopkins draws potential connections to the naturalist Thomas Hesketh, who was the source for many of the plants described in John Gerard’s Herbal, a work Shakespeare is known to have used. The plants given by Hesketh to Gerard, Hopkins suggests, have Shakespearean resonances not only in Romeo and Juliet, but also in Twelfth Night and King Lear. Frederick Kiefer proposes, in ‘Hamlet’s “What a Piece of Work is a Man”’ (N&Q 65[2018] 74–5), a connection between the speech and Nicholas Lesse’s An Apologie or Defence of the Worde of God [1548], a translation of Philip Melanchthon’s The Justification of Man by Faith Only. Kiefer adduces several reasons for Shakespeare’s familiarity with Lesse’s work. Hamlet’s meditation following his interrupted journey to England, for one, seems to evoke Calvinist concerns about predestination. We are also reminded that Hamlet is a student at the University of Wittenberg, where Luther and Melanchthon both taught. In ‘Commonplaces, Aristophanes, and Clouds in Hamlet’ (N&Q 65[2018] 535–6), Vanessa Lim and Joanne Paul posit a connection between Aristophanes and a passage in Act III, scene ii of the play, in which Hamlet and Polonius discuss the shape of a passing cloud. The conversation between the two characters appears to reference a commonplace idea collected in Erasmus’s Adagia that is also a dig at those who earnestly discuss things of no importance. Rhodri Lewis’s ‘Shakespeare, Olaus Magnus, and Monsters of the Deep’ (N&Q 65[2018] 76–81) argues that Shakespeare found in Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus the ‘insigne verbum—the arresting image, idea, or phrase—that would become the germ of the “monsters of the deep” that trouble Albany’s moral imagination’ (p. 77) in King Lear. In ‘Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and the New Astronomy’ (N&Q 65[2018] 81–3), Peter D. Usher argues that the play’s ‘new heaven, new earth’ could refer to the astronomical model of stellar infinity set out in A Perfit Description of Cælestiall Orbes [1576] by Thomas Digges. It seems reasonable to assume, Usher contends, that ‘Antony challenges Cleopatra to set the bourn at the physical but unknown limit of Digges’ inductive extrapolation to infinity’ in Act I, scene ii of the play (p. 83). Mark Houlahan and Aidan Norrie argue, in ‘Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius’ (N&Q 65[2018] 539–42), that the former’s debt to the latter has not be adequately recognized. There are two key sections in the play, Houlahan and Norrie argue, that demonstrate Shakespeare’s engagement with Demetrius, namely Cleopatra’s ‘Good now, play one scene’ in Act I, scene iii, and Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra’s appearance before Mark Antony in Act II, scene ii. In ‘Wonder and Nostalgia in Hamlet’ (SEL 58[2018] 353–72), Judith H. Anderson explores the ‘emotional content’ of the play’s opening scene, paying particular attention to ‘the emotions of wonder and nostalgia evident in the beginning and recalled at the end’ (p. 353). The latter emotion, Anderson notes, is ‘a subject relatively novel in relation to Hamlet, particularly when it is regarded not merely as an expression of loss but more complexly as a source of familiarity, reassurance, and strength’ (p. 353). Anderson’s reading of the play draws on modern understandings of these emotions, as well as insights from Plato, Aristotle, and the Latin rhetorical tradition inherited by Renaissance humanists. In an account that stresses Hamlet’s youth at the play’s opening and throughout much of its developments, Anderson notes that ‘the home Hamlet recognizes and for which he is nostalgic in a positive way [prior to Act IV] is Wittenberg, not Denmark’ (p. 364). At the same time, the prince ‘clearly also experiences the melancholy, mourning kind of nostalgia for a very different Denmark that he inextricably imagines and remembers, the kingdom of the father he idealizes in the first three acts of the play’ (p. 365). Vladimir Brljak argues, in ‘Hamlet and the Soul Sleepers’ (RRR 20[2018] 187–208), that Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech is informed by soul-sleeping eschatology. Presented in ‘numerous contemporary publications as a serious and widespread threat to the orthodox Christian faith’, soul-sleeping is ‘the belief that on being detached from the human body at death, the soul assumes an unconscious state, usually described as “sleep” or a sleep-like torpor, in which it remains until reawakened at the last judgment’ (p. 187). Reading the soliloquy against this context, Brljak sees Hamlet as ‘engaged in a dangerous bout of theological bargaining, from which he comes out evading the ultimate pitfalls of atheism or annihilationism, but in the process reveals himself as subscribing to what was in orthodox eyes only a slightly less damning heresy’ (p. 201). This is said to have broader implications for our understanding of the play’s religious element, which Brljak argues is ‘not ambiguous but aligned with mainstream Church of England polemics of the period’ (p. 203). Charles Whitney’s ‘Foreclosing the Future in Macbeth, Hamlet, and “Agnotocene” Climate Policy’ (EMC 13[2018] 176–87) offers presentist interpretations of the two tragedies in light of (intergenerational) climate justice. Characters in these plays, Whitney argues, ‘can plausibly stand for groups, forces, or attitudes’: Macbeth offers ‘manipulation of information (riddling prophecies), victimized children, the question “why?”, and … a glimpse of human community in harmony with nature’, while Hamlet features ‘a case study in intergenerational injustice’, in the form of ‘a child whose life is commandeered by a recklessly obsessed father and who becomes, too late, a kind of political insurgent’ (p. 177). Comparative Drama brought out a second instalment of last year’s special issue on ‘The Tyrant’s Fear’, with no fewer than four articles on Macbeth. In ‘Linguistic Taboos and the “Unscene” of Fear in Macbeth’ (CompD 52[2018] 55–84), Silvia Bigliazzi argues that the play’s ‘unstaging of Duncan’s death is not an isolated strategy’ (p. 58). Instead, it is ‘part of a broader dramatization of the psychological process leading the hero-villain to become a tyrant not so much on account of identifiable fears, as stated in the play’s sources, but of his losing touch with affect altogether’ (p. 58). In ‘Tyranny and Fear in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ (CompD 52[2018] 85–102), Seth L. Schein first compares how the two playwrights construct tyranny and the tyrant, before considering the place of fear in each play, studying how it is ‘a dramatically significant emotion in the minds of individual characters and, more generally, an affect that pervades the dramatic universe’ (p. 85). Eric Nicholson’s contribution, ‘Who Watches the Watchmen, Especially When They’re on Edge? Liminal Spectatorship in Agamemnon and Macbeth’ (CompD 52[2018] 103–21) investigates the ways in which playwrights like Aeschylus and Shakespeare ‘call deliberate attention to “opsis”, or the spectating dimension of theatre-going’, and how the scripts of Agamemnon and Macbeth ‘connect what can be called “liminal spectatorship” to the staging of political behaviour’ (p. 104). The Watchman of Agamemnon and the Porter of Macbeth, Nicholson suggests, also ‘perform the task of what we would do if we found ourselves, like the Chorus of Argive Elders, or the Scottish King’s subjects, at the edges of our tyrannical rulers’ blood-soaked and blood-haunted residences’ (p. 119). In ‘Macbeth and Regimes of Reading in Francoist Spain’ (CompD 52[2018] 141–57), Keith Gregor examines the question of Macbeth’s reception during the years of Franco’s rule, exploring the regime’s appropriation of Shakespeare as well as differing adaptations of the play by Luca de Tena and Léon Felipe. Fear is also the central theme a special edition of the online Actes des congrès de la Société français Shakespeare. In ‘“The dread of something after death”: Hamlet and the Emotional Afterlife of Shakespearean Revenants’ (SfShak 36[2018]), Christy Desmet argues that ‘the early modern English imagined a range of post-mortem experiences’. In turn, the ‘emotions felt by those who experienced them and the subsequent uncertainty engendered in the living is best defined as “dread”’, which ‘links the living inexorably with the dead’. Situating Hamlet against the early modern female complaint (and Shakespeare’s own characters from this tradition), Desmet suggests that Hamlet is ‘just one of Shakespeare’s largely feminized revenants who return from the undiscovered country to set the historical record straight and to communicate to us their dread of the afterlife’. Graham Holderness’s ‘Terrorism and Culture: Macbeth, 9/11 and the Gunpowder Plot’ (SfShak 36[2018]) continues an ongoing discussion between Holderness and Robert Appelbaum on using Shakespeare as a means to reflect on terrorism. Holderness reiterates the arguments made in his earlier essay on ‘Shakespeare and Terror’, co-authored with Bryan Loughrey and published in Shakespeare After 9/11: How a Social Trauma Reshapes Interpretation [2011]. Macbeth, Holderness argues, ‘is driven by fear, and obsessively seeks, with an apocalyptic urgency, a “cleansing purgation” of the world from that which he fears most, the power of others’. Macbeth’s ‘vision of the future is his own lineage’, and constitutes ‘a rejection of all politics to make room for an infinite extension of the self’. There is a ‘commonality of discourse’, Holderness suggests, between ‘the language of Islamic terrorism’, the testimony of the gunpowder plotters, and Shakespeare’s play. ‘From Fear to Anxiety in Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ (SfShak 36[2018]), Christine Sukic’s contribution, situates the play against the social dimensions of fear and courage as it was conceptualized in the early modern period. In Macbeth, Sukic argues, ‘the hero undergoes a change, from an absence of fear that characterizes an obsolete kind of heroism, to anxiety expressed about a world that is unknowable, illusory, and impalpable’. Marguerite A. Tassi’s ‘Rapture and Horror: A Phenomenology of Theatrical Invisibility in Macbeth’ (EIRC 44[2018] 1–26) attempts to ‘recapture and describe theatrical experiences of invisibility that arise in performances of Macbeth’, using both text and performance to ‘gauge the phenomenality of horror and rapture in the audience’s experiences of the play’ (p. 4). ‘In a state of rapture induced by invisible phenomena’ such as the dagger he sees before him, Tassi argues that Macbeth ‘produces a work of horror’, a ‘work of physical and spiritual ruin that results in the characters’ and audience’s sense of estrangement from the natural and the social, and a sense of intimacy with the Other, with the monstrous and with evil’ (p. 23). (f) Late Plays This year wide-ranging works engaging with metatheatre, time, intertextuality, philology, and queer studies have appeared on a wide range of late plays, with even Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare’s late collaboration, being analysed at length. Familiar themes of religion, geography, and colonial studies also continue to appear in the studies of these plays. The Tempest remains the most studied of the late plays, though this year it was closely followed by works on The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with Cymbeline having received little attention. In ‘Theatrum Mundi: Rhetoric, Romance and Legitimation in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale’ (SP 115[2018] 719–41), David A. Katz contrasts the ‘efficacy of metatheatrical conceits with the problematic response generated by formal argument’ in many of Shakespeare’s late plays (p. 720). Katz contends that these plays, ‘by adapting the comparison between moral and theatrical acting’, offer ‘a model of ethics that encourages men and women to conceptualize morality as pragmatic performance, as a form of role-playing, dependent upon critiquing oneself as though one were an actor in a play’ (pp. 720–1). Katz points to the way in which both Ariel in The Tempest and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale use performance to induce patriarchal figures to reform when reason has failed them. Indeed, Katz argues that in The Winter’s Tale Hermione’s and Paulina’s ‘near perfect arguments’ of Ciceronian oratory were incapable of moving Hermione’s husband (p. 727). Katz goes on to describe why Hermione’s speech, which he argues corresponds to classical and contemporary oratory, is unable to sway her husband because his reason, or ratio, has been corrupted by jealousy (pp. 728–9). Reason, however, is undone by performance—particularly in the last scene of the play. It is through performance that Leontes, and Hermione, are saved, not reason. While other works this year also address the role of plays within plays and the nature of playing a role itself in the late plays, this field is partly made prominent this year by the focus of the spring issue of Shakespeare Bulletin on metatheatre. Amongst the articles produced in this thematic issue, are Callan Davies’s discussion of Cymbeline, ‘Matter-Theatre: Construction in Cymbeline’ (ShakB 36[2018] 69–88), and Bridget Escolme’s comparison of intimacy and performance in Pericles and The Tempest. Davies discusses the way in which Cymbeline ‘moves beyond metatheatrical moments or “events” to a more fundamental concern with dramatic construction that pervades a play’ through both a recognition and self-awareness of theoretical ‘matter’ and ‘at the level of narrative, verse, and dramaturgy’ (p. 70). According to Davies’s analysis, ‘Shakespeare’s continual reference to the building blocks of rhetoric indicates a self-conscious recognition of Cymbeline’s artifice’ reflecting contemporaneous concerns over rhetorical artifice and truth (p. 70). This connects to Katz’s discussion of the same concerns in relationship to The Winter’s Tale. Much of Davies’s examination focuses on the rhetorical and physical entrance and speech of Jupiter in Act V of the play, where both the text and the stage directions emphasize and contrast physical objects and actions and speech itself. Bridget Escolme’s ‘Public Eye and Private Place: Intimacy and Metatheatre in Pericles and The Tempest’ (ShakB 36[2018] 111–30) discusses a different form of performance in Pericles, that of the public performance of a societal role in the public sphere and the relationship between that role and private desires and actions. Escolme’s work touches on several of the late plays, but focuses primarily on The Tempest and Pericles. The aim of Escolme’s article is to examine how both early modern and modern audiences experience and interpret the delineation of the public and private persona or space in these plays through an examination of both early modern texts and the 2016 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse productions of four of Shakespeare’s late plays. Because the Wanamaker is based on a Jacobean design and uses candlelight rather than modern lighting, it creates an interesting space in which to examine and consider how early modern audiences experienced a private playhouse as opposed to a larger open-air structure such as the Globe. For Escolme, this intimate space itself enhances the metatheatricality of the plays and further emphasizes the delineation and connection between public and private spheres within them. José A. Pérez Díez’s ‘The Wide Gap of Sixteen Years: The Performance of Time in The Winter’s Tale in Britain, 2001–2017’ (ShakB 36[2018] 299–317) examines the role of time within the late plays. Díez is interested in performance: not the philosophy of performance, but rather in how the character of Time has been played in productions of The Winter’s Tale in Britain since 2001. Díez suggests that the reinterpretation of this role for modern audiences is preferred in part because time itself is so thematically central to the play. Díez’s work shows that time not only plays a role (sometimes as a character) in the plots of the late plays, but in how we engage with them and how they affect their audience. Geography in the late plays is the foundation of two articles: David M Bergeron’s discussion of Sicily in Much Ado About Nothing and The Winter’s Tale, in ‘Shakespeare and Sicily’ (MedS 26[2018] 179–93), and Suzanne Tartamella’s discussion of sources for Pericles’ eastern Mediterranean geography, culture, and religion in ‘Shakespeare the Escape Artist: Sourcing the East in Pericles, Prince of Tyre’ (SP 115[2018] 472–504). Bergeron is discussing what Shakespeare knew of Sicily and his use of it as a location for two plays that focus on ‘the issue of hospitality, which gets disrupted’ over the course of each play (p. 180; emphasis in original). This article focuses on the way in which The Winter’s Tale evokes themes of the earlier Much Ado About Nothing, and engages with whether Shakespeare’s choice of location plays a role in that thematic resonance. Tartamella makes an enticing connection between a medieval nostalgia for a pre-Islamic Christian East and the contemporary East in the early seventeenth-century imagination in Pericles. This is discussed through connections made in the play to the story of Apollonius, Reformation and counter-Reformation preoccupations with the origins of Christianity, and, most strikingly, between the paganism of the play and Eastern Orthodox practices. Rather than reading the text as overtly Catholic, Tartamella views it as engaging with Eastern Christianity. The emphasis on religious ritual and the depiction of a journey—a pilgrimage if you will—which humbles its hero through suffering to facilitate a miraculous restoration of a beloved family member is at the heart of Pericles. But in Tartamella’s reading this becomes less about Shakespeare’s possible recusancy and more about an escape to a place and a past that is connected ‘not only [to] the primitive roots of literary form but also the sacred wellsprings of the Christian East’ (p. 504). Ecology and The Tempest remains an area of interest in the ever-changing tides of literary criticism. A major new work examining weather in The Tempest and in the making of Goethe’s Werther and Zola’s Rougon Macquart—Literature and Weather: Shakespeare-Goethe-Zola—is by Johannes Ungelenk. In one notable passage, Ungelenk refers to The Tempest as ‘a play about theatre’ even as he discusses it as a play about weather. Ungelenk points to the play’s metatheatrical dimensions. Indeed, if there is an overarching theme to this year’s literary criticism of the late plays, it seems it is metatheatre—after all, it was Shakespeare who told us the world is a stage, so it seems proper that the heightened theatricality of the late plays, with their choral characters, classical roots and play-within-a-play scenes should be so strongly engaged with the current trend to metatheatre. For Ungelenk, each moment of metatheatricality in The Tempest is ‘conceptualised with the help of notions of the weather’, a theme which, he argues, has gone unnoticed in spite of the breadth of work on the play to date (p. 21). What follows is an in-depth examination in detail of weather, internal and external, in The Tempest before he turns to similarly intense analyses of Goethe’s Werther and Zola’s Rougon Macquart. Kay Stockholder’s posthumously published Thinking about Shakespeare also notes the way in which the late plays, and The Tempest in particular, ‘give greater priority to the symbolism of the action rather than to action as mimetic of possible human situations’ (p. 184). In a thoughtful section on Caliban and Prospero’s relationship, Stockholder points not to race as an explanation of the treatment of Caliban, but to the breach of trust created in their relationship by Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda. This is a welcome addition to the discussion of this character, as it comes from a very different perspective to that which has come to dominate much of the discussion of The Tempest in recent years. Stockbridge points to how early in their relationship ‘Caliban responds to Prospero’s tender treatment, with a return of it, reminding Prospero “then I loved thee”’. In contrast to Prospero, Stockholder argues, none of the other characters begin with tender treatment, all instead focus on Caliban’s apparent grotesqueness, his bestiality. Others that he encounters think of him as a commodity, which, while threatened with slavery and seemingly controlled by Prospero, he is not. For Stockholder it is the earlier relationship that makes Prospero and Miranda so cruel towards Caliban, implying that ‘Prospero would not react so angrily toward Caliban now had he not loved him as he did then’, and that even his proclamation of ownership is entangled with the very nature of his almost paternal relationship with Caliban (p. 196). In other words, Stockholder suggests that the ownership in question is the same ownership of a paternal figure who is still very much emotionally entangled with a once close confidant and pupil. While this runs contrary to much contemporary analysis that focuses on race rather than relationship, this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the discussion of Caliban in The Tempest. Other works on The Tempest this year return to more familiar postcolonial views of Caliban and race, and either embrace those norms, as in Izuu Nwankọ E.’s ‘Re-engaging Master Narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax’ (JCL Online First[2018]), or complicate it, as in Jeffrey R. Wilson’s article on different interpretations of the character, ‘“Savage and Deformed”: Stigma as Drama in the Tempest’ (MRDE 31[2018] 146–77). Nwankọ E. examines how The Tempest has become ‘the object of … postcolonial interpretations’ through contemporary African and Caribbean literature. Nwankọ E. is interested in the narrative created by Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax and its relationship with the postcolonial interpretation of The Tempest. For Nwankọ E., Caliban’s attempt at rape becomes a ‘supposed desire’ to rape Miranda, and the narrative of Shakespeare’s work is, in this view, tightly bound up in concerns over slavery, empire, and colonial expropriation (p. 10). Jeffrey R. Wilson attempts to reconstruct the different imaginings of the character of Caliban over time, from an early modern ‘devil’, a ‘monster’, some pre-human ape, or as a ‘racial other’, and to look at them not through a postcolonial lens, but through an early modern disability studies perspective. This study of stigma, presentation, disability studies, and magical thinking within the context of dramatized early modern social relationships is thoughtfully handled by Wilson. The author shows that the dehumanized Caliban is, because of his appearance and behaviour, cruelly stigmatized by other characters who encounter him and, through them, by the audience who then have to ‘reckon with the causes and effects of stigma’ (p. 149). Wilson argues that Shakespeare himself engaged in marking characters through their physical description ‘because physical difference was the insignia of evil in the renaissance’ (p. 150). In a thoughtful final comment Wilson hopes that there may be a production of the play in which Caliban is presented not as a devil, monster, or racial other, but merely as physically deformed/disabled, allowing the character’s response to the abusive name-calling he is subjected to, to reflect the experience of those who are stigmatized for their physical differences to normative bodies. Megan Snell’s ‘Chaucer’s Jailer’s Daughter: Character and Source in The Two Noble Kinsmen’ (SQ 69[2018] 35–56) discusses the origins of the character of the Jailer’s Daughter in Two Noble Kinsmen. Snell establishes that this character is almost non-existent in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, from which the plot of Two Noble Kinsmen was derived; barely mentioned as an unnamed and un-gendered friend. While she likewise remains nameless in Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, she also becomes a strikingly different and tragic figure, suffering through her unrequited love for Palamon. The Jailer’s Daughter makes a series of appearances without interacting with any of the play’s primary characters, usually to describe and display the depth of her lovesickness. Snell makes a striking argument that, rather than being some extraneous invention, the character and her language derive directly from the source material, that she ‘exemplifies the play’s layered intertextual relationship with …]The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘inherits the dangerous consequences of lovesickness found in the source and expresses these extreme feelings through a shared metaphorical language’. It is in the discussion of this metaphorical language (the repurposing of ‘Chaucer’s persistent liquid imagery in her character’s mad preoccupations with leaks and ships’) that Snell’s argument becomes most persuasive and thought-provoking (p. 38). According to Snell, as her mental state deteriorates—in part due to her failure to consume anything but liquid—the Jailer’s Daughter begins to represent, physically and metaphorically, the melancholic humour, the dangerous ‘distinctly feminine challenge to the containment of liquid affect’ (p. 43). The discussion of liquids, chastity, lovesickness, and humoral instability that runs through all the tales in the First Fragment is drawn together by Shakespeare and Fletcher into a single striking character, showing, according to Snell, a deeper and wider reading of the First Fragment by the authors rather than some thoughtless or parochial addition to the play. This is a thoughtful addition to the discussion of this often unexamined play. Hilary Ball’s discussion of imitation and reflection as ‘queer reflections’ in Two Noble Kinsmen focuses on the difference between the titular characters, whose love is destructive, with Emilia’s turn away from narcissistic self-love (Shakespeare 14[2018] 1–13). Ball examines the role of the myth of Narcissus in theories of homoerotic desire, showing how the play uses mirror and twin metaphors to show the homoerotic bond between the kinsmen for one another, and to describe Emilia’s ‘quasi-erotic relationship with her childhood friend Flavina’ (p. 3). Ball points to how Palamon’s love for Emilia not only destroys his close bond with Arcite, but also harms the character of the Jailer’s Daughter, who is driven mad by his thoughtless treatment of her. Arcite too is ultimately destroyed by his imitation of Palamon’s desire to possess Emilia, ultimately killed in his duel with Palamon. Thus the resolution of the play, according to Ball, often misread as an erasure of same-sex desire, is in fact a criticism of ‘not only those narrative structures that relegate homoerotics to the past tense, but also of the conventional rhetorics and tropes used to imagine homoerotics in the first place’ (p. 10). For Ball, this is contrasted in the play with Emilia’s journey, from playing at homoerotic desire with her mirror image in her friend in Flavina to a more mature and less narcissistic love of others who are not like herself, including the two men she does not desire either to marry or to watch fight one another for her hand (p. 10). For Ball, it is the failure of the Narcissus myth to account for human relationships between individuals that the play is examining. Emilia’s dismissal of Narcissus as a fool, Ball argues, interrupts ‘an idyllic mirroring aesthetic the play has thus far established in its depiction of same-sex love and desire’ (p.1). It is through this disruption—and the play’s examination of a range of homoerotic and heterosexual relationships—that, Ball argues, the play engages with Ovid’s Narcissus and dismisses all such irrational and selfish love as itself foolish, whether it is homosexual or not. (g) Comedies In ‘“To admire and do otherwise”: Hopkins’s Modified Translations of Shakespeare’s Casket Song’ (VP 56[2018] 181–95), Elizabeth Howard looks at Gerald Manley Hopkins’s Greek and Latin translations of Shakespeare, arguing that they were more than just an academic exercise. Howard’s essay ‘considers how Hopkins’s additional lines in his Latin verse underscore the ironic tragedy of love’s death and how his Greek variant clarifies Shakespeare’s ambiguous voices in the song from The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 181–2). Howard argues that, by ‘antiquating’ them, Hopkins has furthered the afterlives of Shakespeare’s songs. Howard gives some background to Hopkins and the Classics, and of critics’ engagement with Hopkins and Shakespeare, showing particular interest in influence and similarities in linguistics. Howard addresses Hopkins’s approach to translation, that the ‘translator must strive not merely for “literality” but also for “fidelity”’ (p. 184). Howard suggests that Hopkins did not think of his works as translations but ‘undertook the ambitious project of creating something new out of Shakespeare, heightening the motion and emotion conveyed in Shakespeare’s underthought and clarifying the multiple voices in the songs’ (p. 185). Howard focuses attention on ‘Tell me where is fancy bred’ from The Merchant of Venice, which was translated into both Latin and Greek by Hopkins. There is discussion of the song in the context of the scene in which it appears (Act III, scene i, when Bassanio chooses a casket), and Howard gives details of how Hopkins changed the song in adaptation, arguing that the Latin version ‘poetically performs the same kind of delay that Bassanio has protested against in the scene’ (p. 188). Howard points out that all Hopkins’s translations of Shakespeare ‘describe or anticipate death’ and all ‘serve as elegies’ (p. 188). Howard focuses on the clarification of voices in relation to Hopkins’s Greek version of the song. Howard concludes the essay by stating that ‘Hopkins offers Shakespeare’s songs a new afterlife, independent of their original setting, metrics, and linguistic boundaries’ (p. 193). In ‘“Of Hagar’s Offspring”: Leah’s Possible Christianity in The Merchant of Venice’ (ANQ 31[2018] 218–22), Clifton Craig suggests that Leah, mother of Shylock’s daughter Jessica, is an ‘overlooked “missing mother” in Shakespeare’s work’ (p. 218). Craig highlights how there is a single mention of her in the play, but that the placement of that as part of the ‘act that helps cement Jessica’s abandonment of her father’s Jewish culture’ (p. 218) gives Leah power, ‘especially if we consider the possibility that she had been a Christian’ (p. 218). In this essay Craig reads Leah as Christian. Craig argues that no character in The Merchant of Venice has a more transient identity than Jessica. In doing this, Craig details Janet Adelman’s work in Suffocating Mothers and applies Adelman’s theories to Leah. Craig reads Leah’s Christianity through references to Jessica’s apparently ‘non-Jewish’ appearance, and highlights how the significance of identity is passed from mother to daughter, especially in relation to religion. Craig argues that ‘reading Shylock’s deceased wife as Christian is an undeniably political act. Giving Shylock a backstory of possible attempted assimilation into mainstream Venetian culture confronts problems of racism, assimilation, and identity politics’ (p. 221). Craig concludes that reading Leah in this way makes her ‘a maternal presence that offers a hope to undo pain, such as in explaining both sides of their father–daughter divide, allowing for a sympathetic reading of both of them’ (p. 222). In ‘Mercy Unjustified: A Reformation Intertext for The Merchant of Venice’ (ShJE 154[2018] 92–105), Richard Hillman offers two intertexts for Merchant: Mercator seu Judicium, the anti-Catholic morality play of 1540 by Thomas Kirchmeyer, and Henri de Barran’s Tragiqve comedie francoise de l’homme justifie por Foy [1554]. Hillman argues that Barran’s play is the more profoundly intertextual, making the case for this through discussion of links between plots and characters, and argues that resonances with these texts ‘may have sharpened [The Merchant of Venice’s] point for an audience of thinking Christians … that souls and faith are far from secure in merely human possession’ (p. 104). Deborah Cartmell and Peter J. Smith edited an addition to the Arden Early Modern Drama series of critical guides on Much Ado About Nothing. Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Reader follows the same format as others in the series: there is a timeline (pp. xii–xv), a general introduction (pp. 1–19) to and a critical backstory (pp. 21–37) of the play, a performance history (pp. 39–65), a ‘state of the art’ chapter (pp. 68–87), a chapter on resources (pp. 177–204), and a number of critical essays under the heading ‘New Directions’. The introduction offers the fact that Beatrice and Benedick can be played into old age as a reason for the play’s enduring popularity, and the guide emphasizes this in other places (such as the performance history and in Elizabeth Schafer and Sara Reimers’s essay). A general introduction to the play is offered, particularly addressing thematic concerns, genre, and relation to other plays in the Shakespeare canon. In the ‘Critical Backstory’ chapter, Alison Findlay covers three areas: the watch; the plot involving Hero and Claudio; and Beatrice and Benedick. Findlay draws attention to the reservations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics about the outspokenness of Beatrice, but also highlights critics’ discomfort with Claudio’s treatment of Hero. In her ‘Performance History’ chapter, Kathryn Prince argues the play’s popularity is down to the ‘habitual combination of the celebratory with the elegiac’ (p. 17) and how productions deal with the contentious issues of the play. Elinor Parsons’s ‘The State of the Art’ chapter addresses more recent criticism and details how it has been dominated by the ‘darker side of the play’ (p. 17). Parsons shows how editorial and performance choices rehabilitate certain characters and highlights how critical attention has more often been focused on Hero and Claudio than on Beatrice and Benedick. In the ‘Resources’ chapter, Brett Greatley-Hirsch and Sarah Neville look at recent print editions and online resources. There are four ‘New Directions’ essays in the collection: in ‘Letting Wonder Seem Familiar—Italy and London in Much Ado About Nothing’ (pp. 89–109), Duncan Salkeld explores the mix of continental and European elements in the play and argues that ‘while the play seems to depict an Italianate romance in which true love meets adversity but wins out in the end, its more unsavoury elements are decidedly local’ (p. 89). Salkeld poses the questions ‘would early English audiences have regarded Shakespeare’s Messina as reassuringly alien or worryingly familiar? how might we read the play in terms of its local, London context?’ (p. 91), and proposes answers to these questions by looking at three areas: Much Ado as a printed text, the construction of Italy in the text, and connections with contemporary London. Salkeld argues that errors introduced into the manuscript by compositors are informative, and he looks at dating the text and the relationship between early versions of the text. Shakespeare’s source material is addressed in relation to the Italian setting, and in discussing London, Salkeld discusses apparently contemporary topological references. In ‘Much Ado—Women (and Men) of a Certain Age’ (pp. 111–31), Elizabeth Schafer and Sara Reimers argue that ‘the relative ages of Beatrice and Benedick have a particular impact on the play’s capacity to generate meaning’ and ask ‘what happens to Much Ado when Beatrice is presented realistically, and in a realistic context, as being “of a certain age”?’ (p. 112). Schafer and Reimers address different external factors that will affect how audiences respond to the actor’s age. The chapter focuses in particular on Nicholas Hytner’s 2007–8 production of the play with Zoe Wanamaker (who was 58 at the time) and Simon Russell Beale (who was 46). They look at the production itself, as well as at critical responses to it. Schafer and Reimers conclude that ‘Hytner’s production turned Much Ado into a realistic exploration of recovering relationships’ (p. 130). In ‘Much Ado or Love’s Labours Won? Does it Matter Which?’ (pp. 134–53) Lois Potter explores how Much Ado may relate to the (lost) Love’s Labour’s Won. Potter takes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014–15 production of Much Ado which the company performed as a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost and titled Love’s Labour’s Won, and Peter Kirwan’s statement that ‘the implication that the two plays are narrative sequels is bunk, but the thematic connection implied by the titles need not be’ (p. 136), as starting points. Potter begins by asking what Love’s Labour’s Won was, offering background to the discovery of the title and possibilities of which play it might be (particularly addressing Much Ado and The Taming of the Shrew), discussing various links between Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado. In a section on Much Ado as metatheatre, Potter addresses issues of staging, especially casting, when performing Much Ado as a sequel to and in conjunction with Love’s Labour’s Lost. In the final essay of the section, ‘Much Ado About Nothing and Social Media’ (pp. 155–76), Christy Desmet looks at the presence of Much Ado on YouTube, addressing, for example, how many searches for the title are conducted, and what the content related to it consists of. Desmet offers a section on Joss Whedon’s 2012 film and the influence this has had on other internet productions, focusing on Nothing Much to Do, SHAKES, and A Bit Much. In ‘Malcontented Agents: From the Novellas to Much Ado About Nothing and The Duchess of Malfi’ (ANQ 31[2018] 176–81), Lucia Nigri finds Matteo Bandello’s portrayal of evil agents to be a source for the malcontents in both Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Nigri details how, while Shakespeare took a lot from the source, it is usually accepted that his villains in Much Ado deviate from the source. However, Nigri seeks to redress this, showing through closer investigation how the ‘novellas’ insistence on slander and stories (re)told by different characters and used by the wrongdoer for his own purposes gives the comedy its interest in the power of counterfeited words’ (p. 176). In relation to Much Ado, Nigri concludes that ‘Don John’s illegitimacy, the play’s surplus of discontented figures, and its interest in the distorting power of words and stories demonstrate that Much Ado About Nothing is even more indebted to Bandello than is generally supposed’ (p. 178). In ‘The Commodity of Errors: Shakespeare and the Magic of the Value-Form’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 149–56), Thomas Cosgrove begins from the premise that The Comedy of Errors is preoccupied with both money and magic, and argues that the particular magic of this play is money. Cosgrove shows how, in the play, characters see magic everywhere while in fact none actually seems to take place. Cosgrove argues that the play’s ‘main conceit is the seemingly magical “confusion” and “transformation” of identities and bodies that the breakdown of the circulation of commodities and money produces’ (p. 150), and shows how the confusing of the Antipholi identity leads to confusion regarding economic exchanges. Cosgrove argues that ‘The Comedy of Errors, then, is motivated not only by the confusion, or errors, that derive from the play’s identical twins, but also by the confusion of the structural positions entailed by commodity circulation, buyer and seller … the titular errors are not that of merely mistaking one twin for another, but instead of confusing which positions they inhabit in the process of exchange’ (p. 151). In making these arguments, Cosgrove draws on the work of Jean-Christophe Agnew, Douglas Brewster, Walter Cohen, and Jonathan Gil Harris. However, Cosgrove looks chiefly to Marx’s theorization of ‘the magical nature of money’ (p. 150) in Capital and The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Cosgrove concludes that ‘the breakdown of the circulation process dependent upon the confusion of the Antipholi not only as identical twins but also as economic dramatis personae motivates the play and allows for money and the market to appear as magical as they actually were in early modern England’ (p. 154). In ‘Face-Off: Defacement, Ethics and the “Neighbour” in The Comedy of Errors’ (TPr 32[2018] 1255–75), Richard Ashby focuses on the characters of Adriana and Egeon. Ashby argues that the action of The Comedy of Errors ‘relentlessly [undermines] the stability of the self’ by staging ‘the traumatic ramifications of a rift between personal and public perceptions of identity, as once familiar others cease to recognise an individual as himself and unfamiliar others suddenly recognise in him a self which the individual does not’ (p. 1255). In so doing, Ashby uses the Lacanian perspective ‘where defacement is understood to result from a sudden … withdrawal of an authenticating gaze’ (p. 1257). Ashby addresses how recent criticism of the play has focused on bodily identity but overlooked the anxiety around the face that is found in the play, and goes on to survey the critical role of the face in post-war philosophy and ethical theory. In so doing, Ashby details, the work of, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek. Ashby discusses Shakespeare’s use of the term ‘defeature’ in The Comedy of Errors in connection with how characters view the effects of time on the body. Ashby argues that ‘the defeaturing impact of time on the body is apparent only in the presence of others or, more precisely, from the perspective of others … the final responsibility for the physical deterioration that afflicts both Adriana and Egeon lies not with time per se, but with the individuals who fail to identify them’ (p. 1261). For example, in relation to Adriana, Ashby argues that Antipholus is responsible for her defeaturing because of his ‘roving eyes’: ‘Bereft of the verifying gaze of Antipholus, the physical features of Adriana … become susceptible to the ruin that could render them unrecognizable’ (p. 1263). In ‘The Place of a Cousin in As You Like It’ (SQ 69[2018] 101–27), Julie Crawford seeks to propose a ‘normalizing’ argument that the bond between Celia and Rosalind in the play ‘illuminates the ethical, social, and political utility of women’s same-sex relations in the early modern imagination’ (pp. 126–7). Crawford starts from the premise that (students) read Shakespeare’s comedies as championing heterosexuality and that, because comedies end in marriage, the homoerotic elements of the plays are often seen as only ever temporary. In contrast, Crawford suggests that ‘many of Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriages that structurally resecure the same-sex and homoerotic relations that played such important roles in bringing them about’ (p. 102). Crawford draws attention to the myriad types of relationships in Shakespeare’s plays and the range of vows beyond those of marriage. The focus in this essay is on kinship, and Crawford argues that ‘the webs of kinship and obligation … center on same-sex vows between women that enable and are further enabled by marriage’ (p. 104). Crawford explores the varied meanings of cousinship in the relationship between Celia and Rosalind through a close reading of the text that allows her to find contemporary social and political significance. Across four sections the essay follows the constant recalibration of the relationship through the various obstacles that face the characters from parents and future (male) partners. The first section explores how the relationship is established: Crawford builds on Jeffrey Masten’s observation that ‘sweet’ almost always indicates the homoerotic, and adds ‘coz’ to this, arguing ‘“cousin” was used as a term of intimacy, friendship, and familiarity [beyond the family connection]’ and ‘its diminutive, “coz”, often functions in early modern comedies as a kind of erotic condensation of such intimacy’ (p. 106). Crawford highlights the various contemporary meanings of ‘cousin’, including the economic resonances linked to ‘next of kin’ and inheritance. In the second section, Crawford relates the relationship to various religious texts, including the Book of Common Prayer and the marriage ceremony, and the book of Ruth and the relationship between Ruth and Naomi. Crawford argues that ‘the vow that Ruth—and Celia after her—makes is itself a form of ritualized kinship rather than merely an imitation of one’ (p. 115). Crawford draws a number of parallels between the relationship and story of Ruth and Naomi and that of Rosalind and Celia. In the third section, Crawford addresses the marriage per verba de praesenti between Rosalind/Ganymede and Orlando, officiated by Celia. In contrast to critics who have read Celia’s accusations of Rosalind misusing her sex as Celia’s fear of losing Rosalind, Crawford instead looks to Rosalind’s response to Celia, which constitutes ‘a superlative invocation of their kinship’ (p. 120). Crawford argues here that ‘Rosalind does not replace Celia … nor does she shift her loyalties from Celia to Orlando. Rather, she countenances a new bond with an extant one, consanguinity and avowed kinship with marriage, same-sex with cross-sex love’ (p. 120). Crawford also reads the unnaturally quick (as it is sometimes seen) coupling of Celia and Oliver in the light of kinship ties, arguing that ‘in marrying brothers, Celia and Rosalind effect an outcome … that ensures their continued kinship and the integrity and security of their inheritance’ (p. 121). In the final section, Crawford addresses the concluding marriages of the play, looking at the language of dowries and jointure used by Duke Senior and Orlando. Crawford shows the continued emphasis on equality and parity between the male and female partners, and argues that the stage direction for Celia and Rosalind to leave together ‘assures us that Celia and Rosalind are still “coupled and inseparable”’ (p. 122). Crawford finishes by discussing the ways in which editions of the play are ‘particularly interventionist on behalf of heterosexuality’, and asserting that ‘there is abundant evidence that early modern women’s relationships with one another, much like those between men, were enmeshed in complex webs of avowed kinship’ (p. 126) which she then details with a number of examples. In ‘What’s So Funny ’bout Peace, Love, and Shakespeare? A Peace Studies Approach to As You Like It’ (Shakespeare 14[2018] 298–311), John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti begin by asserting that recent criticism has focused on Shakespeare in relation to war, ignoring the periods of peace in early modern England. Garrison and Pivetti argue that war has been shown to be ‘at the centre of things, whether in Shakespeare’s time or our own’ (p. 299). In contrast to this type of criticism, Garrison and Pivetti take a peace studies approach and ‘address simultaneous issues of genre, politics, and temporality, all with the intention of disrupting narratives in which the only activity is violent conflict’ (p. 299), offering a reading As You Like It that ‘examines peace not as the brief respite from a history of endless violence, but rather as the beginning of counter-narratives with possibilities for altruism, friendship and stability’ (pp. 299–300). Garrison and Pivetti explore the links between comedy, love, and peace in Shakespeare and use As You Like It as a case study. They argue that ‘As You Like It’s insistence on depicting distraction, foolishness, and idleness is precisely what makes it an exploration of peace’ (p. 301). Attention is paid particularly to Jaques and Touchstone, and also to Orlando as he enters the forest. Garrison and Pivetti argue that ‘Orlando’s experiences in Ardenne bear out that creative relationship to the past’ and that the play ‘suggests that when we begin to acknowledge that our ties to the past are always in part based on fantasies of direct connection, we (like Orlando) are liberated to imagine that another world is possible’ (p. 304). They conclude with discussion of Rosalind’s epilogue and state that Rosalind’s embracing of both male and female gender identity ‘initiates an act of peace’ (p. 308). In ‘Bengal as Shakespeare’s India and the Stolen Indian Boy: The Historical Dark Matter of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (EMLS 20:i[2018] 1–27), Imtiaz Habib comments on the resurgence of ideas about India’s wealth that has led to a ‘rich vein of critical attention … accruing to [the] idea of India in Shakespeare in the Western academy’ (p. 1) that focuses especially on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Habib aims to show in the article ‘that Shakespeare’s Indian picture was based on early English experience of the Bengal delta in eastern India, so that Bengal was the unmarked faceplate of Shakespeare’s India’ (p. 4), and that this belongs to ‘what may be termed “historical dark matter”’ (p. 4), a term taken from phenomena in physical astronomy. The essay is structured in three parts: the first addresses Shakespeare’s knowledge of India, the second looks at ‘the critical poetics of how Bengal silently coloured Shakespeare’s imaginations of India’ (p. 4), and the third applies this to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Habib suggests that Shakespeare’s knowledge of Bengal came from accounts of the eight-year trip of Ralph Fitch to India in 1583. Habib comments on significant features of what Fitch says (and the significance of things he doesn’t say), and notes that ‘Fitch’s Bengal is a fluid, liminal zone, one that is both impalpable and real, nameless and identifiable, a malleable entity’ (p. 7) and that the language Fitch uses about Bengal ‘is characterized by wealth’ (p. 7). Habib goes on to note that ‘one activity Fitch likely would have seen … was the casual abduction of locals for conversion to Christianity and transportation to Europe’—this is the ‘historical dark matter’ referred to in the title of the article (p. 10). Habib then highlights a number of ‘convergent factors’ that place Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in ‘productive proximity’ (p. 14) with Fitch, and posits the possibility of a ‘tavern conversation’ between Shakespeare and Fitch, calling this ‘a quintessential dark historical event that is humanly predictable but not documentarily visible’ (p. 14). Habib argues that ‘the imaginative charge of Fitch’s dry description of India appears in Shakespeare, in free floating non-specific imagistic allusions, hologramic simulacra’, and that ‘Fitch’s articulated and silent experiences of Bengal namelessly, indivisibly, haunt the idea of India that Shakespeare scatters in cryptic allusions … across his plays but centrally incorporates in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (p. 16). In discussing the changeling boy, Habib argues that the child is more properly an Indian boy and addresses the violence and sanitization of his abduction, how this both relates to other events of the play and foreshadows the actual taking of people and materials that would soon happen. In ‘Of Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: The Conversation about Poetry in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (BJJ 25[2018] 194–213), Donald Carlson asserts that ‘In MSND we hear Shakespeare replying to the recently martyred Jesuit Robert Southwell’s thoughts about the proper uses of poetry’ (p. 194) and that ‘Shakespeare’s response to Southwell’s advice … consists of a disagreement with Southwell’s premises about the aims of poetry’ (p. 194). Carlson contends that ‘Shakespeare recasts the very notion of piety that anchors Southwell’s view’ (p. 195). Carlson details the background of the ‘discussion’ between Southwell and Shakespeare, and references the posthumous ‘The Author to His Loving Cousin’ which Shakespeare seems to be engaging with in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before moving on to discussion of the play itself, in which Carlson explores possible references to and echoes of Southwell in Shakespeare’s text. Carlson concludes that, in evoking past ages in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘Shakespeare gives life in the playhouse to things disappearing from sanctuary and altar: the imaginal life of the old faith, a life conducive to poetry and sympathetic to poets’ (p. 211). In ‘Shakespeare’s Imitation Game: How Do You Solve a [Problem Set] Like Katherina?’ (Symploke 26[2018] 267–92), John Freeman reads The Taming of the Shrew as a computer program in order to look at how characters and people are programmed into particular roles. Freeman states that the play ‘operates as a formal system, set up and “run” as a program with it own special set of “functions” and “scripts” specifically designed to [process] “problem sets” encoded as plots and subplots’ (p. 267). Freeman argues that ‘what particularly distinguishes Taming from other comedies is how it engages the audience in its complex and sophisticated programming strategies’ (p. 268) such as the framing device which creates a play-within-a-play. Freeman devotes a section of the article to the Induction, arguing that these scenes are ‘subroutines operating in the context of the larger play … setting forth premises by way of particulars that support … the larger play’s generalizations’ (p. 271). Another section references the Second World War Enigma code machine to demonstrate how ‘Taming’s own coding procedures, posed as suppositions, become increasingly complex’ (p. 278) and arguing that ‘the play requires a good deal of ongoing computations from both its characters and its audience’ (p. 278). In the third section, ‘To Compute or Not To Compute…’ Freeman engages with notions of the separateness of actor and role, and reading ‘Kate [as] a program, a platform that Shakespeare supplies and upon which others are certainly free to add new applications’ (p. 287). Freeman concludes that ‘the play seems on the verge of becoming a Turing machine in its own right, the instantiation of a hypothetical device that Turing envisioned as having no spatial or temporal limitations, an endless supply of paper, and no limits on computational speed’ (p. 289). Books Reviewed Akhimie Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 219 . hb £96 ISBN 9 7808 1535 6431, e-book from £17.50 ISBN 9 7813 5112 5048. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Banks Kathryn , Timothy Chesters , eds. Movement in Renaissance Literature: Exploring Kinesic Intelligence. Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 249 . £79 ISBN 9 7833 1969 1992. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bardelmann Claire. Eros and Music in Early Modern Literature and Culture . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 265 . £115 ISBN 9 7811 3857 9811. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bate Jonathan , ed. Titus Andronicus . ArdenS 3 . [ 2018 ] pp. xxiv + 352 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7813 5003 0909, pb £10.99 ISBN 9 7813 5003 0916. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bates Catherine , ed. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry . Wiley . [ 2018 ] pp. 680 . £124.75 ISBN 9 7811 1858 5191. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bernard J.F. Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xi + 252 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7814 7441 7334, e-book £75 ISBN 9 7814 7441 7358. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bertram Benjamin. Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England. Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 282. £120 ISBN 9 7811 3870 8853. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Caputo Nicoletta. Richard III as a Romantic Icon: Textual, Cultural and Theatrical Appropriations . Lang . [ 2018 ] pp. 272. £48 ISBN 9 7830 3432 9989. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Cartmell Deborah , Peter J. Smith , eds. Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Reader . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 280. £75 ISBN 9 7814 7428 4370. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Chaudhuri Sukanta , ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . ArdenS 3 . [ 2017 ] pp. xvi + 365 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7814 0813 3507, pb £8.99 ISBN 9 7814 0813 3491. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Clark Sandra. Shakespeare and Domestic Life: A Dictionary . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 440 . hb £130 ISBN 9 7814 7258 1808, e-book £140.40 ISBN 9 7814 7258 1815. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Continisio Tommaso , Bianca Del Villano , eds. Queens on Stage: Female Sovereignty, Power and Sexuality in Early Modern English Theatre . Aracne . [ 2018 ] pp. 208 . €30 (pdf €15) ISBN 9 7888 2551 3509. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Corcoran Neil. Reading Shakespeare’s Soliloquies: Text, Theatre, Film. ArdenS . [ 2018 ] pp. 240 . £65 ISBN 9 7814 7425 3512. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cousins A.D. , Daniel Derrin , eds. Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama. CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 288. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0717 2548. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Del Villano Bianca. Using the Devil with Courtesy: Shakespeare and the Language of (Im)Politeness . Lang . [ 2018 ] pp. xix + 279 . £47 ISBN 9 7813 4995 3165. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Depledge Emma. Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700 . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiv + 252 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 7104. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Edmondson Paul , Ewan Fernie , eds. New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. xxiii + 292 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7814 7424 4558, pb £28.99 ISBN 9 7814 7424 4541, e-book £31.30 ISBN 9 7814 7424 4565. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Fulton Thomas , Kristen Poole . The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 304 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7811 0719 4236, e-book $80 ISBN 9 7811 0855 8907. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Garrison John S. Shakespeare and the Afterlife . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 155 . hb £50 ISBN 9 7801 9880 1092, pb £16.99 ISBN 9 7801 9880 1108. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ghose Indira. Much Ado About Nothing: Language and Writing . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 180 . £45 ISBN 9 7814 7258 0986. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gibbons Alison , Andrea Macrae , eds. Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language. Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xix + 279 . £76 ISBN 9 7813 4995 3165. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gossett Suzanne , Helen Wilcox , eds. All’s Well That Ends Well . ArdenS 3 . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 432 . hb £80 ISBN 9 7819 0427 1192, pb £12.99 ISBN 9 7819 0427 1208. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Halsey Katie , Angus Vine , eds. Shakespeare and Authority: Citations, Conceptions and Constructions . Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xxi + 347 . £87 ISBN 9 7811 3757 8532. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Hirschfeld Heather , ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 592 . £95 ISBN 9 7801 9872 7682. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Hiscock Andrew , Lina Perkins Wilder , eds. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory . Routledge . [ 2017 ] pp. xxvi + 328 . £136 ISBN 9 7811 3881 6763. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Ioppolo Grace , ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . NCE . [ 2018 ] pp. 264 . pb £7.95 ISBN 9 7803 9392 3575. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Johnson Bonnie Lander , Eleanor Decamp , eds. Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700. UPennP . [ 2018 ] pp. 368 . £77 ISBN 9 7808 1225 0213. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Kamaralli Anna , ed. Much Ado About Nothing . ArdenS . [ 2018 ] pp. lv + 285 . pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7814 7427 2094. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Kerrigan John. Shakespeare’s Originality . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiv + 167 . £26.49 ISBN 9 7801 9879 3755. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Kietzman Mary Jo . The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xi + 254 . hb £79 ISBN 9 7833 1971 8422, pb £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1989 1095, e-book £63.99 ISBN 9 7833 1971 8439. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Lander Jesse M. , J.J.M. Tobin , eds. King John . ArdenS . [ 2018 ] pp. 354 . £12.99 ISBN 9 7819 0427 1390. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Langley Eric. Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications. OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 336 . £65 ISBN 9 7801 9882 1847. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Lemon Rebecca. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. UPennP . [ 2018 ] pp. 280 . £56 ISBN 9 7808 1224 9965. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Logan Sandra. Shakespeare’s Foreign Queens: Drama, Politics, and the Enemy Within . Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 279 . £62 ISBN 9 7811 3753 4835. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Luke Nicholas. Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character. CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 260 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 2154. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Lupton Julia Reinhard. Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life . UChicP . [ 2018 ] pp. 272 . hb $82.50 ISBN 9 7802 2626 6015, pb $27.50 ISBN 9 7802 2654 0917, e-book $10 to $27.50 ISBN 9 7802 2626 6152. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Macintosh Fiona , Justine McConnell , Stephen Harrison , Claire Kenward , eds. Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 672 . £110 ISBN 9 7801 9880 4215. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Mahood M.M. , Tom Lockwood , introd. The Merchant of Venice . NCaS 2 . [ 2018 ] pp . x + 205 . hb £49.99 ISBN 9 7811 0714 1681, pb £8.99 ISBN 9 7813 1650 6646. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Mares F.H. , Travis D. Williams , introd. Much Ado About Nothing . NCaS 2 . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 181 . hb £49.99 ISBN 9 7811 0717 4733, pb £8.99 ISBN 9 7813 1662 6733. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Maxwell Julie , Kate Rumbold , eds. Shakespeare and Quotation . CUP [ 2018 ] pp. xi + 316 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0713 4249. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Mayer Jean-Christophe. Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 259 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7811 0713 8339, e-book $84 ISBN 9 7811 0867 1613. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC McCarthy Denis , June Schlueter . ‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. 520 . £75 ISBN 9 7818 4384 4884. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC McEachern Claire. Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 324 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7811 0842 2246, e-book $80 ISBN 9 7811 0839 7070. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC McMullan Gordon , Philip Mead , Ailsa Grant Ferguson , Mark Houlahan , Kate Flaherty . Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 240 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7814 7427 1431, pb £28.99 ISBN 9 7813 5012 6541, e-book £31.31 ISBN 9 7814 7427 1448. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Menzer Paul , ed. Romeo and Juliet . ArdenS . [ 2017 ] pp. 360 . pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7814 7428 0143. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Mudan Finn Kavita , Valerie Schutte , eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens . Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xix + 530 . £179.99 ISBN 9 7833 1974 5176. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC O’Neill Stephen , ed. Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change across Media. Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 336 . £75 ISBN 9 7813 5011 8829. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Parker Patricia. Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords . UPennP . [ 2018 ] pp. 424 . £52 ISBN 9 7808 1224 9743. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Prescott Paul , ed. Othello . Arden . [ 2018 ] pp. 408 . pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7814 7427 2346. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Raber Karen. Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. 216 . hb £75 ISBN 9 7814 7423 4436, pb £23.99 ISBN 9 7814 7423 4443, e-book £81 ISBN 9 7814 7423 4450. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Reid Lindsay Ann. Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval . Brewer . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 267 . £60 ISBN 9 7818 4384 5188. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Richmond Hugh Macrae. Shakespeare Relocated: Studies in Historical Psychology . Lang . [ 2018 ] pp. 306 . £64 ISBN 9 7814 3314 6732. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Rokison-Woodall Abigail , ed. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Arden . [ 2017 ] pp. xlix + 232 . pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7814 7424 5197. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rokison-Woodall Abigail , ed. Hamlet . Arden . [ 2017 ] pp. 432 . pb £6.99 ISBN 9 7814 7425 3888. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Roychoudhury Suparna. Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science . CornUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 248 . £35 ISBN 9 7815 0172 6552. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Sanders Norman , Christina Luckyj , introd. Othello . NCaS 2 . [ 2018 ] pp . x + 234 . hb £49.99 ISBN 9 7811 0712 908 5, pb £8.99 ISBN 9 7811 0756 9713. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Schalkwyk David. Shakespeare, Love, and Language. CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 260 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0718 7238. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Scott Charlotte. The Child in Shakespeare . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. viii + 172 . £55 ISBN 9 7801 9882 8556. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Shaughnessy Robert. As You Like It: Shakespeare in Performance . ManUP . [ 2018 ] pp . x + 228 . £75 ISBN 9 7807 1908 6939. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Shohet Lauren ed. Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare. ArdenS . [ 2018 ] pp. 344 . £75 ISBN 9 7813 5001 7290. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Smith Cassader L. , Nicholas R. Jones , Miles P. Grier , eds. Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology. Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xvii + 244 . £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1976 7857. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Stockholder Kay rev. , Amy Scott . Thinking about Shakespeare . Wiley . [ 2018 ] pp. 248 . £24.99 ISBN 9 7811 1905 9011. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Thomas Alfred. Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages . Palgrave . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 260 . £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1990 2173. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tribble Evelyn. Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body . Bloomsbury . [ 2017 ] pp. ix + 227 . £80 ISBN 9 7814 7257 6033. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Ungelenk Johannes. Literature and Weather: Shakespeare-Goethe-Zola . [ 2018 ] pp. ix + 590 . Gruyter. £91 ISBN 9 7831 1055 9057. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Van Dijkhuizen Jan Frans. A Literary History of Reconciliation: Power, Remorse and the Limits of Forgiveness . Bloomsbury . [ 2018 ] pp. xii + 236 . hb £85 ISBN 9 7813 5002 7220, pb £28.99 ISBN 9 7813 5015 4841, e-book £91.80 ISBN 9 7813 5002 7244. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC White R.S. Ambivalent Macbeth . SydneyUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 222 . £16 ISBN 9 7817 4332 5483. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Zamir Tzachi , ed. Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 312 . £79 ISBN 9 7801 9069 8515. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - VII Shakespeare
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maaa007
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/vii-shakespeare-bS7t4j9aja
SP - 364
EP - 453
VL - 99
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -