Shakespeare 

About: Shakespeare is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Hamlet (place) & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1745-0918. Over the lifetime, 811 publications have been published receiving 2752 citations.

Strange Weather in King Lear

Abstract: This article argues that King Lear can help re-shape the emerging discourse of eco-criticism. The play's focus on human dis-harmony with the non-human environment resonates with recent developments in ecological science like the “post-equilibrium shift”. Shakespeare's representations of dis-equilibrium in the storm scenes can correct eco-criticism's reliance on pastoral and Romantic visions of harmony. The play's emphasis on the way natural systems, especially the weather, disrupt humanity's meaning-making capacities generates an alternative to dualistic notions of the self–nature relationship. By representing ecological instability and pluralized selfhood, King Lear reminds “green” readers how difficult and disorderly living in a mutable eco-system can be.

Late Falstaff, the Merry World, and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Abstract: This essay addresses longstanding critical disappointment surrounding Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which it argues reflects the play's own concerns with the seductions of memory and the claims of the new. It explores contemporary understandings of mirth, suggesting that Merry Wives juxtaposes the carnivalesque Sir John with Windsor's confident citizenry to work through nostalgia for “Merry England” in the Elizabethan present. At the same time, as an early citizen play The Merry Wives of Windsor explores the aesthetic as well as the political implications of old mirth. Falstaff focuses these concerns, embodying not only past carnival but also theatrical history: in particular, he himself is a survivor of an earlier comic present and is usually seen in the light of this remembered glory. Critical discontent has often focused on the apparent inconsistency between early and late Falstaff, but the article argues against this tradition. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's work on late style, it suggests that...

Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview

Abstract: This paper surveys the discipline. With numerous signs that the era dominated by the new historicism is coming to an end, Shakespeare studies in 2005 appears to be at a crossroads. A number of new books have appeared summarizing the results of two decades for the general public of research. Another sign is the number of works re-examining the field's foundational assumptions, such as possible co-authorship of a number of Shakespeare's works or the issue of whether Shakespeare should be conceived as writing solely for the theatre or for readers via the early modern book trade. In addition, it seems clear that the new historicism has split into two different streams. One, epitomized by the new materialism has foregone an orientation toward our contemporary world, preferring to recreate Shakespeare's historical context empirically. The second has arisen as a reaction to this tendency and self-consciously interprets Shakespeare in the context of our own culture, even when it is involved in situating Shakespea...

Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach

Abstract: In 1602 the fourth quarto edition of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy appeared, the title page describing it as “Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted”. The authorship of these five Additions, totalling 320 lines, has been much discussed, the leading candidates being Shakespeare and Jonson. This essay uses a new method in authorship attribution studies, drawing on insights from Corpus Linguistics. The advent in the 1960s of large electronic corpora of actual language use, and the ability to create concordances, revealed that human beings communicate not just by deploying single words but also by grouping words into sequences, collocations of several words. Some of these are shared by language communities (“by the way”, “the bottom line”), others are unique to individuals. New software programs, devised to detect student plagiarism, can scan two texts in parallel and reveal every collocation of three consecutive words...

Global Shakespeares as Methodology

Abstract: Having reached a critical mass of participants, performances and the study of Shakespeare in different cultural contexts are changing how we think about globalization. The idea of global Shakespeares has caught on because of site-specific imaginations involving early modern and modern Globe theatres that aspired to perform the globe. Seeing global Shakespeares as a methodology rather than as appendages of colonialism, as political rhetorics, or as centerpieces in a display of exotic cultures situates us in a postnational space that is defined by fluid cultural locations rather than by nation-states. This framework helps us confront archival silences in the record of globalization, understand the spectral quality of citations of Shakespeare and mobile artworks, and reframe the debate about cultural exchange. Global Shakespeares as a field registers the shifting locus of anxiety between cultural particularity and universality. This article explores the promise and perils of political articulations of cultur...