Focusing on England, Hungary and on some other European countries, the book explores the latent religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the 1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1864. It shows how the Shakespeare cult used quasi-religious (verbal and ritual) means of reverence, how it made use of some romantic notions, and how the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was utilized for political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of literature.

Where, when, and why did European Romantics take to Shakespeare? How about Shakespeare's reception in enduring Neoclassical or in popular traditions? And above all: which Shakespeare did these various groups promote? This collection of essays leaves behind the time-honoured commonplaces about Shakespearean translation (the 'translatability' of Shakespeare's forms and meanings, the issue of 'loss' and 'gain' in translation, the distinction between 'translation' and 'adaptation', translation as an 'art'. etc.) and joins modern Shakespearean scholarship in its attempt to lay bare the cultural mechanisms endowing Shakespeare's texts with their supposedly inherent meanings. The book presents a fresh approach to the subject by its radically descriptive stance, by its search for an adequate underlying theory along interdisciplinary lines, and not in the least by its truly European scope. It traces common trends and local features not just in France and Germany, but also in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and the West Slavic cultures.

Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years. The essays in this volume consider Venice a real as well as symbolic landscape that needs to be explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare's historical context and in the later tradition of reconfiguring one of the most represented cities in Western culture. Shylock and Othello are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical; we are still haunted by these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare’s biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children’s fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.

This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.