A fun-filled fantasy romp through Elizabethan England . . . It has been said that one man could not possibly have created all the works attributed to William Shakespeare. However, what if Shakespeare was not a man? What if Shakespeare was an immortal vampire? What if the Dark Lady of his sonnets was a zombie hunter? What if they met, fell in love, thwarted evil together . . .

The last quarter century has seen a “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare’s plays reflect profound skepticism and even dismissal of the truth claims of revealed religion. This divide, though real, obscures the fact that Shakespeare often embeds both readings within the same play. This book is the first to propose an accommodation between religious and secular readings of the plays. Benson argues that Shakespeare was neither a mere debunker of religious orthodoxies nor their unquestioning champion. Religious inquiry in his plays is capacious enough to explore religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, everything from radical belief and the need to tolerate religious dissent to the possibility of God’s nonexistence. Shakespeare’s willingness to explore all aspects of religious and secular life, often simultaneously, is a mark of his tremendous intellectual range. Taking the heterodox as his focus, Benson examines five figures and ideas on the margins of the post-Reformation English church: nonconforming puritans such as Malvolio as well as physical revenants—the walking dead—whom Shakespeare alludes to and features so tantalizingly in Hamlet. Benson applies what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—his ability to treat both sides of an issue equally and without prejudice—to show that Shakespeare considers possible worlds where God is intimately involved in the lives of persons and, in the very same play, a world in which God may not even exist. Benson demonstrates both that the range of Shakespeare’s investigation of religious questions is more daring than has previously been thought, and that the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the orthodox and the unorthodox, is one that Shakespeare continually engages.

All aspects of the zombie lifestyle are surveyed in this satirical take on an orientation manual for the newly undead. From how one became a zombie in the first place and the stages of zombification to survival mechanisms, this handbook offers specific advice on everything a fresh zombie needs to know about "life" expectancy, hunting techniques, hitching a ride, hand-to-mouth combat, and feeding etiquette. Instructions for extracting the living from boarded up farmhouses and broken down vehicles are included along with dozens of helpful diagrams outlining attack strategies such as the Ghoul Reach, the Flanking Zak, the Bite Hold, and the Aerial Fall for securing human prey and their all-important flesh and brains.

First in the cult classic trilogy: “A fantastic zombie novel . . . There are many layers to this zombie apocalypse, and this book just gets things rolling” (Booklist). Welcome to New York City, Population Zero? The power grid has collapsed. There is no running water, no light, no heat. The massive neon signs of Times Square are dark now, and the subway trains crouch silent in their tunnels, waiting for commuters who will never return. An epidemic of staggering lethality has passed over the city and left nothing living in its wake. And yet the city is not deserted. The dead have returned to life, and they're hungry. The millions of people who once worked and lived in New York have been turned into cannibalistic monsters whose only function is to consume. No living person would dare enter the city--it would be suicide. Dekalb doesn't have a choice. He must protect his daughter's future, and that means retrieving vital medical supplies from the UN building in Midtown. A cadre of teenage girl soldiers have been recruited to help him find what he needs, and get back alive. They're well armed. They're devoted to their mission and willing to sacrifice anything to pull it off. But the odds against them are staggering. Especially when it turns out that not all zombies are created equal. Deep inside the city a medical student named Gary comes back from the dead different--his mind is intact. He can still think and feel. He's hungry, just like the rest, but unlike them he can plan, plot, and scheme. He can even lead the others, bending them to his will. Soon he has a small army at his command, a growing mob of rotting corpses all devoted to one cause: to find meat for their master. When Dekalb and Gary cross paths sparks will fly, destinies will clash--and the future of humanity will be decided, one head shot at a time.

The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of Shakespeare scholarship with film and media studies, particularly genre theory. The book is organised into six large chapters, discussing films that form broad generic groups. Part I looks at three genres from the classical Hollywood era (western, melodrama and gangster-noir), while Part II deals with three contemporary blockbuster genres (teen film, undead horror and biopic). Beside a few better-known examples of mainstream cinema, the volume also highlights the Shakespearean elements in several nearly forgotten films, bringing them back to critical attention.

This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. While The Shakespeare User contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical works on digital and Internet Shakespeares, this volume looks beyond the study of Shakespeare artifacts to the system of use and users that constitute the Shakespeare network. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction.