Featuring contributions by established and upcoming scholars, Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England explores the ways in which Shakespearean texts engage in the social and cultural politics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century translation practices. Framed by the editor's introduction and an Afterword by Ton Hoenselaars, the authors in this collection offer new perspectives on translation and the fashioning of religious, national and gendered identities in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

This study emerges from an interdisciplinary conversation about the theory of translation and the role of foreign language in fiction and society. By analyzing Shakespeare's treatment of France, Saenger interrogates the cognitive borders of England - a border that was more dependent on languages and ideas than it was on governments and shorelines.

In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Shakespeare's international status as a literary icon is largely based on his masterful use of the English language, yet beyond Britain his plays and poems are read and performed mainly in translation. Shakespeare and the Language of Translation addresses this apparent contradiction and is the first major survey of its kind. Covering the many ways in which the translation of Shakespeare's works is practised and studied from Bulgaria to Japan, South Africa to Germany, it also discusses the translation of Macbeth into Scots and of Romeo and Juliet into British Sign Language. The collection places renderings of Shakespeare's works aimed at the page and the stage in their multiple cultural contexts, including gender, race and nation, as well as personal and postcolonial politics. Shakespeare's impact on nations and cultures all around the world is increasingly a focus for study and debate. As a result, the international performance of Shakespeare and Shakespeare in translation have become areas of growing popularity for both under- and post-graduate study, for which this book provides a valuable companion.

This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focusing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.

This collection brings together perspectives on regional and social varieties of British English in fictional dialogue across works spanning various literary genres, showcasing authorial and translation innovation while also reflecting on their impact on the representation of sociolinguistic polarities. The volume explores the ways in which different varieties of British English, including Welsh, Scots, and Received Pronunciation, are portrayed across a range of texts, including novels, films, newspapers, television series, and plays. Building on metadiscourse which highlighted the growing importance of accent as an emblem of social stance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapters in this book examine how popular textual forms create and reinforce links between accent and social persona, and accent and individual idiolect. A look at these themes, as explored through the lens of audiovisual translation and the challenges of dubbing, sheds further light on the creative resources authors and translators draw on in representing sociolinguistic realities through accent. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in dialectology, audiovisual translation, literary translation, and media studies.

Twelfth Night is the most mature and fully developed of Shakespeare's comedies and, as well as being one of his most popular plays, represents a crucial moment in the development of his art. Assembled by leading scholars, this guide provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporary study of the play. Throughout the book chapters explore such issues as the play's critical reception from John Manningham's account of one of its first performances to major current comentators like Stephen Greenblatt; the performance history of the play, from Shakespeare's day to the present and key themes in current scholarship, from issues of gender and sexuality to the study of comedy and song. Twelfth Night: A Critical Guide also includes a complete guide to resources available on the play - including critical editions, online resources and an annotated bibliography - and how they might be used to aid both the teaching and study of Shakespeare's enduring comedy.