Shakespeare's Princes of Wales spotlights the surprising abundance of princes of Wales--English and Welsh alike--appearing onstage in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In drawing our attention to the oft-overlooked and frequently misunderstood Welsh inheritance, and in investigating its staged and shadowed heirs in plays and court performances by Shakespeare, Peele, Fletcher, Jonson, and more, Marisa R. Cull suggests that the growing scholarly interest in Wales's influence on English national identity must be conditioned by the political and theatrical specificity of the princedom. Illuminating the princedom's unique role as an extension of the Welsh past in contemporary England, Shakespeare's Princes of Wales reveals early modern English culture's understanding of the princedom as linked to England's most pressing national crises: the tenuous connection between bloodline and succession, the anxiety over England's native strength, and the fraught process of fashioning a British state. In the pages of this book, we meet familiar characters--Hal, Glendower, Fluellen, and more--wholly transformed through the added insights about the princedom, and encounter long-ignored or forgotten heirs, meaningfully resurrected for the insights they provide on the Anglo-Welsh past. In telling the story of the early modern princedom, Shakespeare's Princes of Wales offers new insights not only into that period's politics and theater, but also into a title that survives, in continued complexity, to this day.

Shakespeare's plays, argues Lings, concern far more than the workings of the human psyche; they are sacred, visionary works that, through the use of esoteric symbol and form, mirror the passage the soul must make to reach its final sacred union with the divine.

Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spenser, Drayton and Dekker. This volume brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic, including leading practitioners of British Studies, in order to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the degree to which Shakespeare continues to impact upon Welsh culture and identity even as the process of devolution in Wales serves to shake the foundations of Shakespeare's status as an unproblematic English or British dramatist.