Migrating Shakespeare offers the first study of the earliest waves of Shakespeare’s migration into Europe. Charting the spread of the reception and production of his plays across the continent, it examines how Shakespeare contributed to national cultures and – in some cases – nation building. The chapters explore the routes and cultural networks through which Shakespeare entered European consciousness, from first translations to stage adaptations and critical response. The role of strolling players and actors, translators and printers, poets and dramatists, is chronicled alongside the larger political and cultural movements shaping nations. Each individual case discloses the national, literary and theatrical issues Shakespeare encountered, revealing not only how cultures have accommodated and adapted Shakespeare on their own terms but their interpretative contribution to the texts. Taken collectively the volume addresses key questions about Shakespeare’s naturalization or reluctant accommodation within other cultures, inaugurating his present global reach.

Republic to restoration cuts across artificial divides between periods and disciplines,often imposed for reasons of convenience rather than reality. Challenging the traditional period divide of 1660, essays in this volume explore continuities with the decades of civil war and the Republic, shedding new light on religious, political and cultural conditions before and after the restoration of church and king. Transdisciplinary in conception, it includes essays on political theory, poetry, pamphlets, drama, opera, art, scientific experiment and the Book of Common Prayer. Essays in the volume variously show how unresolved issues at national and local level, including residual republicanism and religious dissent, were evident in many areas of Restoration life, and were recorded in memoirs, diaries, plays, historical writing, pamphlets and poems. An active promotion of forgetting, and the erasing of memories of the Republic and the reconstruction of the old order did not mend the political, religious and cultural divisions that had opened up during the Civil War. In examining such diverse genres as women's religious and prophetic writings, the publications of the Royal Society, the poetry and prose of Marvell and Milton, plays and opera, court portraiture, contemporary histories of the civil wars, and political cartoons, the volume substantiates its central claim that the Restoration was conditioned by continuity and adaptation of linguistic and artistic discourses. Republic to restoration will be of significant interest to academic researchers in a wide range of related fields, and especially students and scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history. -- .

Shakespeare's unique status has made critics reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which some of his plays are the outcome of adaptation. In Shakespeare's Stage Traffic Janet Clare re-situates Shakespeare's dramaturgy within the flourishing and competitive theatrical trade of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates how Shakespeare worked with materials which had already entered the dramatic tradition, and how, in the spirit of Renaissance theory, he moulded and converted them to his own use. The book challenges the critical stance that views the Shakespeare canon as essentially self-contained, moves beyond the limitations of generic studies and argues for a more conjoined critical study of early modern plays. Each chapter focuses on specific plays and examines the networks of influence, exchange and competition which characterised stage traffic between playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson and Fletcher. Overall, the book addresses multiple perspectives relating to authorship and text, performance and reception.

Shakespeare's unique status has made critics reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which some of his plays are the outcome of adaptation. In Shakespeare's Stage Traffic Janet Clare re-situates Shakespeare's dramaturgy within the flourishing and competitive theatrical trade of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates how Shakespeare worked with materials which had already entered the dramatic tradition, and how, in the spirit of Renaissance theory, he moulded and converted them to his own use. The book challenges the critical stance that views the Shakespeare canon as essentially self-contained, moves beyond the limitations of generic studies and argues for a more conjoined critical study of early modern plays. Each chapter focuses on specific plays and examines the networks of influence, exchange and competition which characterised stage traffic between playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson and Fletcher. Overall, the book addresses multiple perspectives relating to authorship and text, performance and reception.

There is a long history in Ireland of performing, studying and responding to Shakespeare's plays. Transposed to an Irish context, Shakespeare has continued to be a source of creative engagement and discussion for Irish writers. This new collection of essays explores the dynamic responses to Shakespeare by Irish writers, in both English and in Irish, since the early twentieth century. Written by leading Irish and international scholars in the fields of Shakespeare and Irish studies "Shakespeare and the Irish Writer" addresses the engagement with Shakespeare and his plays in the works of Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Bowen, Shaw, Beckett and McGuinness as well as Irish language writers. It surveys Shakespeare's reception in Ireland and suggests new ways of interpreting his work and his cultural associations in and from Ireland. Indeed, the collection reveals how the category 'Shakespeare and the Irish Writer' discloses a level of cultural continuity across the contours of the history of Ireland and Britain. What emerges is an interaction with Shakespeare's plays that, whether emulative or parodic, iconoclastic or subtly allusive, or a combination of these, is complex and creative.These essays provide new insight into Shakespeare's reception in Ireland, illustrating how his plays have initiated a dialogue in Irish writing, and continue to do so. They show how Irish responses to his work constitute a legitimate form of criticism, enlarging understanding of Shakespeare in a broader than national context. "Shakespeare and the Irish Writer" will appeal to scholars of modern Irish writing and to Shakespeare scholars, particularly those interested in the appropriation of the many plays and their cultural afterlife.

Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out.In Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy"""a grieving father seeks public justice for the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the 'real' thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, "The Revenger's Tragedy"""(anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and cruel. Ford's '"Tis Pity She's a Whore"""represents an innovative re-working of the genre as a brother's love for his sister leads to his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In Webster's "The White Devil" crimes of passion ignite revenge in the courts of the Italian city states.This student edition contains fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play, focusing on its action and play of ideas.

This collection of essays by Douglas Jefferson from various periods of his distinguished career and by fellow academics writing in response to his work represents a novel dialogic form of literary criticism. In his essays ranging from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" to the "Canon", Jefferson is always stimulating and engaging, while offering nuanced and informed readings of his chosen texts. Replying to Jefferson's work, contemporary critics have variously extended his ideas, disclosing new ways of reading texts in the light of current debate and more theoretical developments, or have adopted a more discursive strategy in using ideas derived from Jefferson's essays to provoke further explorations. Douglas Jefferson (1912-2001) spent virtually his entire academic life at the University of Leeds, starting as an undergraduate in the School of English in 1930, and interrupted only by his studies at the University of Oxford (Merton College), where he gained a B.Litt in 1937, and his educational services in Egypt during the Second World War. His was a career remarkable for distinguished service to his profession, comprising not only an extensive range of publications on writers from John Dryden to Iris Murdoch but in the care with which he nurtured and encouraged generations of students and colleagues both at home and abroad in the study of English literature.

Migrating Shakespeare offers the first study of the earliest waves of Shakespeare’s migration into Europe. Charting the spread of the reception and production of his plays across the continent, it examines how Shakespeare contributed to national cultures and – in some cases – nation building. The chapters explore the routes and cultural networks through which Shakespeare entered European consciousness, from first translations to stage adaptations and critical response. The role of strolling players and actors, translators and printers, poets and dramatists, is chronicled alongside the larger political and cultural movements shaping nations. Each individual case discloses the national, literary and theatrical issues Shakespeare encountered, revealing not only how cultures have accommodated and adapted Shakespeare on their own terms but their interpretative contribution to the texts. Taken collectively the volume addresses key questions about Shakespeare’s naturalization or reluctant accommodation within other cultures, inaugurating his present global reach.

In this study of revenge tragedies – notably by Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Marston and John Webster – Janet Clare suggests that genres are not passively inherited, but made and re-made every time a new play is performed. The implication that there is an identifiable genre of revenge tragedy rehearsing common conventions is challenged as Clare examines Renaissance plays of revenge on their own terms. While disclosing evident inter-textual links and a similar appeal to classical material, revenge plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period strive for a range of effects including satire, parody and farce. Some plays embody a providential outlook while others seem defiantly secular. Francis Bacon’s famous maxim ‘a kind of wild justice’ captures the moral ambivalence of revenge: a rough justice on the point of anarchy. Janet Clare demonstrates the problematic nature of revenge as it defines dramatic action As the exploration of plays in this study reveals, revenge is not only bound up with justice, honour and duty, but impelled by perverted impulses, envy and resentment.