Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering Shakespeare alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, popular culture, and history, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Shakespeare’s Forgotten Allegory: Vice, Virtue, and Spoilt Children
1st Edition
By Julian Real
May 05, 2025
Shakespeare’s Forgotten Allegory posits three startling points: that we have today forgotten a cultural icon that helped to bring about the Renaissance; that this character, used to distil classical wisdom regarding how to raise children to become moral adults, consistently appeared in plays ...
The Play of Conscience in Shakespeare’s England
1st Edition
By Jade Standing
May 05, 2025
Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced AI systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement ...
Shakespeare’s Exiles
1st Edition
By Richard van Oort
January 16, 2025
Why are human societies hierarchical? How did centralized political authority originate? Anthropologists tell us that foraging societies are egalitarian compared to their agrarian and industrial successors. So what prompted our foraging ancestors to submit to the authority of big men, chiefs, and ...
The Death of Hamlet: A Counterfactual Reading of Shakespeare
1st Edition
By Amir Khan
January 07, 2025
This book is an intervention in Hamlet scholarship. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), Nietzsche famously posited the death of God, taken to mean the dissolution of all horizons within which human beings construct a plausible ontology that gives words significance. The idea of God, as a ...
Shakespeare, Dramatic Poetry and Value
1st Edition
By MacDonald P. Jackson
December 30, 2024
This book redirects attention to a truth largely ignored by recent criticism—that Shakespeare’s excellence as a playwright is inextricable from his excellence as a poet. It explores the diverse means by which Shakespeare’s poetry enriches his drama, illustrating how particular words in a particular...
Shakespeare and Indian Nationalism: The Bard and the Raj
1st Edition
By Manojit Mandal
December 18, 2024
Shakespeare and Indian Nationalism aims to articulate the reception of Shakespeare by the 19th-century Indian intelligentsia from Bengal and their ambivalent approach to the Indian Renaissance and consequent nationalist project. Showcasing the cultural politics of British imperialism, this volume ...
New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains
1st Edition
Edited
By James Newlin, James W. Stone
November 28, 2024
It has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking...
Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others: Finding the Heart of the Play
1st Edition
By Sidney Homan
November 28, 2024
Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as “a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play … a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres.” He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, ...
Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Jonathan Baldo
October 14, 2024
A distinguishing feature of Shakespeare’s later histories is the prominent role he assigns to the need to forget. This book explore the ways in which Shakespeare expanded the role of forgetting in histories from King John to Henry V, as England contended with what were perceived to be traumatic ...
Retheorizing Shakespeare through Presentist Readings
1st Edition
By James O'Rourke
October 14, 2024
This book offers a theoretical rationale for the emerging presentist movement in Shakespeare studies and goes on to show, in a series of close readings, that a presentist Shakespeare is not an anachronism. Relying on a Brechtian aesthetic of "naïve surrealism" as the performative model of the ...
Shakespeare’s Mirrors
1st Edition
By Edward Evans
September 26, 2024
Clear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of...
Histrionic Hamlet: Shakespeare's Ultimate Metatheatrical Experiment
1st Edition
By Piotr Sadowski
September 18, 2024
According to psychological research on acting, the histrionic personality consists of a compulsive tendency to play-act, exaggerate emotions, succumb to illusions, to seek attention through speech, body language, and costume, to be seductive and impulsive. An original intervention in the critical ...