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 Unmuted Women
1st Edition
By Gül Kurtuluş
November 27, 2025
Shakespeare’s Unmuted Women explores women’s speeches in selected plays by Shakespeare, highlighting women’s discerning insight as a vital ingredient in these selected works. The book discusses the use of rhetoric in speeches by women as a cementing material that supports the casing of the ...
Speech Act Theory and Shakespeare: Scenes of Thanking in Shakespeare’s Plays
1st Edition
By Chahra Beloufa
October 26, 2025
Speech Act Theory and Shakespeare delves deeper than linguistic ornamentation to illuminate the complex dynamics of thanking as a significant speech act in Shakespearean plays. The word “thanks” appears nearly 400 times in 37 Shakespearean plays, calling for a careful investigation of its veracity ...
Shakespeare and Phenomenology: Theory and Practice
1st Edition
By Daniel Johnston
September 18, 2025
This book considers how Shakespeare’s theatre investigates and reveals “Being-in-the-world”. Through the lens of phenomenology (the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience) Johnston examines how Shakespeare’s texts and dramaturgy reveal aspects of Being. This volume explores ...
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Shakespeare
1st Edition
By Kelsey Ridge
July 17, 2025
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Shakespeare combines literary criticism, performance studies, psychiatric literature, trauma studies, and disability studies to examine the presentation of PTSD in Shakespeare’s plays. This volume takes as case studies 1 Henry IV, Othello, Macbeth, Much Ado About ...
Receiving the Stranger in Shakespeare: Hospitality and Hostility in the Plays
1st Edition
By Joan Fitzpatrick
June 08, 2025
Hospitality to strangers has become an increasingly prevalent topic in recent years, from political upheavals resulting in the displacement of millions of people, to the emergence of our collective obligations towards strangers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the vexed question of when to welcome...
Ineffable Bodies: Heroism on the Early Modern Stage
1st Edition
By Christine Sukic
May 29, 2025
Ineffable Bodies focuses on early modern heroism in drama through the notion of ineffability in order to define new dramatic forms. Drawing from Vladimir Jankélévitch’s studies on the ineffable, the book focuses on heroic bodies on the early modern stage as the seat of an aesthetic shift in drama: ...
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 ...
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 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, ...