As the first book to use fiction as theory, Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction reads backward to demonstrate how recent novelists redeploy foundling and lyric plots to uncover a Shakespeare who similarly challenges the mythological homogeneity that scripts us.

This book analyses the ways contemporary fiction writers draw on Shakespeare - the man, his work and his cultural legacy.

The Shakespearean novel is undergoing a renaissance as the long prose narrative form becomes reinvigorated through new forms of media such as television, film and the internet. Shakespeare and the Modern Novel explores the history of the novel as a literary form, suggesting that the form can trace its strongest roots beyond the eighteenth-century work of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson to Shakespeare’s plays. Within this collection, well-established Shakespeare critics demonstrate that the diversity and flexibility of interactions between Shakespeare and the modern novel are very much alive.

This book shows that Shakespeare continues to influence contemporary Irish literature, through postcolonial, dramaturgical, epistemological and narratological means. International critics examine a range of contemporary writers including Eavan Boland, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Frank McGuinness, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, and explore Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories and comedies, as well as his sonnets. Together, the chapters demonstrate that Shakespeare continues to exert a pressure on Irish writing into the twenty-first century, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the fact that his writing is inextricably tied to the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonization of Ireland. Contemporary Irish writers appropriate, adopt, adapt and strategize through their engagements with Shakespeare, and indeed through his own engagement with the world around him four hundred years ago.

Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone. How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to “kill Shakespeare” as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeare’s shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between “interpretation,” “adaptation” and “rewriting”? The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the reader’s or spectator’s already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeare’s texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting?

Shakespeare in Children's Literature looks at the genre of Shakespeare-for-children, considering both adaptations of his plays and children's novels in which he appears as a character. Drawing on feminist theory and sociology, Hateley demonstrates how Shakespeare for children utilizes the ongoing cultural capital of "Shakespeare," and the pedagogical aspects of children's literature, to perpetuate anachronistic forms of identity and authority.

This book offers a collection of essays on Shakespeare's life and works in popular forms and media.

Shakespeare's tragedies contain an astonishing variety of suffering, from suicides and murders to dismemberments and grief. Stanley Wells considers how the bard's tragic plays drew on the literary and theatrical conventions of his time. Discussing the individual plays, he also explores why tragedy is regarded as a fit subject for entertainment.

We celebrate Shakespeare as a creator of plays and poems, characters and ideas, words and worlds. But so too, in the four centuries since his death in 1616, have thinkers, writers, artists and performers recreated him. Readers of this book are invited to explore Shakespeare's afterlife on the stage and on the screen, in poetry, fiction, music and dance, as well as in cultural and intellectual life. A series of concise introductory essays are here combined with personal reflections by prominent contemporary practitioners of the arts. At once a celebration and a critical response, the book explores Shakespeare as a global cultural figure who continues to engage artists, audiences and readers of all kinds. Includes contributions from: John Ashbery, Shaul Bassi, Simon Russell Beale, Sally Beamish, David Bintley, Michael Bogdanov, Kenneth Branagh, Debra Ann Byrd, John Caird, Antoni Cimolino, Wendy Cope, Gregory Doran, Margaret Drabble, Dominic Dromgoole, Ellen Geer, Michael Holroyd, Gordon Kerry, John Kinsella, Juan Carlos Liberti, Lachlan Mackinnon, David Malouf, Javier Marías, Yukio Ninagawa, Janet Suzman, Salley Vickers, Rowan Williams, Lisa Wolpe, Greg Wyatt. All proceeds from the sale of this volume will be donated to the International Shakespeare Association, to support the study and appreciation of Shakespeare around the world.

Shakespeare's career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's islands and the Muslim connection, Michael Coveney's on the late Sir John Gielgud, Robert Ellrodt's on Shakespeare's sonnets and Montaigne's essays, Stephen Orgel's on Shakespeare's own Shylock, and Marina Warner's on Shakespeare's fairy-tale uses of magic. Also included in the volume's several sections are original pagers selected from special sessions and seminars by other distinguished writers, including Jean E. Howard, Gary Taylor, and Richard Wilson. Tom Clayton is Regents' Professor of English Language and Literature and chair of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of Minnesota. Susan Brock is Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham. Vicente Fores is Associate Profe