This book argues that moments of allusion to the supernatural in Shakespeare are occasions where Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes register the perseverance of haunted structures in modern culture. This "reenchantment," at the heart of modernity and of literary and political works central to our understanding of modernity, is the focus of this book. The author shows that allusion to supernatural moments in Shakespeare ("scare quotes") allows writers to both acknowledge and distance themselves from the supernatural phenomena that challenge their disenchanted understanding of the social world. He also uses these modern appropriations of Shakespeare as provocations to reread some of his works, notably Hamlet and Macbeth. Two pairs of linked chapters form the center of the book. One pair joins a reading of Marx, concentrating on The Eighteenth Brumaire, to Hamlet; the other links a reading of Keynes, focusing on The Economic Consequences of the Peace, to Macbeth. The chapters on Marx and Keynes trace some of the strange circuits of supernatural rhetoric in their work, Marx's use of ghosts and Keynes's fascination with witchcraft. The sequence linking Marx to Hamlet, for example, has as its anchor the Frankfurt School's concept of the phantasmagoria, the notion that it is in the most archaic that one encounters the figure of the new. Looking closely at Marx's association of the Ghost in Hamlet with the coming revolution in turn illuminates Hamlet's association of the Ghost with the supernatural beings many believed haunted mines. An opening chapter discusses Henry Dircks, a nineteenth-century English inventor who developed—and then lost his claim to—a phantasmagoria or machine to project ghosts on stage. Dircks resorted to magical rhetoric in response to his loss, which is emblematic for the book as a whole, charting ways the scare quote can, paradoxically, continue the work of enlightenment.

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.

The most influential treatments of Shakespeare's Sonnets have ignored the impact of theology on his poetics, examining instead the poet's "secular" emphasis on psychology and subjectivity. Reading Shakespeare's Will offers the first systematic account of the theology behind the poetry. Investigating the poetic stakes of Christianity's efforts to assimilate Jewish scripture, the book reads Shakespeare through the history of Christian allegory. To "read Shakespeare's will," Freinkel argues, is to read his bequest to and from a literary history saturated by religious doctrine. Freinkel thus challenges the common equation of subjectivity with secularity, and defines Shakespeare's poetic voice in theological rather than psychoanalytic terms. Tracing from Augustine to Luther the religious legacy that informs Shakespeare's work, Freinkel suggests that we cannot properly understand his poetry without recognizing it as a response to Luther's Reformation. Delving into the valences and repercussions of this response, Reading Shakespeare's Will charts the notion of a "theology of figure" that helped to shape the themes, tropes, and formal structures of Renaissance literature and thought.

Great Shakespeareans presents a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This major project offers an unprecedented scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. An essential resource for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies.

Demonstrating and defending a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this collection of essays by Tom McAlindon combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. The volume includes six interpretative studies, all but one of which involve challenges to radical readings of the plays involved, including Henry V, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Doctor Faustus. The other three essays are critiques of the claims and methods of radical, postmodernist criticism (new historicism and cultural materialism especially); they illustrate the author's conviction that some leading scholars in the field of Renaissance literature and drama, who deserve credit for shifting attention to new areas of interest, must also be charged with responsibility for a marked decline in standards of analysis, interpretation, and argument. Likely to provoke considerable debate, this stimulating collection is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

This essay collection addresses the paradox that something may at once “be” and “not be” Shakespeare. This phenomenon can be a matter of perception rather than authorial intention: audiences may detect Shakespeare where the author disclaims him or have difficulty finding him where he is named. Douglas Lanier’s “Shakespearean rhizome,” which co-opts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of artistic relations as rhizomes (a spreading, growing network that sprawls horizontally to defy hierarchies of origin and influence) is fundamental to this exploration. Essays discuss the fine line between “Shakespeare” and “not Shakespeare” through a number of critical lenses—networks and pastiches, memes and echoes, texts and paratexts, celebrities and afterlives, accidents and intertexts—and include a wide range of examples: canonical plays by Shakespeare, historical figures, celebrities, television performances and adaptations, comics, anime appropriations, science fiction novels, blockbuster films, gangster films, Shakesploitation and teen films, foreign language films, and non-Shakespearean classic films.

Allusions to Shakespeare haunt our contemporary culture in a myriad of ways, whether through brief references or sustained intertextual engagements. Shakespeare’s plays and motifs have been appropriated in fragmentary forms onstage and onscreen since motion pictures were invented in 1893. This collection of essays extends beyond a US-UK axis to bring together an international group of scholars to explore Shakespearean appropriations in unexpected contexts in lesser-known films and television shows in India, Brazil, Russia, France, Australia, South Africa, East-Central Europe and Italy, with reference to some filmed stage works.

Explores Jacques Derrida's distinctive approach to ShakespeareOffers the first comprehensive and accessible account and discussion of Derrida's engagement with ShakespeareChallenges the way we have traditionally come to think about the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and philosophy, as well as literary geniusContextualises Derrida's readings of Shakespeare within his wider philosophical project and discusses in how far they relate to - or are distinct from - his engagement with other dramatic or literary worksThis book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama. Contextualising Derrida's readings of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear within his wider philosophical project, Alfano explores what draws Derrida to Shakespeare and what makes him particularly suitable for philosophical thought. The author also makes the case for Derrida's singular understanding of the relationship between philosophy and Shakespeare and his radical idea of what literary genius is.

"Thy bloody and invisible hand": tragedy and political economy -- Greek tragedy and the raptor economy: the Oresteia -- Marlowe's theater of night: Doctor Faustus and capital -- Hamlet and the work of death -- The same old grind: Milton's Samson as subtragic hero -- Hegel, Marx, and the novelization of tragedy -- Beckett's tragic pantry -- Postscript: after Beckett

We know Shakespeare's writings only from imperfectly-made early editions, from which editors struggle to remove errors. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century, refined with technological enhancements in the 1950s and 1960s, taught generations of editors how to make sense of the early editions of Shakespeare and use them to make modern editions. This book is the first complete history of the ideas that gave this movement its intellectual authority, and of the challenges to that authority that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Working chronologically, Egan traces the struggle to wring from the early editions evidence of precisely what Shakespeare wrote. The story of another struggle, between competing interpretations of the evidence from early editions, is told in detail and the consequences for editorial practice are comprehensively surveyed, allowing readers to discover just what is at stake when scholars argue about how to edit Shakespeare.