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.
Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic
1st Edition
By Matthew J. Smith
November 13, 2026
Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic explores Shakespeare’s unique contribution to the history of recognition as both a narrative trope and a moral event. Recognition, central to classical anagnorisis and modern moral philosophy, also has deep roots in medieval Christian ...
Reinventing Shakespeare: Translation, Adaptation and Afterlives
1st Edition
Edited
By Miriam Leung-che Lau, Anna Wing-bo Tso
November 06, 2026
This groundbreaking scholarly collection examines Shakespeare's global impact beyond the Anglophone world, bringing together diverse perspectives from sixteen contributors across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The work explores three interconnected themes: the translation and reception of ...
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Shakespeare
1st Edition
By Kelsey Ridge
October 16, 2026
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
October 16, 2026
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
August 26, 2026
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: ...
Imperial Concerns in Early Modern Drama: Anti-Imperialism and Race
1st Edition
By Philip Goldfarb Styrt
August 16, 2026
Imperial Concerns in Early Modern Drama: Anti-Imperialism and Race offers a compelling reassessment of how major Renaissance playwrights, including William Shakespeare, engaged with early discourses of empire. Challenging narratives that align early modern drama with emergent imperial ambitions, ...
Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Rival Poet: The Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
1st Edition
By Mark Bradbeer
July 26, 2026
Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Rival Poet explores Shakespeare’s sonnet series and A Lover’s Complaint, both published in 1609. These poems are viewed in their historical context: in particular, in the context of Shakespeare’s patron. Through this prism, the patron’s relationship with “both” his ...
Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy: The Bible, the School of Salamanca and Kingship
1st Edition
By Luis Javier Conejero-Magro
July 21, 2026
Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy explores the profound and multifaceted relationship between William Shakespeare’s historical dramas and biblical intertextuality. This study moves beyond reductive compilations of biblical references or sectarian interpretations, delving instead into the aesthetic and...
The Death of Hamlet: A Counterfactual Reading of Shakespeare
1st Edition
By Amir Khan
July 19, 2026
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’s Exiles
1st Edition
By Richard van Oort
June 21, 2026
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 ...
Histrionic Hamlet: Shakespeare's Ultimate Metatheatrical Experiment
1st Edition
By Piotr Sadowski
May 21, 2026
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 ...
Shakespeare, Dramatic Poetry and Value
1st Edition
By MacDonald P. Jackson
May 21, 2026
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...