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 and Phenomenology: Theory and Practice
1st Edition
By Daniel Johnston
September 19, 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 18, 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 09, 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 30, 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 06, 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 06, 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 06, 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, ...
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 ...