The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.

Michael Neill, University of Kent / University of Auckland,David Schalkwyk, Queen Mary University of London

Michael Neill is Professor in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Issues of Death (1997) and Putting History to the Question (2000). He has edited a number of early modern plays, including Anthony and Cleopatra (1994) and Othello (2006) for the Oxford Shakespeare, and (most recently) The Renegado (2010) for Arden Early Modern Drama, as well as The Spanish Tragedy (2014) and The Duchess of Malfi (2015) for Norton Critical Editions.


David Schalkwyk is currently Academic Director of Global Shakespeare, a joint venture between Queen Mary College, London and the University of Warwick. He was formerly Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. Before that he was Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, where he held the positions of Head of Department and Deputy Dean in the faculty of the Humanities. His books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (Delaware, 2004), and Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge, 2008). His most recent book is Hamlet's Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, published in 2013 by the Arden Shakespeare. He has just completed a monograph on love in Shakespeare.

Part I: Genre
1. What is Shakespearean Tragedy?, Paul A. Kottman
2. The Classical Inheritance, Richard Halpern
3. The Medieval Inheritance, Rory Loughnane
4. The Romantic Inheritance, Edward Pechter
5. Ethics and Shakespearean Tragedy, Tzachi Zamir
6. Character in Shakespearean Tragedy, Emma Smith
7. Preposterous Nature in Shakespeare's Tragedies, Philip Armstrong
8. Shakespearean Tragedy and the Language of Lament, Lynne Magnusson
9. The Pity of It: Shakespearean Tragedy and Affect, David Hillman
10. 'Do You See This?' The Politics of Attention in Shakespearean Tragedy, Steven Mullaney
11. Tragedy and Religion: Religion and Revenge in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Peter Lake
12. Shakespeare's Anatomies of Death, Richard Sugg
13. 'Minded Like the Weather': The Tragic Body and its Passions, Gail Kern Paster
14. Shakespeare's Tragedy and English History, Andrew Hadfield
15. Shakespeare's Tragedy and Roman History, Tom Bishop
16. Tragedy and the Satiric Voice, Hester Lees-Jeffries
17. 'The action of my life': Tragedy, Tragicomedy, and Shakespeare's Mimetic Experiments, Subha Mukherji
18. Queer Tragedy, or Two Meditations on Cause, Lee Edelman and Madhavi Menon
Part II: Textual Issues
19. Authorial Revision in the Tragedies, Paul Werstine
20. Digital Approaches to the Language of Shakespearean Tragedy, Michael Witmore, Jonathan Hope and Michael Gleicher
Pert III: Reading the Tragedies
21. 'Romaine Tragedie': The Designs of Titus Andronicus, Michael Neill
22. Romeo and Juliet as Event, Crystal Bartolovich
23. Julius Caesar: Making History, Emily C. Bartels
24. The Question of Hamlet, Catherine Belsey
25. Seeing Blackness, Reading Race in Othello, Ian Smith
26. King Lear and the Death of the World, Leah S. Marcus
27. 'O horror! horror! horror!' Macbeth and Fear, Andrew J. Power
28. Antony and Cleopatra, Bernhard Klein
29. Coriolanus: A Tragedy of Language, David Schalkwyk
Part IV: Stage and Screen
30. Early Modern Tragedy and Performance, Tiffany Stern
31. Performing Shakespearean Tragedy, 1660-1780, Peter Holland
32. Staging Shakespearean Tragedy: The Nineteenth Century, Russell Jackson
33. Tragedy in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Theatre Production: Hamlet, Lear, and the Politics of Intimacy, Bridget Escolme
34. Ontological Shivers: The Cinematic Afterlives of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Courtney Lehmann
35. Hamlet: Tragedy and Film Adaptation, Douglas Lanier
36. Intermediated Bodies and Bodies of Media: Screen Othellos, Sujata Iyengar
37. Screening the Tragedies King Lear, Macdonald P. Jackson
38. Macbeth on Changing Screens, Katherine Rowe
39. The Roman Plays on Screen: Autonomy, Serialization, Conflation, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
40. 'The Bowe of Ulysses': Reworking the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Peter Byrne
41. Shakespeare's Tragedies on the Operatic Stage, William Germano
Part V: The Tragedies Worldwide:
(I) European Responses
42. The Tragedies in Italy, Shaul Bassi
43. The Tragedies in Germany, Andreas Hofele
44. French Receptions of Shakespearean Tragedy: Between Liberty And Memory, Pascale Drouet and Nathalie Rivere de Carles
45. Shakesperean Tragedy in Eastern Europe, Pavel Drabek
46. Shakespearean Tragedy in Russia: In Equal Scale Weighing Delight and Dole, John Givens
(II) The Wider World
47. Shakespearean Tragedy in the Nineteenth-Century United States: The Case of Julius Caesar, Gay Smith
48. Unsettling the Bard: Australasia and the Pacific, Mark Houlahan
49. Shakespeare's Tragedies in Southern Africa, Colette Gordon, Daniel Roux and David Schalkwyk
50. In Blood Stepped in: Tragedy and the Modern Israelites, Araham Oz
51. Shakespeare's Tragedies in North Africa and the Arab World, Khalid Amine
52. Shakespearean Tragedy in Latin America and the Caribbean, Alfredo Michel Modenessi and Margarida Gandara Rauen
53. Shakespearean Tragedy in India: Politics of Genre - or How Newness Entered Indian Literary Culture, Poonam Trivedi
54. 'It is the East': Shakespearean Tragedies in East Asia, Alexa Huang