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Ninety-five-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. In the following essay, which is a personal response to my experience of this group of Shakespearean readers, to Doris Held, and to the work of Shakespeare in general, I attempt to chart the full impact of the Bard’s work on my life and on the world around me. I am neither a scholar nor a historian. In a true sense, I am a bystander Shakespearean, who has received deep reward and benefit from the experience, but it is Doris Held and her group who opened my eyes to the precise nature of this unexamined reward. Doris brought the spirit of the group from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been a dues-paying member for decades of something called the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association, which itself dates to 1880. My wife Debra and I attended the first meeting in Northampton more than a decade ago, and we have been receiving emails from Doris four times a year ever since. While these communications often induce guilt, they invariably lead to pleasures that I would never want to relinquish. That is a complicated dynamic in my routine, and I try to grapple with its ebb and flow in the pages that follow. Each time I get one, I have a version of the same conversation in my head. Is Doris still doing this? Haven’t they done all the plays by now? All things considered, wouldn’t they—and I—rather be home watching a true crime documentary about Gaby Petito on Netflix? What the hell is William Shakespeare to me anyway? At this point, if I’m honest, Shakespeare is Doris. The experience with this group led me in two directions. One took me back to my now long-ago history with Shakespeare’s work as an actor in college. The other took me via historical research into the prehistory of Doris Held’s previous Shakespeare group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two paths gave me a deeper grasp of the influence of his work across the world and on my own life.

Following the “intertextual turn” in adaptation studies, scholars of Shakespearean performance have embraced the interpretive possibilities offered by infidelity, focusing increasingly on the corrective potential of recent stagings and adaptations. Such productions are not primarily valuable as progressive rewrites, however. In claiming not to be “Shakespeare”, these productions make testable claims about the nature of the Shakespearean playtext. In this paper, I examine two recent stage productions and one non-traditional film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing: Kenny Leon’s 2019 Public Theater production, Chris Abraham’s 2023 Stratford Festival production, and Will Gluck’s 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. All three performances are consciously unfaithful to Shakespeare’s text or setting, and their revisions attend to making the characters’ behavior more palatable for a contemporary liberal–progressive audience. Yet when we compare these revisions with the original playtext, Shakespeare’s own views come into sharper relief, as does our own inclination to identify with characters that Shakespeare’s immediate audience may have felt quite distanced from. I argue that in their drive to correct the play and make the characters more likable, these productions paper over Shakespeare’s critique of the arbitrary construction—and violent enforcement—of social hierarchy. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, I show that Shakespeare’s deliberate narrative framing invites a more skeptical, disapproving understanding of his characters. My hope is that this discussion leads to an understanding of Much Ado About Nothing as a “problem play” rather than a “problematic” one.

Shakespeare’s Beatrice, Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones are three literary incarnations of the same female comic character. They share characteristics that make them all funny for the same reasons at vastly different times. This is due to an inextricable bond between gender and comedy that targets the audience’s expectations of normative femininity. The comic heroines in these three texts are all funny because they deliberately and consciously defy conventional constraints of femininity. The humor of each text results from the comic incongruity that is created by these women’s refusal to be what they ought to be and all three authors reward them for it.

While staying at his friend Leonato's home, Claudio falls in love with Hero, Leonato's beautiful daughter, and they agree to marry.In the meantime, they decide to trick their friends Benedick and Beatrice--who have nothing but insults for each other--into falling in love as well.

William Shakespeare’s comedy, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy,” peer through black naturalism’s socially deterministic lens, despite conflicts in time, geopolitics, social norms, and literary imagination. Specifically, Don John’s truculent reference about “sing[ing] in his cage” (1.3.32) inspired investigation into whether Dunbar’s famed line, “I know why the caged bird sings” (21), intentionally alludes to Shakespeare’s work. While the research is inconclusive, the references provide clarity for Don John’s character particularly. Essentially, Don John’s foolhardy evil meets society’s standards for masking social truths, just as Dunbar’s poem has been reduced to a sweet and imaginative ditty over time. Thus, this article broadly explores society’s tendency to recycle oppression under expedient pretenses. Although Don John self-proclaims inherent evil, closer scrutiny of his figurative scar – coat of arms, representing illegitimacy – reveals a socially determined position, more consistent with Dunbar’s second-rate life based on skin color and his naturalism based on whiteness. Because Mowat and Werstine suggest that Don John’s ill-intentioned behaviors are less about biology (blood) than impassioned human response to social injustice (Blood), naturalism links the unlikely pair. As such, the article uses Dunbar’s black naturalism to exemplify societal “caging” in and “Sympathy.”

Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter's Tale share a common setting: Sicily. This article explores what that setting means in the plays by focusing on the issue of hospitality, which gets disrupted. A key element of hospitality is entertainment, which literarily means “to hold together.” But fractures occur in Sicily, leading to a breakdown of the social fabric. The center does not hold. In Much Ado about Nothing, for example, the wedding scene in 4.1 should offer the quintessence of joy and hospitality; but it does not, thanks to the machinations of Don Jon and the credulity of Claudio and others. It takes a presumed death to begin the restoration. Similarly, in the Sicilian world of The Winter's Tale hospitality falters completely by the end of 3.2 as Hermione apparently dies and so does the royal son. The remainder of the play seeks a way to re-create an entertaining, hospitable Sicily. Against all odds, such a restoration, portrayed most profoundly in the appearance of Hermione in the final scene, occurs as the fatal country of Sicily recovers the art and grace of hospitality.

This essay focuses on some Shakespeare productions in Japan during 2014 and 2015. One is a Bunraku version of Falstaff, for which the writer himself wrote the script. It is an amalgamation of scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor and those from Henry IV. It was highly reputed and its stage design was awarded a 2014 Yomiuri Theatre Award. Another is a production of Much Ado about Nothing produced by the writer himself in a theatre-in-the-round in his new translation. Another is a production of Macbeth arranged and directed by Mansai Nomura the Kyogen performer. All the characters besides Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were performed by the three witches, suggesting that the whole illusion was produced by the witches. It was highly acclaimed worldwide. Another is a production of Hamlet directed by Yukio Ninagawa, with Tatsuya Fujiwara in the title role. It was brought to the Barbican theatre. There were also many other Shakespeare productions to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

Nine scholars conclude that Emilia Bassano-Lanier was the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, but the intellectual implications have not been previously considered. Shakespeare incorporated the plots of about forty Italian novelle and classical histories and plays—some of the most important never translated—into his plays. Shakespeare’s achievements become more comprehensible when one reads the Italian and classical sources, translated into English in the nineteenth century and recently available online. His most successful plays rely on the plots and characters of such sources. Shakespeare, as “chaste autodidact,” may have located, translated, comprehended, and assimilated such diverse sources. It is more plausible that he received help. Using historical and literary analysis this article concludes that the plays include debts to a highly educated Italian-speaking person(s) who understood the court and power and changed and developed his views about women. The bilingual poet Bassano-Lanier, mistress of his aged patron, was highly educated in classical literature and Italian and was familiar with the ways of the court. She is the person most likely to have provided such assistance. She is not the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays, but she or a person with her attributes is probably his secret inspiration, educator, and expositor. Such assistance provides the most plausible explanation for his knowledge of courts, classical and Italian literature, and love. Shakespeare was obsessed with sexual jealousy. Spirited, active, articulate, and sexual women are integral to his plays, women who were like Bassano-Lanier, as described by her physician Doctor Simon Forman, with whom she performed “sexual villainy” between 1597 and 1600. She performed at great houses in plays and masques and “was maintained in great pride” by the Lord Chamberlain, patron of Shakespeare’s company. She had the means and the motive to help Shakespeare write “immortal lines to time.” She argued at length in verse and probably inspired sonnets and his creation of women characters in plays such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, and Anthony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, included sexually explicit references to a musical Dark Lady with black wiry hair which would have harmed Bassano-Lanier’s ambitions for social advancement. Bassano-Lanier responded by publishing a book of poetry in 1611, which champions, theologically, a new status for women.

This paper intends to provide a thorough analysis of some linguistic features of Early Modern English present in three Shakespeare movies and how they have been transferred in the Spanish translation for dubbing. To achieve it, a close observation of forms of address, greetings and other archaic formulae regulated by the norms of decorum of the age has been carried out. The corpus used for the analysis: Hamlet (Olivier 1948) and Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh 1993), highly acclaimed and rated by the audience as two of the greatest Shakespeare movies. A more recent version of Hamlet (Branagh 1996)—the first unabridged theatrical film version of the play—will be analyzed too in the light of the translation choices, and the results will be compared with those of the other two films.