From:     Mike Jensen <jensensh@hotmail.com>

Date:      June 4 at 5:52 PM EDT

Subject:  Shakespeare Newsletter 75:1

The new issue of Shakespeare Newsletter is now online with three performance reviews and two special features.

Performance Reviews

• Henry IV at TFANA by Laura Kolb
• Richard III at the Globe by M. Tyler Sasser
• Romeo and Juliet at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck by Kim Paffenroth

Newsletter Features

• Talking Books Update by Michael P. Jensen
• Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2025 by Michael P. Jensen

Non-subscribers, please note that Sasser’s performance review of Richard III is open access, available to all.

https://shakespearenewsletter.com/newsletters/75-1/

All the best,

Mike Jensen

From:     Richard A. Strier <rastrier@uchicago.edu>

Date:      June 1 at 4:33 PM EDT

Subject:  Announcement

I am happy to report that The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press) is now—finally!—out on paperback.

Richard Strier

From:     Edward Gieskes <GIESKESE@mailbox.sc.edu>

Date:      May 28 at 1:57 PM EDT

Subject:  Call for Submissions: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Call for Submissions: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (MaRDiE) is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to premodern English drama and theater history. An internationally recognized board of scholars oversees the publication of MaRDiE. The journal welcomes submissions that represent various theoretical and methodological perspectives and that offer wide-ranging discussions of plays and early performance history as well as topics pertaining to cultural history, manuscript studies and the history of printing.

Please see https://mardie.sites.utk.edu/ or contact the editors with questions about submissions:

Edward Gieskes gieskese@mailbox.sc.edu

Heather Anne Hirschfeld hhirschf@utk.edu

From:     Robert Shaughnessy <r.shaughnessy@gsa.surrey.ac.uk>

Date:      May 28 at 6:24 AM EDT

Subject:  Peter Thomson

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am reposting below Chris Baugh’s tribute from the DramaHE mailing list, as I know that some of you will remember Peter and wish to mark his passing.

I knew Peter from the days when he was my PhD examiner—a brisk viva followed by the serious business of a more leisurely conversation in the pub—and then and always he was a brilliant and generous mentor and guide, a scholarly polymath, hands-on practitioner, cricketer, and a man with a ready wit, sense of mischief and an enormous appetite for life. As external examiner of the Shakespeare MA programme he led at the University of Exeter, I had the privilege to witness that he was also a dedicated and inspiring teacher. As much at home with eighteenth-century actors as with Brecht, his interests were prodigious and wide-ranging; for members of this list he will be best known for his Shakespearean scholarship, which included a spell as reviewer for Shakespeare Survey in the 1970s, his books Shakespeare’s Theatre and Shakespeare’s Professional Career, and much else. The phrase ‘he had a good innings’ has never been more apt.

I owe Peter a great deal and will miss him. May his memory be a blessing.

Robert

Hello

Many of you will have now heard that Peter died suddenly over the weekend following a nasty fall. Peter was my friend for over half a century, beginning as my 2nd year tutor at Manchester in 1964. Since then he has been mentor, referee, external examiner, and pub quiz companion (our team was ExGold—when he was at Exeter and I at Goldsmiths’.)

Importantly for us all, aside from his research, publications, and teaching practice, he was an absolutely committed and passionate believer in our subject within the university. Wherever he worked (Manchester, Swansea and Exeter) he fought long and hard for its importance and integrity as a subject. Importantly, he loved and promoted our work as colleagues, and he was consistently excited and energised by the expanding community of scholars and artists that emerged since university drama and theatre study began in the 1950s. He was a founder member/ initiator of SCUDD during the 1970s and he thought its annual conference to be an important diurnal highlight. During the 1980s he very much saved our subject that was threatened with closure in many universities. He initiated a transfer scheme when Bangor was under threat whereby staff were re-located to other departments (Kent, Exeter and Swansea). During the 1990s, SCUDD was accepted by the then Higher Education Funding Council to be so energetic and representative of the discipline that its thoughts and statements about research and practice were fed verbatim into the documentation for the first rounds of research assessment in RAE1996, 2001, and 2008.

As a teacher and curriculum planner there was never a distinction between scholarly study and artistic practice: history was rigorously dramatized—David Edgar made a splendid Fielding when the project wrote and performed the 1737 Stage Licensing Act. When Peter got the Chair at Exeter the final year ‘Practical Essay’ rapidly became a hallmark of experimental learning (and a great joy for the external examiner). Peter would never allow a distinction to be made between studio learning and the most sophisticated scholarly practice and research.

Peter was a great cricketer and was latterly occupied with writing a history of county cricket. Some of this was in autobiographical form. He sent me an early chapter about his teenage years in Sheffield which he discovered we both shared. Peter’s father was the minister of a Methodist Chapel in Nether Edge, and he was intrigued by the lurking effects of Methodism in both of us. Earlier this year he sent me some recent writing including a long and brilliant chapter on ‘Shakespeare’s Womenfolk’—not characters in the plays—but Anne, Joan, Susanna, and Judith. The dour and reserved puritanism (Joan and Judith?) brought methodism to mind.

But I must conclude with a word about the sheer conviviality of Peter whether playing marbles on the carpet (each favourite marble named after an English Cricketer—his favourite being a vicious little marble ‘opening batsman’ called Cyril Washbrook), or in heated Dr. Johnson-like debate in the bar at a SCUDD conference. Few could sustain his intake of beer alongside his crystal-clear radical thinking.

I am desperately sad to lose Peter but we must all be glad that we have had such a terrific and passionate patron.

Christopher Baugh FHEA FRSA

Emeritus Professor of Performance and Technology

University of Leeds

c.l.baugh@leeds.ac.uk

From:     Ian McCormick <ian.mccormick@hotmail.co.uk>

Date:      May 8 at 5:31 PM EDT

Subject:  Book Announcement: Shakespeare: New Voices

In Shakespeare: New Voices a diverse range of contributors were asked to rethink, reframe, and re-contextualize Shakespeare’s drama in relation to contemporary debates across the academy and public discourse. Accordingly, this new collection presents a variety of new voices emerging out of contemporary Shakespeare and performance studies in the wider context of a global age of culture wars, identity politics, digital transformation, and pedagogic innovation.

Shakespeare: New Voices is a bold and necessary collection for our times. It not only examines Shakespeare’s place in twenty-first-century culture but also interrogates the role that literature, performance, and theory can play in social justice movements, intensifying culture wars, and emancipatory pedagogy.

In an era marked by global unrest, heightened attention to social justice, and a backlash against “wokeness,” Shakespeare’s drama persists as a cultural cornerstone and serves as point of common reference; the plays create a forum for debate and contestation, and opportunities for creative appropriation and adaptation. At one extreme, we find the Shakespeare Idol (Bardolatry); at the other the critique of transcendence and universalist claims, and a more nuanced exploration of forms of inclusion and exclusion within global Shakespeare studies.

With accessibility, originality, and meticulous scholarship as key guiding principles, this volume provides a pluralistic account of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary social and cultural life.

CONTENTS

1   Voices of Resistance and Renewal

Ian McCormick

2   Shakespeare, Social Justice and the Struggle for Relevance

Ananya Dhawan Deol

3   The International Ramifications of Antonio’s Debt

Alex Flores

4   “Mislike me not for my complexion”: Black Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays

E. Kalu Amah

5   Rewriting Caliban and Epistemic Struggle: A Postcolonial Reading Across Texts.

Chijioke Izuegbunem

6   “I Grant I am a Woman”: Gender Inequity, Women’s Non-Traditional Casting, and Why Modern Shakespeare Should be “Woke”

Emily Pickett

7   Class Agenda? Radicals and Reactionaries on Stage/in the Classroom

Lisa Gould-Crooke

8   Teaching Shakespeare Insults First: A Case for Practical Shakespeare Introductions

Savannah Xaver

9   “The Milk of Human Kindness”

Jessica Tooker

10   Trauma, PTSD to Recovery: Exploring the Journey of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes through the Lens of Optimality Theory

Kanak Kanti Bera and Sovan Tripathy

11   Shattered Mirrors: the Consequences of Narcissism in Shakespeare’s Parent-Child Relationships

Aglaia Maretta Venters

12   Shedding New Light and Meaning in the Field of Shakespearean Canon: Reconstructing an Ecological Perspective

Shantanu Siuli

13   Fixing Shakespeare, Breaking America: Translation, Turmoil, and the American Cultural Divide

Cason Murphy

14   Nikos Velmos’s New Voice for Cleopatra: Rewriting Shakespeare from the Margins of Interwar Greece (1924)

Dimitra V. Dalpanagioti

15   Mimicry, Androgyny and the Biological Roots of Rosalind’s Strategy

Catherine Diamond

16   Performative Dissonance: Shakespeare, Drag, and the Legal Regulation of Identity

Max Barrett

17   “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained”: Using Fanfiction to Teach and Understand The Merchant of Venice in an Era of Hate

Allison Duque

18   Remaking and Reshaping Shakespeare through Fan Fiction

Bethany Smith

19   Witchcraft as Statecraft: Women’s Agency in The Hollow Crown’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henriad

Susan Kendrick 

20   Shakespearean Voodooism in Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin”: Serendipitous Appropriation and Modernization of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Nancy Ann Watanabe

21   From Flesh to Puppet: Performance and Evolutionary Adaptation in Boğaziçi Performing Arts Ensemble’s Master Shakespeare

Gökçe Yetkin

ISBN: ‎ 979-8255328079

Birmingham: Quibble Academic

326pp £12.99

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GYRM5VCW

Dr Ian McCormick

From:     Elena Pellone <lenavision@live.com>

Date:      May 7 at 9:07 AM EDT

Subject:  Book announcement 

Dear SHAKSPEReans,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my monograph: Directorless Shakespeare: Transformations through collective Embodied Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2025).

https://www.routledge.com/Directorless-Shakespeare-Transformations-through-collective-Embodied-Literary-Criticism/Pellone/p/book/9781032771885

Challenging received scholarship on the practice of Shakespeare’s theatre, this book displaces a contemporary cultural bias towards leadership models to reconsider possibilities of working in a non-hierarchical and inclusive creative theatrical practice. It offers ways of restoring to actors a sense of what the existentialists termed “autonomy” that Shakespeare’s company would have embodied. Against a critical account of two major Shakespeare playhouses—Shakespeare’s Globe, London and the American Shakespeare Center—the book describes the original practice-based research by Anərkē Shakespeare and Venice Shakespeare Company without a controlling director. Their staging of three directorless Shakespeare plays, and his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, with diverse actors, performance spaces, languages and countries, explores multilingual, intersectional, cross-disciplinary and international possibilities of early modern performance and study. Directorless Shakespeare as “Embodied Literary Criticism” releases the dialogical forces of Shakespeare’s texts, which are more fully served by the centrifugal force of the collective ensemble rather than the centripetal force of the single director. It allows texts to speak fully and multiply, in democratic exchange with an audience, liberated from directorial or theoretically driven concepts.

From:     Alexa Alice Joubin <ajoubin@email.gwu.edu>

Date:      April 16 at 4:14 PM EDT

Subject:  Barbara Hodgdon Award and Screening Shakespeare

Professor Alexa Alice Joubin received the Shakespeare Association of America’s (SAA) Barbara Hodgdon Award at the 2026 annual conference in Denver, USA. Her “The Great Globe Itself: An Introduction to Shakespeare in Heterotopia” (PDF) in her book Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare received the Barbara Hodgdon Award which “recognizes work that is innovative in method and scope and that opens up new avenues of inquiry in the field of performance.”

Joubin’s “Introduction to Shakespeare in Heterotopia” outlines new methodologies for the study of global Shakespeare through the notion of heterotopia—a concept, proposed by Michel Foucault, that describes worlds within worlds, or cultural spaces that are transformative because of their contradictory or trans-historical ideologies. Artists and audiences project their beliefs onto Shakespearean narratives to create hybrid worlds across cultures and history. Since the fictional space created by performance juxtaposes multiple worlds, this space—a microcosm of different temporalities and worlds—has multiple layers of cultural meanings.

Additionally, Joubin’s open-access Screening Shakespeare (https://screenshakespeare.org) received an honorable mention of the SAA’s Publics Award which “recognizes pioneering and culturally significant efforts to engage broad and diverse Shakespeare publics through teaching, scholarship, performance and activism.” Screening Shakespeare is a permanently free, interactive, multimedia textbook. It features a community-centered, multilingual, embedded AI tailored for public education.

Certified by Quality Matters, the project is now part of the OER Commons repository of peer-reviewed, Creative Commons openly-licensed resources. The website covers key concepts of Shakespearean mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and music, and film theory, and is designed for multimodal, equitable access, even functioning as an audio book.

From:     Jessica Tvordi <tvordi@suu.edu>

Date:      April 7 at 8:04 PM EDT

Subject:  CFP: Wooden O Symposium 

 August 3-5, 2026

Southern Utah University - Utah Shakespeare Festival

The Wooden O Symposium is a cross-disciplinary conference exploring the impact of Shakespeare’s plays on culture and history, from his time to the present. This face-to-face conference aims to foster research in the field of Shakespeare Studies and to provide connections between academia and professional theatre productions through our partnership with the Utah Shakespeare Festival. The Wooden O Symposium limits participation to 25 presenters to ensure robust conversation and feedback as we strive to create a community of scholars engaged with the work of Shakespeare.

Our 2026 keynote speaker is Dr. Daniel Vitkus, Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Elizabethan Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

We invite proposals for presentations on any topic relating to Shakespeare and his plays, including:

• Shakespeare and Adaptation
• Shakespeare in Performance
• Shakespeare and History, Culture, and Society
• Shakespeare and Rhetoric
• Shakespeare and the Arts
• Shakespeare and his Global Contemporaries
• Theoretical Approaches

We also encourage papers and presentations speaking to the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2026 summer season: Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. Conference registration includes 1 ticket to Troilus and Cressida and 1 to Hamlet, as well as 50% off any USF ticket from August 3-5 for you and your guests.

The deadline for proposals is May 1, 2026. Please include a 200-250-word abstract and the following information:

name of presenter

• participant category (faculty, graduate student, or independent scholar)
• college/university affiliation
• email address
• audio/visual requirements and any other special requests.

All abstracts should be submitted through the following link: 2026 Wooden O Symposium Submission Form

For more information, please contact the conference co-organizers, Scott Knowles at scottknowles@suu.edu or Jessica Tvordi at tvordi@suu.edu.

From:     Darren Freebury-Jones <Darren_F.J@hotmail.co.uk>

Date:      April 7 at 2:31 PM EDT

Subject:  The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd: Volume 2

Dear SHAKSPERians,

April 7 marks publication day for The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd: Volume Two.

This volume provides detailed cases for an expanded Kyd canon, including collaborations with Shakespeare.

Further information can be found in the two links below:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/the-collected-works-of-thomas-kyd-9781843846956/?v=7885444af42e

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/feb/24/plays-16th-century-playwright-thomas-kyd-double-new-edition

Darren Freebury-Jones.

From:     Darren Freebury-Jones <Darren_F.J@hotmail.co.uk>

Date:      April 7 at 2:26 PM EDT

Subject:  Amussen and Freebury-Jones

Dear SHAKSPERians,

I recently enjoyed speaking with historian Susan Dwyer Amussen about Shakespeare and our respective books Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers and What’s in a Name?

You can book tickets to stream our online conversation here: https://www.fane.co.uk/susan-darren

Darren Freebury-Jones.

From:     Darren Freebury-Jones <darren_f.j@hotmail.co.uk>

Date:      March 17 at 4:20 AM EDT

Subject:  Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers

Dear SHAKSPERians,

The paperback edition of my book SHAKESPEARE’S BORROWED FEATHERS: HOW EARLY MODERN PLAYWRIGHTS SHAPED THE WORLD’S GREATEST WRITER is now published.

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526177346/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeares-Borrowed-Feathers-Playwrights-Greatest/dp/152617734X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 

Darren Freebury-Jones

From:     Sean Kevin Lawrence <sean.lawrence@ubc.ca>

Date:      March 14 at 10:27 PM EDT

Subject:  In Memoriam Jay Halio

Dear SHAKSPEReans, 

I thought you might be interested to know of Professor Halio’s passing.

https://www.udel.edu/academics/colleges/cas/news-events/news/2026/march/in-memoriam-jay-halio/

Yours, 

Sean Lawrence.

From:     Stephanie Chamberlain <sechamberlain@semo.edu>

Date:      March 10 at 10:08 AM EDT

Subject:  Book Announcement

Dear SHAKSPEReans,

I am pleased to announcement the publication of my volume, ‘What Country, Friends, Is This?’: Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile, co-edited with Vanessa I. Corredera, Baylor University and James M. Sutton, Florida International University by ACMRS Press. 

 Stephanie

From:     Stephanie Chamberlain <sechamberlain@semo.edu>

Date:      March 5 at 11:17 AM EST

Subject:  CFP: Journal of the Wooden O

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Journal of the Wooden O (JWO) is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on Shakespeare studies. The editors invite papers on topics related to Shakespeare, including Shakespearean texts, Shakespeare in performance, the adaptation of Shakespeare works (film, fiction, and visual and performing arts), Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and history, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

The JWO is published annually by Southern Utah University Press in connection with the Gerald R. Sherratt Library and the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Articles published in the JWO are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, World Shakespeare Bibliography and appear full-text in EBSCO Academic Search Premiere.

Selected papers from the annual Wooden O Symposium are also considered for publication.

SUBMISSIONS: Manuscripts should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17^th edition. Manuscript submissions should generally be between 4000-8000 words in length. Please review the JWO Style Sheet, which may be found at https://www.suu.edu/library/wooden-o.html. The deadline for submission is October 16, 2026. Authors should include all of the following information on a separate page with their submission:

• Author’s name
• Manuscript title
• Mailing address
• Email address
• Daytime phone number

Submit electronic copy to: woodeno@suu.edu (Only .doc, .docx or .rtf files will be accepted.)

For more information, contact:

Journal of the Wooden O

c/o Southern Utah University Press

351 W. University Blvd.

Cedar City, Utah 84720

435.586.1955

woodeno@suu.edu

From:     Mark Bradbeer <bradbeer56@gmail.com>

Date:      March 2 at 7:24 PM EST

Subject:  Book Announcement

New Book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 

There are two different writing styles in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). A minority of the 154 sonnets employ the ‘you’ second-person address mode (instead of ‘thou’).

In my new book, I make the case that these styles are indicative of two poets (Sonnet 83.14). Whereas Shakespeare used ‘thou’, his Rival used ‘you’.

My approach suggests that Shakespeare’s mistress, commonly called the Dark Lady (Sonnet 127), was also a rival for their patron’s affections. It is her tender voice that enters the series at Sonnet 13. It was her humble voice which rhetorically asked: Was Shakespeare’s “spirit, by spirits, taught to write above the mortal pitch?” (Sonnet 86.5-6). Inadvertently, this resolves the problematic search for a rival poet who was better than Shakespeare.

There is much more new information revealed by using this Two-Poet hypothesis. My book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Rival Poet: The Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Routledge, 2026), is now available for order and delivery later this year.

This research supports the thesis of my earlier book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author (Routledge, 2022), which is now available in the less expensive format of paperback or ebook.