All’s Well That Ends Well and the Art of Love

Shakespeare Quarterly has some exciting news to share. On January 1, 2019, Oxford University Press (OUP) will become the journal’s new publisher.

Both Ewan Fernie and Paul Kottman have recently published books that address the expansive topics of Shakespeare and freedom. In addition to each author reviewing the other’s book in our Fall 2017 issue, Fernie and Kottman answered a set of our questions to further explore the relationship between Shakespeare and freedom.

When his career appeared to have bottomed out in 2009, comedian Marc Maron turned in desperation to the medium of podcasting and created WTF with Marc Maron, a show that has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon with over six million downloads per month…

Dr. Barbara Mowat, our friend and colleague, coeditor of the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, consulting editor at Shakespeare Quarterly, former director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, former editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and former chair of the Folger Institute, passed away on November 24, 2017. She was 83….

One springboard for my recent book, The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare (which Ken Gross generously reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly 68.1), was what Randall McLeod has called a “Keatspearian” moment. On January 23^rd, 1818, John Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey that he “sat down to read King Lear . . . and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet preparatory thereto.”…

I was at a matinee performance of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in May of 2016, looking down at the action from way up in the balcony, surrounded by Canadian High School students. Two young women in front of me spent the afternoon making out. But I’d heard the story was good, and I wanted to see how things would turn out…

Well, now. It looks like Caesar can really matter to this play!

That might seem a not-so-striking discovery. After all, countless European students over many centuries learned to venerate Caesar as a leader of exceptional genius who brought law, order, and civilization to the rugged…

Missouri Williams’s King Lear with Sheep lives up to its title: it stages Shakespeare’s famous play with sheep. More specifically: Shetland, Blackface, and Oxford Down sheep from both urban and agricultural farms in England, who have played Lear in a wide variety of heaths. The play premiered in a former timber warehouse at Surrey Docks…

It is with great pleasure that we at Shakespeare Quarterly launch this new digital space. It will highlight and showcase the content of current and upcoming published issues of the journal. It will also host supplemental materials that will give you a more robust engagement with the essays in our issues. Additionally, lively…

SQ: Tell us what drew you to write Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter (2015) and what is its relation to your book Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (2011)?  GH: It would be true to say that Black and Deep Desires grew out of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare though I wouldn’t have anticipated that…

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare imagines a common enough situation—someone you love, if ambivalently, will never love you—and in doing so suggests how unrequited love might become an art, a practice of sustaining relationship with those who prefer no relationship whatsoever and who might not merit our investment…

This essay contends that Reformation Biblical hermeneutics offer a vital way to understand the relationship between three of Titus Andronicus’s most infamous features: its insistent use of classical texts; its figurative-literal play; and its grotesque violence. In Titus, classical texts offer an oblique way to stage dangerous questions…

In this essay, Bayer examines Henry Norman Hudson, an understudied yet pivotal figure in the emergence of Shakespeare studies as a discrete and institutionalized academic discipline in the United States. Professionalizing Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth century, I argue, entailed considerable conflict and negotiation…

The name of Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus has been referred to no historical source and has been usually interpreted as having relation to the biblical Aaron. But Aaron was the name of one of the best known “Moors” of the world: Harun al-Rashid, called “Aaron” in English-language sources.