Shakespeare Quarterly continues to work through a production backlog caused by manufacturing problems and the COVID-19 pandemic. We are grateful for the continued patience and support of both our authors and our readers. Abstracts for essays scheduled to appear in the Summer 2020 issue are now available here.

Shakespeare Quarterly is a highly selective journal that is eager to receive strong work in all areas of Shakespeare studies by scholars at every career-stage. In the interest of making our editorial procedures as transparent as possible, we provide the following information….

As many of you probably know, Shakespeare Quarterly is behind schedule. In spite of  production delays, we continue to receive and accept exciting, cutting-edge scholarly work, and we want to do what we can to let our readers know what is forthcoming. For the most current abstracts, click here.

We are very pleased to announce that, effective September 1, 2020, James Kuzner has joined the Shakespeare Quarterly editorial team as the journal’s first-ever Book Reviews Editor. If you would like to review a book for SQ, or if you hope to have SQ review your book, please contact James directly at james_kuzner@brown.edu…

The Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly expresses its strong support for the call to action posted by the RaceB4Race collective this June (https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/its-time-to-end-the-publishing-gatekeeping-75207525f587). We reaffirm the journal’s interest in receiving and publishing work in early modern critical race studies…

“If you find a Christ figure in Shakespeare you fail this course.” “You’re like a butterfly; you touch on everything and alight on nothing.” “The Magi are the intellectuals in the story: they come late, compromised, bearing useless gifts.” Not what I, a first-year student at Fordham University, expected to hear from the Jesuit before me, the imposing Father Tim Healy…

Sightings of my bin-liner began on the first day of spring break. My cell phone buzzed with unusual frequency as incoming texts arrived from friends and colleagues, all sent from the security check-point in the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, and all accompanied by iPhone photos of the plastic bins that go through the x-ray scanners…

In its allusions to past, present, and even futuristic theater, the Thomas Jolly Richard III seemed a perfect beginning to the year of Shakespeare commemoration in France, focused as it is on his afterlife. I was surprised that most of the people I talked to in Paris interpreted this production simply as something intended to appeal to a young audience, and perhaps, therefore, selling out…

For many, including the friend who invited me to join her at the theater, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream should be staged in an Arthur Rackham world, replete with nineteenth-century fairies clothed in gossamer robes. Although my friend was deeply disappointed that Peter Brook’s famous 1970 production did not conform to her…

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

This essay challenges existing paradigms of Hamlet revision by taking seriously the prospect that Roberts’ printinghouse set Q2 from a manuscript at least minimally prepared for theatrical performance. By exploring part-lines in Q2 and cuts effected between Q2 and F in light of the particularities of surviving playhouse manuscripts …

How do we explain the presence and activity of evil in the world? There are a number of possible answers to this question in early modern England. In Othello (c.1604), I argue that Shakespeare engages with competing contemporary accounts of what evil is, where it comes from, how it works, and why it is permitted in the first place…

Why does Shakespeare’s greatest villain explicitly avoid poison—this most villainous method of killing—when he appears to second Othello’s resolution that Desdemona “shall not live”?  This essay argues that despite Iago’s seeming endorsement of Othello’s idea to kill his wife, her death was never part of Iago’s intrigue…