Chaucer’s Jailer’s Daughter: Character and Source in
The Two Noble Kinsmen

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.

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…

Jeremy Lopez introduces himself as the new Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly in his first From the Editor.

This essay explores the troublesome question of English national identity in Shakespeare’s King John, a strikingly skeptical history play that often appears to subvert more than support any cohesive notion of English nationhood. I argue, however, that the play’s skeptical attitude toward English identity and legitimacy ultimately leads to a surprisingly robust conception of the English nation…

In Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter appears to have little connection to Chaucer, the play’s named “noble breeder.” Only a single line in The Knight’s Tale offers a corresponding figure for her: the anonymous “freend” who helps Palamon escape prison. This essay argues, however, that her relationship to Chaucer extends far beyond this task…