Shakespeare’s three political tragedies―Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear―have numerously been presented or adapted on film. These three plays all involve the recurring trope of madness, which, as constructed by Shakespeare, provided a wider canvas on which to detail those materials that could not be otherwise expressed: sexual desire and exp…[Read more]

This essay describes and illustrates the activities associated with the University of California at Berkeley’s Shakespeare Program, over the last forty years, covering teaching innovations, numerous research publications, multiple productions and videos of Shakespeare’s plays, and creation of websites, Shakespeare’s Staging and Milton Revealed.

Using the techniques of Symbolic Logic this paper consolidates the theories about Shakespeare’s views on human sexuality as explored in H. M. Richmond, “Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy,” reformulating them as an algorithm demonstrating that intense love seemingly depends on encounter with a powerful; obstacle to the full realization of a relationship.

Due to the interactive affordances of twenty-first century technologies, the relationship between readers and texts is often repositioned as part of a communal experience of consumption and reproduction. Inclusive in this expanding culture are user-generated adaptations of Shakespeare, most saliently fanfic. The fanfic universe prolifically…[Read more]

Nearly all scholars who work on medieval or early modern texts at some point work from digital facsimiles. There are advantages and disadvantages to such objects: what they might offer in terms of convenience and availability, they lack in material information. We can adjust the nature of what questions we ask of which object, consulting digital…[Read more]

This comparative study in the evolution of subjectivity in European literature during the Renaissance ascribes it to the impact of the Reformation on the public representation of authorial identity, differing from Stephen Greenblatt’s later application of Foucault to six Tudor authors.

“King Lear,” like all great tragedies, is surely designed to entertain and illuminate, not to depress an audience – as too many interpretations argue. Lear abdicates to ensure the future of Cordelia, from excessive love of virtue and justice, the violation of which initially drives him mad – with rage – but he progressively goes sane, learning t…[Read more]

This article reads the problem of trespass within William Shakespeare’s King Lear. I draw upon eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone’s notion of trespass, sixteenth-century jurist Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty, in order to understand the question of property rights that emerges in Lear’s abdication of his sovereignty.