Migrating Shakespeare: First European Encounters, Routes and Networks

Migrating Shakespeareoffers the first study of the earliest waves of Shakespeare’s migration into Europe. Charting the spread of the reception and production of his plays across the continent, it examines how Shakespeare contributed to national cultures and - in some cases - nation building. The chapters explore the routes and cultural networks through which Shakespeare entered European consciousness, from first translations to stage adaptations and critical response. The role of strolling players and actors, translators and printers, poets and dramatists, is chronicled alongside the larger political and cultural movements shaping nations. Each individual case discloses the national, literary and theatrical issues Shakespeare encountered, revealing not only how cultures have accommodated and adapted Shakespeare on their own terms but their interpretative contribution to the texts. Taken collectively the volume addresses key questions about Shakespeare’s naturalization or reluctant accommodation within other cultures, inaugurating his present global reach.

Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Studies and Co-Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull, UK, and was Visiting Professor in the Department of Intercultural Studies at the University of Florence. Her books include ’Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (second edition 1999), Drama of the English Republic, 1649-1660, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedies (2006) and most recently Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (2014).

Dominique Goy-Blanquet is professor emeritus at the University of Picardie, France, member of the editorial board of La Quinzaine Littéraire and of En attendant Nadeau, a contributor to Books and to the Times Literary Supplement, and was president of the Société Française Shakespeare 2009-2015. Her works include Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (2003), Shakespeare et l’invention de l’histoire (3rd augmented edition, 2014), Côté cour, côté justice: Shakespeare et l’invention du droit (2016), translations of John D. Wilson, What happens in ’Hamlet’, Anthony Burgess’s Little Wilson and Big God, W. H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare.