ENG 625: Studies in Shakespeare: Home

Comparative Drama publishes original essays on any aspect of dramatic literature and theatre. In its fifty-year history the journal has often focused on early drama, but we publish studies of drama and theatre from any historical period. We include a variety of methodologies and theoretical perspectives, with a strong interest in interdisciplinary scholarship. We aim to bring significant work to a wide international audience and seek studies that are international in spirit.

Founded in 1950 by the Shakespeare Association of America, Shakespeare Quarterly is a refereed journal committed to publishing articles in the vanguard of Shakespeare studies. Submissions are double blinded. The Quarterly, produced by Folger Shakespeare Library features notes that bring to light new information on Shakespeare and his age, issue and exchange sections for the latest ideas and controversies, theater reviews of significant Shakespeare productions, and book reviews to keep its readers current with Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.

In Blood Relations, Janet Adelman confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With her distinctive psychological acumen, she argues that Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christian and Jew specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adelman locates the promise--or threat--of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play.

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to recuperate and redirect their social energies.

This Guide steers students through the critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies from the sixteenth century to the present day. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.