This chapter discusses the options, premises and conditions of editing The Spanish Tragedy as considered at the time of the author's participation in the 2006 workshop held at the University of Warwick on Thomas Kyd and the most famous play attributed to him. It focuses on assessing what a new edition may contribute to, by addressing the major constituent elements. The editorial options for an editor in the early twenty-first century are: facsimiles, literal transcriptions, editions restoring the author's intentions, editions reconstructing the texts of 'works viewed as collaborative (social) products', multi-textual editions and electronic or hypertextual editions. The choice among these options is determined by negotiations among the intended readership, the editor's purpose and the publisher's conditions. The chapter examines the problems involved in the latter option, an objective that is not ruled out in the Guidelines of the Arden Early Modern Drama series.

Recent puppet theory engages with how this ancient form exists in dialogue with contemporary digital technologies. In 2017, the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted an ambitious production of The Tempest in which Mark Quarterly’s performance as Ariel was rendered alongside a digital puppet through the use of live motion capture technology. This chapter examines how the hardware and software used by the RSC and Intel to render Quarterly’s ‘Double Ariel’ engages with The Tempest’s themes of liminality, and specifically Ariel’s liminal textual status as a supernatural entity. By deconstructing the technical systems used to render Ariel’s avatar in this production, the chapter also explores processes of iterative ‘technodramaturgy’ – the interplay between traditional dramaturgies and the innate, often concealed dramaturgies of technical systems themselves (software, hardware or mechanical). In the RSC Tempest, this technodramaturgy heightened the wonder and spectacle of Shakespeare’s sprite, leading to theatrical discoveries around rendering the supernatural through digital puppetry.

11

This chapter provides an analysis of the early modern Burgundian werewolf trials. It focuses on contemporaneous ecclesiastical and political circumstance to explain the relative frequency with which female werewolves were accused and tried in this particular area of France. The brutal killing of Perrenette Gandillon as a supposed she-werewolf is indicative of the atmosphere in the mountains of Franche-Comté, a territory in Burgundy, France. The werewolf panics and the comparatively large numbers of werewolf trials in Franche-Comté represent a relatively unique phenomenon in Europe, with the exception of Latvia and Estonia. The werewolf trials began in 1521, with the death sentences for heresy pronounced by the Inquisition courts, and ended in 1663 with acquittals before secular courts. The concept of the werewolf nevertheless remained particularly alive in the inaccessible regions of the Jura, where several cases of alleged lycanthropy came before the courts.

This chapter questions early modern conceptions of the supernatural from a linguistic perspective: can language produce supernatural effects? How is the supernatural expressed through language? First, it considers the context of early modern theatre in which prophecies were problematic, as church and state tried to avoid the spread of seditious rumours. The evocative power of prophecy resisted these regulatory efforts, and monarchs recognised the close link between prophecies and poetry, attested since antiquity in the figure of the poet-prophet. Then the chapter discusses how the language of prophecy (in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Richard II or Richard III) could trick audiences into believing in the supernatural power of prophecies, despite the fact that the language used turns out to be non-performative. Instead, prophecies make language ‘stutter’ (a concept borrowed from Gilles Deleuze), rather than advance the plot. Prophecies posit a number of hypothetical futures, questioning our interpretation of historical narratives and supernatural phenomena. By producing the supernatural through language, rather than through characters or special effects, prophecies challenge our interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.

This chapter takes up the problematic relationship between female shamefastness and the model of hardy masculinity and considers its disturbing implications for female exemplarity founded on shamefastness. As Chaucer’s adaptations of the narratives of Virginia and Lucretia demonstrate, women’s shamefast chastity is not only under threat from masculine hardiness, but can even provoke that threat, either by stimulating masculine desire or by inviting men to prove their manhood. The chapter begins by exploring how Chaucer represents the irreconcilability of shamefast femininity and forceful masculinity elsewhere in his work. It then continues to the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, and shows that Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower (c. 1330–1408), approach the theme of ‘manly force’ from very different angles. Whereas Gower invites readers to consider what might have happened in a Rome that was justly governed by chaste rulers, Chaucer engages readers in a deeply uncomfortable experiment in counterfactual thinking about female honour, an experiment that threatens to reopen the question of whether the binary of death or dishonour need exist in the first place.

In this introductory chapter, Sam George and Bill Hughes outline the scope of the collection, beginning with an account of Polidori’s life and the background to the composition of The Vampyre, noting all the problems that have surrounded this story. The legacy of The Vampyre is briefly detailed, from the early stage adaptations and appropriations of his tale to contemporary filmic and novelistic appearances of Polidori himself. Accounts of Polidori have not always treated him well; this collection aims to redeem him. A survey of the critical material on The Vampyre follows, analytically linking it with the chapters in the collection, which are summarised in the conclusion of this Introduction.

9

This chapter examines how the supernatural elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are constructed from mythical and folkloric sources but reconfigured as contemporary topical allusions. The play thus seems to be a locus for potentially competing influences: borrowing from the past while also writing to the present moment, most likely to excite the interest of his audiences and their yen for gossip or scandal. Shakespeare’s invention of the name ‘Puck’ for the puckle figure of folklore creates opportunities for every member of an audience to see the figure as consonant with their own local knowledge of such a sprite, but also enables the playwright to develop an allusion to George Buck and his competition with John Lyly for the reversion of the Master of Revels. The play thus also positions the censor as its first audience, with the allusion and Puck’s epilogue addressed directly to the Master of Revels at the time, Edmund Tylney, making amends for recent offences by Shakespeare’s company. The forest outside Athens becomes the site for a clash between modes of signification – sources and topicality – anchoring supernatural elements to far more worldly contemporary issues.