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This chapter examines the ways in which ‘racial issues’ migrated from Rhodesia to London through institutional connections between the London School of Economics, the University of London and the University of Rhodesia from the 1950s to 1970s. As Walter Adams was appointed as the new director of LSE from his post as principal of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1967, LSE students were against his appointment to protect what they construed as the most multiracial university in Britain from having a director they regarded as holding reactionary racial views. The students made further demonstrations against Adams’s directorship until 1974. In doing so, their voices became stronger, reflected in the school’s governance and policymaking processes. The continued inflow of returning staff and international students from new Commonwealth countries shaped new communities and cultures at the University of London. These students’ radical activities in Britain helped to highlight and challenge racial issues within British universities and among students. Britain’s 1960s student counterculture was shaped by these colonial networks that brought the colonial empire’s race and decolonisation issues ‘home’. By introducing new postcolonial perspectives on the history of the University of London, this chapter argues the earlier activism of LSE students and student demonstrations at British universities in the late 1960s are a key example of Britain’s afterlives of empire and the predecessor of current movements to ‘decolonise the university’.

The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of the figure of the female werewolf. In the nineteenth century, at the fin de siècle, female authors began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman's novella The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf'. The female werewolf's potential for subversion of societal norms and expectations in any era is considerable, and the female lycanthrope was put to excellent use in this regard by the Victorian authors. The choice of the werewolf in itself could be interpreted as an effort to subvert masculine literary history, given that for thousands of years the female werewolf was non-existent in written fiction.

In her afterlives in Japan, Ophelia becomes a woman with supernatural power. In an early twentieth-century novel, Natsume’s Kusamakura (1906), the Ophelia figure resists a supernatural curse. In other mid-century novels, she is a ghost who raises an angry voice against an abusive Hamlet, such as in Kobayashi’s Ophelia’s Literary Remains (1931) and Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary (1955). In post-modern Japanese pop culture, such as manga and anime, Ophelia is an avenging ghost (Nakata’s Ringue (1998) and The Ring 2 (2008)), a water dragon (Yagi’s Claymore (2007)), a protectress of the tree of life (Oizaki’s Romeo × Juliet (2007)), a sea goddess (Miyazaki’s Ponyo (2008)), a grim reaper (Toboso’s and Shinohara’s Black Butler (manga: 2006–present; anime: 2008-11), an adolescent ghost (Otsuka, Zero: 2014) and backstroke champion who has supernatural power to communicate with animals (Inoue, Ophelia, not yet: 2015). This chapter argues that various transformations of Ophelia in Japan create a critical intervention in Ophelia’s fetishised image as a dedicated lover, beautiful corpse, innocent adolescent and passive victim.

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling meditates on the portrait of Dr John William Polidori by F. G. Gainsford and on the vulnerability displayed which manifested in his sadly unfulfilled life. Frayling expands on the composition of that portrait and on Polidori’s biography. He reminisces on the presence of the portrait as he unied the history of the vampire in his seminal work of the 1970s. Frayling remarks on the then invisibility of Polidori compared to the present-day recognition of his importance, in which this collection and its originary symposium (which he attended) play a part.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book takes the reader on a rewarding journey from Thomas Kyd's Proserpine to William Shakespeare's Prospero. It focuses on the relationship between The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet - two plays which testify simultaneously to the paradigmatic consolidation and the dissolution of the genre. The book explores the way in which 'the text' of The Spanish Tragedy has been (re)constructed by editors over the course of the four centuries since its first staging, with particular emphasis on twentieth-century editions and the Routledge Anthology. It engages with issues of identity and new ideas regarding the play's complex relations with its political and cultural context of emergence and early circulation. The book also explores some of the challenges adaptors face when turning it into a screenplay.

This chapter arises from the work Hilary Hinds and the author undertook in preparing the text of The Spanish Tragedy for their jointly edited book, The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. It argues that The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama was a publishing venture based on economic hardship. The Spanish Tragedy requires the reader to disengage from the familiar narrative codes of the modern world at a number of different levels. Back in the early twentieth century, it would seem that the preference presaged the resurgence of interest in the work of Thomas Kyd, exemplified by the very successful conference held at the University of Warwick, the emergence of the present volume and new individual editions of The Spanish Tragedy. Some of the respondents drew attention to a clear paradox concerned with the relationship of Kyd to William Shakespeare's work in general and Hamlet in particular.

Thomas Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy some time in the late 1500s, in an Elizabethan London that was busy reinventing English culture. The legitimate and regionally oriented Plantagenets had been defeated by Henry VII, who quickly moved to establish a centralised, grandiose, imperial state, which his descendants, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, expanded and consolidated. The Spanish Tragedy is the tragedy of a naive and hardworking man at the table of the rich, who is robbed of everything he loves - including justice. In The Spanish Tragedy, the biggest technical problem in the adaptation is pruning away all the extraneous bits and, perhaps, leaving in some of the play's Additions, if they go to pointing out the theme the adaptor has determined has the most relevance for the audience. The Spanish Tragedy is the story of Hieronimo, a hard worker at the table of the King.

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This chapter, by Kath Stevenson, explains that traditions of Christian knowledge are an abiding preoccupation for William Langland in Piers Plowman, with Langland exploring fundamental questions about the pre-eminence or otherwise of abstract learning, textually mediated and transmitted (‘clergie’), over experiential knowledge (‘kynde knowynge’) and about the role of learning in Christian salvation. What good is knowledge? In an age of abstruse academic discourse, in which Langland himself was deeply versed, Langland’s protagonist Will searches urgently for the knowledge that is truly valuable, that is, the knowledge that will enable him to save his soul. Stevenson locates Langland’s ambivalence concerning the efficacy of textually mediated learning within the wider contexts of vernacular theology in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in particular shows Langland’s treatment of the Passion in the central passus of his poem to be informed by the developing traditions of affective piety. For Langland the Passion can function as a site in which textual and experiential knowledge are united, with abstract intellectual knowledge becoming transfigured as it is fused with ‘kynde knowynge’.