William Shakespeare's Romeo and Thomas Kyd's Hieronimo were two of the most highly praised creations of Elizabethan tragedy, yet neither has an obvious flaw. In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the Romans perform their customary expiation of the spirits of those who have died in battle by sacrificing the highest-born male among their prisoners of war. Because of their dazzling theatricality the tragedies of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Marston have remained alive in later centuries. Just as sixteenth-century tragic theory was frequently based on a moralistic misreading of Aristotle, so many twentieth-century readings of Elizabethan tragedy were based on a psychological misreading of Aristotle. For most educated Elizabethans, Aristotle was a master of political theory and moral philosophy. The Spanish Tragedy of Kyd simultaneously set the pattern for late Elizabethan revenge drama and raised theatrical self-consciousness to a new level of sophistication.

This chapter explores our current moment in the history of The Tempest in performance, in which female actors have increasingly taken on the role of Prospero, transforming him into Prospera. Goodland challenges the prevailing view that this change is seamless, arguing that it reveals implicit bias against women in that they are largely viewed as mothers rather than as magi. She shows this by examining the tension between feminist scholarship and play reviews in three high-profile productions: Blair Brown’s 2003 stage portrayal at McCarter Theatre, Olympia Dukakis’s 2012 performance at Shakespeare & Company and Helen Mirren’s 2010 Prospera in the film by Julie Taymor. While Shakespeare’s play ultimately suggests that the difference between Prospero and Sycorax, between male and female forms of magic, is illusory, Goodland’s analysis shows that the replacement of a male body with a female body is not so seamless. Bodies matter. The biases of our twenty-first century culture are written in the laws that endeavour to control women’s bodies and in the reviews that construe their value to society under the category of a domesticated motherhood rather than as individuals who are leaders and scientists.

Bill Hughes shows how, in her 1816 novel Glenarvon, Byron’s spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb turned her own attraction‒repulsion to the poet into a Gothic and sentimental fiction of amatory seduction and betrayal alongside political revolt. Here, the eponymous Glenarvon is notably Byronic, feeding off Byron’s own self-fashioning and Lamb’s mimicry of him, while drawing on Milton and Richardson. Glenarvon takes part in the anticolonial Irish Rebellion of 1803, inciting the people with his rhetoric and personal charm. Glenarvon’s political persuasiveness is linked to his sexual glamour. Glenarvon’s women themselves become Byronic; Byronism is an infection, like vampirism. With all these conflicting forces, Lamb’s novel shifts between an anti-Jacobin stance and radicalism. Polidori’s revision of Ruthven strips away Lamb’s ambivalence, but by clearly marking the aristocratic demon lover as both Byronic and a vampire, inaugurates a literary archetype. Yet many of Ruthven’s descendants, in Gothic and paranormal romance, resurrect the alluring mix of rebellion and faithlessness that Lamb depicted and whose progress is traced in this chapter.

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Tribe Arts is a philosophically inspired, radical-political theatre company based in Leeds. Founded by Tajpal Rathore and Samran Rathore, it aims to amplify the stories and voices of second- and third-generation black and Asian people in Britain, interrogating themes and issues such as race, belonging and identity. Tribe Arts’s previous shows have included Darokhand, a reimagining of six Shakespeare plays, amalgamated into an original story set in a striking Gothic-Mughal world – stylistically a gothic landscape evoking Mughal India; and Tribe Talks, a radical format of participatory theatre in which a panel of speakers motivate the audience to discuss important topics around the history of black and Asian people. In 2020, Tribe Arts launched Off/Stage, the only e-zine currently dedicated to black and Asian theatre and culture in the UK. This interview sees editors Josh, Liam and Emma reconvene with Thaj and Sam, both of whom presented on decolonial theatre practice at the original 2018 ‘After Empire?’ conference. In this conversation, held during the autumn of 2020, Thaj and Sam reflect on their origins as an organisation, exploring why decolonial theatre is necessary in modern Britain and how their work confronts the legacies of empire across British society.

This chapter considers the presentations of adolescent female lycanthropes in fantasy fiction written after Neil Jordan's 1984 film, focusing specifically on texts in which a teenage female is both the central character and the intended reader. Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Was a Teenage Werewolf was released in 1957, and presented lycanthropy as related to the hormonally driven male adolescent body in a way that would be revisited by Rod Daniels in his 1985 comedy horror film, Teen Wolf. In the female werewolf young adult (YA) fiction of the early twenty-first century, it is rare to find lycanthropy explicitly associated with menarche, as it is in 'Boobs' and Ginger Snaps. The coincidence of the heroines' names in the Dark Divine and Wolves of Mercy Falls series has interesting implications for a consideration of female werewolves in YA fiction. The concept of 'grace' is an important aspect of characterisation in these novels.

Like the previous chapter, Michelle Brown’s contribution represents an instance of the integration of Christian and pre-Christian Germanic knowledge in the early Middle Ages. Brown explores the context and meaning of the distinctive late-tenth-century rune-stone carved at the royal burial ground of Jellinge in Denmark, viewing the monument as a book in stone and a symbol of conversion and of changing political agendas in Scandinavia in the tenth century. Ranging widely across early medieval art, Brown explains that the stone (like the Auzon/Franks Casket, to which she also alludes) draws upon both Christian and pagan Norse traditions ‘to form a new, integrated iconography that formed a distinctive expression of the Scandinavian experience of cultural synthesis and conversion’.

In American and Canadian literature of the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples of North America were frequently equated with wild animals, particularly wolves. By the nineteenth century, wolves had been hunted to extinction in the north-east and their loss has often been linked in literature with the forced removal of North American tribes from their land. Nineteenth-century authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Honoré Beaugrand chose to set their narratives during America's colonial period when Native Americans and wolves were still mainly in possession of their land and considered a threat to European colonists. In 'The Werewolves', published in 1898 in Century Illustrated Magazine, Canadian author Honoré Beaugrand takes the motif of 'Indians' as wolflike one step further by transforming them completely into loup-garous or werewolves. As a werewolf, La-Linotte-Qui-Chante is the ultimate symbol of otherness in nineteenth-century fiction, female, indigenous and monstrous.

This essay considers the space of the museum as a dissident of location of postcolonial critique, inspired by Daljit Nagra’s poetic sequence ‘Meditations on the British Museum’ (2017). It fully acknowledges the Western institution of the museum as complicit in articulating colonial perspectives, but also challenges the views of those who regard museums as forever compromised by their indebtedness to empire. To this end, the essay combines recent thinking in museum studies concerning ‘diasporic objects’ with the critique of origins central to critical adoption studies in order to query the problematic nativism and unexplored passion for the patrial that sometimes underwrites ‘decolonial’ attitudes to object provenance and legitimate heritage. Drawing, too, upon Nicholas Thomas’s work regarding ‘curiosity’, it reframes the museum as a site of postcolonial critique where emergent relations might be struck through uncommissioned encounters between the museum’s visitors and its galleries. The new constellations of meaning created as a consequence empower us not only to admit but also redeploy our contact with colonialism’s plunder for purposefully resistant ends. A cognisance of exactly these possibilities resides at the core of Nagra’s poetic sequence, which imagines a diasporic visitor to London’s British Museum wandering at will among its myriad objects drawn from, but not confined to, a plethora of empires, ancient and modern. In his exploration of the museum as a space of generative opportunities for resistant thinking, Nagra curates in his poetry a generative encounter between the present’s enduring coloniality and the contestatory constellations yielded by unchartered diasporic curiosity.