The introduction constitutes a comprehensive overview of the field of Shakespeare and the supernatural, covering terminology, historical ideas surrounding magic, witchcraft, ghosts and demonology, responses to the supernatural in the space of the theatre, and the ways in which Shakespeare’s work is located between discourses of enchantment and emerging scepticism. It also highlights the porous boundaries between ideas of nature, the preternatural and the supernatural. Providing relevant contexts for the issues explored in the book, it outlines the volume’s five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and present-day transformations. The introduction also presents a summary of the contributions by each of the authors and explores the dialogues that open up between the various chapters.

While stage adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have grappled with representing fairies and fairy flight since the play’s early performances at the original Globe, the ‘magic’ of film offered possibilities of supernature not previously available to stage productions. Initially this capability was fully exploited in early adaptations of the Dream such as Vitagraph’s 1909 silent adaptation, and Max Reinhardt’s spectacular 1935 film for Warner Brothers. As cinema matured, and our reading of the play changed, the heavy reliance on special effects made way for other, more subtle techniques. Film directors took differing approaches in representing the fairies’ supernatural powers and their materiality, offering new and exciting ways to ‘read’ the fairies. This chapter explores how the fairies are represented in a number of film adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1909 through to 2016, and considers the effect that film ‘magic’ has on realising the supernatural in the play.

In his introduction to The Works of Thomas Kyd, Frederick Boas remarks that the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy was nowhere more enduring than on the continent of Europe. This chapter traces the career of the play in the Low Countries. It places the work of Thomas Kyd in the context of the various political and cultural contacts between England, the Netherlands and Flanders. The chapter looks at The Spanish Tragedy as one of a range of specifically English revenge plays that crossed the Channel during the early modern period. It argues that the lasting position of The Spanish Tragedy in the Low Countries is of interest from a politico-religious perspective. The chapter focuses on the recontextualisation of The Spanish Tragedy and the genre of revenge tragedy in the Dutch Republic.

Richard North’s chapter argues that the Old English verse saint’s life Andreas (on the apostle St Andrew) appropriates the secular epic poem Beowulf for mock-epic purposes, turning knowledge of Beowulf, a poem which by implication must have been famous in Anglo-Saxon England, to a new Christian purpose. Andreas is seen to offer through its mock-epic style a satirical commentary on the heathen nostalgia of Beowulf. In Andreas knowledge of secular literature and its version of the past is astutely re-appropriated for religious purposes, being absorbed into and transcended by a Christian celebration of the true heroism of the saint. This chapter adds a new dimension to the understanding of Anglo-Saxon literary history and the place of secular tradition within it.

In Shakespeare’s England, ghosts were problematic, associated with Catholic ideas about Purgatory. However, ghosts proved popular on the early modern stage, and in Shakespeare’s plays the throne is a particularly haunted space. In Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Richard III and Macbeth, political leaders encounter ghosts who had held power themselves or who were murdered as part of the brutal process of obtaining political power. Ghosts not only unsettle the boundary between life and death in these plays but also question monarchs’ positions, undermining assumptions of legitimacy. Pursuant to the theory of the king’s two bodies, the spirit of divine kingship passed seamlessly to the next legitimate ruler, but in cases of rupture, where power did not legitimately pass, the spirit of ‘authentic’ monarchy could be left disembodied, thus constituting a spectral presence displaced from the political body. Shakespeare was intensely interested in cases of rupture. This chapter explores the ghosts in these four plays, examining how they haunt political spaces, and resonate with the additional spectre, the second ghost, of the disembodied, legitimate ruler.

Collecting folklore has played a significant role in the history of the Estonian nation and state, helping to build an Estonian identity. This chapter discusses the werewolf texts collected on the island of Saaremaa, which comprise about one-seventh of the full corpus. It introduces those werewolf legends from Saaremaa whose plots are more widely known and that can be classified according to their plots. Ivar Paulson has suggested that some aspects of Estonian folk belief that are related to the forest even contain references from the era of hunter-gatherers. The idea of wolves as the pups of St George, to whom God casts down food from above, apparently contains remnants of the pre-Christian notion of the Master of Animals as well as the image of the wolf in the Catholic era. There are several customs related to the positive power of the wolf in Estonian traditions of past centuries.

Homelessness appears only once as a literal, rather than as a figurative, motif in Ishiguro's work. Ishiguro worked with the homeless for a brief spell in the: 1970s, as a member of the community group the Cyrenians who provide food, accommodation and welfare advice for itinerants. The twentieth century was the age of both exiles and chameleons, those displaced involuntarily and those who chose to drift and adapt. One of Ishiguro's main motivations for writing The Remains of the Day was to produce a book which was not only about Englishness, but also engaged with recognisable English literary traditions. The quandary of weighing the relevancy of the English/Japanese correspondences in The Remains of the Day is quagmired further by the distortions of what Edward Said calls 'Orientalism'. Displacement is a word that often crops up in criticism of Ishiguro's novels.

In Robin Yassin-Kassab’s novel The Road From Damascus (2008), Muntaha, one of the central characters, refuses to identify with ‘the Arab nation’, stating ‘I’m British anyway. I’m a British Muslim’. Through yoking a transnational religious affiliation to her country of settlement, Muntaha distances herself from Arab diaspora contexts and instead inscribes herself into a multicultural Britain. Robin Yasin-Kassab is one of a growing number of Arab novelists writing in English, including the likes of Ahdaf Soueif, Jamal Mahjoub, Selma Debbagh and Leila Aboulela, who take the subjectivities and displacements of Arab immigrant subjects in Britain as their theme. Their novels unfold as a drama of choice about belonging in diaspora, examining how the parallel and sometimes intersecting identities Arab and/or Muslim have been transformed in recent decades. This chapter demonstrates how these writers represent the impact of contemporary politics on Arab immigrants in Britain. In doing so, their novels reflect on the lingering legacy of empire and grapple with the specters of colonialism that continue to animate present conflicts.

This chapter, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Asa Simon Mittman, addresses the subject of cartography and medieval perceptions of geographical space, specifically in relation to Jerusalem. The chapter pays particularly attention to the map of the city in a manuscript from twelfth-century Flanders, doing so in the context of an overview of medieval map-making which stresses the symbolic function of maps within a Christian view of the physical world, with Jerusalem the ideal city at its centre. For the composer of the map examined here, however, Jerusalem is not just an ideal, but a real city. Thus theological understanding is strikingly combined with the practical knowledge.

On 10 June 2020, three days after #BlackLivesMatter protesters toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race topped the UK non-fiction bestseller chart. It brought with it a wave of books marketed as guides for readers – especially white readers – wishing to educate themselves about the effects of structural racism on individual lives. Many of these titles place notable emphasis on the value of personal anecdote and experience, blending memoir with often detailed and cogent anti-racist critique to create a kind of anti-racist life writing that has a long history in African American literary culture. While the genre is less widely known in Britain, this chapter argues that a similar suturing of individual biographies into the structural contours shaping social, cultural and institutional life in Britain after empire has been deployed by a number of Black writers in recent years, often to persuasive and powerful effect. This 'anti-racist non-fiction’ genre blends memoir with social and historical commentary to build similar connections between individual experiences and structural conditions, often (though not always) without conforming to the individualising inclinations of identity politics that are otherwise so pervasive in our neoliberal era. To demonstrate its arguments, the chapter focuses on two of the most rigorous and best-selling of Britain’s anti-racist non-fiction titles: Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking and Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.

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