The Britain of the 1960s and 1970s lacked the kinds of dominant political figures to make Caesar feel topical, but the 1980s and 1990s positively brimmed with analogues to the story of a dictator's demise and its aftermath. Margaret Thatcher emerged from her first re-election campaign in the summer of 1983 riding a wave of nationalist fervour generated by war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Caesar is one of Shakespeare's most single-mindedly masculine plays. Despite the obvious parallels with Thatcher in the play, it requires a particular leap of the imagination for an audience to see a specific female leader in the physical presence of a male actor. Leftist activist theatre had come under attack early in Thatcher's regime, most dramatically and publicly over two Howard Brenton plays, both staged in 1980, which caused a firestorm of protest and recrimination, much of it with significant financial implications.

This chapter looks at Caesar in regional theatre, presenting a detailed study of two Caesar productions by a single company, Georgia Shakespeare. Georgia Shakespeare is one of approximately 233 active Shakespeare-driven theatre companies in the United States. Georgia Shakespeare's early years featured several playful, mainstream adaptations of Shakespeare including a musical Shrew and a Mafia-themed Hamlet. Though Georgia Shakespeare had weathered the fiscal crisis of 2009 better than most regional companies due to some voluntary cost-cutting the previous year, money was tight. Moreover, as a LORT theatre, they are obligated to maintain a ratio of 12 (higher paying) Equity to every 2 non-Equity contracts. Georgia Shakespeare's expanded Casca continued the character's life as follows. When civil war broke out, Casca went to war as an officer defending the new Brutus-led regime against Mark Antony and Octavius.

In November 1937, Orson Welles's production of Julius Caesar, staged at New York's Mercury Theatre on Broadway, opened to immediate adulation and controversy. The production, famously, was decked out with all the trappings and scenic theatricality of contemporary European Fascism and renamed Caesar: Death of a Dictator. Caesar was the Mercury's Theatre's inaugural production, brought to the stage only a few months after the increasingly financially precarious outfit, headed by Welles and John Houseman, who had worked together at the Federal Theatre, came into being. Welles's cavalier attitude to characterisation took its toll with the actors, and not just those who had to share the stage with Brutus. Welles's effective absence from rehearsal as an actor led to a performance which was often hesitant about such basics as physical placement, blocking and script.

Julius Caesar opens with a scene in which authority figures struggle to read their audience. That audience, which is celebrating Caesar's triumphal return on the death of Pompey, have dispensed with those signs of their profession which would normally announce their function and status. On a crucial level, Julius Caesar is about theatre and its use on the political stage. But for a play so charged with the theatrical and with ideas of performativity, the play's stage history has been chequered at best, and reviews of strong productions invariably open with a note of surprise. Unlike other Shakespeare plays, there has been no seismic shift in Caesar's stage history, no new reading or production innovation which has transformed the play entirely in the theatre. Julius Caesar recorded historical events for its original audience, but it did so for a world which has itself become history.

Chapter 9 aligns anxieties regarding family lineage in Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009) with similar anxieties in classic Gothic texts such as The Monk and Zofloya, or the Moor. Watkiss shows how the familiar, the linear and the domestic are revealed to be fragile constructions. Events do not proceed as they should; these are families that are ‘out of joint’, redundant in their ability to sustain themselves and future generations. In addition, qualities aligned with the institution of the family such as the familiar, the domestic and the homely are exposed as unstable foundations. Unlike early Gothic texts such as The Monk and Zofloya, or the Moor, whose Gothic families are denied lineage, Her Fearful Symmetry allows the Gothic family to continue through the non-linear; a perverse rendering of familial relations that accumulates three generations into one body.

The introduction sets forth a genealogy of disenchantment, from mid and late nineteenth-century fears of degeneration as a consequence of anthropological work, anxieties about increasing mechanisation and the concomitant growth of mass culture. The ways in which the theories of social reformers such as C. F. G. Masterman and declinists such as Oswald Spengler prefigure and inform First World War literature are outlined. The increasing predominance of mass culture, in line with improvements in literacy, meant that the novel was becoming the form in which matters of note were discussed, and writers’ views on writing are mobilised to support this analysis. Typically British pre-war enchantments are sketched out, and the book is situated within the current field of First World War Studies. A chapter outline is provided.

This chapter details the rise and fall of the War Books Boom of 1928 - 1930. Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was first serialised in Germany on the tenth anniversary of the Armistice to widespread controversy. A few months later, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End became a theatrical success in London's West End. Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero is a focus for the chapter, perhaps the most vitriolic novel of the War Books Boom. The title of Aldington's novel shows clearly that the redemption of previous novels such as Raymond's is now largely gone. The concluding analysis is of women's Western Front nursing narratives, examining in detail War Nurse, an anonymously-published popular romance by Rebecca West. These works are just as shocking as any combatant writing, dealing on a daily basis with bodies and minds broken by mechanical warfare. By 1930 commercial novels seek to capitalise on the language of disenchantment, grown throughout the decade from a marginalised to a dominant position.

This chapter explores the New Zealand television series Mataku, an example of Maori culture that adopts foreign approaches and acts as a transcultural form. The series reveals much about the global nature of the gothic, where contemporary culture and modern media practices present commercial arenas for Indigenous perspectives and superstitions to merge with more advanced horror traditions. American cinema has demonstrated the broadest and most explicit appropriations of Indigenous cultures for the creation of gothic screen fiction. The Strength of Water foregrounds Maoritanga, and it captures the wild landscape and crashing seascape of the Hokianga region in Northland, near the top of New Zealand, where many Maori reside. This is another isolated community within which some inhabitants feel trapped, and into which a young drifter, Tai (Isaac Barber), arrives and moves into an abandoned home, only to act as a catalyst for the tragedy.

Chapter Seven discusses the composition of the cover image in relation to temporal circularity, mirror images and the phenomenology of left/right apprehension.

Chapter Six argues that Troilus and Cressida and The House of Fame share a distinctive soundscape that collapses the distance that normative literary history would put between them. Trojan laud becomes the tittle-tattle of Southbank stews. Both works eliminate difference between voice, sound, noise, and air. In both works, the trumpet plays a key role. Resulting from its brazen lack of valves, the trumpet blows literary repute and stinky fart with insouciant caprice. The final part of the chapter considers the crucial role of silence and name in each work. The Chaucerian narrator refuses to anchor the free-floating tidings of Troy with the authority of a Proper Name. The figure of Antenor in Troilus is his opposite: a name without a voice.

In chapter 7, Agnes Andeweg focuses on the Gothic dimensions of sisterhood in Dutch feminist fiction. Renate Dorrestein’s (1954) fictional autobiography Het perpetuum mobile van de liefde (The Perpetual Motion Machine of Love, 1988) offers a case of Gothic monstrosity perceived from a feminist perspective. Whereas the feminine monster has usually been read as indicator of the register of difference, in Dorrestein’s work the monster is monstrous because of an uncanny resemblance between Self and Other. Dorrestein investigates the feminist notion of sisterhood through the autobiographical narrative about her sister’s suicide and fictional monsters. By making the political personal again, Dorrestein finds modes to express the unspeakable rivalry and competition between sisters – and that includes feminists.

In Trilby, La Svengali employs 'that devil's trick' specifically to relieve the heroine of a painful 'Neuralgia in the eyes, or something'. Trilby's susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion, and the sexual abuse that implicitly forms part of her relationship with the leering Svengali, an eastern European domiciled in Bohemian Paris, would perversely seem to prove the rule voiced by the correspondent in the Daily News. The popularity of Trilby, though, at a time at which British mesmerism was itself apparently in abeyance, seems surprising. The reporting of Jean-Martin Charcot's practice may effectively represent the final word on mesmerism in popular British consciousness in the nineteenth century. The 'devil's trick' of mesmerism might very well display some temporary alleviation of symptoms, or an improvement, even, on the part of the patient, but its application apparently vouchsafed no lasting curative value.