This chapter explores the interactions between text, performance and venue to develop a typology of the aesthetics of the supernatural in Shakespearean productions in the Honour Court of the Avignon Popes' Palace between 1947 and 2015. A locus of conflicts, whether it actualises the hero's inner turmoil or the opposition between characters – generally between the murderer and his victim(s) thirsting for revenge – the ghost also crystallises the challenging confrontation between performance and venue, theatrical event and spectacular monument, the transient and the permanent. As a metatheatrical motif, the ghost questions not only the theatrical medium but also the theatricality of the venue and their compatibility. Shakespearean ghosts thus challenge the Avignon Festival while paradoxically confirming its vocation as a platform for experimentation, a laboratory for the performing arts and a showcase of contemporary theatre.

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This introduction first gives an overview of Korean War historiography alongside a summary of the war itself, before exploring the position of the Korean War and the Cold War in British history-writing. It highlights how selfhood and citizenship have emerged as growing categories of analysis in Cold War studies and argues why it is important to consider them in the context of post-1945 Britain. It closes by exploring the challenges and possibilities of writing the social history of warfare and bringing domestic and military ‘spheres’ together in a meaningful way.

Greyhound racing survived the Second World War very much intact and experienced an immediate post-war boom. However, the fuel crisis of 1946–47 led to the introduction of discriminatory fuel controls and restrictions by the first Attlee Labour government followed by taxation on the greyhound tote and upon bookmakers in 1948. This affected both the large National Greyhound Racing Society tracks, that depended upon tote betting for their livelihood, and the small flapping tracks which were more dependent upon the bookmakers to attract bettors to earn them gate money. There may have been other factors at play as the post-war British economy faced austerity, and as the Labour government felt that it was protecting industrial productivity, but the continued hostility towards greyhound racing seems to have led to a tipping point where betting on the on-course tote and with the on-course bookmakers declined and was transferred to off-course betting, which was not taxed. From that period onwards crowds declined, the tote takes declined, and tracks began to close.

Chapter 4 builds upon the discussion in chapter 3 which had focused on economic decline under Labour and how the Conservatives attempted to exploit this. Chapter 4 will identify how this was aligned to a wider critique of Labour based around social decline. It will consider how the broken economic and social policy agendas of Labour were used by the Conservatives to justify a shift away from Big Government, and towards their new governing strategy of the Big Society. The chapter will provide a critique of the Big Society, and the cynicism it provoked within Conservative ranks, before arguing that it should be seen within the context of depoliticisation. Chapter 4 will imply that the Big Society slogan was a rhetorical device for Cameron – i.e. it masked an ideologically motivated strategy to adjust the balance between the state and society. Therefore, chapter 4 will argue that the Big Society narrative should be seen within the context of (a) shifting public expectations of what the state should be responsible for, and (b) limiting the extent to which the state can be blamed.

In the opening chapter Sándor Chardonnens focuses on medieval collections on dream divination. Taking account of a vast corpus of such writings, widely dispersed chronologically and geographically, he argues that alphabetical and thematic dream books, dream lunaries and mantic alphabets belong to the same branch of divination, that of oneiromancy, but that they were rarely anthologised in clusters within the same collection. He investigates patterns of transmission of dream divination in manuscripts and early printed texts in order to understand whether the ways in which those three types of dream divination were clustered together may give us an indication of genre awareness.

The chapter examines the emergence of the form of the loyal address during the Cromwell Protectorate. It focuses in particular on the addresses sent to the second Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell. The chapter argues that these addresses formed part of a national Cromwellian ‘succession crisis.’ Though these texts did not help Richard Cromwell remain in power, their political utility was recognised by the restored monarchy which employed them to secure public acknowledgment of Charles II’s rule.

The RSPCA, founded in 1824, is often treated by historians as an arm of the establishment, primarily intent on reforming the disruptive behaviour of the lower orders. This chapter gives a more nuanced view of the Society’s policies. Despite its admitted social discrimination, and its failure to grapple with such moneyed-class cruelties as field sports and live cattle transit, the Society was essentially a thoughtful, idealistic and multi-vocal body, the fulcrum of the nineteenth-century animal-protection movement. It was supportive of the many new initiatives and specialised animal charities that sprang from RSPCA work – many of them led by women. However, a perceived need to keep in step with public opinion on anti-cruelty measures, and to avoid charges of ‘sentimental’ extremism, made the RSPCA itself wary of promoting women to any positions of influence, despite their record of passionate and energetic support for the cause. While women represented a significant majority of donors and grassroots workers for the Society, they were debarred from membership of its executive until 1906.

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.

This chapter examines influential collecting and taste manuals from the second half of the nineteenth century dedicated to both a male, respectively a female, audience. After providing a brief history of collecting and its development in post-revolutionary France, the chapter explains how the visual and critical discourses about the proper appearance of the modern, private interior and about the arrangement of objects displayed therein informed the development of a new historicist, themed aesthetic. This new aesthetic required a mastermind to supervise the organization of each interior decorating ensemble within the upper as well as the middle-class private home - increasingly more decorated in the aftermath of the Industrial and Consumer Revolutions - paving the way to the work of the later interior decorators at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.