This question is posed by the authors of A Mirror for Magistrates, the enormously popular verse history collection that came out in increasingly expanded editions from the 1550s onwards. In the collection, guilty or unfortunate historical figures make didactic orations to the poets who transcribe them, in short poems interspersed with practical and theoretical prose discussions between the poets themselves (Baldwin, Ferrers, Sackville and others). The question quoted above appears in the poem ventriloquizing Collingbourne, a citizen in the time of Richard III ‘cruelly executed for making a foolishe rime’.1 The poem emotively illustrates the risks of satirizing authority figures in verse. The foolish rhyme itself appears to have been merely a couplet: ‘The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our Dog, / Do rule al England, under a Hog’ (fol. C.xliii). As the reanimated Collingbourne explains, the cat is Catesby, the rat is Ratcliffe, and the dog is Lovell. Richard III himself is the hog, partly because it is the animal depicted on his device or badge, and partly – as the speaker somewhat disappointingly admits – ‘to ryme’ (fol. C.xliiv). Overall, the poem reads as a manifesto for freedom of ideas in verse, and a lament for the loss of satirical licence since the ancients. It also raises some questions about rhyme and historical truth.

In The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike, which was translated into English in 1568, André Thevet describes the people of France Antarctique, a French colony in Brazil.

Shakespeare’s late romances engage with the dynastic politics of Jacobean England, particularly through the theme of achieving redemption through royal children and their politically advantageous marriages. In the narrative trajectory of The Winter’s Tale, the interruption and restoration of Leontes’s and Polixenes’ relations over the arc of the dramatic plot are entangled with the international order as defined by the bilateral relations of Bohemia and Sicilia. By the play’s end, the cross-border marriage of Perdita and Florizel forges the integration of the two kingdoms.1 In this article, I suggest that The Winter’s Tale represents the anxieties and potentialities of Anglo-Spanish peace through the Spanish match. I ground this reading upon the racialized associations of Sicilia, which have hitherto not sufficiently been considered in analyses of Leontes and his family. At the time the play was written and first performed, Sicilia was a part of Habsburg Spanish territory, having been incorporated in the sovereignty of the kingdom of Aragon following Frederick III’s 1296 coronation in Palermo.2 James I’s pursuit of peace with Continental Europe was initially welcomed by a war-weary England whose economy had been devastated by prolonged naval war with Spain. The Treaty of London was signed in 1604 and ratified in 1605 through the embassy to Valladolid headed by Lord Admiral Charles Howard, the Earl of Nottingham.

Scholarly discussions of race in Othello have almost exclusively focused on the eponymous character.1 Often forgotten is another Moorish character the play evokes, even if she does not make an appearance on the stage: Barbary, the maidservant Desdemona remembers in the Folio version and with whose tragic story she identifies to process her own experience of rejection and grief.2 Barbary is an example of those women about whom Kim F. Hall wondered: why, ‘[w]hile feminists are increasingly uncovering the voices and presence of white Englishwomen’, do ‘women of color … [even though] clearly a presence in … sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, … remain “invisible women” existing at the margins of English culture and current critical practice[?]’.3 Barbary’s near absence from the critical response to the play is paralleled by the excision of her story in the early decades of the twentieth century when act 4, scene 3 was routinely cut from performances.4 This article seeks to fill this gap by arguing that Barbary, a figure with no counterpart in Shakespeare’s principal source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565), is crucial to the play’s engagement with race and gender. Through Barbary, Othello challenges stereotyped racist and sexist representations of Moorish female servants on the early modern stage, often characterized by contempt for their alleged lustfulness, treachery, and unfaithfulness to (often) white mistresses.5 Othello’s depiction of Barbary also subverts contemporary visual and theatrical portrayals of Moorish maidservants that reduce them to figures of Otherness whose Black skin serves as a racial background against which the whiteness of their mistresses’ skin – and so those mistresses’ privilege, status and virtue – shine.

The year 2020–2021 witnessed the publication of important titles that invite us to reflect on the history of editing and textual studies, their specific relationship to earlier approaches such as New Bibliography, the responsibilities we bear when presenting new or revisionist narratives, and ways in which the field can do more to embrace diversity. A landmark resource was released in the form of the two-volume New Variorum Edition of King Lear, with Richard Knowles’s breath-taking textual notes recording all variants in seventy-seven editions from the period 1619 to 2000. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series Complete Works was released, as was the much anticipated second edition of Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare in Print, complete with an updated chronological appendix that now takes us to the year 2017. The first scholarly edition of the commonplace book Bel-vedére or the Garden of the Muses was also published, and exciting new monographs by Faith Acker, Zachary Lesser and Molly G. Yarn were joined by edited collections entitled Shakespeare / Text and the Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies.

A crucial feature of Sean Holmes’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first performed in 2019, was the recruitment at each performance of a different audience member to play Starveling, with the sympathy and encouragement of the rest of the cast. He had very few actual words to speak, but, during the Pyramus and Thisbe performance, his job was to keep pumping the organ that (supposedly) kept the lights functioning on the amateur stage; at the end, sent back to his seat, he was generously applauded. Though in the 2021 revival this part of the play was somewhat diluted by the need to keep him at a safe distance from the actors, it still produced some enjoyable moments and a final round of applause. In retrospect, it also strikes me as emblematic of 2021: it was a year in which plenty of amateurs got to play Shakespeare (in numerous online Zoom reading groups) and in which, even when theatres reopened, focus was as much on the audience as on the play. Theatre, never considered a particularly safe medium, suddenly had to think of safety at all costs (and the costs were often horrendous).

When Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance was published in 2020, the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was already in place in the UK. In the light of these circumstances, in Viral Shakespeare in the Cambridge Elements series (2021), she reflects on her ‘responses to some of the unique spectatorial configurations, novel experiences and creative innovations that emerged in the time of the pandemic’ (8). The result is a remarkable personal account of the ‘fleeting insights and experiences garnered from watching Shakespeare in lockdown’, which are ‘worth preserving because they speak to a moment of unprecedented intensity and emotional rawness that is profoundly marked by Shakespeare’ (11). ‘Viral’ is, of course, a metaphorical adjective in the digital world that has acquired a distinctive resonance since the beginning of 2020. Aebischer describes an important consequence of the sudden abundance of Shakespeare performances available online: ‘The broadcasts intersect and impact one another so that precursors turn into successors, what follows after can change the meaning of what comes before, and dialogues between productions defy the laws of chronology. The linearity of succession makes way for viral interpenetration, as contagion travels freely between any broadcasts that come into contact’ (25).

In 1603, Shakespeare was booed off the stage. He was performing alongside Richard Burbage in one of the period’s most notorious flops: Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. No fewer than four contemporary witnesses, including Jonson himself, attest to the heckles, jeers and hisses with which the play was greeted by its first audience at the Globe, who apparently had little patience for Jonson’s meticulous reconstruction of imperial Rome.2 By contrast, Shakespeare’s Othello, written in the same period and performed by the same company, gained immediate and lasting popularity, and, as Samuel Pepys attests, was one of the first plays to be performed when the theatres reopened in 1660.3 So, too, the plays appear to be at odds in their choice of and approach to source material. From direct quotations from little-known Greek tragedies to extensive translation of Roman historiography, Sejanus is self-consciously erudite.4 For the main plot, Jonson followed Tacitus’ account of Tiberius’ influential favourite, Sejanus, and his fall from the emperor’s grace, as recounted in Books III to VI of the Annales. The lost sections of Book V he supplemented with material from Cassius Dio and Suetonius.

There are many linguistic differences between the two variant texts (octavo and folio) of Henry VI Part 3. One feature which has been largely overlooked by critics is evidence of a fairly consistent pro-Yorkist bias in the octavo of 1595. Richard of York’s assertion that the throne is ‘mine inheritance as the kingdome is’ (sig. A3v) is modified in the folio to ‘as the earldom was’ (1.1.78), placing his claim as the next step on the ladder of ambition rather than the assertion of a de jure fact. On the field of Towton, in which Edward leads the Yorkists to their greatest triumph, Warwick declares that he will soon ‘be crowned Englands lawfull king’ (sig. C5 r); the folio line is ‘England’s royal king’ (2.6.88), ambiguously suggesting that Edward will be royalized in an act of realpolitik. When an oath is sworn to effect a return to the Yorkist bloodline after Henry’s death, the octavo text includes four lines not in the folio, in which Henry concedes that Richard is king ‘by right and equitie’ (sig.

The time of hate in which we live dictates that we answer fully and collaboratively the challenges of all forms of violence, including racism, antisemitism, misogyny, transphobia and other types of bigotry. In a time when the classroom is subject to ‘new forms of subterfuge, secret recordings, and professor watch lists’, it is all the more important to bring our academic work to build more equitable, sustainable communities, rather than exploiting trendy topics that service academic advancement and not students and community members. One of the core values of the humanities lies in understanding the human condition in different contexts, and Shakespeare’s oeuvre as a cluster of complex, transhistorical cultural texts provides fertile ground to build empathy and critical thinking. Developing ‘independent facility with complex texts’, as Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi’s research shows, enables ‘divergent paths to knowledge’, which promotes equity and diversity. Indeed, as Timothy Francisco and Sharon O’Dair point out, the heuristic value of complex texts lies in their ability to expose ‘the oppression by a status hierarchy’ and encourage the formation of hypotheses and critiques.

Writing from a Western, Anglophone context, Andrew Hartley argues that ‘university production … is a crucial index of what Shakespeare has become’, since productions manifest and shape the ‘ideas about Shakespeare which the audience, cast, and crew subsequently t[ake] out into the world’. This article uses Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) Open University’s production of Shakespeare, and its context within the wider Vietnamese Shakespearian scene, to explore ‘what Shakespeare is’ in twenty-first-century Vietnam, from the creative industries to higher education. In doing so, it redresses two gaps in the existing literature. Firstly, Shakespeare studies scholars have ‘mainly ignored the Shakespeare going on right under our noses’ – that is, university productions. Secondly, Judy Celine Ick writes that Southeast Asia is overwhelmingly absent from the construct ‘Asian Shakespeare’. It is, in any case, a construct that often assumes and reinforces ‘essentializing notions of Asian collective identity’ – Asian homogeneity – as Yong Li Lan has shown.

In its 2020 issue, Cahiers Elisabéthains focused on the various experiences of Shakespeare in the early months of lockdown. Reviewers (disclosure: I was one) frequently commented on the difference in their level of engagement when they watched a play alone in their room, and I shall return later to this issue. But they also noted the one unquestionable advantage of digital theatre: none of its seats has restricted views. Of course, the computer’s view is restricted, especially in livestream, but we don’t usually notice the limitation of our viewpoint because we assume that, as in film, there is an intention behind it.

In the London playhouses, the sound of Latin was a regular feature of the auditory experience, albeit in bitesize bursts. At the same time, although Latin was firmly entrenched at the universities as the language of academic drama, Oxford and Cambridge students did, on occasion, write plays in English. Running counter to what many early modern writers liked to claim, therefore, neither side had exclusive use of the language with which their production centre was associated: professional dramatists did not stick to English, and amateur dramatists at the universities did not stick to Latin. To understand English revenge tragedy, we must keep Latin in the picture and be open to the idea of multiple streams of influence running between the different production centres of Oxford, Cambridge and London. To this end, in this article I present a new way of viewing English revenge tragedy that allows us to embrace the corpus in all its variety. I show how, in the world of early modern drama in England, there exists a common language which transcends the choice of Latin or English: the Thyestean language, steeped in a tradition of ambition and one-upmanship.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Shakespeare community hard. Not only were conference meetings cancelled, but also live performances at playhouses and festivals worldwide. Eager to entertain and maintain their loyal fan base, theatre companies with access to a store of pre-recorded productions offered them freely for public home consumption via the internet. At the same time, scholars and teachers scrambled to complete their academic years by converting classroom and lecture hall meetings into virtual educational opportunities. Synchronous and asynchronous teaching models responded to the social distancing needs of twenty-first-century educators and students. If a pandemic could impact the long-dead Shakespeare, then 2020 was the year for it to happen. With videoconferencing the new norm, any classroom, any stage, any ‘on your feet’ Shakespeare delivery method, along with a host of other in-person activities, seemed stretched to their limits.

The years 2019–20 saw the publication of editions and monographs that offer new insight into the afterlives of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and their reception and circulation, especially in continental Europe. The final edition in the Arden Third Series was released, as was an Arden Early Modern German Shakespeare edition containing two re-translations of early modern German versions into English, as well as an updated New Cambridge King Lear and an edition of the First Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was also a very exciting year for textual studies, with a new generation of scholars returning to the work of New Bibliographers with renewed energy and new methodologies, and an open-access database reshaping our knowledge of and access to extant copies of the Shakespeare folios and pre-1700 quartos.