Since 9/11, a striking number of Shakespeare productions have appropriated the distinctive colours of desert camouflage. The print – marked by faded tones and an overall impression of dry and earthy environs – has become almost the standard choice for productions of Macbeth, Othello, and Henry V. Yet there has been little, if any, discussion of desert camouflage as a costuming decision. Examining productions ranging across two decades – from Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003) to Max Webster’s Henry V (2022) – this essay argues that the use of the print synopsizes the ways in which productions refract contemporary understandings of global conflict. Camouflage costuming ignites a nexus of Shakespearean meanings around the brutality of the protagonist, war-crimes, PTSD, veteran-ship, and spectacular violence. The newly cynical readings that result render irrelevant traditional debates about the pro- or anti-war stance of Shakespearean theatre. In representing – via desert camouflage – a new kind of warfare, theatre in the post-2001 era envisages conflict as self-defeat. Finally, then, these productions speak to incompleteness, irresolution, regret, and a never-ending cycle of global violence.

Concentrating on adaptations of As You Like It, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, this chapter argues that Shakespeare’s comedies on screen constitute a significant and cross-fertilizing body of work. Scriptwriters have pursued imaginative routes through the syntax of the comedies, and there has been considerable experiment in terms of updating Shakespeare’s language. Comedy is the genre where constructions of gender/sexuality are often expressed with filmmakers recognizing in Shakespeare’s comedies opportunities to explore agency, voice and embodiment. The comedies on screen anticipate many of the themes energizing recent criticism, and in this there is a pronounced self-consciousness. Harking back to earlier experiments, the most recent Shakespearean comedies showcase their own artifice along with strategies of revision dependent on a dense intertextuality.

In the debate around Shakespeare and 9/11, the question of Shakespeare’s political uses tends to be addressed only in the most oblique of ways. As Matthew Biberman, the editor of Shakespeare Yearbook’s special issue on the theme, notes, criticism typically retreats into a looser discussion of ‘the role that canonical texts can play in the development of ethical, philosophical and civic frameworks’.

Often cited as the most democratic of genres, autobiography in the early modern period crosses the divides of class, religion and political persuasion. At one end of the social spectrum are the autobiographies of Viscountess Elizabeth Mordaunt and Lady Anne Halkett. At the other may be found autobiographies written by women of the servant and labouring classes, such as Barbara Blaugdone, Barbara Scaife and Anne Herring. In terms of spiritual allegiance, distinctive are Catholic writers such as Lady Lucy Knatchbull and Elizabeth Cellier; arresting too, however, are those Protestant writers who span all possible shades of Nonconformity. Politically, autobiographers frequently appear at several removes from one another, a fact which is graphically illustrated in the instances of Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish, who chronicle local or national happenings in addition to their own spiritual and material concerns. The range of women writing is matched by the spectrum of forms in which they wrote. As the anthology Her Own Life (the first point of departure for readers investigating the field) made clear, women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signalled selves across a variety of literary and non-literary genres. The term 'autobiography', then, can be applied to an important body of women's literary and cultural materials which ranges from diary to memoir and from conversion narrative to prophetic statement. This chapter addresses the multiple ways in which early modern women were able to write autobiographically and reflects upon the means whereby the early modern female 'I' might be read with critical currency.