This article explores the role that notions of plot play in Shakespeare source study. Drawing on three moments of scholarly engagement with the sources for Romeo and Juliet, the article shows how plot structures critical inquiry by enabling some kinds of questions while precluding others.

This article re-examines the affective affordances of William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, arguing that the garden scene did not necessarily lead spectators towards a specific conclusion on the issue of dearth. Instead, audiences were enabled to consider what constitutes justice through their collective emotional experience as an affective community.

Radio and television were part of an ongoing narrative of technological innovation in the teaching of Shakespeare in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the voices of NCTE’s English Journal teachers in those decades who strived to weave the new technologies into student-centred, project-based curricula.

This article discusses the ways audio versions of The Tempest convey the play’s visual spectacles through language and sound effects; in addition, it examines the actors’ voices, particularly the use of different accents and verbal tics that help the auditor visualize the characters and the action.

Shakespeare may have returned to his first tetralogy when writing the second tetralogy to develop connections between English bravery and hunger, as well as English cowardice and gluttony. Especially relevant are hitherto overlooked parallels between Sir John Oldcastle and Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s treatment of dishonourable conduct and appetite.

This article discusses Alfred Hitchcock’s plans to direct a modernized adaptation of Hamlet in the context of his filmography. While Hitchcock never completed any Shakespearian adaptations, his repeated allusions to Shakespeare in his films chart his thinking about the status of cinema and his own role as a directorial auteur.

This article examines the significance of geography at the Inns of Court in terms of community formation and its policing. It analyses Twelfth Night to explore how geographical references (especially to a ‘new map’) draw on the fraught atmosphere at the Inns in terms of ever-changing knowledge about the world.

This article discusses how two late nineteenth-century public intellectuals, based respectively in Portugal and Brazil, co-opted Shakespeare into discussions that involved reimagining the communities they addressed – at a crucial point in their social, political and constitutional histories.

This article reconsiders Shakespeare’s treatment of Englishness as far more provisional and divergent than has traditionally been understood. Attending to persistent inter-community conflicts in Merry Wives and Henry V, it presents Shakespearian history as defined as much by the lower and middle classes as by titled noblemen.

This article introduces the artistic and community practice of Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble (2022–2023) as emblematic of an ensemble-based MFA training model. Drawing on scholarship on community theatre, the article argues that a grassroots training model has the potential to bridge the theoretical division between university theatre and community partner.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, competing approaches to timekeeping raise questions not only about the nature of time, but about who has influence over whom, why and when. This article explores overlooked intersections between time-practices and politics of place, empire, class and technology which preoccupy Shakespeare in Dream.

In my first year reviewing London productions, I resolved to see everything that I could, including adaptations – a total of nineteen shows in thirteen different spaces: two Romeo and Juliets, three Lears (or versions thereof), three Macbeths (or versions thereof), and among the others only four comedies (three of them at the Globe) and two histories. What follows pays particular attention to design and attempts to take the temperature of the London professional theatre scene, an environment that is precarious even as it is varied, resilient, sometimes puzzling, sometimes frustrating, but almost never less than interesting in its engagement with Shakespeare’s plays.

Challenging the general denial of race and racism in Europe, this article attempts to make visible the effects of German systemic racism by focusing on the archive version of Thomas Ostermeier’s 2010 Othello tradaptation at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, in which Sebastian Nakajew, a white actor, played Othello in blackface.

This article explores The Merchant of Venice through the lens of developments in monetary, mercantile and medical knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century, in order to demonstrate how and why Shakespeare thinks about blood in economic and peculiarly circulatory terms.