This article is concerned with printing error in the First Folio of The Comedy of Errors. It examines the effect of these errors on the reader and argues for a revision of their silent correction in modern editions. In so doing, it highlights a seventeenth and early eighteenth century history of reading which tried, and often failed, to correct them.

My article discusses the emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong Shakespeare and a newfound Hong Kong identity in Hardy Tsoi’s Julius Caesar (2012) and Shamshuipo Lear (2015), where Tsoi merely appropriates Shakespeare to illustrate the socio-political problems of Hong Kong, thus alluding to Dennis Kennedy’s argument of “Shakespeare without Shakespeare”.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk), a Shakespeare resource maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

The stranger was everywhere in early modern England. Part of a larger project about sixteenth and seventeenth century English perceptions of identity, human mobility, and belonging, this article shows how the Comedy of Errors unfolds against the backdrop of the city of London’s own troubled relationship with ‘strangers’

This article provides a biographical aspect of Dekker and Middleton in conversation with Shakespeare on social madness in 1&2 Honest Whore and the plague pamphlets, which critique Shakespeare’s mad romanticism in the critical years of 1604-05 where Shakespeare’s silence about Jacobean London’s social dispossession is too evident to ignore.

‘Continental Shakespeare’ considers the evidence of Shakespeare on the continent, including the 1622 advertisement of the First Folio in a supplemental listing of English books to a Latin catalogue for the German book fair at Frankfort-on-the-Main, to argue that even before there were modern nation states, Shakespeare was already transnational.

This essay traces the careers of thirty-two early modern actors, recorded as having begun as boy players, who transferred from one acting company to the other at least once, considering how the arrival of star players such as Nathan Field and Stephen Hammerton might have affected a company’s repertory.

This essay presents a case for the importance of seeing race in the nontraditional casting of Shakespeare’s English histories, as exemplified by the presence of Nigerian-British actress Sophie Okonedo as Margaret of Anjou in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses.

This year provided the opportunity to see major productions of nearly all of Shakespeare’s history plays, most of them in London. My reviewing year started with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s cleverly truncated Richard II at the Almeida Theatre. The set, by Ultz, was a bare grey vault. As the play started, Simon Russell Beale’s Richard, clad in a plain black T-shirt, came downstage, explaining to the audience that ‘I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world” (5.5.1–2). The rest of the cast of eight stood behind him, facing the rear wall.

Macbeth is unusual in its representation of marital intimacy and in its central dynamic of a husband and wife working together in partnership. The article argues that this intimacy is realized in the imaginary private space of the curtained bed and through the speech form known as the curtain lecture.

Over the last few decades advice books on how to handle Shakespearean verse have proliferated. But much of the advice they offer is misleading. This article explores some of their most striking errors, but also highlights the radical challenge they represent to the default priorities of Shakespearean scholarship.

This article considers the impact of celebrity on productions of Hamlet. It does so through reference to the Hamlets of David Tennant (2008), Jude Law (2009), Benedict Cumberbatch (2015), and Andrew Scott (2017), and aims to analyse how textual choices, staging and marketing are influenced by a new target audience.

This paper examines the unsettling ways in which historical “redemption” is rendered in The Winter’s Tale and Australia’s landmark legal decision on Indigenous property rights (Mabo). It explores how creative and shame-filled forms of remembrance can interrupt the tragic law that condemns us to repeat the horrors of the past.