This article examines the sources behind the Pyrrhus Speech in Hamlet, demonstrating how Shakespeare’s manifold interweaving of texts can be decoded through sequential procedures of complexity and ultimately represented through networks.

With the slow metabolism of academic publishing, we are only now seeing in print those works produced during or shortly after Trump’s tenure as 45th president of the United States. Encountering these books now is curiously temporally displacing. On the one hand, such books offer the promise of reflecting soothingly, perhaps therapeutically, on a time confined to the past. The writing of history is a way of telling ourselves that certain things are over. But reading a book that engages in such reflection on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, then attempting to review it the day after forces a dislocation in perspective. Simultaneously, one looks at the past that was safely confined to the narrative of history, and one must also reckon with the traumatic intrusion of that past once again. It is hard not to read these books hauntologically.

Despite the amount of innovation and creativity in evidence, reviewing Shakespeare productions outside London in 2024 was a somewhat gloomy experience. The first performance under consideration, Tim Crouch’s Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel, was performed as part of the Mayfest festival, originally founded in 2011 by Kate Yedigaroff and Matthew Austin. This biennial festival is one of the best places to find new work in the country, bringing world-class, international live performance to Bristol, and has long been a force for good in the city. This year, for example, it operated a ‘pay-what-you-can’ ticketing structure to encourage those without economic means to access performances and build new audiences. Sadly, in November 2024 Mayfest announced that they would have to take an organizational hiatus until 2026 for financial reasons, evidence of a cultural sector in crisis that could be witnessed up and down the country. In Sheffield, for example, I was fortunate to see Northern Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum where Prokofiev’s outstanding score was played by the Northern Ballet Sinfonia.

After a brief drought, 2024 saw the release of seven new single-play editions: As You like It; Henry IV, Part I; Macbeth; Measure for Measure; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Romeo and Juliet; and The Tempest – all published as part of the Oxford World’s Classics New Oxford Shakespeare series. The texts, which are taken from The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, overseen by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan in 2016, have now been furnished with compelling new introductions by Todd Andrew Borlik, Indira Ghose, Emma Smith, Emma Whipday, Callan Davies, Hannah August and Lauren Working, respectively, with more of the editions (twenty-eight in total) set to be released at the start of 2025.

Leonard Becket’s various publications insistently quote passages from Lucrece as illustrations for the subjects they explore. In developing this sustained afterlife for Lucrece, Becket’s works exhibit a striking redactive agency, whilst the poem itself serves to illuminate a meditation on the fragility of life.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from listings, company publicity and published reviews. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

Among Richard III’s child characters there are multiple moments of community building and disruption. In particular, Richard’s pageboy undermines these communities by being culpable in his master’s murderous plot. Rather than the pageboy being an ‘anti-child’, he exhibits self-preserving behaviours mirroring students in early modern grammar schools policing each other.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most environmentally explicit dramas. Exploring how the play stages the relationship between humans and the natural environment, this article argues that its comedically flawed attempts to represent nature unsettle any sense of human dominion over the wild, offering a new environmental epistemology.

This article argues that Fletcher’s Women Pleased features an overlooked response to Shakespeare’s Othello in terms of dramatic structure, staging, setting, genre, characterization and thematic concerns that calls attention to some crucial aspects of Shakespeare’s play in such a way as to make Fletcher emerge as an early critic of Shakespearian drama.

Immediately after World War II, a left-wing kabuki company called Zenshinza started the seinen gekijo undo (‘Theatre for Young People’), performing four Shakespearian plays for young audiences throughout Japan. This article examines how Zenshinza’s interpretations of Shakespeare first supported, and then later contradicted, the changing cultural policies of occupied Japan.

This article traces close links between professional musicians and acting companies at the early modern Inns of Court. It also explores two plays with documented Inns performances – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and James Shirley’s Hyde Park – considering how they may have been staged and received in this musically rich performance context.

This article considers recent Shakespearian productions emphasizing sound, including Max Webster’s acclaimed, yet controversial, London production of Macbeth with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, and Knock at the Gate’s entirely auditory Shakespearian presentations, created for listening in the dark with headphones. Binaural technology creates striking soundscapes in each instance.

Sir John Gielgud was a highly regarded Shakespearian performer on stage and screen. However, his prolific career playing Shakespeare on radio is far less celebrated. This article shows that he not only was one of the most important early radio actors, but continued to be influential throughout his life.

This article focuses on a transmedial project that has become an important strand in a growing adaptational network in which Hamlet is being reactivated to explore the current situation in Ukraine. Exploring the adaptational principles of ruination and reconstruction, it discusses the fragility and promises of local, national and transnational community-building through Shakespeare.

This article explores The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses through the lens of Brexit. It positions the series as the most recent in a line of BBC television adaptations of the Henry VI plays to capture the tensions and crises simmering within the changing national identity of Britain.

Arguing for the value of being ‘ratchetdemic’ and engaging ‘productive discomfort – a defining feature of Brown’s ‘critical–personal–experiential’ pedagogy – this article offers a retrospective examination of how the self matters in teaching, research and learning. Brown attends to the impact of personal trauma and suggests scholarly work is linked (un)consciously to healing.

‘Community’ is a popular term often invoked by Shakespearians in ways that assume a clear meaning. To problematize community, this article briefly examines the literature on community in social science and history before turning to its use by Shakespearians. It concludes with a reading of community in James Ijames’s Fat Ham.