This article surveys BBC radio broadcasts of ten plays by Thomas Middleton – both solely authored and collaborated plays. The sixteen productions broadcast between 1950 and 2009 received diverse storytelling approaches. Some are superb radio drama and some not. Also noted are news, documentary and discussion programmes with Middleton content.

Preparing this review essay – a compilation covering the best of the last two years’ publications – I have been reflecting on what I mean by ‘Shakespeare in performance’: what does this category permit, and what might it exclude? The connotations of ‘performance’ with ‘liveness’ and the here-and-now prompt an eagerness to review the latest studies about the latest performances, yet even as I do this is complicated by new light being shed on historical theatre practices and re-evaluations of adaptations in a variety of media (across TV, cinema and online platforms), let alone how digital and technological advances are forcing us to reconsider how we might conceive of ‘liveness’ at all. ‘Performance studies’, as a term, seems almost at odds with ‘theatre history’, the latter stuck in the past, the former thrillingly vital, yet both are on offer within Shakespeare studies; in fact, often, there is surprising continuity between theatre practices old and new (not to mention the building of new theatres, and new-old (replica or archetypal) theatres). And enough of the intentions of the performances: what of the reception? It is remiss not to also consider the focus of audiences, and their practices of decoding, reinterpretating and reappropriating.

This article offers a critical account of audio description (AD) for Shakespeare performances. AD delivers visual information in verbal form for blind, visually impaired and partially sighted users, and the article addresses its mechanisms of composition, delivery and reception, as well as the issues that arise from its engagements with diverse casting.

A roundtable from the World Shakespeare Congress of 2021, discussing the state of play around race and postcoloniality in Shakespeare studies.

This essay makes a new case for the worldly character of Shakespeare’s sonnets, first by tracking the sonnet form to its possible origins in Arabic literature and then by asking whether Shakespeare could have known about such Middle Eastern poetry.

This essay considers questions of control and consent in A Lover’s Complaint through an exploration of the Renaissance ‘figure of similitude’. Shakespeare’s poem works through patterns of likeness and unlikeness, exploring the chilling risks involved for women when they – or their lovers – are taken to resemble something they are not.

Two bird poems – William Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ and Farid ud-din Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr – allegorize the Sufi idea of non-possession in desire. Sufism’s absolute goal is desire, and desire’s absolute condition is death: ‘I long for death; what use is “I” to me’, says Attar, as he ventriloquises Shakespeare’s dead lovers.

This essay studies how John Milton, going blind some three decades after Shakespeare’s lifetime and caught in his own tumultuous historical moment, engaged with Shakespeare’s sonnets. Readings two pairs of sonnets by the two poets, it shows that Shakespeare remained a sustaining poetic companion for Milton’s journey into blindness.

This essay will focus on Shakespeare’s poetry and its refractions in the work of Bhanu Kapil and Preti Taneja asking how forms of lyric thinking emerge in a prose-poetry of lament. Examining how and why Shakespeare’s poetry resonates (differently) for these two postcolonial writers, I consider how lyric’s distinctive ontological perspective makes uniquely legible the imbrications of race and poetic form.

This essay reexamines Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint and The Rape of Lucrece in light of recent work on early modern women’s complaint poetry. It explores the limits of feminine sympathy in Shakespeare’s framed ‘female complaint’ poems and, in comparison, women writers’ distinctive use of the form to eschew the ekphrastic contemplation of women’s ‘pretty’ pain.

A roundtable from the World Shakespeare Congress of 2021, discussing the state of play around gender and sexuality in Shakespeare studies.

This article argues that in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Venus employs her penetrating gaze as ocular power to influence Adonis. Utilizing fascinum, a gendered phenomenon, Venus’s gaze disrupts the gender power dynamics, ultimately causing Adonis psychological distress and leading to his tragic demise.

This essay argues that as much as Shakespeare’s poem A Lover’s Complaint stages unavoidable love and betrayal, it also interrogates antiquarianism, a uniquely sensory approach to history. Referencing Spenser’s The Ruines of Time alongside Ovid’s Narcissus, A Lover’s Complaint stages both the attractions and dangers of interacting with the past in an antiquarian way.

Twin explanations are offered for the historic lack of scholarly interest in Richard Barnfield, now acknowledged as a significant influence on Shakespeare: a homophobia inherited from the nineteenth century; and a more recent critical bewilderment occasioned by Barnfield’s seemingly self-evident queerness, which runs counter to presently-understood histories of sexual subjectivity.

This essay focuses on Lucrece’s letter-writing on the morning after being raped by young Tarquin, placing it in the context of Justus Lipsius’s Epistolica institutio (1591) and of the 1590s vogue for Tacitism and raison d’état. An association with Lipsius may further be signaled by the ‘anchora spei’ device appearing on the title page of the first edition of Lucrece.

A practitioner’s account of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, and his importance for theatre-makers and other artists.