In discussions of adaptations of Shakespeare’s texts, the focus is generally on how much the later writer has changed. In this essay, however, I look at a number of recent adaptations of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My interest is in adaptations that retain many of the original features of the poems. The poets who write these adaptations demonstrate how what we might see as repetition is also difference.

Caroline Randall Williams’ 2019 collection reorients the biographical speculation surrounding the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets toward the woman who has been advanced as their inspiration, focusing on her instead of on Shakespeare, to help embody black women’s often-obscured history in the west.

“Shakespeare’s Canvas” reads Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128 alongside Picasso’s studies of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas to argue for the critical value of the discursive practice of variation in literary studies.

This article reads Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint alongside Sara Ahmed’s Complaint!

It makes prominent the differences in identities and circumstances between Ahmed’s complainants and Shakespeare’s. It analyses Ahmed’s style and the hope for change that her writerly activism offers, alongside the Young Woman’s use of objects, tears, and other women’s voices to make her complaint heard.

Shakespeare’s treatment of banishment, exile, and exclusion in his comedies and late plays is explored in the context of recent performances and current patterns of migration.

A roundtable from the World Shakespeare Congress of 2021, discussing Asian Shakespearean theatre.

This essay argues for the replacement of that nineteenth-century euphemism, ‘Dark Lady’, with a Black Mistress. The more we examine the language that creates this figure, the more the so-called Fair Youth and even the speaker of the Sonnets become less ‘fair’, thereby exposing the instability of Whiteness. This essay will also examine some of the reasons for our racial blindspots when it comes to the Sonnets.

2023 saw the release of an updated edition of the New Cambridge Romeo and Juliet, featuring a new Introduction by Hester Lees-Jeffries; engaging minigraphs on Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology and Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing, written by Tiffany Stern and Paul Salzman, respectively; and Heidi Craig’s and Sarah Ledwidge’s studies which offered exciting new evidence to revise our understanding of the status of Shakespeare’s works in the book trade between the 1640s and early 1660s. 2023 was, of course, the quatercentenary of the Shakespeare ‘First Folio’, a milestone marked by an ‘Anniversary’ special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly entitled ‘On Shakespeare’s First Folio and Early Modern Critical Race Studies’, guest edited by Noémie Ndiaye.

When Shakespeare is deployed to endorse fascist spectacle, can fiction spark resistance to structural violence? Through recent political crises in Britain, India, and America, and via my novel We That Are Young, I interrogate racism, misogyny and media artifice, and call for activism through collective narrative and the writer-reader bond

This essay explores an encounter between a Shakespearian sonnet and an Urdu lyric (in English translation) in the nazm form by twentieth-century South Asian-Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84): Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57, ‘Being your slave, what should I do’, and ‘Don’t Ask Me, My Love, for That Love Again’ (1962–65), by Faiz

COVID-19 seemed like a distant memory as theatres re-opened in 2022; faces went unmasked, and houses seemed fairly full as I began travelling the country for performances of Shakespeare. Perhaps surprisingly, few performances focused on or even contained traces of the pandemic. Instead, other pressing social concerns came to the fore, including the climate emergency, intergenerational conflict – recalling the supposed disparities between Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z – as well as questions of representation and identity, especially regional and national identity. I saw plays in pairs in the hope that productive comparisons would ensue, and common themes did emerge. The two Midsummer Night’s Dreams were focused on issues of language and translation, while the two Hamlets shared a concern with child and adult dynamics. Both Tempests interrogated issues of ecology and climate change, while the Macbeths foregrounded the contemporary through their aesthetics and appeal to new audiences.

These are books filled with uncertainty. This theme is explicit and central to Lauren Robertson’s Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater, but uncertainty features throughout 2023’s Shakespeare studies in sometimes surprising ways. Questions of knowing and unknowing, the uncertainty of sound, and the slippery unknowability of identities, categories and physical phenomena present a world of unstable knowledge and fraught attempts to fix sense and meaning upon it. Questioning, deconstructing and rendering deliberately obscure emerge as key critical methods, and much seems productively indeterminate.

To begin with those texts tied more closely to questions of performance, Laura Jayne Wright’s Sound Effects: Hearing the Early Modern Stage considers ‘the shifting and malleable sonic world’ of early modern drama (2). This is a work concerned more with the semantics than the mechanics of sound effects, though audience response is a key preoccupation.

A translator of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century must perform many roles: editor to solve textual cruxes, director to determine the dramatic function of the scene; and adaptor and poet to recreate the drama in a target language. Translations activate potentialities of Shakespeare’s text, which is resonant in different meanings.

This is my last Shakespeare review for this journal, and a good thing too. Most of the Shakespeare productions I saw this year were really adaptations. Almost all were ‘presentist’. This does not mean that I didn’t enjoy many of them, just that my particular kind of expertise was largely useless: their ideal reviewer would be a social historian or an expert on popular culture. Because the collective tendency seemed to me significant, I am covering more productions than usual, and, because they were dominated by a directorial vision, I am naming only directors. This is of course unfair to the actors, but the abundance of online reviews means that anyone can supplement my accounts. Directors often seemed to rely on their audience’s previous experience or expectations of the plays, which is presumably why they mostly confined themselves to the same small group that everyone already knows.