Six years older than Shakespeare and Marlowe, Thomas Kyd (1558–94) shares with them the honour of being among the first writers of tragedy in English. Together, Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare turned the decasyllabic blank verse into the form of expression that gave English Renaissance drama its unique character. It is impossible to say if Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy precedes or postdates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, but the more than generous attention it was soon to receive in revivals, editions, quotations, allusions and parodies, suggests that it was the first early modern blockbuster.

Kyd’s early life had much in common with Shakespeare’s. Both playwrights were born into a middle-class background, and their fathers enjoyed a good social status. Kyd’s father, a scrivener or court notary, served as Warden of the Company of Scriveners in 1580 and Shakespeare’s held municipal offices as alderman and bailiff. They differ, though, in one respect: whereas Kyd’s father was highly literate, Shakespeare’s signed legal documents with an illiterate man’s mark. Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge all had an academic background, but there is no indication that Kyd or Shakespeare attended university, even though they received a good secondary education. At the King’s New School in Stratford, Shakespeare was taught by two learned schoolmasters: Simon Hunt – who left Stratford in 1575 for the Catholic seminary at Douai and became a Jesuit – and Thomas Jenkins. Kyd attended one of the most advanced educational centres in London, Richard Mulcaster’s Merchant Taylors’ School, which also had Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge among its pupils. Both Kyd and Shakespeare may have done some play-acting at school, because performing Latin plays was part of the curriculum. Before becoming playwrights for some of the most successful companies of their time, they may also have worked as players, and both, without permanent success, looked for the patronage of a noble lord. Both have been suspected of Catholic sympathies without conclusive evidence.

War memorials have long been regarded as the most visible form of Great War commemoration practices. Whether through public memorial or private grave, the First World War has been fixed in collective memory for its numerous dead. The word ‘remembrance’ is inextricably associated, at least in the collective imagination of many European and Commonwealth countries and the US, with the poppy and 11 November. Commemorating the First World War is often equated with remembering the dead. As public sites of mourning, Sir Edward Lutyens's Monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval and his Cenotaph in Whitehall contrast with the private space of the soldier's regular slab, on which very little room is left for a personalized inscription. The private space of commemoration is reduced to a line or two – while the public rite of enforcing the same gravestone for all soldiers enacts a communal practice of remembrance. War memorials, as Jay Winter has argued, can be read as sites of both memory and mourning, places where collective grief and individualized remembrance are materially located. Whether public, as the Somme memorial at Thiepval, or private, as soldiers’ graves, war memorials and war cemeteries together give form to a material culture of Great War commemoration which is literally linked to a fixed, permanent, singular location.

It has not been sufficiently stressed that the materiality of Great War commemoration and its remembrance rites stretches beyond sculpture, architecture, gardens of remembrance and the iconological programmes of communal or private funereal art and that war memorials for the dead of the Great War began to appear in the form of printed matter long before the end of the war itself. Unlike architecture, sculpture or gardens, books are movable objects, not anchored to a fixed, permanent ‘site’ or unique locus.

Memory, according to George Eliot in Middlemarch, is what makes of a man's past not simply dead history. Memory, continues Eliot, is far from being mere outworn preparation for the present; it is, rather, a wound that reopens man's past. Eliot's words prompt me to dedicate this paper to the memory of Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank, because her work will always remain in my memory certainly as more than outworn preparation for the present, for its seminal influence in the history of Shakespearean criticism in Europe. In one of her latest pieces, included in a collection of essays on Victorian Shakespeare, she drew attention to the need of studying European reception of Shakespearean comedy on its own, trying to chart the path it followed, a path which runs somehow parallel to, but is not identical with, the main road of Shakespearean reception, which, in the nineteenth century at least, was mostly concerned with the tragedies. This is why I feel that perhaps there is something in the fate of Shakespearean comedy in nineteenth-century Spain that is worth a little detour.

In 1879, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford finally gave Britain a playhouse centrally devoted to the performance of the plays of Shakespeare. The play chosen for the opening performance was, as it is well known, Much Ado about Nothing.

Narrative revisions of King Lear in the twentieth century, unlike rewritings of other Shakespearian plays, are not numerous, but there are at least two novels that can claim a link with Shakespeare’s tragedy of filial ingratitude: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) and Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991). Smiley’s novel is a feminist adaptation in modern dress; Carter’s postmodern farce has its King Lear allegiances diluted in a richer broth of Shakespearian appropriation. Smiley adopts plot, characters and thematic content from King Lear, but alters the narrative’s point of view. Carter, rejecting a direct appropriation of plot and narrative thread, retains some Shakespearian characters and the themes of ingratitude and father–daughter relations.

Over a century before Smiley or Carter found inspiration in King Lear, a Romantic English novelist saw the advantages of rewriting the Shakespearian adaptation of a popular tale about a father and his three daughters. As a rewriting of King Lear, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) has more in common with Carter’s than with Smiley’s, since the author mostly rejects the storyline but retains themes and characters. Carter, however, rewrites the Shakespearian tragedy to produce a farce and Austen turns King Lear into a tragicomedy. In spite of their differences, they all decentre the Lear figure and rewrite Cordelia, divesting her of any trace of her nineteenth-century attributes, her meek, angelic and suffering nature and her heroic and virtuous disposition.