Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

This chapter reads Hamlet in the light of debates in early modern animal studies, arguing that it is a play that responds to contemporary religious and philosophical questions about the distinction between humans and animals in its representation of flesh and of death. In particular, it focuses on ideas about the difference between human and animal death, and sees in Hamlet a challenge to the assumption of human immortality, reading human fleshiness – our edibility – as lying at the core of the play’s contemplations. In what is often regarded as Shakespeare’s key exploration of “the human,” the chapter argues that what can be found is a conception of our species that offers a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the early modern period, but also of our own.

The conclusion ties together some of the arguments that have recurred throughout this book. Productions of Shakespeare often cast a spotlight on core debates within a conflict, but do not have fixed wartime identities and are, instead, malleable and responsive as a result of their multi-layered networks of production and reception, which is the core methodological framework proposed in this book. It examines the recent use of Hamlet during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to reflect on the future of ‘wartime Shakespeare’ and the need for further studies that emphasize the transnational mobilization of Shakespeare that reflects the increasing ‘place-less-ness’ of modern conflict.

This chapter turns to the emotional sources of Johnson’s poetical criticism. The chapter examines the contrast between Johnson’s response to the overblown dramas of Dryden and his enthusiasm for the power of Alexander’s Feast (1697). Attention then moves to Johnson’s taste for poetry deriving from genuine sorrow when this is compared with the confected grievings of Milton’s Lycidas. But Johnson’s emotional consciousness eschews excess. His neo-Latin verse, for example, seems to shield Johnson from memories that might be too painful to express in English. Reinforcing this vulnerability are Johnson’s emotional state on the death of his wife and his disordered feelings at the news of the widowed Mrs. Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi. Unbearable loss is then explored by reference to a scene from Rasselas and through a passage from the Preface to Shakespeare on tragedy. The deaths of Shakespeare’s heroines caused him intense pain; the combination of tragic with comic scenes as “mingled” drama supplied its own intensity, as Hamlet illustrates.

In 1939 John Gielgud visited Denmark to perform Hamlet at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, a location closely associated with the setting of Shakespeare’s famous play. A photograph of Gielgud and Fay Compton, who played Ophelia in the production, shows the two actors posing in front of a stone relief of Shakespeare, which was unveiled at Kronborg during their visit to mark what was clearly intended as both a cultural and a diplomatic exchange between Denmark and the UK at this tense moment in European history. This essay suggests that Gielgud’s performance in Elsinore and the events that surrounded it were ‘haunted’ in different ways, both by the memory of the previous war and by the fear of the war rapidly approaching. It shows how several factors – the location, the play, the historical moment between two world wars – would have created a particularly resonant intersection between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘war’.

This essay concentrates on the practice and significance of parodying Shakespearean speeches during wartime, which reached a height during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. At a particularly pivotal moment – the renewal of war in 1803 – a spate of parodies of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy appeared in print, most of which adapted the speech for Napoleon, who debates the merits of invading Britain. This essay examines these overlooked parodies, paying particular attention to George Woodward’s ‘Buonaparte’s Soliloquy at Calais’ published by Rudolph Ackermann and circulated widely, including in the Weimer-based journal London und Paris. While these confident parodies express unambiguous support for Britain’s war effort and condemn Napoleon, they do not testify to united public opinion about the necessity of war or to untrammelled optimism about its outcome. This essay establishes their wider significance: they draw attention to a politically and culturally astute readership that was not limited by national or conflict lines, and they reveal the fractures beneath confident wartime propaganda. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy becomes a malleable rhetorical template for carrying out topical wartime debate, facilitating political discourse that could draw attention to the divisive debates underlining this period of conflict.

The Introduction establishes the distinctive focus and range of contributions within Shakespeare at War. This transhistorical material history prioritizes how Shakespeare is used at times of war from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and shows how this focus sheds light on some of the core political issues dominating a conflict, the wartime role played by the arts, and the shifting cultural capital of Shakespeare for different communities. The Introduction argues for the importance of a ‘material’ emphasis: all contributions use a significant archival object as their starting point in order to establish how these items can help us recover different wartime stories, voices, and perspectives. In place of a single, linear history, our aim – through the structure, content, and material focus of the collection – is to embrace a plurality of histories. The Introduction also contextualizes the diversity of its twenty-six contributions: nineteen are essays by Shakespeare scholars, war historians, or public figures who have served in the British Army, while the remaining seven are by theatre directors who have directed Shakespeare while the UK was at war or have set their productions at times of war to encourage audiences to think critically about the complexities of major conflicts.

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

At the end of Act 4 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff learns that his wife and children have been killed on Macbeth’s orders. Macduff initially experiences grief as involuntary memory. Malcolm urges Macduff to turn immediately to thoughts of revenge, but Macduff is unable to do so. Like Hamlet although more briefly, Macduff is caught in what he calls an intermission of inaction and feeling, analogous to Lauren Berlant’s impasse. In this brief pause, poetic meter, repetition, and enjambment comprise an affective dramaturgy through which grief, disbelief, and anger can be felt and made into the materials for memory. Macduff’s grief is ultimately assimilated into the structure of a revenge plot, but the moment briefly reveals a different way of speaking, thinking, feeling, and remembering, an alternative to both the gendered, racialized chaos of Macbeth and the gendered, racialized control embodied in Malcolm.

Chapter 2 gives a reading of the obscure work The Nightwatches by the dramatist August Klingemann. The protagonist Kreuzgang is an odd outsider, highly critical of society around him. He is a night watchman, who goes out each night and observes people in their ordinary lives. Kreuzgang begins with some semblance of normalcy but then becomes increasingly disenchanted with the world until he finally fully embraces nihilism. Klingemann presents a mishmash of carefully framed scenes of horror and despair. It is a gallery of personalities with strange images and stories. People are portrayed as vain, pretentious, cruel, and hypocritical. The work raises the question of whether we, as human beings, are really anything beyond the social masks that we wear. Theater metaphors are often used to emphasize the idea there is nothing substantial in human life, but we are all playing meaningless roles, and then we die. Kreuzgang’s description of his fellow inmates in the insane asylum reveals an inverted world where what is usually accepted as reasonable by mainstream society is in fact irrational, and vice versa. The mad are the sane in an insane world.

The introduction sets out the two key techniques by which the early modern theater entwined its spectators in uncertainty, ultimately offering a new model of this theater’s process of performance – one that encouraged its spectators’ imaginative participation by, paradoxically, frustrating it. The practitioners of this highly experimental theater regularly drew attention to the technologies of stagecraft, inviting spectators’ uncertainty about the stage’s fictional representations by calling attention to them as performances. The introduction also pushes back against the established account of a Jacobean and Caroline theater that catered to the increasingly sophisticated theatrical acuity of its spectators, arguing that practitioners’ eagerness to exploit familiar conventions into the seventeenth century regularly upended even knowing playgoers’ dramatic expectations. Finally, the introduction argues that these moments of interpretive unsettling should be considered a fundamental, even primary, element of the early modern theatrical experience.

This chapter considers the conceptual function of the echo as a metaphor for processes of intertextual dialogue and transformation. When thinking about the character that Shakespeare’s texts assume in Beckett’s works, instead of terms like adaptation, quotation or association, it is the notion of echo that aptly describes Beckett’s ways of engaging with his predecessor and materializing this engagement in the theatrical performance. This chapter regards the echo both as a principle of composition and an immanent figuration that is realized in the theatrical performance. Matter and materiality, stones and bones in Beckett’s works very often become a metonymy for the text itself in that they expose its opacity and resistance, and, at the same time, render it immortal as a kind of petrified lacuna. The chapter considers Beckett’s use of the materiality of stones and bones and reads Happy Days with Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline and Hamlet.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.

Just before his death, Hamlet bids Horatio “to tell my story.” However, immediately after Fortinbras's arrival, when Horatio wants to perform this task and “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about”, Fortinbras interrupts him, claiming “some rights of memory in this kingdom” for himself, and commands his men to “Take up the bodies” and “Go bid the soldiers shoot.” These final moments of Shakespeare’s play initiate the dramaturgical process for future generations to recount the events which led to Hamlet’s death, reconsidering, re-enacting as well as resisting his and the play’s legacy in constantly shifting forms and constellations. This chapter reflects on how this dramaturgical process is established in the play itself bringing together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. Highlighting the performative link between virtue and virtuosity, dramaturgy connects research and practice and is designed to develop and enhance creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by illuminating these texts from innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for stage interpretations of the text.