Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions...

This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to ...

Circuits of disease correspond to previously unconsidered practices of caregiving in early modern English drama in this new volume by Darryl Chalk and Rebecca Totaro. They explore how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to and intersected with local and international ideas of communal care, health management, quarantine, embodiment, and theatricality.The role of the spectators who found themselves represented in such themes of caregiving in times of crisis fin...