Shakespeare Studies

Volume 54 of the academic journal devoted to Shakespeare and Early Modern English Drama, Culture and Literature, published annually with peer-reviewed articles, forums, and reviews.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual, and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically focused forums and includes substantial reviews. An international editorial board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period—for research scholars as well as teachers, actors, and directors.

Volume 54 includes a Forum "In Honor of Bruce R. Smith" with contributions from its editor Heather James, Katherine Rowe, Jeffrey Masten, Scott Trudell, Evelyn Tribble, Amanda K. Ruud, Rachel Willie, Katie Bank, Stephen Orgel, and Lena Orlin.

It features articles by Tom Rutter ("Possible Evidence for the Early Influence of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Robert Peake's Portrait of Edward Grimston"); William Carroll ("'The Wars of Love's Labour's Lost: Performance and Interpretation"); Scott Maisano ("In a Berowne Study: Daydreaming in Love's Labour's Lost and of Love's Labour's Won"); and Xing Chen (Nothing, my lord: A pun, King Lear, and a Defense of Rhetoric"); a Roundtable exploring "'Anne's World: New Conversations about Anne Shakespeare"; and four talks from the 2025 Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America conference.

Book reviews consider important publications: Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science; Shakespeare's Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty; Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage; Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response; Sex Lives: Intimate Infrastructures in Early Modernity; Shakespeare and the Law; Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage; and Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade.