Charting the early dissemination of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries in the 19th century, this opens up an area of global Shakespeare studies that has received little attention to date. With case studies exploring the earliest translations of Hamlet into Danish; the first translation of Macbeth and the differing translations of Hamlet into Swedish; adaptations into Finnish; Kierkegaard's re-working of King Lear, and the reception of the African-American actor Ira Aldridge's performances in Stockholm as Othello and Shylock, it will appeal to all those interested in the reception of Shakespeare and its relationship to political and social conditions.

The volume intervenes in the current discussion of global Shakespeare and more recent concepts like 'rhizome', which challenge the notion of an Anglocentric model of 'centre' versus 'periphery'. It offers a new assessment of these notions, revealing how the dissemination of Shakespeare is determined by a series of local and frequently interlocking centres and peripheries, such as the Finnish relation to Russia or the Norwegian relation with Sweden, rather than a matter of influence from the English cultural sphere.

An introduction to the volume that outlines the history of Shakespeare reception in the Nordic countries in the period approximately 1870 - 1940.

The story of Shakespeare's Nordic play is also, inevitably, one of cultural exchanges before, during and after the early modern period. From its origins in Nordic tradition to its re-introduction in the Nordic countries through Shakespeare's play, the story of Hamlet from the Middle Ages to the present is inextricably bound up with Nordic history and culture. In tracing some of these links, this special issue develops our recent work on the early dissemination of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries, focusing here on that most Nordic of plays, Hamlet. Although there is already a great deal of criticism on Hamlet in various national or regional contexts, very little of this has focused on the Nordic countries.1 It is therefore fitting, we believe, to provide a necessarily brief outline of the rich and varied history that Shakespeare's play has had in Northern Europe.

A thematic issue of the journal Critical Survey in which we explore the receptioni history of Hamlet in the Nordic countries.

Examining the changing reception of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries between 1870 and 1940, this follow-up volume to Disseminating Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries focuses on the broad movements of national revivalism that took place around the turn of the century as Finland and Norway, and later Iceland, were gaining their independence. A number of contributions demonstrate how translations and productions of Shakespeare were key in such movements, as Shakespeare was appropriated for national and political purposes. Other contributions discuss how the role of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries was partly transformed in the 1920s and 1930s as a new social system emerged, and then as the rise of fascism meant that European politics cast a long shadow on the Nordic countries and substantially affected the reception of Shakespeare.

A review of articles and books published on Christopher Marlowe during 2014.

This edited collection brings together literary scholars and art historians, and maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Changing satire demonstrates how satire proliferated in various formats, and discusses a wide range of material from canonical authors like Swift to little known manuscript sources and prints. As the book emphasises, satire was a frame of reference for well-known authors and artists ranging from Milton to Bernini and Goya. It was moreover a broad European phenomenon: while the book focuses on English satire, it also considers France, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain, and discusses how satirical texts and artwork could move between countries and languages. In its wide sweep across time and formats, Changing satire brings out the importance that satire had as a transgressor of borders.

This book chapter examines the reception of the African-American actor Ira Aldridge’s visit to Stockholm in 1857, during which he performed Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the title role of Othello at the Royal Theatre. The event caused a very lively debate in the press, revealing a wide range of responses, from the openly racist to the equally openly anti-racist, as well as a conflict between aesthetic norms concerning realism in acting. While reviewers often brought up the question of Aldridge’s blackness, they were deeply divided as to his acting. Moreover, the lines of division cannot be neatly categorized in terms of aesthetically conservative and racist versus aesthetically radical and anti-racist. Instead, some of the most positive responses to Aldridge’s performances are also the most deeply entrenched in racial categorization whereas some of the more hostile ones reject or play down race. Thus, the discussion of aesthetics in the reviews has a complex relation to the sometimes casual, sometimes elaborate referencing of race. In order to discuss this connection, the chapter contextualizes the production from the perspective of changes in theatrical practice, and in particular in debates over the nature of acting in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This book chapter traces the use of Shakespeare in the works of Eyvind Johnson (1900-1976) from the 1920s until the 1940s. Its main argument is that the role of Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular change in accordance with Johnson's own changing political, ideological and aesthetic outlook. In the earlier novels, the Hamlet figure stands for the general sense of rootlessness and lack of initiative following the First World War, whereas later novel represent deliberate attempts at overcoming this impasse. Subsequently, if Shakespeare in the later 1930s could raise the question of the general relevance of literature and culture in an age of fascism, the Bard would later be aligned with the healing and reconciliation needed in the wake of the Second World War.

The present paper suggests that the representations of manhood in Elizabethan satire mobilized cultural and sexual values at odds with prevailing masculine ideals of self-control. Thus, the paper investigates to what extent the conventions and conditions of early modern satire imply redefinitions of or challenges to early modern masculinity. While other types of poetry often explore emotional weakness such as tears or effeminacy, even representing ‘alternative’ masculinities, satire is extensively preoccupied with other forms of flawed manhood, such as the angry, dissolute or reckless man. Elizabethan satire explores countercodes of manly conduct, although such countercodes are manifestly different from the ‘soft’ or ‘effeminate’ man of much lyric poetry. Instead, the disorderly and unruly manhood in Elizabethan satire should be understood as an interrogation of classical genre conventions that also responds to early modern patriarchal notions of moderation.

Recent years have seen extensive research in fields such as early modern masculinities, violence and the passions, although rarely so in connection with satire. This is despite the fact that the angry male satirist has been at the focus of much criticism of Elizabethan satire, particularly Marston’s, since Alvin Kernan’s seminal The Cankered Muse (1959). The present paper suggests that Marston’s verse satire enacts early modern notions of masculinity, although not simply in the sense of reproducing patriarchal norms. Despite their enthusiastic, Juvenalian attacks on all sorts of male depravity, Marston’s satires do not offer a straightforward reproductions of traditional norms. Rather, through the varying registers of the satirist – which far from always embody the standard ‘angry’ persona – and the tendency to aggressively challenge the reader and various people in the poems, Marston’s satires in one sense explore alternative, non-patriarchal codes of male competition. At the same time, the satirist explicitly denies involvement in typical rituals of male bonding such as drinking and drunkenness. In other words, Marston’s satirical stance involves the fashioning of a deliberately extreme male that stands outside early modern ideals of self-control but also in some respects rejects the notion of excess. Stoicism and Calvinism, both of which have been discussed as ideological frameworks for Marston’s satires, do not offer reassurance in this respect; rather, the paper concludes, the very extremity of Marston’s persona can be said to challenge the (male) reader to himself find an answer to the question: what is a man?

This note argues that one passage in Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff (1599) refers to a hitherto unacknowledged source, Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom from 1596.

This paper suggests that Thomas Nashe’s religious pamphlet Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) draws on an Augustinian narrative of religious conversion. Long regarded as an anomaly in Nashe’s otherwise secular output, Christs Teares was offered to the pious Lady Elizabeth Carey, and Nashe arguably adopted elements of Augustine – including direct references and similarities of tone and narration – in his work in order to find patronage from the Carey household. In terms of life-writing, Nashe’s self-presentation in the pamphlet is intensely bound up with the events of his own life, and the book as a whole is offered as an extended piece of repentance in the wake of Nashe’s much-publicized conflict with Gabriel Harvey in the 1590s. Thus, Christs Teares is also configured by Nashe as “the Teares of my penne” – a narrative of conversion that draws deliberate parallels between Augustine, the “young man puft vppe with the Ambition of that tyme”, and Nashe’s own biography.

This paper suggests that Thomas Nashe’s religious pamphlet Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) draws on an Augustinian narrative of religious conversion. Long regarded as an anomaly in Nashe’s otherwise secular output, Christs Teares was offered to the pious Lady Elizabeth Carey, and Nashe arguably adopted elements of Augustine – including direct references and similarities of tone and narration – in his work in order to find patronage from the Carey household. In terms of life-writing, Nashe’s self-presentation in the pamphlet is intensely bound up with the events of his own life, and the book as a whole is offered as an extended piece of repentance in the wake of Nashe’s much-publicized conflict with Gabriel Harvey in the 1590s. Thus, Christs Teares is also configured by Nashe as “the Teares of my penne” – a narrative of conversion that draws deliberate parallels between Augustine, the “young man puft vppe with the Ambition of that tyme”, and Nashe’s own life.

The protagonist of Jenny Andreasson's autobiographical novel Teatern (2022) is a young female director whose feminist production of Hamlet at the Swedish national stage fails to have its planned premiere. While the novel makes a point of describing the misogynist structures behind this failure, the present article suggests that class structures and precarity are the main reasons behind it. The financial difficulties of the theatre generate a clear discrepancy between cultural capital – embodied by Shakespeare's canonical play – and economic. The resulting precarious work situation is reflected in the protagonist's yearning for stability, in her recurring assertions of class privileges vis-à-vis her co-workers and in her increasing sense of alienation from both them and her own work. While not strictly paraphrasing Shakespeare's play, the protagonist invokes parallels to both Hamlet and Ophelia, and Teatern, instead of locating these parallels in an ‘existential’ reading of Shakespeare's play, anchors the theme of alienation in the economic and social strictures of the theatre institution.

Largely ignored by theorists of satire, anachronism as a narrative and thematic device becomes particularly relevant to understand English satire produced during the 1590s and early 1600s. While generally building on principles of Verfremdung, satire would develop in the Elizabethan period to embrace anachronism as a way of delimiting its own contemporary world. In the writings of John Marston, Joseph Hall, Donne and others, the obscurity of allusions is highlighted by the insistent use of Latinate names as well as Roman terms, practices and objects. From a reader’s point of view such anachronisms of satirical writing become a means of signalling both inclusion (in the select group who might understand the references) and exclusion (since anyone claiming to understand the references would also be implied to be, in Marston’s words, a ”lewd Censurer”). Thus, rather than mere ’imitation’ or a straightforward means to the end of displaying classical learning, anachronism is a crucial modus operandi of Elizabethan satire, one that simultaneously transcended and perpetuated the distance from the literary past.  

If anything, the migration of Shakespeare into Sweden was complex and fraught with uncertainties. The scant existing documentation of performances in the 18^thcentury indicates that the introduction of Shakespeare often took the route via French or German translations, although in some cases there are clear indications that English was the source language. Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden, had lively contacts with Great Britain and it was also here that for example Hamlet was staged the first time. Notably, Shakespeare was not performed in the capital of Stockholm until the 1810s: it was theatres in provincial towns like Gothenburg and Norrköping that introduced Shakespeare, in various versions, to the Swedish stage. In the light of this historical development, the present paper argues that the migration of Shakespeare into the country was strongly linked to the rise of a wealthy provincial bourgeoisie, often with economic connections in England and Scotland. Once Shakespeare begun to be staged in the capital, it was for different reasons, involving the rise of literary Romanticism, and from the horizon of a Europe that had been affected by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, the paper concludes, the early history of Shakespeare in Sweden was not so much the result of national projects or specific agendas as the consequence of an emerging class restructuring and economic interests.

It has been something of a critical commonplace to see Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) as a representative of  “pure”, uncommitted literature. “If asked what Nashe ‘says’, we should have to reply, Nothing”: C.S. Lewis’ statement also can be said to foreshadow post-structuralist readings (e.g. Jonathan Crewe’s) according to which Nashe’s prose basically reveals the logocentric prejudice of the reader. Arguably, though, it is precisely in its obsession with aspects of language that Nashe’s pamphlets reflect commitment: to literary culture, to questions of style, reading and taste. In the lively debate on the role of English vernacular literature in the 1590s, Nashe’s texts stand out not only because they have lots of things to say about the English language and the literary climate (in for example the prefaces to Greene’s Menaphon or Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella) but because they can be said to reflect commitment in their very form: indeed, their exploitation of a satirical persona forces the reader to respond over questions of what literature is, why we read it and who has control over it. In other words, in engaging with Nashe’s underanalysed effort as a critic and writer on aesthetic matters, this paper argues that Nashe’s preoccupation with language is not a matter of lacking commitment so much as a prerequisite for it. As interventions in the literary culture of his time, then, Nashe’s works can be said to refocus the notion of what vernacular literature can or should do.

Criticism on Thomas Nashe has been notoriously preoccupied with the idea that he had nothing to say. While recent analyses have shown that his works in fact do say lots of specific things about the literary culture of his time, Nashe’s peculiar form and style remain at the centre of attention. This essay suggests that Nashe’s preoccupation with style is also what invokes a sense of commitment in his readers; by their use of the author’s persona and their often baffling narration, Nashe’s works also force the reader to consider questions of what literature is, why we read it and who has control over it. In other words, the repeated admissions of incompetence and narrative digressions have the result of engaging the readers in exercising their judgement and deliberating on aspects of style, narrative and, generally, what literature is.

This essay argues that the second of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays conflates two biblical narratives—those of the Tower of Babel and the fall of Babylon. While this conflation was widespread in early modern culture, Marlowe's play—unlike many other representations of these narratives—does not suggest reconciliation or salvation as an alternative to the tower or the fall of man. Instead, through its complex response to theological, political, and linguistic issues, Tamburlaine 2 depicts a world in which Babel and Babylon cannot be redeemed.

This essay argues that the dream narratives in Girolamo Cardano’s autobiography De vita proper liber (written 1575) share important characteristics with the didactic and exemplary uses of dreams in late classical and medieval hagiography. While not a piece of hagiography in itself, Cardano’s book features dreams with a particularly rich indebtedness to Christian and hagiographic devices such as the “upward ascent” narrative also found in saints’ dreams. Moreover, Cardano’s dreams, the Christian element of which has been underplayed by scholars, also posit the dreamer as a mediator between God and audience in ways that my article relates to the exemplary force in divine dreams. Thus, in the extension the article also deals with how to mediate dreams (editing them, writing them down, conferring authority on them) and investigates the senses in which dreams achieved status as “true” or “prophetic”.

This paper presents a parallel reading of the use of dreams in the drama of Shakespeare and Strindberg. Of course, dreams are a common device in theatre from all times, although their significance and dramatic function vary over time. Specifically, dreams in early modern drama such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream could sometimes serve as a figure for the audience,  as in Puck’s address to the spectators: “You have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear”. In other cases such as John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon the play is deferentially suggested to be the author’s dream, with deference to his patron: “Remember all is but a Poets dreame, / The first he had in Phœbus holy bowre”. By contrast to such concessions to the audience and their patronage, Strindberg’s symbolist drama of the early 20^th century – itself strongly inspired by Shakespeare – utilizes the dream device in a way that reflects the structure of the human psyche. His A Dream Play (1907) deliberately sets out to “reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream”, in which characters “are split, double and multiply”. Moreover, the fin-de-siècle sensibility of Strindberg’s play suggests a different conception of the author: dreams no longer represent the will of the audience so much as the condition of the writer. In other words, the Shakespearean dreams of Strindberg's plays reflect both changing conceptions of interiority as well as historically conditioned changes in the status of the author.

Central to verse satire since its Roman inception, walking, particularly in city space, is an integral element also to Elizabethan satirical poetry. Rather than assume a strict pattern of imitation from Roman to Elizabethan, however, this paper argues that the device of the city walk in satirists such as Donne, Guilpin and Marston responds to pattern of urbanisation in the late 16^th century as well as new forms of representing city space in visual and conceptual terms. To these poets, the city becomes a space that is both traversable and mappable, and rather than simply describe urban territory, satirical writing also – in Michel de Certau’s words – ‘manipulates spatial organization’.

An introduction to the anthology Urban Encounters: Experience and Representation in the Early Modern City

Verse satire from Roman times and onward draws extensively on gender stereotypes in its depictions of urban and decadent men. While clearly drawing on such literary traditions, Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597–98) spans over a wider register in emphasising both rural and urban contexts, and in focusing specifically on aspects of husbandry, pedigree and provision. Rather than being simply classical imitation, the failed men of Hall's satires should be understood from the economic context of early modern masculinity, which constituted manhood in terms of pedigree and providing for one's household. Unlike other Elizabethan satire, which predominantly attacks sexual vice as an urban phenomenon, Virgidemiarum depicts flawed manhood in broader terms of failed husbandry. In doing so, the essay contends, Hall's satires re‐enact changes in social structure and in the conceptions of masculinity at the time.

As is well known, war is a strong presence in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, with its court page protagonist and gory depiction of the massacre of the Anabaptists in 1536. However, warfare and soldiery are recurring metaphors in Nashe’s other writings and the purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between the conditions of warfare and the conditions of authorship. “Many Souldiours are most impatient vaine-glorious . . . Many puny Poets & old ill Poets are mighty vaine-glorious” (Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem): in Nashe’s restlessly associative prose, the martial desire for honour and reputation becomes a figure for the desire for poetic fame, and Nashe’s defence of the theatre in Pierce Penniless is rooted in the idea that idle “Captaines and Souldiers” need dramatic entertainment: “There is a certaine waste of the people for whome there is no vse, but warre: and these men must haue some employment still to cut them off”. Thus, war as a figure in Nashe’s writings is frequently associated with literary pursuit: the violent struggle for survival and honour is analoguous, and both soldier and poet exist on the same precarious borderline between glory and “waste”. The latter is a common figure for literature in Nashe’s writings, and characteristically, it is the outsider position of both soldier and poet that is explored; both are vagrant (as “those who come from the warres” who “cosen, begge, and starve”, both strive for glory and both are relegated to the social margin. As symbolic presences in Nashe’s writing, then, warfare and soldiers seem to serve the function of commenting on the conditions of the writer.

The present article suggests that war and peace are explored in the works of Thomas Nashe as figures for the condition of the writer. Throughout his career, including his troubles with the authorities and his conflict with Gabriel Harvey, Nashe makes use of the war metaphor in order to elaborate on the condition of authorship. However, war is also a literal presence in Nashe’s texts, which frequently reference events like the Spanish Armada or the campaign in Ireland. Thus, the article examines the complex interplay between social reality and self-referential metaphor that characterizes Nashe’s use and descriptions of warfare.

It is hardly controversial to say that the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More (1592–93?) is insistently preoccupied with issues of surveillance, control and punishment. In its depiction of the Ill May Day Riots in 1517 and the subsequent downfall of Thomas More, the play represents both More’s role as surveyor of the crowd and a victim of royal surveillance and punishment. However, in its twists and turns of plot Sir Thomas More transcends generalizations about penal justice. While not staging a “pre-panoptic” system of control, the play frequently but ironically thematizes surveillanceas an instrument of power, but it falls short of suggesting that surveillance produces pliable individuals. Instead, Sir Thomas More comes close to suggesting repentance rather than retribution as a model of justice, though this model is also made problematic through the character of Thomas More. 

Although satire is generally known for its problematic relationship to aspects of genre, the formal verse satires written in the 1590s by for example John Donne and John Marston are usually thought of in terms of imitation of classical satirists like Horace, Juvenal and Persius. However, despite the fact that several satirical writers were also theatregoers and at least Marston made a career as a playwright, little attention has been paid to the question whether Elizabethan satire was also infused with a theatrical understanding of space and dialogue. Although frequently thought of as ‘monologic’, Elizabethan verse satire displays patterns that could be termed theatrical in the sense of exploring differing, conflicting voices; Marston not least excels in this type of polyvalent, inconsistent dramatic persona. Moreover, the satirists’ strong sense of dramatic, urban space is not only imitated from Latin models but, the paper argues, is an emulative, visualizing and genre-bending take on classical satire.

This essay argues that the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe’s (1567–1601) erotic poem »The Choise of Valentines« explores early modern senses of distinction between manuscript writing and print. In his dedication and in subsequent responses to critique against the poem, Nashe invokes a sense of intimacy with his patron and his audience – an intimacy that is associated in his texts with manuscript writing but is enacted by references to, and directly in, the medium of print. In other words, »The Choise of Valentines« constructs a fiction of privacythat is rhetorically and commercially exploited in the medium of print – which is, in turn, constructed as the public opposite of the intimate, private medium of manuscript writing.