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Shakespeare’s enduring significance lies in the persistent counternarrative his plays and poetry offer against the permanence of mortality. This study examines the strategies through which Shakespeare resists death’s finality, situating its argument within the cultural realities of the Shakespearean age. Across three sections, it analyzes the dramatic and poetic techniques that articulate this challenge to mortality. While acknowledging the importance of textual and performance-based scholarship, the book argues for renewed attention to Shakespearean meaning. In doing so, it reconsiders what continues to make Shakespeare matter within literary and intellectual history.
Toby Widdicombe is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He has published numerous books, most including Max Nettlau's Utopian Vision: A Translation of Esbozo de historia de las utopias (Anthem Press, 2023) and a co-edited volume, Celebrating Tolkien's Legacy (Walking Tree, 2024).
Acknowledgments
Note on Quotations
Introduction
Prologue: Life and Death in the Age of Shakespeare
Part I: Strategies of the Body
Chapter 1. Of Sleep and Dreams; Creation of Children; Slowing of Death; Recycling
Chapter 2. Corpse as Prop; Digging More Deeply
Part II: Strategies of the World
Chapter 3. Fame; Infamy; Rumor; Reputation
Chapter 4. Arcadian Retreat, and Posterity
Chapter 5. The Earlier Tetralogy
Chapter 6. The Later Tetralogy
Chapter 7. The Singletons
Part III: Other Strategies
Chapter 8. The Numinous
Chapter 9. The Dramatist
Conclusion: Of Macbeth and Jaques
Appendix: Selected Scholarship of Shakespeare
References