On Wasting Time

By Claire White In France, the turn of the millennium ushered in a bold, and controversial, act of legal reform that sought to reshape the French citizen’s working life: the introduction of a 35-hour working week. For many, the law…

Shakespeare’s Metadrama and the Informer

By Bill Angus If you have ever wondered what was really going on in the secret overhearing and tacit observations, the metadramatic inner-plays and devices which Shakespeare constantly revisits, you may have been told that he was ‘playing with the…

St. William of Stratford?

By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…

Shakespeare’s Questions

By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…

A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

By Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko Sherlock Holmes, “the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV” (Guinness World Records News), is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in…

Invisible Tweets? Ben Jonson and Social Networking

By Kelly Stage In 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman found themselves in prison because parts of their play Eastward Ho (written also with James Marston) had offended King James’s Scottish favourite, Sir James Murray. Jonson and Chapman took to…

Kinds of Insight

By Kate McLoughlin This article arose from a paper I gave at the conference on the Long Modernist Novel at Birkbeck, University of London, in April 2014, organised by Scott McCracken and Jo Winning, the editors of this volume of…

The Pleasures of Literary Communication

By Roger D. Sell Literary activity can be studied as one among other kinds of human communication. Such an approach strongly endorses the insistence of present-day historicist scholars on the precise contexts, not least the precise political contexts, within which…