We thought we knew what Romeo and Juliet was all about: the conflict between the individual and society, between young love and old hate, between subjective experience and external norms. Yet these conflicts, Paul A. Kottman argues in this iconoclastic new reading of the play, have already been pushed into the background by the time the two lovers compose their first sonnet. Yes, the families are feuding, but a certain civic or constitutional order has already rendered this vendetta archaic and inconsequential, no longer able to satisfy the need for virile recognition on the part of either the older or the younger men. Yes, family feuds and social expectations divide the lovers, but these “stony limits” (2.2.67) can be overleaped, though not without cost, by any ingenious and self-directed teen equipped with a rope ladder or a smart phone. Yes, Romeo’s murder of Tybalt exiles him from Verona, but it does not condemn him to death, and the banishment invites all manner of solutions, many of them tested in other plays by Shakespeare. And yes, the death of Romeo and Juliet will ultimately reconcile the families, ratifying the choral constitutionalism already on offer in Act 1—but this communal achievement jars with our investment in the acts of the two lovers. It computes formally and generically, but not affectively; no civic gain can be worth these private losses, in part because these losses are not fully felt as such.

John Madden's recent film, Shakespeare in Love, accrues its historical and indeed historiographical interest not from any antiquarian impulse, but rather from the way it links Shakespeare's artistic achievement to his engagement with the life and work of another dramatist, Christopher Marlowe. In the film, Marlowe's flamboyant farcicalness, grandiloquent poetry, and short, violent life lay the groundwork for the mimetic achievements of Shakespeare, who took both his inspiration and his negative example from the extremes mapped by Marlovian virtuosity. The film even introduces a third term: the Artaudian excess of the young John Webster, who confesses in the film to having "played the head in Titus Andronicus," and who is thus given the historical task of enunciating within Shakespeare's early work a theatre of cruelty at odds with the representational canons of the high Shakespearean tradition. Moreover, through its very liberties with history, the film manages to replicate some of the definitive moves of that most creative of historians, William Shakespeare. By applying the plot of Romeo and Juliet to the war of the theatres, the film reproduces not Shakespeare the man but rather that battery of playful revisionary and allusive techniques, of incessant double-plotting, that characterizes Shakespeare's relation to his own historical and literary sources.

Janet Adelman (1941–2010) was a major force of innovation in the field of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature. Her book Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘‘Hamlet’’ to ‘‘The Tempest’’ (1992) remains one of the most cited works of psychoanalytic feminist criticismof Shakespeare. As professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from1968 to 2007, Adelman had a shaping influence on several generations of undergraduate and graduate students. Blood Relations, the finalmonograph in her illustrious career, extends Adelman’s groundbreaking studies of gender, psyche, and culture in Renaissance drama into problems of religion and ethnicity, combining historicism with psychoanalysis, feminism, and race theory in order to craft a nuanced account of the hermeneutic and political world of Shakespeare’s England.

This ambitious and engaging volume gathers together papers delivered at a conference at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in 2007. Contributors include art historians, archaeologists, historians, curators, and literary scholars. Essays are grouped thematically, while a second table of contents lists essays by object type (clothing, shoes, tableware, domestic goods, etc.). The volume is weighted heavily toward historical study, with very little theoretical or phenomenological reflection. Instead, archaeologists like David Gaimster and Dinah Eastop and established literary scholars like Natasha Korda and Lena Cowen Orlin provide very precise object histories, always tuned, however, to scenes of meaning and use, both in situ and over time. The diverse pieces converge in their commitment to understanding the performative, practical, and sensuous life of objects in acts of worship, courtship, care, consumption, conviviality, and commensality. Some highlights from the volume follow.