UC Irvine

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.