Shakespeare in the North

Adam Hansen is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. He is the author of Shakespeare and Popular Music (Continuum, 2010) and co-editor of several collections, including Shakespearean Echoes, with Kevin J. Wetmore, eds. (Palgrave, 2015) and The White Devil: A Critical Reader, with Paul Frazer, eds. (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is on the editorial board of This Rough Magic, and Reviews Editor for English: The Journal of the English Association.

In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, the ruthless mill owner learns his disastrous industrial strategy from Coriolanus. The excellent contributors to Shakespeare in the North expand this fruitfully antagonistic relationship, placing England’s national poet to the north of traditional Shakrespeare centres of culture and replacing Stratford, London, Arden and Windsor with Blackpool, Edinburgh, Northumberland and Tyneside.

• AcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction, Adam HansenI: Shakespeare and the Early Modern NorthShakespeare’s Northern Blood: Transfusing Gorboduc into Macbeth and Cymbeline, Paul Frazer‘Here are strangers near at hand’: Anglo-Scottish Border Crossings Pre- and Post-Union, Steve Veerapen Shakespeare, King James and the Northern Yorkists, Richard StaceyNorth by North-West: Shakespeare’s Shifting Frontier, Lisa HopkinsII: Performing Shakespeare in the NorthThe People’s Shakespeare: Place, Politics, and Performance in a Northern Amateur Theatre, Adam Hansen Only Northerners need apply? Northern Broadsides and ‘no-nonsense’ Shakespeare, Caroline HeatonShakespeare and Blackpool: The RSC A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016): A Play for the Nation?, Janice WardleWilliam the Conqueror: The Only Shakescene in a Country, Richard Wilson III: Appropriating Shakespeare in the North‘What is Shakespeare to Manchester’?: Shakespearean Engagement in The North at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Monika Smialkowska A Road by Any Other Name: Heaton History Group, a North East suburb, and Shakespeare, Chris Jackson Lancastrian Shakespeares: Hamlet and King Lear in North West England (2005-2014), Liz Oakley-Brown Shakespeare’s Cheek: Macbeth, Dunsinane and the Jacobean Condition, James LoxleyPostscript: News from the North, Willy Maley