Chris Laoutaris – författare

‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’FINANCIAL TIMES ‘This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!’ ALISON WEIR FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 A BBC RADIO 4 FRONT ROW NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection.Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare ’ s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. And he considers how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him ‘not of an age, but for all time’. ‘Beautifully written and utterly compelling… comprises all the drama, intrigue and surprises of a Shakespeare play' Tracy Borman

‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’FINANCIAL TIMES ‘This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!’ ALISON WEIR FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 A BBC RADIO 4 FRONT ROW NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection.Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare ’ s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. And he considers how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him ‘not of an age, but for all time’. ‘Beautifully written and utterly compelling… comprises all the drama, intrigue and surprises of a Shakespeare play' Tracy Borman

This study explores maternity in the ‘disciplines’ of early modern England. Placing the reproductive female body centre-stage in Shakespeare’s theatre, Laoutaris ranges beyond the domestic sphere in which the rituals of childbirth, midwifery and wet-nursing were performed in order to recuperate the wider intellectual, epistemological, and archaeological significance of maternity to the Renaissance imagination. Focusing on ‘anatomy’ in Hamlet, ‘natural history’ in The Tempest, ‘demonology’ in Macbeth, and ‘heraldry’ in Antony and Cleopatra, this book reveals the ways in which the maternal body was figured in, and in turn contributed towards the re-conceptualisation of, bodies of knowledge. The relevance of the maternal to early pedagogical, aesthetic, and scientific disciplines, Laoutaris argues, makes itself felt when crises overturn the desired outcomes of birth and nurture. Instances of tragic intervention - such as disease, bewitchment, monstrosity, and death - expose the potentially destabilising power of maternity, dismantling the epistemological certainties with which the maternal body had been invested in the interests of masculine legitimation. Shakespeare resists a monolithic concept of motherhood, presenting instead a range of contested ‘maternities’ which challenge the distinctive ‘ways of knowing’ these early disciplines worked to impose on the order of created nature. Key Features*Provides a new interpretation of a subject which is becoming increasingly popular among Shakespeare scholars, cultural and medical historians, and feminist critics*Focuses on four of Shakespeare's best-loved plays *Presents striking visual material which forms a central component of the book's critical methodology, including anatomical plates, cabinets of curiosity, early modern follies and grottoes, archaeological discoveries, artefacts of witchcraft and superstition, early natural historical specimens, Renaissance ‘monsters’, ceramics, portraiture, funerary monume

Were Renaissance women merely the silent subjects of the images of themselves they witnessed circulating in the visual cultures around them? Or did they have the opportunity to challenge these figurations? This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines the representation of women at the intersections between portraiture, literature and drama in Renaissance Britain. It explores how power, politics, patronage, agency and creativity were manifested across text, cultural inscription and ‘portraiture’ - defined in its broadest sense as a cultural artefact expressive of female image and identity. Forms of ‘portraiture’ discussed in this vibrant collection include portraits, miniatures, engravings, sculptures, embroideries, tapestries, murals, emblems, illuminated manuscripts, reliquaries, curated collections, theatrical props, calligraphy and other decorative features.Bringing together art historians, curators, heritage specialists and scholars of early modern history, drama and literature, this collection situates women both as the subjects and devisers of ‘cultures of portraiture’. The essays in this volume examine how power was negotiated through the royal icon; how self-portraiture became a means of navigating the dangerous worlds of religious and courtly factionalism; how the commissioning, collecting and curating of paintings, relics and life-writings fashioned shared testaments of faith and enabled female networks across political and pedagogical arenas; how drama staged the anxieties surrounding a threatening female agency; and how creativity wielded through narrative prose fiction, illuminated manuscripts and poetry, allowed women to co-opt and subvert prevailing visual tropes and stereotypes. In the process, it reveals how women were both the interrogators and active co-creators of their own self-images, re-defining their ‘portraits’ as forms of public identity-building and political commentary, as well as tools for social disruption and the realization of their dynastic ambitions.