New issue of Shakespeare Bulletin now out!

The latest issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, the journal of Shakespeare and Performance, is now published. 43.1, which is available open-access, is a special issue on "The Fantasy of Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage"

 Edited by Louise Geddes and Nora J. Williams, the issue includes the following original articles:

- Sujata Iyengar, "Dreams Deferred: Joseph Papp's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964) and Gloria Naylor's 'Cora Lee'" explores the vision of an Afrocentric Midsummer Night's Dream imagined in the novelist Cora Lee's work, inspired by Papp's then-radical integrated casting practices for New York's Mobile Unit.

- Emer McHugh and Justine Nakase, "'Between a mask and a face': Race, Nation, and Nontraditional Casting in Ruth Negga's Shakespeare on Broadway" looks at Ruth Negga's recent starring roles in Hamlet and Macbeth on Broadway, and the failures of both productions and reviewers to account for her legibility as an Irish actor of color. [a valuable read for Reviewing Shakespeare students]

- Donovan Sherman, "Whiteness and Witness: Fat Ham's Classicism" engages philosophically with James Ijames's Fat Ham to explore that play's courting and subversion of the spectacularization of the Black body for white audiences' gaze, in response to Hamlet's own preoccupation with whiteness.

- Louise Geddes and Nora J. Williams, "Afterword: The Fantasy of Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage" builds on the previous essays to offer a reimagination of the meanings of "relevance" in contemporary Shakespearean theatre, pushing against the conflation of "relevance" with ideas of the "present" or "contemporary" in order to make a new case for what can, or should, be valued in performance.

- Performance reviews span the Globe in this issue, including of the Guthrie's marathon Henriad, a Korean two-person dance duet based on Hamlet, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's Henry V, the Globe's most recent Taming of the Shrew (the one with the massive onstage ionic baby that I know I've ranted about to a lot of you), and reviews of rarely staged plays including John Marston's Antonio's Revenge and both parts of Marlowe's Tamburlaine. This issue's book review is of Emma Whipday's collection Shakespeare/Play, including mention of a wonderful chapter by our very own Susan Anderson.