Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies

This article proposes that Nicolas de Montreux's tragedy Isabelle (c. 1584), which draws its main plot and framing elements from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, presents distinctive resemblances to both Shakespeare's early narrative poems. Its heroine chooses death to avoid a rape, with the example of Lucrece multiply evoked. Framing this episode is an amorous pursuit illustrating the tyrannical potency of both love and hate in a way anticipating the goddess's rejection by Shakespeare's Adonis. While Isabelle cannot be considered a formal source, there is reason to hypothesise its catalytic function for Shakespeare at a formative stage of his career.

This article nuances the familiar binary of art and nature in The Winter's Tale by considering contemporary trends in manufacturing and art patronage that complicated both fields: trends that rendered nature a site for the circulation of cheap commodities, and incentivised wealthy patrons to signal their purchasing power by commissioning pieces so realistic that they seemed to merge with the natural sphere. Building on scholarship on oral culture and ecocriticism, this article suggests that Hermione's ‘awakening’ speech might be read as an extension of the movement towards hyperrealism, redeeming orality from contemporary prejudices and presenting it, instead, as an aesthetic artefact of its own.

This ‘intermedial’ production of Queen Lear (2022) – deploying ‘recorded and projected performance alongside “live” acting’, and having ‘technologies of digital projection (new) and hand-built scenery (old) work side-by-side’ (W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, 2020) – followed a text scripted by Juan Carlos Rubio in collaboration with director Natalia Menéndez: Queen Lear: Fragmentos de una lectura microscópica y libre de ‘El Rey Lear’ de William Shakespeare. In the wake of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement, this Queen Lear could not but intersect with the enunciation of gender as performative rather than innate, giving agency to the female voice and character. It proffered a different ending from Shakespeare's King Lear, one thought to open a door to hope.

Henry III of Valois was often described as a weak and dubious sovereign until mid-20th-century scholarship reassessed his figure. This essay argues instead that Christopher Marlowe had already revealed the King's ‘veritable visage’ in his The Massacre at Paris, where he praised his strategic political line regarding the wars of religion. By highlighting the similarities between Marlowe's account and Giordano Bruno's tribute to Henry III in his Lo Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, this contribution underscores a possible connection between the two, and that the defaming portrait of the last Valois was not universally accepted in early modern Europe.

Briefly charting the journey of the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival (CISF) from a post-communist venture, in 1994, to a leading global Shakespeare festival, this introduction examines its 30th anniversary edition, ‘Communities Build Festivals’, both in terms of continuity and innovation, focusing on new programming and community engagement initiatives. It explores the Festival's mission, as articulated by director Vlad Drăgulescu, and its emphasis on a ‘Shakespeare for everyone’ by fostering community building and challenging the traditional roles of audience and artists. Finally, it reflects on how festivals build communities and collaborations, highlighting the CISF's role as a cultural incubator, an international platform, a space for artistic expression and community support, particularly for artists from Ukraine and Moldova, and as a catalyst of new festival initiatives.

This article studies how graphic adaptations (such as comic books and manga) of works by William Shakespeare can be used in the teaching of English literature in various contexts, including teacher education and English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). It argues that graphic adaptations of Shakespeare have particular performative, literary, and visual qualities that make them especially well-suited to address questions about medium and genre, as well as identity, race, gender, and other such issues, in their treatments of the canon.