This innovative book transforms how we understand Shakespeare’s creative universe and enduring relevance. Rather than looking at the plays in isolation, Elisabeth Bronfen treats seriality as the organizing principle in Shakespeare’s works, revealing how Shakespeare’s dramatic universe operates through recurring formulas traveling between plays.

Each chapter tracks a thematic series: Nocturnal scenes, hallucinations, and spectral apparitions; the trafficking in secrets and the culture of surveillance it produces; the folly of love and the reversal of desire into contempt; the cyclical interplay between war and peace; the anxieties and fantasies that queenship raises; cross-dressing; the corpse as a body of evidence; objects – bloody cloths, jewels, letters, and chopped-off heads – that serve as actors in their own right; and final words.

This will be illuminating reading for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies, as well as a wider audience interested in more philosophically oriented discussions of Shakespeare and those interested in issues of seriality. With the concept of “serial reading” as a novel form of literary interpretation, it will also be of interest to those in the wider field of literary and cultural theory.

Elisabeth Bronfen is Emerita Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, USA. Her areas of specialization are literature and visual culture, femininity
and death, cross-mapping as a hermeneutic process, and psychoanalysis.