Unsettled Shakespeares argues that adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays world-wide engage actively with the age of unsettlement: a social and political reality shaped by several global traumas and disruptions in the last few years. Taking ideas of unsettledness and unsettlement as a point of departure, it contends that such adaptations execute a vital role—and have a unique utility—in canvassing possibilities for global justice. The contributors to this original collection explore the ways in which recent adaptations converse with the plays to debate the unsettled condition, whether this expresses itself in the recuperative potentialities of theatre in conflict situations; in the place of Indigenous studies and the role of translation; in the effects of diaspora in Asia, India, Ireland, Europe and the US; in the workings of gender, sexuality and race inside unsettled ideologies; in the movement of actors and, crucially, in the transmission of the Shakespearean text.

Taarini Mookherjee is a literary scholar and educator whose research fields include global Shakespeare, postcolonial theory, early modern drama, and theatre and performance studies. She is the author of Nationhood and Identity in Indian Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1989-2020 (2026) and has published widely on Shakespeare and adaptation.

Emer McHugh is an Irish writer and theatre historian who lives in Belfast. She is Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast, and has published widely on Irish Shakespeare performance and actors’ histories. She is the author of Irish Shakespeares: Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (2016).

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is the author of Shakespeare and World Cinema (2023) and ‘Hamlet’ and World Cinema (2019), and the co-editor of Women and Indian Shakespeares (2022).