Shakespeare and Wales

From the Marches to the Assembly

Willy Maley, Philip Schwyzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317056287
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spenser, Drayton and Dekker. This volume brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic, including leading practitioners of British Studies, in order to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the degree to which Shakespeare continues to impact upon Welsh culture and identity even as the process of devolution in Wales serves to shake the foundations of Shakespeare's status as an unproblematic English or British dramatist.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A Welsh Correction
• 1 Shakespeare’s Welsh Grandmother
• 2 Thirteen Ways of Looking Like a Welshman: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
• 3 Glyn Dwr, Glendouer, Glendourdy and Glendower
• 4 Rhymer, Minstrel Lady Mortimer and the Power of Welsh Words
• 5 ‘bastard Normans, Norman bastards’: Anomalous Identities in The Life of Henry the Fift
• 6 Shakespeare’s ‘welsch men’ and the ‘King’s English’
• 7 ‘O, I am ignorance itself in this!’: Listening to Welsh in Shakespeare and Armin
• 8 Contextualizing 1610: Cymbeline, The Valiant Welshman, and The Princes of Wales
• 9 Cymbeline, the translatio imperii, and the matter of Britain
• 10 ‘Howso’er ’tis strange … Yet is it true’:The British History, Fiction and Performance in Cymbeline
• 11 ‘Let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition’: Shakespeare, Wales and the Critics
• 12 Cackling Home to Camelot: Shakespeare’s Welsh Roots
• Afterword: Translating Shakespeare
• Bibliography
• Index