Shakespeare and His Religious Afterlives

Marta Cerezo

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781836955931
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781836955955
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Exploring Shakespeare's religious afterlives, this volume examines how Shakespeare's works have been translated, interpreted, and adapted across diverse cultural and religious contexts. It analyses unexplored nineteenth-century Swedish translations of Shakespeare's works that reflect the interrelation between the sacred and the secular at work at the time in the Swedish education system. It also looks into Spanish translations of biblical intertexts in Richard II, and explores stage and film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth from a religious standpoint, reads King Lear from a Buddhist perspective, and shows how the play is adapted and turned into a religious experience by students in Flint, Michigan.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Sweden and Shakespeare’s Protestant Afterlife: Three Translators in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 2. ‘Our golden crown’: Analysis of Religious Intertextuality in Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Its Translation into Spanish
• Chapter 3. Between Two Worlds: The Dybbuk, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Reparative Tragedy
• Chapter 4. Transgressive Catholicism: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
• Chapter 5. Redeeming Lady Macbeth: Gender and Religion in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015)
• Chapter 6. The Way of the Bodhisattva: A Buddhist Understanding of King Lear
• Chapter 7. Unaccommodated Religion: King Lear in Flint, Michigan
• Chapter 8. Lear Reassembled
• Index