This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Jane and Will, the Love Story.- Part I History, Contexts and Criticism.- 2. Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons.- 3. William Shakespeare and Jane Austen: Biographical Challenges, – 4. Austen and Shakespeare Translated.- 5. Jewels, Bonds and the Body: Material Culture in Shakespeare and Austen.- Part II Intertextual Connections.- 6. Is it ‘a marriage of true minds’? Balanced Reading in
Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion.- 7. ‘As sure as I have a thought or a soul’: The Protestant Heroine in Shakespeare and Austen.- 8. Tyrants, Lovers, and Comedy in the Green Worlds of
Mansfield Park and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.- 9. Forbidden Familial Relations: Echoes of Shakespeare’s
King Henry VIII and
Hamlet in Austen’s
Mansfield Park and
Sense and Sensibility.- Part III Theatre, Film and Performance.- 10. Shylock’s Turquoise Ring: Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park and the ‘Exquisite Acting’ of Edmund Kean.- 11. Austen and Shakespeare: Improvised Drama
.- 12. Shakespeare, Austen and Propaganda in World War II.- 13. Screening Will and Jane: Sexuality and the Gendered Author in Shakespeare and Austen Biopics.- 14. Austen and Shakespeare, Detectives.- 15. The
Twilight Saga as an Adaptation of Shakespeare and Austen.- 16. Curating Will & Jane.- 17. Afterword.
About the author
Marina Cano is Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave, 2017). Her research interests include women’s writing, the long nineteenth-century, performance and gender theory.
Rosa García-Periago is Lecturer at the University of Murcia, Spain. She is currently on leave as Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast with a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship awarded by the EU. Her research interests include Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Bollywood and adaptation in Indian Cinema.
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