Tom Bishop is a professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), the translator of Ovid's Amores (Carcanet, 2003), the editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Internet Shakespeare Editions), and a general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. He has published articles on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, Australian literature, and other topics, and is currently writing a book on Shakespeare's Theatre Games.

Alexa Alice Joubin is a professor of English, women's, gender and sexuality studies; theatre; and international affairs at George Washington University, in Washington, DC, US, where she serves as founding codirector of the Digital Humanities Institute. Her latest books include Race in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series (with Martin Orkin, 2019), Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (coedited, 2018), and Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (coedited, 2014). Alexa holds the Middlebury College John M. Kirk Jr chair in medieval and Renaissance literature at the Bread Loaf School of English. She is a general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook.

Natalia Khomenko is a lecturer in English literature at York University (Toronto), Canada. Her dissertation traced the evolution of the virgin martyr vita from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance in England. She has published articles in Early Theatre and Borrowers and Lenders, and is a contributor to the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Her current research project, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Insight Development Grant, focuses on the reception and interpretation of Shakespearean drama in early Soviet Russia.

Part I: Soviet Shakespeare: Guest Editor

1 Introduction: Shakespeare After the October Revolution

Natalia Khomenko

Early Soviet Context

2 Ivan Aksenov and Soviet Shakespeare

Aleksei Semenenko

3 Stalin and Shakespeare

Irena R. Makaryk

4 Shakespeare, Formalism, and Socialist Realism: The Censured Hamlets of Mikhail Chekhov and Nikolai Akimov

Kim Axline Morgan

Late Soviet Context

5 Feeling Love in Soviet Russia: The Slippery Lessons of Romeo and Juliet

Natalia Khomenko

6 Hamlet's Soviet Operatic Afterlife: Between Individuality and Allegory

Michelle Assay

Soviet but Not Russian: Language and National Identity

7 Negotiating With the Socialist Realist Discourse: The Case of Romanian Shakespeare Scholarship

Madalina Nicolaescu

8 WHO IZ HOO ¿ND WHAT IZ WATT? Between ¿F¿Z, CCCP and USSR

Jana B. Wild

The Soviet Past After the Collapse

9 Laughing at Tragedy: Elena Chizhova's Critique of Popular Shakespeare

Sabina Amanbayeva

10 Anti-Stratfordianism in Twentieth-Century Russia: Post-Soviet Melancholy and the Haunted Imagination

Vladimir Makarov

Part II

11 Madness and Metaphor in Lisa Klein's and Claire McCarthy's Ophelia

Tom Ue12. Innovation and Retrospection: Some Books About Shakespeare and His Times, 2015-2016

John Mucciolo

For its eighteenth volume The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare's work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output.