Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and is the author of ten books, including a Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007); Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

• 1. Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England.- 2. Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II.- 3. Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice.- 4. Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet.- 5. Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr.- 6. “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth.- 7. Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary”.

“This … is a timely book. It is also highly readable and easy to recommend: it is never less than stimulating, its parallels between medieval and later texts often illuminating and thought provoking.” (Ivana Djordjević, Speculum, Vol. 94 (4), October, 2019)