Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance,
Edited by Marina Cano & Rosa García-Periago
Palgrave, 2019
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.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction: Jane and Will, the Love Story,
Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago
Part 1: History, Contexts and Criticism
Chapter 2: Jane Austen as ‘Prose Shakespeare’: Early Comparisons,
Joanne Wilkes
Chapter 3: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen: Biographical Challenges,
Robert Bearman
Chapter 4: Shakespeare and Austen Translated,
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø
Chapter 5: Jewels, Bonds and the Body: Material Culture in Shakespeare and Austen,
Barbara Benedict
Part 2: Intertextual Connections
Chapter 6: Is it ‘a marriage of true minds’? Balanced Reading in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,
Lynda Hall
Chapter 7: ‘As sure as I have a thought or a soul’: The Protestant Heroine in Shakespeare and Austen,
Claire McEachern
Chapter 8: Tyrants, Lovers, and Comedy in the Green Worlds of Mansfield Park and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Inger S. B. Brodey
Chapter 9: Forbidden Familial Relations: Echoes of Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII and Hamlet in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility,
Glenda Hudson
Part 3: Theatre, Film and Performance
Chapter 10: Shylock’s turquoise ring: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park and the Exquisite Acting of Edmund Kean,
Judith Page
Chapter 11: Austen and Shakespeare: Improvised Drama,
Marina Cano
Chapter 12: Shakespeare, Austen and Propaganda in World War II,
Rosa García-Periago
Chapter 13: Screening Will and Jane: Sexuality and the Gendered Author in Shakespeare and Austen Biopics,
Lisa Starks
Part 4: Popular Culture
Chapter 14: Austen and Shakespeare, Detectives,
Lisa Hopkins
Chapter 15: In the Pursuit of Love: Twilight, Jane and Will,
Heta Pyrhönen
Chapter 16: Curating Will & Jane,
Janine Barchas and Kristina Straub
Chapter 17: Afterword,
Mark Thornton Burnett