CFP: Shakespeare Jahrbuch 162 (2026) “Shakespeare and Popular Cultures”

The 2026 volume of Shakespeare Jahrbuch will be a special issue on “Shakespeare and Popular Cultures”. Shakespeare’s status as a cultural icon is increasingly modified and enriched by the recognition that his works shaped and were in turn shaped by early modern popular culture, just as the reception and – in the most literal sense of the word – the popularity of his plays and poems were (and still are) the result of engagements, mediations and adaptations also from ‘lowbrow’ perspectives. The editorial board invites contributions on the ways in which popular cultures feature, from a variety of perspectives, in Shakespeare’s plays and/or poetry; productions, adaptations and spin-offs of these works in popular cultures from the seventeenth century until today; as well as references to Shakespeare in popular cultural debates, media, or phenomena. Contributions with a contemporary or historical perspective are equally welcome.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• popular rites, ceremonies and festivals belonging to religious culture, such as May Day, carnival, the Christmas season and Twelfth Night; popular belief and observance in post-Reformation England; popular parodies of religious figures
• popular forms of knowledge about the human body, nature and the supernatural: popular medicine and healing, superstition and astrology, prophecy and sooth-saying, myth and folklore, magic and witchcraft, demons and fairies
• the making and unmaking of social communities: civic rites (e.g. guilds, Mayoral shows); social disciplining of individuals (e.g. the charivari, scold’s bridle, cuckingstool); mobility and popular xenophobia; popular forms of political participation; riot and rebellion
• the gendering of early modern popular culture: contributions of women to domestic and material domains as reflected in housekeeping manuals, recipe books or midwifery manuals, as well as the production of everyday material objects
• popular forms and sites of consumption in early modern England, such as food culture, clothing, toys and games, fairs and markets, popular entertainments, including the theatre
• orality and literacy in popular culture, representations of the everyday in different media
• popular forms of reading and writing like diaries, jestbooks, ballads, broadsides, murder/crime pamphlets, chivalry books, chapbooks
• youth culture in Shakespeare / Shakespeare in youth culture, children’s literature and young adult fiction; Shakespeare in educational settings
• recasting and adaptations of storylines and characters from Shakespeare in modern popular media such as film and TV shows, comic books and graphic novels, video games, popular music and social media
• Shakespeare in online cultures and communities, blogs, fandoms
• Shakespeare and digital theatre: technologically enhanced productions, zoom-(toYouTube-)productions
• the popular theatre and its audiences in Shakespeare’s time; modern forms of popular theatre
• digital editions and the challenges of editing Shakespeare today

Please send an electronic version of your article to the general editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Prof. Isabel Karremann. The deadline for submissions (in English or German, c. 6,000 words) is 30 April 2025. Please observe the style sheet, which can be downloaded from the website of the German Shakespeare Society). Articles are selected for publication on the basis of a double-blind peer-review system.