Shakespeare’’s Liminal Spaces: Contesting Authority on the Early Modern Stage

This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare’s liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth’s nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.

Ben Haworth is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Nottingham Trent University