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
Marina Cano is Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave, 2017). Her research interests include women’s writing, the long nineteenth-century, performance and gender theory.
Rosa García-Periago is Lecturer at the University of Murcia, Spain. She is currently on leave as Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast with a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship awarded by the EU. Her research interests include Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Bollywood and adaptation in Indian Cinema.
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 “Curating 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.