Early Modern German Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew

This open access book provides translations of early German versions of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The introductory material situates these plays in their German context and discusses the insights they offer into the original English texts.

English itinerant players toured in northern Continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, meaning the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. There are four plays that can legitimately be considered as versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The present volume (volume 2) offers fully-edited translations of two of them: Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus) and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen / An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). For the other two plays, Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet), see volume 1. These plays are of great interest not only to all Shakespeareans, but also to scholars who are concerned with the broader issues of translation, performance and textual transmission over time.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.

Lukas Erne is Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003; 2nd edn 2013) and Shakespeare and the Book Trade (2013). He gave the Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2012.

Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is author of Standing on Points: The History and Culture of Punctuation and Refrains in Early Modern Literature (forthcoming).

Maria Shmygol is a Research Fellow on the ‘Complete Works of John Marston’ project at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the editor of William Percy’s The Aphrodysial (1602) in the Malone Society Reprints series (2022).