Shakespeare and Terrorism delves into how extremists have responded to Shakespeare – whether they’ve attacked him or been inspired by him – and investigates what the playwright and his works can tell us about the nature, psychology, and consequences of terror. Literary critic and historian Islam Issa takes readers on a journey from Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon and London to a variety of locations: from Western Europe to the Balkans to the US, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, and from the theatre to the digital world. Considering incidents from Shakespeare’s time through today, including the Gunpowder Plot and 9/ 11, as well as pivotal figures from Hamlet and Macbeth to Hitler and Bin Laden, this book brings to light new ideas about key characters, events, and themes both in Shakespeare’s plays and the world around them. A thrilling and accessible read, this ground-breaking book will enlighten and engage students, researchers, and general readers interested in Shakespeare, social sciences, history, and the complex relationships between life and art.

Shakespeare and Terrorism delves into how extremists have responded to Shakespeare – whether they’ve attacked him or been inspired by him – and investigates what the playwright and his works can tell us about the nature, psychology, and consequences of terror. Literary critic and historian Islam Issa takes readers on a journey from Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon and London to a variety of locations: from Western Europe to the Balkans to the US, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, and from the theatre to the digital world. Considering incidents from Shakespeare’s time through today, including the Gunpowder Plot and 9/ 11, as well as pivotal figures from Hamlet and Macbeth to Hitler and Bin Laden, this book brings to light new ideas about key characters, events, and themes both in Shakespeare’s plays and the world around them. A thrilling and accessible read, this ground-breaking book will enlighten and engage students, researchers, and general readers interested in Shakespeare, social sciences, history, and the complex relationships between life and art.

Early Modern Britain's most dramatic story, the Gunpowder Plot, brought to life with unique original sources.

Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 explores the representation of terrorism in plays, novels, and films across the centuries. Time and time again, writers and filmmakers including William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Gillo Pontecorvo, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Steven Spielberg refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, “a deed without a name,” but they do not stop there. Instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by providing comforting narratives reassuring audiences and readers of their moral superiority and the perfidy of the terrorists, these writers and filmmakers confront the unspeakable by attempting to see the world from the terrorist’s perspective and by examining the roots of terrorist violence.

"Is terrorism crime or war? Can there be a 'war against terrorism'? In this fully updated edition, Charles Townshend unravels the questions at the heart of the problem of terrorism - its causes, methods, effects, and limitations - suggesting that it must be understood as a political strategy whose threat can be rationally grasped and answered"--Publisher's description.

In the current climate of global military conflict and terrorism, Shakespeare at Peace offers new readings of Shakespeare’s plays, illuminating a discourse of peace previously shadowed by war and violence. Using contemporary examples such as speeches, popular music, and science fiction adaptations of the plays, Shakespeare at Peace reads Shakespeare’s work to illuminate current debates and rhetoric around conflict and peace. In this challenging and evocative book, Garrison and Pivetti re-frame Shakespeare as a proponent of peace, rather than war, and suggest new ways of exploring the vitality of Shakespeare’s work for politics today.

Shakespeare and Violence, first published in 2002, connects to anxieties about the problem of violence, and shows how similar concerns are central in Shakespeare's plays. At first Shakespeare exploited spectacular violence for its entertainment value, but his later plays probe more deeply into the human propensity for gratuitous violence, especially in relation to kingship, government and war. In these plays and in his major tragedies he also explores the construction of masculinity in relation to power over others, to the value of heroism, and to self-control. Shakespeare's last plays present a world in which human violence appears analogous to violence in the natural world, and both kinds of violence are shown as aspects of a world subject to chance and accident. This book examines the development of Shakespeare's representations of violence and explains their importance in shaping his career as a dramatist.