This collection of essays by experts in Renaissance and Gothic studies tracks the lines of connection between Gothic sensibilities and the discursive network of the Renaissance. The texts covered encompass poetry, epic narratives, ghost stories, prose dialogues, political pamphlets and Shakespeare's texts, read alongside those of other playwrights.

The authors show that the Gothic sensibility addresses subversive fantasies of transgression, be this in regard to gender (troubling stable notions of masculinity and femininity), social orders (challenging hegemonic, patriarchal or sovereign power), or disciplinary discourses (dictating what is deemed licit and what illicit or deviant). They relate these issues back to the early modern period as a moment of transition, in which categories of individual, gendered, racial and national identity began to emerge, and connect the religious and the pictorial turn within early modern textual production to a reassessment of Gothic culture.

Introduction - Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier
Part I: Shakesperean hauntings
1.Yorick's skull - John Drakakis
2. Beyond reason: Hamlet and early modern stage ghosts - Catherine Belsey
3. 'What do I fear? myself?': nightmares, conscience and the 'gothic' self in Richard III - Per Sivefors
4. Queen Margaret's haunting revenge: the gothic legacy of Shakespeare's War of the Roses - Elisabeth Bronfen Part II: Renaissance theatre
5. Vision and desire: fantastic Renaissance spectacles - Beate Neumeier
6. From grotesque to gothic: Ben Jonson's Masque of Queenes - Lynn Meskill
Part III: Gothic textuality in the early modern period
7. Exhumations: scopophobia in Renaissance texts - Duncan Salkeld
8. Bright hair and brittle bones. Gothic affinities in metaphysical poetry - Ulrike Zimmermann
9. Vampirism in the bower of bliss - Garrett Sullivan
10. Ghostly authorities and the British popular press - Andrea Brady
Part IV: Persistence of the gothic
11. Monstrous to our human reason. Minding the gap In The Winter's Tale - Richard Wilson
12. Shakespeare, Ossian and the problem of 'scottish gothic' - Dale Townshend
13. The rage of Caliban. Dorian Gray and the gothic body - Andreas Höfele
Index

Editors

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich

Beate Neumeier is Professor of English Studies at the University of Cologne