'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both oeuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.

This unique study is the first monograph on the manifold intertextual relations and poetic echoes between Shakespeare and Beckett.

About the Author
Claudia Olk is Professor of English at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich and Director of the Munich Shakespeare Library. Her monographs include Travel and Narration (1999) and Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision (2014). Her edition of one of Virginia Woolf's unpublished manuscripts appeared in 2013. She is the president of the German Shakespeare Association.


Book Information
ISBN 9781316514030
Author Claudia Olk
Format Hardback
Page Count 300
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 19mm