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Reading the Coastline in Shakespeare’s Britain

Edited by Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

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Published 31 October 2026

About this book

Examines early modern English literary representations of ports, shorelines and littorals at home and abroad

  • Discusses plays set in ports ranging from Dover to Milan and Tunis
  • Is alert to ecological issues
  • Attends to questions of race and slavery

When Regan in King Lear asks ‘Wherefore to Dover?’ she mobilises a number of early modern anxieties. Shores and coastlines are liminal spaces, subject to erosion, invasion and tidal flux. With their metaphorical mouths and their subjection to wind, wave and tide, ports were emblematic of instability, especially in the cases of once-thriving harbours which had silted up (Winchelsea) or coastal settlements claimed by the sea (Dunwich). Early modern plays and poems are drawn to such areas both within Britain (Southampton and Harfleur in Henry V, Scarborough and Bristol in Edward II, Harlech in Richard II) and further afield in Tunis, Alexandria, Algiers, Malta and other sites where cultures clashed, slaves were traded, and people of different faiths mingled. This edited collection draws together new research on early modern British representations of the lived environment of the coast at home and abroad.

Reviews

This sparkling collection ventures between domestic and international ports of call and across an impressive range of literary texts to demonstrate that the coastline, rather than a marginal space, was absolutely central to the cultural imagination of early modern England during its rise as a global maritime power.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Time and Tide
Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

Part I: Ports and People
1. 'What world is this?': Harbours as Spaces of Closure in Pericles
Mateusz Godlewski
2. The Case of Dunwich: Using a Lost Coastal Town to Reroute Early Playing Circuits
Laurie Johnson
3. Sailing to Milan: The Imperial Mediterranean in Shakespeare’s Milanese Plays
Philip Goldfarb Styrt

Part II: Tides and Tropes
4. ‘We hope sometimes to see you on these Coasts': Affective Encounters in Katherine Philips’s Sea Poems
Anna-Rose Shack
5. Lyric on the Shore: The Ecology of Form in Elizabethan Sonnets
Danila Sokolov
6. Poetry, Sea Roads and the Edge of Doom
Bill Angus

Part III: Piracy, Trafficking and Trade
7. ‘He ne’er saw English harbour': Ports and Harbours in Richard Brome’s The English Moor
Cristina Paravano
8. The North African Port of Tunis as a Space of Mutability in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1624)
Iman Sheeha
9. Goodwin Sands in the Early Modern English Imagination
Laurence Publicover

Part IV: The Coast and the Land
10. Ships Sailing Where Sheep Feed: Water Management and Coastal Threat in Galatea
Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley
11. From Whitby to the Humber: England’s Dangerous North-east
Lisa Hopkins
12. Storm Still: King Lear on the Coast
Stewart Mottram

Coda: Edges and Ends

Notes on Contributors
Index

About the contributors

Bill Angus

Bill Angus is pursuing a rich and varied life in New Zealand. Previous publications include Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (2024) and Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019) both co-edited with Lisa Hopkins and published by Edinburgh University Press. His latest book, Divorcing Jesus (2025) maps a moral and intellectual path from the ruins of Christianity towards the ideal of Atheism.

Lisa Hopkins

Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. Previous publications include Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (2024) and Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019) both co-edited with Bill Angus and published by Edinburgh University Press.