Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage

Explores the idea that Shakespeare's dramatic writing, which powerfully represents the sea, also resembles it

• Awarded 2025 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice
• Provides both close and expansive readings of the figure of the sea in a wide range of Shakespeare plays
• Focussed comparisons with other dramatic voices, such as Plautus, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, W.B. Yeats
• Brings to bear the histories of the sea, of theatre, of early modern English society, of Shakespeare reception, and of the British Empire in an interdisciplinary study

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives – poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be felt.