Early Modern German Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew: Tito Andronico and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen in Translation

About the Author

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English dramatist, poet, and actor, generally regarded as the greatest playwright of all time.

Lukas Erne is Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva. He is author of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003). He has taught at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, at the University of Neuchâtel and, as Visiting Professor, at Yale University.

Maria Shmygol is a Research Fellow on the 'Complete Works of John Marston' project at the University of Leeds. She is the editor of William Percy's The Aphrodysial (1602) in the Malone Society Reprints series (2022).

Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Standing on Points: The History and Culture of Punctuation and Refrains in Early Modern Literature (forthcoming).

Product Description

This book provides translations of early German versions of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The introductory material situates these plays in their German context and discusses the insights they offer into the original English texts.

English itinerant players toured in northern Continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, meaning the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. There are four plays that can legitimately be considered as versions of Shakespeare's plays. The present volume (volume 2) offers fully-edited translations of two of them: Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus) and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen / An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). For the other two plays, Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet), see volume 1. These plays are of great interest not only to all Shakespeareans, but also to scholars who are concerned with the broader issues of translation, performance and textual transmission over time.

The open access edition of this book is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.