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e’re delighted to reveal the shortlisted authors for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023, a prize that supports our mission to promote the work of new and emerging scholars.

The Award, worth £3,000, was last granted in 2020, to Emma Whipday for Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (2019) and Oliver Morgan for Turn-taking in Shakespeare (2019) – and both Emma and Oliver have joined the judging panel for this year’s Award, which also includes Hanh Bui and Daniel Starza Smith.

The judges considered 25 eligible titles from around the world, which address early modern drama in English, and cast new light on the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To be eligible, the book needed to be the author’s first academic monograph.  

The judges were looking for work that significantly enhanced our understanding of Shakespeare’s time, written with clarity and style. In the judges’ opinion, the short-listed titles are likely to make a considerable impact on their fields, and on Shakespeare studies more broadly.  

But it was a close-run thing. Chair of judges  Will Tosh said:

‘The number and range of submitted titles was astonishing this year. It was definitely a bumper crop, in quantity and quality. I want to thank all the authors whose publishers submitted their books for providing such a rich and illuminating reading experience.’  

The judges will determine a final winner or pair of winners later in the summer, with the result announced in September. The winning author or authors will be invited to deliver a lecture in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.     

The seven short-listed titles for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023 are: 

On Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England, the judges said:

“Fictions of Consent offers a bold, original, and transformative argument about the construction of the twinned concepts of service and slavery in the early modern imagination. Ranging from the legal to the material, from the schoolroom to the playhouse, and from the early modern past to its troubling inheritances, Urvashi Chakravarty’s readings of The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest radically challenge our understanding of freedom, servitude, and race-making in Shakespeare’s world.”

On Strangeness in Jacobean Drama, the judges said:

“In Strangeness in Jacobean Drama Callan Davies makes a thrilling case for ‘strangeness’ as a critical concept. Jacobean England increasingly turned to the word ‘strange’ to label the foreign, ambiguous, unusual, bizarre, wondrous, supernatural, violent, or doubtful. Drawing on the drama produced in James’s reign – including plays by Shakespeare, Marston, Jonson, and Webster – Davies shows what we can learn from this ‘strange turn’ about contemporary anxieties and excitements, and the new forms of spectacular entertainment that emerged at this time.”   

On Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature: Desire, Status, Biopolitics, the judges said:

“In Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature, Ari Friedlander does more than tell the story of Renaissance rogues (the highwaymen, con artists and sex workers of Shakespeare’s England). Through dazzling readings of early modern drama (as well as canting literature, works of early demography and Paradise Lost) he shows us a new way to study the history and culture of ourselves – and how our insatiable desires helped shape the identities we carry today.”  

On Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade, the judges said:

“Ben Higgins’s Shakespeare’s Syndicate is a hugely impressive study of the bookish world around the First Folio. Conceived as an extensive close reading of the book’s title page, it takes the reader on a thrilling tour of the book trade that published, printed, marketed, and sold this most influential of volumes. Devoting a chapter each to Edward Blount, John Smethwick, William Aspley, and William and Isaac Jaggard, Higgins makes the case for these figures as ‘merchants of belief’, vital to the formation of the book’s value, and the ‘creation of [its] literariness’.”   

On Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, the judges said:

“Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness is a work of astonishing scope. Moving between plays in three languages, it traces the part played by early modern drama in the racialisation of blackness—the ideologically fraught process by which a phenotype becomes a racial category. The onstage impersonation of Afro-diasporic people by white performers, it argues, was a rapidly evolving transnational phenomenon. Placed in this broader context, Shakespeare’s own black characters emerge in a wholly new light.”  

On Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theatre, the judges said:

“Katherine Schaap Williams’s Unfixable Forms exposes the contradiction at the heart of staged disability: a theatricalized hypervisibility that nonetheless obscures the ideological incoherence of its (many) presumed meanings. The book’s sensitive, wide-ranging exploration of key concepts such as deformity, ugliness, sickness, and monstrosity reflects the capacious registers of ‘disability’ itself, both in the early modern era and our own time.”   

On Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature, the judges said:

“Gitanjali G. Shahani’s Tasting Difference explores the ‘culinary contact zone’ between Shakespeare’s England and the non-European world. This elegantly written book demonstrates the striking extent to which the words that come out of a writer’s mouth are shaped by the foods they put into it. By doing so, it provides both a new model for understanding early modern ideas about racial, cultural, and religious difference, and fresh readings of some of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays.”