This collection of essays by experts in Renaissance and Gothic studies tracks the lines of connection between Gothic sensibilities and the discursive network of the Renaissance. The texts covered encompass poetry, epic narratives, ghost stories, prose dialogues, political pamphlets and Shakespeare's texts, read alongside those of other playwrights. The authors show that the Gothic sensibility addresses subversive fantasies of transgression, be this in regard to gender (troubling stable notions of masculinity and femininity), in regard to social orders (challenging hegemonic, patriarchal or sovereign power), or in regard to disciplinary discourses (dictating what is deemed licit and what illicit or deviant). They relate these issues back to the early modern period as a moment of transition, in which categories of individual, gendered, racial and national identity began to emerge, and connect the religious and the pictorial turn within early modern textual production to a reassessment of Gothic culture.

Introduction - Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate NeumeierPart I: Shakesperean hauntings 1.Yorick's skull - John Drakakis 2. Beyond reason: Hamlet and early modern stage ghosts - Catherine Belsey 3. 'What do I fear? myself?': nightmares, conscience and the 'gothic' self in Richard III - Per Sivefors4. Queen Margaret's haunting revenge: the gothic legacy of Shakespeare's War of the Roses - Elisabeth Bronfen Part II: Renaissance theatre 5. Vision and desire: fantastic Renaissance spectacles - Beate Neumeier 6. From grotesque to gothic: Ben Jonson's Masque of Queenes - Lynn MeskillPart III: Gothic textuality in the early modern period7. Exhumations: scopophobia in Renaissance texts - Duncan Salkeld 8. Bright hair and brittle bones. Gothic affinities in metaphysical poetry - Ulrike Zimmermann9. Vampirism in the bower of bliss - Garrett Sullivan10. Ghostly authorities and the British popular press - Andrea Brady Part IV: Persistence of the gothic11. Monstrous to our human reason. Minding the gap In The Winter's Tale - Richard Wilson12. Shakespeare, Ossian and the problem of 'scottish gothic' - Dale Townshend 13. The rage of Caliban. Dorian Gray and the gothic body - Andreas Höfele Index