The Shakespeare Jahrbuch 2011 will be a special issue devoted to “Shakespeare and the City”. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries London was a dynamic and expanding city; a political, cultural and economic metropolis where different classes and ethnicities met and interacted with one another. Contemporaries stressed the contrasts co-existing side by side. Thomas Dekker, for example, saw early modern London as “the goodliest of thy neighbors, but the prowdest; the welthiest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest; for thou art attir’de like a Bride, drawing all that looke upon thee, to be in love with thee, but there is much harlot in thine eyes.” This issue of the Jahrbuch will seek to discuss these contradictory perspectives on early modern London, focusing in particular on the multilayered relationships between the city and the theatre as well as on Shakespeare’s engagement with the metropolis. This will be complemented by contributions discussing the role of Shakespeare for the metropolis from the sixteenth century until today.

The editorial board invites essays on the following topics:

• London as the cultural metropolis of early modern England
• The scene is set in London: theatre and urban space
• Shakespeare in London
• The city on the early modern stage
• Shakespeare’s cities
• The country and the city in Shakespearean drama
• The urban underworld in Shakespearean drama
• Shakespeare and the city comedy
• Shakespeare, sex and the city
• The city in early modern tragedy
• Representations of the city in film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays
• London’s Shakespeare
• Shakespeare and the modern metropolis

The Shakespeare Jahrbuch, the Yearbook of the German Shakespeare Society, is a peer-reviewed journal. It offers contributions in German and English, scholarly articles, an extensive section of book reviews, and reports on Shakespeare productions in the German-speaking world. It also documents the activities of the Shakespeare Society.

Papers to be published in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch should be formatted according to our style sheet, which can be downloaded from our website.

Please send an electronic version of your manuscript (of about 5,000 words) to the editor by 31 March 2010.

Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting
Shakespeare Jahrbuch
Institut für Englische Philologie
Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
D-14195 Berlin
E-mail: jahrbuch(at)shakespeare-gesellschaft.de