Call for Papers
Shakespeare Jahrbuch 163 (2027)
“Shakespeare and Truth: Practices and Performances”
When it comes to notions of truth, political, cultural and philosophical debates of recent years have been dominated by concepts and bywords that stress the relational but also contested nature of truth, such as “post-truth”, “post-factual”, “fake news”, “alternative facts”, “debunking” etc. While some of these concerns and ideas may have some relevance for discussions of Shakespeare, the 2027 volume of Shakespeare Jahrbuch on “Shakespeare and Truth: Practices and Performances” will focus on the historical dimensions of truth and on how Shakespeare’s works engage in, but also reflect on practices, semantics and poetics involved in the production, enforcement and interrogation of truth claims. The editorial board therefore invites contributions that approach concepts and performances of truth in Shakespeare from various perspectives.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- historical discourses and practices of producing knowledge and truth (philosophy, theology, law, historiography, astronomy, new science)
- truth and lying in political and historiographical discourses (Machiavelli, Bacon, Tacitus, Polydore Vergil, Thomas Morus)
- literature and truth: early modern poetics and poetic truth (Sidney)
- truth and religion: religious conversion and equivocation in post-reformation England; the Bible as source of truth; role of Bible translations; religious prophecies
- truth and the material world: objects and their functions in the play world (as objects of evidence, detractors from truth, or mobilisers of affects) and in the theatre (production of authenticity, guiding of attention, judgement)
- praxeological perspectives: involvement of specific practices, agents, objects, practice-material arrangements, and artefacts in producing, enforcing and challenging truth (claims); how affordances of objects cooperate in producing or undermining truth claims (rings, chains, money, handkerchief, headgear, bracelets etc.)
- semantics of truth: various meanings of “true”: as in “legitimate, loyal, reliable, practical, constant, good, useful, probable, correct, exact, genuine;” “true prince”, “true friend”, “true lovers”, “true servant”, “true numbers”, “true qualities”
- truth and figurative speech; use of tropes (metaphors, similes, puns, irony etc.) by fool figures; in riddles, prophecies, dreams, visions
- law, judgement, and justice on the stage; evidence and knowledge production; making evident what is not self-evident
- Shakespeare’s theatre as a site of truth production; as experiment, laboratory (Bacon), “anatomical theatre”
- genre-specific perspectives: how generic conventions affect (re)presentation of truth claims on the stage
- historical performance context: how performance conditions (theatre, stage, staging, audiences and audience behaviour, company, actors, acting style etc.) affect dramatic engagement with truth claims
Please send an electronic version of your article to the general editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Prof. Isabel Karremann (email: karremann@es.uzh.ch) and the guest editor for this volume, Prof. Roland Weidle (email: roland.weidle@rub.de). The deadline for submissions (in English or German, c. 6,000 words plus a 200 word-abstract) is 31 May 2026. Please observe the style sheet, which can be downloaded from the website of the German Shakespeare Society. Articles are selected for publication on the basis of a double-blind peer-review system.