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.
Call for Papers: Shakespeare Seminar Online 2026
At the end of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure – a play full of cunning disguises, performed righteousness, and hidden corruption – Isabella speaks her truth. While she was silenced before by Angelo’s “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” (1.4.168), she now appeals to the Duke and the public to listen to her “true complaint” and give her “justice! Justice Justice! Justice!” (5.1.26-27) Panicking, the accused attempts to discredit Isabella: “she will speak most bitterly and strange” (5.1.41), Angelo proclaims, but in a move that anticipates Gisèle Pelicot’s “shame must change sides”, Isabella flips the narrative: She picks up on Angelo’s word “strange”, only to emphasise that the man’s behaviour, and not her speaking, is what is strange: “Most strange: but yet most truly will I speak.” (5.1.42) After listing Angelo’s wrongdoings, Isabella reiterates how “this is all as true as it is strange”, but then adds: “Nay, it is ten times true, for truth is truth / To th’e end of reck’nin”. (5.1.50-52)
While this scene from Measure for Measure, with its almost eerily contemporary relevance, highlights the irreversible nature of certain facts, Shakespeare’s plays also, again and again, dramatise the relativity and contingency of the concept of “truth”. Truth is subject to individual perception (“’‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’” [Hamlet 1.2.79]), performance (“I am not what I am” [Othello 1.1.71]) and sometimes even denial and connivance (“When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies” [Sonnet 138.1-2]). In light of the many resonances between Shakespeare’s works and contemporary discourses on truth in our post-truth moment, this seminar seeks to explore the contested field of truth in and through Shakespeare’s works. Therein, we follow John Drakakis’s assertion that “to understand the poisonous implications of the world of ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-fact’ that now confronts us, we do not need more scientists, or more disseminators of information (a.k.a. spin doctors). What we need is a greater public exposure to the literature and drama that prefigure and comment critically upon the crises that they have historically generated. In short, we need to go back to Shakespeare”.¹ We therefore invite papers that engage with, but are in no way restricted to, the following topics:
- Judicial / racial / philosophical/ social / political / queer / ecological / theatrical / religious truth(s) in Shakespeare
- Truth-telling in Shakespeare
- Shifting concepts of truth: Shakespeare’s time vs. the present day
- Shakespeare and fake news – now and then
- Shakespeare’s relevance for contemporary post-truth discourses
- Political (mis)appropriations of Shakespeare for the sake of ‘truth’
- Biographical (un)truths about Shakespeare
- Shakespeare and conspiracy theories
- Negotiating socio-political truths in the 21st century via Shakespearean performance and adaptation
- Werktreue / Negotiating fidelity as ‘truth’ in adaptation studies
- Whose Shakespeare – Whose truth?
- Dismantling canonical truths
Our seminar will address these issues with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage, which will take place from 24–26 April 2026 in Bochum, Germany. As critical input for the discussion, we invite papers of no more than 15 minutes that present concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic. Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) and short bio notes by 15 December 2025 to the seminar convenors:
Dr. Marlene Dirschauer, University of Hamburg: marlene.dirschauer@uni-hamburg.de
Dr. Jonas Kellermann, University of Konstanz: jonas.kellermann@uni-konstanz.de
The Seminar provides a forum for established as well as young scholars to discuss texts and contexts. Participants of the seminar will subsequently be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for publication in Shakespeare Seminar Online (SSO). While we cannot offer travel bursaries, the association will arrange for the accommodation of all participants in a hotel close to the main venues. For more information, please contact Marlene Dirschauer and Jonas Kellermann. For more information about the events and publications also see: https://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/.
Download the PDF of the call for papers here.
¹ John Drakakis. “Shakespeare, Tragedy, Post-truth: Hamlet, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra.” Law and the Humanities: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato (de Gruyter, 2019), 5-25 (25).
Martin Lehnert Prize
The Martin Lehnert Prize, donated by the former president of the German Shakespeare Society, is intended to honour students or young academics who have made outstanding contributions to the work and impact of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries or the culture of Shakespeare’s time, its reception and/or communication.
The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding final thesis (Magister, Master’s, Staatsexamen), a dissertation or a documented student project (theatre production, exhibition, etc.). The prize money is €2,000 for a dissertation, €500 for a thesis and €500 for a student project. The prize is aimed in particular at the departments of English, German and Theatre Studies.
Nominations can be made for German or English-language papers written or submitted at universities in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Work produced at universities in non-German-speaking countries by young academics from Germany, Austria or Switzerland can generally also be nominated. The academic supervisors of the respective work are authorised to make nominations.
The Martin Lehnert Prize is awarded at the spring conference of the German Shakespeare Society in April.
Proposed works (from the current year or the two previous years) can be submitted to the German Shakespeare Society in two copies and accompanied by an expert opinion by 15 December.
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft e.V., Windischenstraße 4-6, 99423 Weimar,
office@shakespeare-gesellschaft.de
Shakespeare Scholarship of the German Shakespeare Foundation in cooperation with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Applications close January 31
The scholarships are aimed at doctoral candidates with an excellent university degree who can demonstrate a conceptual connection between the research project to be realised in Weimar and their dissertation. The newly established graduate scholarships focus on the early modern period in the broader sense, including the Baroque period and the processes of its reception and transformation up to the present day. Interdisciplinary and comparative projects on theatre, Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as on the transmission and reception of the early modern period in Germany and especially in Weimar Classicism are also particularly welcome. Funding is available for ambitious projects for the realisation of which the collections of the Klassik Stiftung are essential.
Julia Jennifer Beine is the first recipient of the Shakespeare Scholarship, April-June 2024.