Call for book chapters: Reading the Coastline in Shakespeare’s Britain 

Edited collection, publisher TBC.

Editors: Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus

Contact emails: L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk / W.J.Angus@massey.ac.nz

Dates: 

• Deadline for submitting chapter proposals (400 words): 17 June 2024
• Notification of acceptance: 24 June 2024
• Deadline for final submissions (6000-8000 words): 31 August 2024

‘Wherefore to Dover?’ (King Lear)

Following the editors’ previous collaborations, Reading the Road from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (EUP, 2020) and Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (EUP, 2024), this edited collection draws together new research on dramatic and other representations of the lived environment of the coast in early modern Britain.

Behind Regan’s question ‘Wherefore to Dover?’ is the fear that ports were often ideal sites of invasion, one felt particularly about Dover, which the French dauphin Louis captured in the reign of King John, but also about Milford Haven where Henry VII landed his army before the Battle of Bosworth. With their metaphorical mouths, ports and harbours were points of vulnerability, and their subjection to wind, wave and tide also made them emblematic of instability, especially in the cases of once-thriving harbours which had silted up (Winchelsea) or coastal settlements claimed by the sea (Dunwich). They were places where customs duties were levied (or evaded), where disease could enter (see Weymouth’s surviving lazaret), and where questions of jurisdiction arose, especially about the legal status of ships. They may signify leaving or arrival, or meeting or taking leave of someone else. Coastlines, ports and harbours figure in King Lear and a number of other early modern plays, in Britain (Southampton and Harfleur in Henry V, Scarborough and Bristol in Edward II, Harlech in Richard II) and further afield, with Tunis, Alexandria, Algiers, Malta and other sites where cultures clashed, slaves were traded, and people of different faiths mingled. Shores and coastlines are also liminal spaces, subject to erosion, invasion, and tidal flux and sites of distinctive myths and folktales and almost always of distinctive occupations.

Chapters might focus on any of the above; or on ports, harbours and coastlines as physical or metaphorical transition points; on the nature of docks and shipyards; on dockside communities as marginal or as access points to the city; on fishing and whaling communities; on beaches, dunes and sea defences as permeable boundaries; on perceptions of literal or figurative coastal mobility; on the apparent ease of travel to the continent for the wealthy; on the coastal wager journeys of watermen; on commerce and the movement of goods; on death by drowning (half of all fatal accidents in the 16th century); on the margins of the sea as places of execution, especially for those executed for sea-crimes; or on coastlines in early modern cartography.

We welcome your ideas and invite chapters that consider early modern English plays or other early modern writing dealing with such places and raising any of these or other related topics and questions.   

 Please send proposals of 400 words and a brief biographical statement to Lisa Hopkins (L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk) and Bill Angus (w.j.angus@massey.ac.nz) by 17 June, 2024.