The title of this collection, Shifting the Scene, adapts words from one of the Choruses in Henry V. Its essays try, without denying authority to the text and the theatre, to widen the scene of inquiry to include other institutions, like education, politics, language, and the arts, and to juxtapose the constructions of Shakespeare and his works that have been produced by them. However, as in Henry V, there is also a geographical dimension. The collection goes beyond England and the English-speaking world and focuses on Europe (including Britain). It brings together 17 essays by leading authorities and promising young scholars in the field
The world is spinning around us and we are spinning with it. When changes occur at the geopolitical level, inevitable changes also occur in people’s identity and in the way they see and represent the world. This book looks at this world with new eyes, approaching contemporary history (and herstory) from a scholarly perspective that cancels borders. Emphasis here is laid on migration, geopolitics, global citizenship, human rights, the EU and the non-EU, and East and West, as represented in fiction and drama or translated on television. The first part of the volume deals with migration and alterations in the non-Western world, with constant references to September 11, terrorism and wars, and the Syrian refugee crisis, before the focus moves on to one of the most important migration hosts nowadays, the European Union, discussing its expansion to the East, French President Macron’s call for renewal, and, lastly, a possible beginning of the end, announced by Brexit. This volume is a mirror of the discourses of globalization, one that makes the old self-other dichotomy obsolete. We are all selves in the eye of the storm that is raving around us, bringing change with it.