Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorists critically investigate the relationship between early modern culture and contemporary political and technological changes concerning the idea of the 'human.' The volume covers the tragedies King Lear and Hamlet in particular, but also provides posthumanist readings of other Shakespearean plays.

BRUCE BOEHRER Editor of A Cultural History of Animals in The Renaissance (2007) and co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
ADAM MAX COHEN Former Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA
GABRIEL EGAN Co-editor of the journals Theatre Notebook and Shakespeare
RAINER EMIG Chair of English Literature and Culture at Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany
MARIE-DOMINIQUE GARNIER Professor of English Literature and Gender studies at the University of Paris 8-Vincennes, France
DAVID B. KING Co-author of the screenplay Halsted and taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Colorado State University, USA
LAURENT MILESI Reader in 20th-Century English/American Literature and Critical Theory at Cardiff University, UK
ANDY MOUSLEY Reader in Critical Theory and Renaissance Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
MAREILE PFANNEBECKER PhD graduate from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, UK
NEIL RHODES Professor of English Literature and Cultural History at the University of St. Andrews, UK
MARK ROBSON Teacher at the University of Nottingham, UK

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Shakespeare Ever After; S.Herbrechter PART I: READING SHAKESPEARE 'AFTER' HUMANISM The Science of the Heart: Shakespeare, Kames and the Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Human; N.Rhodes 'A passion so strange, outrageous, and so variable:' The Invention of the Inhuman in The Merchant of Venice; S.Herbrechter Shakespeare and the Character of Sheep; B.Boehrer Homeostasis in Shakespeare; G.Egan PART II: 'POSTHUMANIST' READINGS Care, Scepticism, Speaking in the Plural: Posthumanisms and Humanisms in King Lear; A.Mousley Cyborg Coriolanus / Monster Body Politic; M.Pfannebecker Renaissance Self-Unfashioning: Shakespeare's Late Plays as Exercises in Unravelling the Human; R.Emig Surviving Truth (Measure for Measure); M.Robson PART III: HAMLET, 'POSTHUMANIST' (Post-)Heideggerian Hamlet; L.Milesi Loam, Moles, and l'homme: Reversible Hamlet; M-D.Garnier 'This'?': Posthumanism and the Graveyard Scene in Hamlet; I.Callus Afterword: Post-Posthumanist Me: An Illiterate Reads Shakespeare; A.M.Cohen & D.B.King Index