Located at the intersection of new historicism and the "new formalism," historical formalism is one of the most rapidly growing and important movements in early modern studies, addressing at once the theoretical challenges posed by history and form. Applying historical formalism to Shakespeare's works, the essays in this collection bring history to formalism and form to historicism, inviting scholars to rethink the familiar critical, pedagogical, and epistemological categories and assumptions of formal and historical criticism.

Stephen Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA.

Introduction, Stephen Cohen; Part 1 Historicizing Form; Chapter 1 The Materiality of Shakespearean Form, Douglas Bruster; Chapter 2 Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage, Jean E. Howard; Chapter 3 "I would I were at home": Representations of Dwelling Places and Havens in Cymbeline, Heather Dubrow; Chapter 4 Storm versus Story: Form and Affective Power in Shakespeare's Romances, Christopher Cobb; Part 2 Re-Forming History; Chapter 5 Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure, Marissa Greenberg; Chapter 6 Partial Views: Literary Allusion, Teleological Form, and Contingent Readings in Hamlet, Nicholas Moschovakis; Chapter 7 Formalism and the Problem of History: Sonnets, Sequence, and the Relativity of Linear Time, R.L. Kesler; Chapter 8 Teaching Shakespeare and the Uses of Historical Formalism, Mary Janell Metzger;