Fiction. Shakespeare'S Narrative Modes. XIX - 2020

"Narrative art takes many different forms: drama is one of those forms [...] and Shakespeare is one of the great narrative artists". Barbara Hardy's celebratory words about Shakespeare's narrative talent define his - and his dramatic characters' - relationship with storytelling. If one embraces Harold Bloom's well-known bardocentric paradigm that Shakespeare contributed to the "invention of the human", the binomial 'Shakespeare and storytelling' seems to plunge its roots in the very heart of the writer's dramatic universe. Starting from these assumptions, it is worth noticing that the Shakespearean canon encompasses disparate forms of narrating: memory, fantasy, report, dream, daydream, truth-telling, lying, slander, boast, confession, confidence, gossip, rumour, news and messages. A wide range of these forms are analyzed in this issue of "Fictions", whose approach to Shakespeare and storytelling employs a number of different hermeneutical methodologies, thus depicting a multi-layered canvas of 'narratives within the plays'. The articles cover multiple aspects of Shakespeare's narrative modes, thus offering a thorough examination of unexplored case studies and presenting new and interesting readings of some of Shakespeare's best-known narrations within his plays.