Kristine Johanson: Shakespeare’s Golden Ages. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

• Lukas Lammers

Shakespeare’s Golden Ages advertises itself as an “intervention [that] resists trends in twentieth- and twenty-first-century nostalgia studies […] which tend to associate the nostalgic exclusively with a past-oriented political conservatism”. Kristine Johanson hopes to challenge this assumption by proposing to examine “Shakespeare’s use of nostalgia as a political rhetoric that is contingent not strictly on a desire for the past, but on a longing for the future”. However, the book is neither a systematic exploration of early modern nostalgia per se, nor is it a study of nostalgia across Shakespeare’s works. Instead, it is a more focused analysis of some of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays (including his Roman history) that aims to show how the playwright, by drawing on nostalgic discourses prevalent at the time, developed a unique dramaturgy that encourages a fundamentally skeptical view towards nostalgia. Arguing that Shakespeare “resist[s] […] the idea of anything like a historical ‘golden age’”, Johanson draws our attention to a more dynamic and varied set of “nostalgic topoi”.