Witchcraft and paganism exert an insistent pressure from the margins of midcentury British detective fiction. This Element investigates the appearance of witchcraft and paganism in the novels of four of the most popular female detective authors of the era: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell. The author approaches the theme of witchcraft and paganism not simply as a matter of content but as an influence which shapes the narrative and its possibilities. The 'witchy' detective novel, as the author calls it, brings together the conventions of Golden Age fiction with the images and enchantments of witchcraft and paganism to produce a hitherto unstudied mode of detective fiction in the midcentury.
During the mid-twentieth century, a dramatic shift was taking place in the conceptualization of Early Modern drama. The internal tensions which had always beset the category of "Elizabethan" drama reached a critical point, and from that crisis the concept of "the Jacobean" emerged in all its horrific glory. Pascale Aebischer's work on the Jacobean has set the terms of debate in two ways. Firstly, her metacritical history in the volume Jacobean Drama has traced the appearance of the term in scholarship and its shifting reputation amongst academics. Secondly, her development of the concept of the "contemporary Jacobean" (notably in Screening Early Modern Drama Today) has drawn on the work of Susan Bennett to demonstrate the ways in which Jacobean drama has provided a source for critical, dissident and resistant theatre and film in the late twentieth century. 1 She has identified works such as Mike Figgis' Hotel, Derek Jarman's Edward II and Alex Cox's Revenger's Tragedy as exemplars of this "contemporary Jacobean" style, which is consciously deviant, transgressive, irreverent and anachronistic, setting itself up in opposition to the tradition of "heritage" Shakespeare films such as Branagh and Thompson's Much Ado About Nothing and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love. Aebischer's ideas have been extended and debated by a number of other critics, including Courtney Lehmann, Jennifer Clement, and the scholars who contributed to a special issue of the journal Interdisciplinary
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This article draws on recent scholarship on Shakespearean allusions and crime fiction to develop an in-depth exploration of Agatha Christie's quotations from the playwright. These quotations do not tend to point to the murderer or give clues to the plot, but fall into three major categories. In some novels she uses them to interpolate the reader within the layers of intertextuality within crime fiction, aligning them with the author and with the detective rather than other characters. In other novels she uses discussions of Shakespeare to position her characters in the midcentury "feminine middlebrow" mode of novels identified by Nicola Humble. In a trio of late novels, her characters use reflections on how Macbeth should be staged to gain insights about the dangerous worlds they inhabit. The article examines how the novels engage with the Shakespearean text, but also with the shifting conceptions of Shakespeare which developed during the twentieth century. It reveals a sophisticated set of textual strategies within Christie's novels, which debate the meaning of Shakespeare's plays, and stage controversies over the ways in which those meanings should be accessed and reproduced.
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