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Shakespeare's Re-Visions of History provides close readings of important, widely studied Shakespeare plays, and puts forward some unique arguments. In The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Othello, Measure for Measure, and Hamlet, Shakespeare depicts how violence is made possible by social collusion, both deliberate and inadvertent. Bystanders' acts of omission and commission allow groups such as Jews, old people, and women to be violently mistreated, and vulnerable individuals to be silenced and excluded. Vanita shows how Shakespeare's dramaturgy draws attention to this collusion through choric comments, understated irony, play with parts of speech, and songs. Later plays, such as King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and Henry the Eighth, contemplate what might happen when society collaborates with the powerless. Tyrants may still triumph but Shakespeare appeals to collective memory and imagination with images of female power, such as the Virgin Mary and the saints, which had been exiled by the Reformation. He recollects histories of miracle and resistance to present a vision of what a future open to forgiveness could look like.

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Ruth Vanita has authored several books, most recently The Broken Rainbow: Poems and Translations (2023); two novels, Memory of Light and A Slight Angle (2022; 2024); The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (2022); Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (2005; revd. edn. 2022), and over eighty scholarly articles. She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including Mahadevi Varma's My Family (2021) and Memory of Light as Pariyon ke Beech. She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India, and edited and translated On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (2023).

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