This volume came into being as a result of the NEW FACES project (“Facing Europe in Crisis: Shakespeare’s World and Present Challenges”), a three-year-long Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership of nine European universities, initiated in the academic year 2016/2017. In the seminars and workshops offered during the intensive programme sessions students were encouraged to explore the cultural, political, and economic functions of the early modern theatre, especially the works by William Shakespeare, and its wider historical and literary context. The essays presented in this collection demonstrate how the past and the present, theory and practice, are inherently interwoven and how the understanding of the crises of the past helps to face contemporary local and global contexts. To accentuate the international character of the project and the value of communication among European nations above their differences in order to work through the current problems together, local languages of the partner universities were present, side by side today’s lingua franca, English, in the form of summaries, abstracts, descriptions of events and in dissemination materials. In this volume this appreciation of unity in diversity is reflected in the abstracts of each text, as they are cited in two languages – English and the native language of the author.

The student essays collected in this book constitute a representative sample of the project’s leading topics. Václav Kyllar’s paper examines the European migrant crisis, especially the dialogue between the Western society and the immigrants, perceived as the Other. He analyses the problem by referring to Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, which showcases the early modern foundations on which Europe stands today. The uneasy relationship between Shylock and the Christians, with its alienation, inequality, and discrimination, mirrors the tensions that can arise from the conflict with a contrasting identity in a heterogeneous society. Jacques Derrida’s philosophical work sheds light on encountering the Other and the binary of hospitality and hostility towards them. Kyllar draws an analogy between such a reading of Shylock’s situation and the current treatment of immigrants, proposing a re-evaluation of the present-day European politics.

“Shylock, the Undoubtable Other” also focuses on the phenomenon of otherness in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.