ABSTRACT
Uncertainty about Shakespeare’s life and authorship opens a window to a form of existential exile, where the connections between a writer and his works seem perpetually suspended. Furthermore, although Shakespeare did not experience exile firsthand, conditions were such in early modern London and Europe that he may have come into frequent contact with the uprooted. Thus his plays profoundly engage with the multiple ways in which exile irreversibly disrupts both individual and community. Shakespeare dramatizes the psychological, linguistic, and social ruptures that might occur due to travel and travail, political and religious exile, and growing old.
