From fantasy and sci-fi to graphic novels, from boy scouts to board games, from blockbuster films to the cult of theatre, Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. Where there is popular culture there are fans and nerds and geeks. The essays in this collection on Shakespeare and Geek Culture take an innovative approach to the study of Shakespeare's cultural presences, situating his works, his image and his brand to locate and explore the nature of that geekiness that, the authors argue, is a vital but unrecognized feature of the world of those who enjoy and are obsessed by Shakespeare, whether they are scholars, film fans, theatre-goers or members of legions of other groupings in which Shakespeare plays his part. Working at the intersections of a wide range of fields – including fan studies and film analysis, cultural studies and fantasy/sci-fi theory – the authors demonstrate how the particularities of the connection between Shakespeare and geek culture generate new insights into the plays, poems and their larger cultural legacy in the 21st century.
From fantasy and sci-fi to graphic novels, from boy scouts to board games, from blockbuster films to the cult of theatre, Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. Where there is popular culture there are fans and nerds and geeks. The essays in this collection on Shakespeare and Geek Culture take an innovative approach to the study of Shakespeare's cultural presences, situating his works, his image and his brand to locate and explore the nature of that geekiness that, the authors argue, is a vital but unrecognized feature of the world of those who enjoy and are obsessed by Shakespeare, whether they are scholars, film fans, theatre-goers or members of legions of other groupings in which Shakespeare plays his part. Working at the intersections of a wide range of fields – including fan studies and film analysis, cultural studies and fantasy/sci-fi theory – the authors demonstrate how the particularities of the connection between Shakespeare and geek culture generate new insights into the plays, poems and their larger cultural legacy in the 21st century.
Celebrate Back to the Future with this illustrated adaptation of the cult classic script, retold in Shakespearean verse by the best-selling author of William Shakespeare's Star Wars. In the iconic film by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, teenaged Marty McFly travels back in time from the 1980s to the 1950s, changing the path of his parents’ destiny . . . as well as his own. Now fans of the movie can journey back even further—to the 16th century, when the Bard of Avon unveils his latest masterpiece: William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future! Every scene and line of dialogue from the hit movie is re-created with authentic Shakespearean rhyme, meter, and stage directions. This reimagining also includes jokes and Easter eggs for movie fans, from Huey Lewis call-outs to the inner thoughts of Einstein (the dog). By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll be convinced that Shakespeare had a time-traveling DeLorean of his own, speeding to our era so he could pen this time-tossed tale.
The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.
From their inception, 'low culture' comics have intersected with the 'high culture' of Shakespeare. This is the first book-length collection dedicated entirely to the exploration of this collision. Its chapters illuminate the ways in which different texts, time periods, politics, authors, media, approaches and forms interact. Ranging from Classic Comics to Marvel, from tebeo to manga, from independent to mainstream comics, texts explored include Y: The Last Man, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (The Sandman #19), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I Am Alfonso Jones, Marvel 1602, Doom 2099, and manga adaptations of The Tempest and Macbeth, among many others. As comic books and their big-screen progeny dominate mainstream popular culture, the association of Shakespeare with comics offers creators and critics tools with which to interrogate the place of Shakespeare within the English and global literary and cultural traditions. Shakespeare and Comics argues that, at a moment when the reassessment and reimagining of literary canons has become more urgent than ever, thinking about Shakespeare through the lens of comics invites us to imagine a literary and cultural landscape in which so-called 'great works' exist alongside and in equal conversation with marginalized writers, topics and forms.
The collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital shaming. Violence against women. Sexual bullying. Racial slurs and injustice. These are just some of the problems faced by today's young adults. Liberating Shakespeare explores how adaptations of Shakespeare's plays can be used to empower young audiences by addressing issues of oppression, trauma and resistance. Showcasing a wide variety of approaches to understanding, adapting and teaching Shakespeare, this collection examines the significant number of Shakespeare adaptations targeting adolescent audiences in the past 25 years. It examines a wide variety of creative works made for and by young people that harness the power of Shakespeare to address some of the most pressing questions in contemporary culture – exploring themes of violence, race relations and intersectionality. The contributors to this volume consider whether the representations of characters and situations in YA Shakespeare can function as empowering models for students and how these works might be employed within educational settings. This collection argues that YA Shakespeare represents the diverse concerns of today's youth and should be taken seriously as art that speaks to the complexities of a broken world, offering moments of hope for an uncertain future.
Publishing its nineteenth volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare’s work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output. Contributions are solicited from scholars across the field, from both hemispheres of the globe. New trends are evaluated from the point of view of established scholarship, and emerging work in the field is encouraged. Each issue includes a special section under the guidance of a specialist Guest Editor, along with coverage of the current state of the field in other aspects. An essential reference tool for scholars of early modern literature and culture, this annual publication captures, from year to year, current and developing thought in Shakespeare scholarship and theater practice worldwide. There is a particular emphasis on Shakespeare studies in global contexts.
"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Modeling his new approach to the critical category of fidelity, Newlin closely examines four twentieth-century films and tv series next to their Shakespearean counterparts within the contexts of their casting, genre, and reception. When a director of an unconventional version of The Tempest, for example, chooses to cast a white man as either Caliban or Miranda, they seemingly depart from Shakespeare's original text. Yet with these casting decisions, Newlin argues that The Master (2012) and Brigsby Bear (2017) eerily recall the realities of the early modern theater. The Master unexpectedly depicts something like the mythic "wild man" figure that informed The Tempest's early-colonial context, while Brigsby Bear invokes the exploitative, abusive treatment of boy-actors cast in female roles on the renaissance stage. Similarly, by not explicitly identifying as an adaptation of Othello, the cult comedy series Vice Principals (2016-17) frees itself to more faithfully capture the play's early modern comic context - while also illuminating the parallels between racist discourse in Shakespeare's age and our own. By reading these works as uncannily faithful adaptations, Newlin articulates something like the original response of Shakespeare's audience. Finally, Newlin demonstrates how a filmed adaptation might itself intervene in Shakespeare's critical reception. As a version of The Winter's Tale that ends tragically, the celebrated film Manchester By The Sea (2016) effectively rebuts Stanley Cavell's celebrated reading of Shakespeare's romance. Recognizing the parallels between Manchester By The Sea and The Winter's Tale, Newlin argues that Shakespeare views grief and guilt as forms of certainty - in contradistinction to Cavell's reading of the play as a portrait of skepticism. The first extended treatment of adaptation as a form of uncanny return, Uncanny Fidelity offers students and scholars of Shakespeare in film, adaptation studies, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory a critical framework to further engage the matter of personal response with deeper theoretical rigor. In redefining what constitutes adaptation, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can radically challenge our own conception of what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean"--
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, the Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 68 is 'Shakespeare, Origins and Originality'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic, and save and bookmark their results.
