Performing Shakespearean Appropriations

This collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on Shakespeare’s afterlives in tribute to Christy Desmet. Contributors explore the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across a range of performance topics, from book history to the novel to television, cinema, and digital media.

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Performing Shakespearean Appropriations explores the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across time periods and through a range of performance topics. The ten essays, moving from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, address uses of Shakespeare in the novel, television, cinema, and digital media. Drawing on Christy Desmet's work, several contributors figure appropriation as a posthumanist enterprise that engages with electronic Shakespeare by dismantling, reassembling, and recreating Shakespearean texts in and for digital platforms. The collection thus looks at media and performance technologies diachronically in its focus on Shakespeare’s afterlives. Contributors also construe the notion of “performance” broadly to include performances of selves, of communities, of agencies, and of authenticity—either Shakespeare’s, or the user’s, or both. The essays examine both specific performances and larger trends across media, and they consider a full range of modes: from formal and professional to casual and amateur; from the fixed and traditional to the ephemeral, the itinerant, and the irreverent.