The Shakespeare Multiverse

Fandom as Literary Praxis

Valerie M. Fazel, Louise Geddes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000463576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis argues that fandom offers new models for a twenty-first century reading practice that embraces affective pleasure and subjective self-positioning as a means of understanding a text. Part critical study, part source book, The Shakespeare Multiverse suggests that fannish contributions to the ongoing expansion of the object that we call Shakespeare is best imagined as a multiverse, encompassing different worlds that consolidate the various perspectives that different fans bring to Shakespeare. Our concept of the multiverse redefines 'Shakespeare' not as a singular body of work, but as space where a process of inquiry and cultural memory – memories in the making, and those already made – is influenced and shaped by the technologies available to the reader. Characteristic of fandom is an intertextual reading strategy that we term cyborg reading, an approach that accommodates the varied elements of identity, politics, culture, sexuality, and race that shape the ways that Shakespeare is explored and appropriated throughout fannish reading communities. The Shakespeare Multiverse intersects literary theory, fan studies, and popular culture as it traverses Shakespeare fandom from the 1623 Folio to the age of the Internet, exploring the different textures of fan affect, from those who firmly uphold fidelity to the text to those who sit on the very edge of the fandom, threatening to cross over into Shakespearean anti-fandom. By recognizing the literary value of fandom, The Shakespeare Multiverse offers a new approach to literary criticism that challenges the limits of hegemonic authority and recognizes the value of a joyfully speculative critical praxis.

1 The Archontic Multiverse A Theory of Shakespeare’s Big Bang

DOI: 10.4324/9780429289507-4

Conventional assumptions place the canon as the gravitational center of Shakespeare appropriation. Such a trajectory, that begins with Shakespeare and radiates out, depends on the supremacy of the written words that make up Shakespeare’s text, in particular the plays as they appeared in the 1623 Folio. However, unlike DC’s multiverse’s 52 storyworlds, each centered around the House of Heroes as its narrative axis,¹ Shakespeare’s multiverse cannot be structured around a single central core. Its sheer diversity of constituent critical and creative universes, worlds, and gravity-free data elides any sense of logical stability, curation, or master plan. Shakespeare affiliates in the multiverse are unstable, and may be capricious and variable. They move in unexpected directions, conditions that are sometimes viewed as exciting and generative but, equally, can also be undervalued and ignored. The archontic nature of the Shakespeare multiverse forestalls a fixed sense of beginning or end, and so when users traverse the multiverse their starting location and perspective of Shakespeare is particular to their situation. That is to say, an encounter with a particular Shakespeare is dependent on the cyborg reader’s point of entry, itself contingent on any prior experience of Shakespeare and/or the multiverse, as well as the cognitive processes that drive affective logic.

Perhaps because of its affiliation with subjective positioning and reader-response theory, Stephen Ahern notes that it is only since 1995 that ‘affective logic’ has begun to garner attention within literary studies. To date, the result is a mere handful of studies (Ahern 2019, 2), but the place of affect is tacit to our book’s claims for cyborg reading. Affect dictates how the cyborg reader blends sources and the choices reveal what drives fan reading. For example, Cumberbatch Critter’s 2014 fanfic, “For You, Much Ado,” overlay’s the CW network’s television show Sleepy Hollow onto Much Ado About Nothing using the fic device of a Shakespearean rehearsal as a means of exploring the sexual tension between the two lead characters on the show. As they perform Beatrice and Benedick’s declarations of love from the fourth act, the author’s understanding of Shakespeare’s play as a romance becomes evident. The fic, however, ends before Beatrice makes her demand for Benedick to “kill Claudio” (4.1.289), isolating the relationship between the would-be lovers as the core of the Shakespeare play (Cumberbatch Critter). Acknowledging the extent to which our affective interests shape reading practices potentially locates the professional scholar in the same arena of use as fans like Cumberbatch Critter and exposes scholarly dependence on the interpretive communities around us for Shakespeare’s ongoing ability to generate meaning. Additionally, as Melissa Gregg argues, “[t]he affective properties of scholarly voices offer the chance to spread conceptual advances and the theoretical insight further than might be the case [in the typical practice of scholarly work]. Adopting an affective register can build momentum for a particular claim, amplifying a message beyond the confine of institutional settings” (2006, 18). We hope our book and its claims appeal to a broader audience than our own Shakespeare colleagues.

In this chapter we argue that fanon – fan canon – transcends canon as key to Shakespeare appropriation. Fanon emerges from cyborg reading, a product of affective responses to a text that result in shared ideas and concepts embraced by the larger fan community as part of the text’s (or character’s) storyline. Historically, literary works designated as ‘canon’ within western literature were determined by academics, scholars and critics; while their determination may have appeared to have been objective – measuring one body of work against another and perhaps all other literature – essentially, canon inclusion was subjective, a measurement of affect, a feeling for one text over another. Likewise fanon develops from an affective position. Fanon, however, “originates with fans rather than the official canon” (“What is Fanon?”), and sometimes starts with a detail or assumption that “gets widely distributed and becomes a major fanon trope … it makes its way around fandom and becomes a well-known idea” (Romano 2016). Although it is difficult to trace its origins, the portmanteau of fan + canon resulting in fanon appears in fandom glossaries as a term that signals “the pieces of information fans make up to supplement” a cultural object’s canon (Romano 2016). Fanon contributes to the archontic expansion of the Shakespeare multiverse, drawing renewed attention to the complexities and characteristics of “archive” in an age when the role of “archivist” is pre-empted by users, and curation is a user practice of data mining and tagging, shifting the emphasis on the generation of meaning from Shakespeare onto the fan. Fanon enables the constructions that lead to new understandings of a literary text, new readings of narratives that emerge through the

overlapping forces – the top-down process of the creator/author establishing an official storyline/characters and the bottom-up process of individual fans and groups of fans who push back to get the product they want, whether in a direct way, such as fan letters and campaigns, or in indirect ways, such as fan-fiction, fan videos and other fanworks (, Chaney and Liebler 2007).

This middle point, this convergence of author and fan, is the locus for fanon.

Fanon extends to Shakespeare studies a language and theory of Shakespeare appropriation that recognizes the extent to which Shakespeare is shaped by those who use him for their own affective purposes. As both a process of crowdsourced knowledge and formulated assumptions promulgated by people who agree on particular representations of a textual element, fanon illustrates how an appropriation can become a concurred truth. Fanon extrapolates meaning out of a text and feeds it back into circulation, outpacing canon as an authoritative voice and making new claims on Shakespeare as cultural memory. In so doing, fanon empowers new worlds and creates a dialogic that perpetually expands Shakespeare’s reach. For example, one of the most common examples of Shakespeare fanon concerns Lady Macbeth. A general assumption of performance and readings is that she alone is responsible for her husband’s murder of their king, and this belief has taken such a hold that it transcends critical reading to become fan canon. The oversimplification of act two, scene three, and the dismissal of Macbeth’s own “horrible imaginings” (1.4.138) that drive him to propose regicide to his wife encourages a stereotypical gendered rendering of Lady Macbeth as a dangerous seductress. Fanon extends to Shakespeare studies a language and theory of Shakespeare appropriation that recognizes the extent to which Shakespeare is shaped by the fans who use him for their own affective purposes. Fanon celebrates and transforms what has gone before, creating a throughline that connects the practices of Heminge and Condell to the artistic work of Mya Gosling’s Good Tickle Brain and asserts the place of ideological, cultural, and technological change in the processes of textual consumption.

Fanon and the Folio

The Shakespeare multiverse exists in part because of the new bibliographers’ deconstruction of the 1623 Folio as an authorial text. Although the multiverse does not orbit a fixed axis, its traceable point of origin, the publication of the 1623 Folio, is an example of how fanon consolidates into something definitive. The folio, built out of fragments that include both the quartos and less stable ephemera such as prompt books, embodied as Complete Works, suggests an authorized corpus that constitutes the Shakespeare canon. The 1623 Folio is Shakespeare’s “big bang” moment, the act of fandom that reorganized performance data into written matter and, in so doing, created wider, more enduring access to the work. The common narrative behind the 1623 Folio is that it started its life as a collaboration, either a festschrift, or a more explicitly commercial venture between Shakespeare fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, publisher Edward Blout, and stationers William and Isaac Jaggard. As Valerie Wayne and Emma Smith each summarize, the folio likely passed under the critical purview of additional contributors, with Ben Jonson most notable for his preface address ‘to the Reader’ (Wayne 2015; Smith 2016a). Furthermore, Smith reminds us that the 1623 Folio “had a long gestation. Some of its contents had their first theatrical presentation some thirty years previously; others must have had their genesis in Shakespeare’s experiences or reading decades before that” (Smith 2016a, 1), suggesting that it emerged over time, as the nascent Shakespeare fandom grew. We cannot know for certain what was gained or lost in the transformation from stage to page, but arguably, the 1623 Folio represents the first material evidence of Shakespeare fandom, wrought by the collaboration of Shakespeare’s peers and admirers, initiating fanon’s leverage in four hundred years of appropriation.

‘Canon’ has long been accompanied by assumptions of authorial intent. What is found to be “true” or “factual” about an appropriated text is implicitly tied to a sense of the original, and logic suggests that, as such, the ‘original’ is sanctioned by its creator. Yet the idea of an original Shakespeare is undermined by a critical contemplation of the many hands through which the work has passed. To wit, recent developments in new bibliography studies have drawn attention to the materiality behind the 1623 Folio in order to illustrate the posthumous consolidation and redaction of Shakespeare’s drama into a singular corpus, a process that was no more the work of one individual than it was Shakespeare himself. It is worth noting that this acknowledgment of the materiality of early book production is remarkably similar to the work of new media theorists who examine the pressures that are put on the Shakespeare text as it migrates across platforms and media. In her 2015 exploration of the transmedia migration of 1990s Shakespeare films, Sarah Hatchuel observes that a wide body of users, “theatre companies or broadcasting networks, or … individuals who interact parasocially and performatively” and who take materials from 90s films “as if they had become as canonical as Shakespeare plays, as if they were Shakespeare’s plays” (Hatchuel 2015, para. 5). To acknowledge a trajectory where Shakespeare migrates from medium to medium, from user to user, supports the argument that cyborg reading hails back to the very inception of a canonized Shakespeare.

As a result of its self-critical subjective stance, fanon can accommodate the non-human agency of a text. This migration between platforms, genres, and user enables Shakespeare to accrue meaning that is then validated by the force of its interpretive community. Subconsciously or intentionally, we users each create our own rules for how we might navigate the Shakespeare multiverse, selecting a recognizable world as ‘our’ universe, or adopting a set of criteria as ground zero for exploration and further acts of worldbuilding. If Shakespeare is accessed, for example, via Tom Hiddleston’s fandom, then Coriolanus might become one of the first texts a fan encounters due to the widespread proliferation of the Donmar 2014 production. Moreover, as framed through fanfic, which frequently highlights homoerotic pairings as slash, any subsequent reading of the play is already conditioned to privilege the relationship between Caius Martius and Aufidius. These rules are shaped by our own affective drives, the manner that we receive the material in question, and the paratexts that frame the nascent immersion in the Shakespeare we have discovered. Our movement through the multiverse leaves digital traces: through clicks, through book purchases or movie downloads, in the sharing of new creative and critical appropriations, or the conversations that take place in classrooms and theatre lobbies. In most cases, our exploration of Shakespeare is highly individualized, and our interests in its reimaginations and appropriation often stretch well beyond the literary. All these ephemera potentially become absorbed into a larger understanding of Shakespeare. Cyborg readers who traverse the multiverse engage in acts of affirmation creating and supporting new blended networks of Shakespearean reading. They encourage headcanons and fanon, new articulations of Shakespeare, new visions and versions that become incrementally true as they accrue communal acceptance.

Canon’s inherent flexibility means that when, for example, theatergoers rejoice at seeing an original version of Shakespeare, they, in fact, attended a composite object that absorbed the text’s material manifestation, its cultural history, and the infinite number of variants that could equally be described as Shakespeare. Cyborg reading accepts both the premise of canon, “which connects the diverse backgrounds and locations of community members, names a common ground” and the corresponding acknowledgment that any “claim about canon nevertheless raises the specter of its opposite” (Driscoll 2006, 88) evoking, in this case, fanon. To wit, canon and fanon are inextricable from one another. As Artifice.com commenter Francisc Nona notes, the emergence of canon is, in many ways, dependent on the potentiality of fanon: “canon has always had its fanon insofar as a canonical work requires a certain apparatus of replication. Nothing is canonical if it does not get to the point where it invites imitation.” In the early phases of fan studies, fanon referred to the fan fiction practice of establishing “something [about a text] not in the canon, invented by a fanfic writer but convincing enough to be adopted by others” (Pugh 2006, 242), emphasising authenticity to the text as fanon’s defining feature. Busse and Hellekson are more reticent about the proximity between canon and fanon. They note:

Most important treatments of fan texts are understandings of canon, the events presented in the media source that provide the universe, setting, and characters, and fanon, the events created by the fan community in a particular fandom and repeated pervasively throughout the fantext. Fanon often creates particular details or character readings even though canon does not fully support it – or, at times, outright contradicts it. Complete agreement on what comprises canon is rarely possible, even with repeated viewings of the primary source, because of the range of individual interpretation.

(Busse and Hellekson 2006, 9)

For Busse and Hellekson, fanon is a site of constant negotiation with both the canonical text and the expectations of other communities within the fandom. They also acknowledge that the terms themselves “are always in dispute” (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 9) and emphasize on the power of the fan community to endorse and circulate particular perspectives, gaining momentum as they are passed around. Busse and Hellekson’s critical sketch of the relationship between canon and fanon could not better spell out Shakespeare’s long history of remediation. The force with which fan ideas have been “convincing enough to be adopted by others” speaks, in particular, to the intellectual industry built up over centuries in response to the idea of Shakespearean authority. To apply Busse and Hellekson to Shakespearean literary praxis, however, demands both a reconsideration of canon and a recognition of fanon as a process. As praxis, fanon not only accommodates canon, but can also absorb the active cultivation of an environment whereby a fan constructed truth can acquire a validity that opens up new understandings of a text. If canon is the amassed data that makes up Shakespeare’s so-called original texts, then fanon is a conflation of data drawn from, and created by, everybody and everything else that subjects Shakespeare to multiple successive reworkings.

Driven as it is by affective desire for Shakespeare, fanon is deeply ingrained in the values of the community that builds it; consequently and implicitly, the presumed supremacy of the 1623 Folio is always under pressure. Amy Cook’s use of Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory demonstrates how the cognitive impulses at play in the creation of fanon organize and absorb the amassed data that includes both human and nonhuman elements, allowing, in theory, for the contamination of canon (whatever that may be) by fanon (Cook 2010, 344). For example, fanon facilitates a historicist understanding of the 1623 Folio as Shakespeare’s intention. Shakespeare’s iconography and the inescapable structures of patriarchy that promote notions of singular male genius facilitate accommodations in the reader that conflate what the cyborg reader experiences with what has already been established by the fandom as worth knowing. Or a cyborg reader might conflate Patrick Stewart’s performance of Macbeth with their understanding of him from the Star Trek franchise and use this to generate new readings. Cook explains such processes:

Blends are constructions of meaning based on projection of information from two or more input spaces into a blended space, such that the blended meaning contains information and structure from more than one space … [i]t is not a combination or a blurring of two ideas, it is a complicated network evoked and integrated to create a new idea.

(Cook 2010, 11)

Similarly, Graham Holderness argues for “the concept of ‘collision’, signifying the impact of a number of forces and objects upon one another … accounting for what sometimes happens to produce the phenomenon we know as ‘Shakespeare’” (2014, 17). Holderness recommends that readers view “creative collisions [as] remarkable” in that “particle collision between two [disparate or similar] objects” can spark new creations (2014, 17). While Holderness’s collisions offers a useful metaphor for critically thinking about newly created narrative work, we rely on the term “assemblages” in this book. Assemblage more tightly aligns with the purposeful cognitive impulses that become integ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction The Multiverse and the Pleasures of Cyborg Reading
• Part 2 The Patient must Minister to Himself, or William and the Doctor
• 1 The Archontic Multiverse
• Part 3 The Prince’s Shadow
• 2 “The Thing Itself”
• Part 4 Four Songs for Lady Macbeth
• 3 Taking Out the (Shakespeare) Trash
• Part 5 Hamlet’s Buzz
• 4 Your Fave is Problematic
• Part 6 The Red Right Hand
• Conclusion Shakespeare and the Cyborg Self
• Bibliography
• Index