The earliest stages of this book can be traced back to the powerful impression made on me by an outlandish 1982 production of Pericles directed by Toby Robertson , which I describe in the next section of this two-chapter Introduction. Inspired over two decades later by a series of productions directed by Ivo van Hove for Toneelgroep Amsterdam and the New York Theater Workshop ( The Misanthrope , The Little Foxes , Scenes from a Marriage , Roman Tragedies , and Kings of War , among others) and by deeply inventive collidings of canonical playtexts with material drawn from popular culture and their own fertile imaginations executed by New York’s Wooster Group under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte ( The Emperor Jones , Brace Up! , Poor Theater , Hamlet , and Troilus & Cressida , among others), I initially conceived of the project as a medium-specific study of experimental stage productions of Shakespeare. At a formative moment in its development, I considered doing for and with “experimental Shakespeare ” something similar to what Katherine Rowe and I had done for and with some of the more venturous Shakespeare films of the 1990s and beyond in New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007), that is, construct an alternative genealogy of Shakespeare performance and reproduction concurrent but at odds with more conventional ways of representing Shakespeare over the course of the last 100 years. But I wanted to avoid a too systematic survey of what counts, or doesn’t, as experimental Shakespeare and to avoid engaging too formally with that other problematic designation, avant-garde , which always seemed to be waiting in the wings to have its say.¹ Above all, I wanted to avoid writing anything amounting to a comprehensive history, which would require my secondhand engagement with fairly recent performances I had not experienced myself and older ones thinly archived in articles and reviews. Having spent many years writing about all manner of literary and cinematic appropriations of Shakespeare, I also did not want to restrict my subject matter to stage (re)production. As I proceeded, I arrived at different organizing principles but remained reluctant to surrender entirely defining terms (like “experimental”) and formative developments (of the avant-garde ) that continued to inform the argument I was advancing for the differences that exceptions to the Shakespearean reproductive rule make. So, although most of this book is focused on theatrical and cinematic work produced in the last fifty years, I offer, as defining case studies toward the end of this chapter, a decidedly historical avant-garde channeling of Shakespeare undertaken in two episodes of James Joyce’s modernist prose epic Ulysses (1921) and a radical anticipation of more recent gender-bending experiments undertaken in Svend Gade and Asta Nielsen’s iconoclastic 1920 silent film version of Hamlet. These case studies are preceded by an explanation of the thinking and terminology that bring such works into the circuit of the book’s prevailing concerns, that is, their standing as reenactments of Shakespeare in a discursive and performative (as opposed to temporal) space I term the Shakespeare aftermath , which I distinguish from the more generally used and understood Shakespeare afterlife . Like aftermath, reenactment is also a word that usually signals something different from how I deploy it here, as I explain below.

In my second introductory chapter, I identify two supplemental interests—the intermedial turn and turn to embodiment —that inform most of the choices of subject matter and ways they are addressed over the course of the book. I say most, not all, because though I am interested in how new media technologies in particular have been deployed to reinvigorate all manner of Shakespeare-related reproduction , I am also interested in identifying the specters of history that fill the traces of Shakespearean reenactment alongside those that emerge from the intermedial machine . I concentrate in the first half of this chapter on two recent productions—Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III (premiere 2015) and Romeo Castellucci’s Julius Caesar . Spared Parts/Giulio Cesare. Pezzi Staccati (2016)—that demonstrate the intermedial turn in contemporary Shakespeare stage production as well as the turn to embodiment that predates, and may well postdate, emergent intermedial trends. I bring this chapter to conclusion with a more sustained case study analysis of the provocative face-off that took place between New York’s Wooster Group, representing the American theatrical avant-garde , and the Royal Shakespeare Company, for so long keeper of the Bardic sacred flame, in their collaborative production of Troilus and Cressida at the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival .

I then begin, in the body of the book, to consider a series of additional works that renegotiate the terms of critical and creative engagement with Shakespeare that have long prevailed in Great Britain and North America. I proceed by privileging textual, performative , and cinematic reenactments I take to be exceptional for how or what they mean, signify, or represent differently than stage and film productions that more or less faithfully replicate the same. Presenting remnants, remains, revised or reassembled versions of Shakespeare’s plays in skewed, slant, elliptical, or even deformed versions of their originals , such reenactments could be said to alter their own reproductive DNA in ways that block or discourage replication .² Avoiding becoming just another stop on the unending line of Shakespearean reiterations, the exception presents itself as inimitable, transforming its own condition of production, its difference, into the singularity of a free-standing work in its own right, despite its always obvious ghosting of its Shakespearean host-text . This has, for example, been both the fate and career of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977), which, despite the notoriety of its production by Robert Wilson , has seldom been conclusively identified with a single, stable, or “faithful” performative realization consistent with its roughly eight-page script. And it surely has, though in different ways, been the case with other production events I plan to examine, which have either toured the world for upwards of 10 years under the exclusive ownership/supervision of its originating directors, designers, and theater companies—e.g., the Wooster Group Hamlet and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (both premiered 2007)—or, like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More , become both a physically grounded institution and a thrice nightly performed event in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

In addition to exploring such contemporary reckonings with the Shakespeare aftermath , I conscript a number of other texts, not all of which are grounded in evidence and descriptions drawn from my first-hand theater experiences. The first of these are Edward Bond’s politically informed reenactment of King Lear in Lear (1971) and graphically embodied representation of Shakespeare’s last years in Bingo (1973), which I address, along with Müller’s Hamletmachine , in my third chapter. Hamletmachine stands as a signal landmark not only of the Shakespeare aftermath but of twentieth-century Western cultural history, which it densely references and explodes in the course of its few outspoken pages of text. Bond’s Lear , combined with Bingo, offers a response to the work and the life that at once deforms and reforms both in terms that could not be more applicable to contemporary political and theatrical concerns. In my fourth chapter, the ghosts of twentieth-century history that Müller dwells on through his disassembly of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are displaced by ghosts from more recent world-historical events in Anatomie Titus : Fall of Rome (2009), Brigitte Maria Mayer’s three-panel film installation, which reenacts differently Müller’s own reenactment of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus . In an elegiac meditation on her husband’s lifework and career, Mayer synthesizes documentary film footage of ritual practices of West Africa and the Middle East and highly stylized presentational art tableaux, often featuring her daughter Anna Müller (as Lavinia) and the late French actress Jeanne Moreau as Tamora, both of whom speak lines of text derived from, but not entirely identical with, Müller’s Titus Anatomie, which haunts the performance from beginning to end. I position this study of contemporary “installation art” as an entry point to a more sustained exploration of radical reworkings of Hamlet undertaken on stage and film, respectively, by an Iraqi-born author and Indian auteur that represent powerful exceptions to how the global turn in Shakespeare reproduction is generally registered and understood. Jawad al-Asadi’s Forget Hamlet (2000) is paired here with Haider (2014), Vishal Bhardwaj’s third filmic reproduction of Shakespeare, which also pointedly forgets Hamlet in an effort to remember/reassemble it differently.

Marvin Carlson famously addresses the varying manifestations of ghosting , with respect to actors, texts, and playing spaces alike, in The Haunted Stage (2001), contending that “ghosting presents the identical thing [audience members] have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes a part of the reception process, with results that can complicate the process considerably” (7). Extending Carlson’s contention to the realm of the avant-garde , James Harding claims that the different contexts Carlson evokes are themselves “populated by ghosts as well—ghosts that press for a revised understanding of the familiar objects one encounters,” adding that “Ghosts make the familiar ‘unheimlich,’ uncanny… strange” (Harding 2013, 192). I explore this process of estrangement generated by what Harding calls “vanguard ghosting ” not only in relation to Shakespeare’s rear-view haunting of reenactments undertaken in his name and in terms of history, but also in relation to the increasingly prominent channeling of Shakespeare through more literal machines than Mayer’s husband, Heiner Müller, had in mind back in 1977 and which Mayer herself deploys ...