Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare

Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, Jim Casey, Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, Jim Casey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319632995
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319633008
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This essay collection addresses the paradox that something may at once "be" and "not be" Shakespeare. This phenomenon can be a matter of perception rather than authorial intention: audiences may detect Shakespeare where the author disclaims him or have difficulty finding him where he is named. Douglas Lanier's "Shakespearean rhizome," which co-opts Deleuze and Guattari's concept of artistic relations as rhizomes (a spreading, growing network that sprawls horizontally to defy hierarchies of origin and influence) is fundamental to this exploration. Essays discuss the fine line between "Shakespeare" and "not Shakespeare" through a number of critical lenses—networks and pastiches, memes and echoes, texts and paratexts, celebrities and afterlives, accidents and intertexts—and include a wide range of examples: canonical plays by Shakespeare, historical figures, celebrities, television performances and adaptations, comics, anime appropriations, science fiction novels, blockbuster films, gangster films, Shakesploitation and teen films, foreign language films, and non-Shakespearean classic films. 

Table of contents

• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Networks and Pastiches
• Chapter 2 “This is not Shakespeare!”
• Chapter 3 Chasing Shakespeare: The Impurity of the “Not Quite” in Norry Niven’s From Above and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Romeo
• Chapter 4 HypeRomeo & Juliet: Postmodern Adaptation and Shakespeare
• Part II Memes and Echoes
• Chapter 5 “I’ll Always Consider Myself Mechanical”: Cyborg Juliette and the Shakespeare Apocalypse in Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga
• Chapter 6 Guest Starring Hamlet: The Proliferation of the Shakespeare Meme on American Television
• Chapter 7 Romeo Unbound
• Part III Texts and Paratexts
• Chapter 8 Chaste Thinking, Cultural Reiterations: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and The Letter
• Chapter 9 Paratextual Shakespearings: Comics’ Shakespearean Frame
• Chapter 10 “Thou Hast It Now”: One-on-Ones and the Online Community of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More
• Part IV Celebrities and Afterlives
• Chapter 11 Dirty Rats, Dead for a Ducat: Shakespearean Echoes (and an Accident) in Some Films of James Cagney
• Chapter 12 YouShakespeare: Shakespearean Celebrity 2.0
• Chapter 13 Finding Shakespeare in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
• Part V Accidents and Intertexts
• Chapter 14 Surfing with Juliet: The Shakespearean Dialectics of Disney’s Teen Beach Movie
• Chapter 15 “Accidental” Erasure: Relocating Shakespeare’s Women in Philippa Gregory’s The Cousins’ War Series
• Chapter 16 Dramas of Recognition: Pan’s Labyrinth and Warm Bodies as Accidental Shakespeare
• Chapter 17 Shakespeare Not Shakespeare: Afterword
• Index