Shakespeare, Race and Anglophone Popular Culture

Vanessa I. Corredera, L. Monique Pittman, Mark Thornton Burnett

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350500587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This collection theorizes the intersections between race, Shakespearean adaptation and pop culture. Chapters take a range of investigative approaches, some centring Shakespeare and others using Shakespeare to theorize pop culture, but all focusing on the ethical implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture and race.

Chapters explore the tensions between the 'low', racialized status of a pop culture form and Shakespeare's 'high' status; the ways race informs a specific Shakespearean reference (in film, television, music, Young Adult literature and self-help manuals, among other forms); and the influence loop between Shakespeare and the systemic racism of creative industries, such as Hollywood and book publishing.

As the analysis of race expands within Shakespeare studies, so too, this collection argues, should the archives for analyzing Shakespeare and race grow. While it is now more common to consider race and embodiment in both early modern and contemporary Shakespearean performance and adaptation, pop culture remains underexplored and undertheorized. As this collection demonstrates, rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can illuminate how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest and shape existing racial imaginaries for broad audiences.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Shakespeare, race and the power of the popular Vanessa I. Corredera & L. Monique Pittman
• 1 ‘The king I know he is’: Black masculinity in the intertextual network of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Disney’s The Lion King and Beyoncé’s Black Is King Claire Dawkins
• 2 Adapting whiteness: Race and the politics of Shakespeare for young readers M. Tyler Sasser
• 3 ‘Calling all the Tiger Mom wannabes!’: Parenting with and without Shakespeare across racial lines Jeanette Nguyen Tran
• 4 ‘The future in the instant’: Whiteness, temporality and Frances McDormand’s Coen Brothers archive in a postmenopausal Macbeth Jennie M. Votava
• 5 Pop remix: Shakespeare and white womanhood in the Mexican-American novel Daniel G. Lauby
• 6 Emily Dickinson casts Othello: Shakespeare and white allyship in AppleTV+’s Dickinson Marianne Montgomery & Vanessa L. Rapatz
• 7 ‘Alpha, Beta, Cuck’: King Lear, Succession and the rescripting of white masculinity Maya Mathur
• 8 Shakespeare and race in two pop culture versions of Station Eleven Michael D. Friedman
• 9 Shakespeare and Bridgerton: The myths of race and gender in Regency Romance Taarini Mookherjee
• Epilogue: Moonflower Murders and the racial evasions of pop Vanessa I. Corredera & L. Monique Pittman
• Bibliography
• Index