Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet(Shakespeare and the Stage)

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.

Table of Contents:
Robert Sawyer, Foreword Darlena Ciraulo and Matthew Kozusko, “Introduction” Part I: Past Jonathan Baldo, “What's in a Game?: Handy-Dandy, War, and Foreign Relations in King Lear” Anne Williams, “Strawberry Hill: The House that Hamlet Built” Katherine Scheil, “What's Past is Prologue: Shakespeare the Romantic” Part II: Present Darlena Ciraulo, “Shakespeare's Bust and the 1960s Batman TV Show” Peter Holland, “On the Shakespeare Trail” Richard Finkelstein, “Shakespeare in the Dorm: The Rhetoric of Character in YouTube Shakespeare” Matt Kozusko, “Why are Shakespeare's Characters so 'Relatable'?” Part III: Future Lisa S. Starks, “Levinas, Jessica, and Memory in Productions of The Merchant of Venice” Alexa Alice Joubin, “Transgender Theory and Global Shakespeare Stephen O'Neill, “Quoting Machines: Shakespearean things in and beyond HBO's Westworld” Sharon O'Dair, “On Character, Character Criticism, and The King is Alive: For Christy Desmet” Sujata Iyengar, Afterword

About the Author :
Matthew Kozusko is professor of English at Ursinus College. Darlena Ciraulo is professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. Robert Sawyer is professor of English at East Tennessee State University.