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OUTERSPEARES:
SHAKESPEARE, INTERMEDIA,
AND THE LIMITS OF ADAPTATION
Edited by Daniel Fischlin
For Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, the global digital me-

dia environment is a “brave new world” of opportunity and revolution.
In OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, not-
ed scholars of Shakespeare and new media consider the ways in which
various media affect how we understand Shakespeare and his works.
Daniel Fischlin and his collaborators explore a wide selection of ad-
aptations that occupy the space between and across traditional genres –
what artist Dick Higgins calls “intermedia” – ranging from adaptations
that use social networking, Cloud computing, and mobile devices to
the many handicrafts branded and sold in connection with the Bard.
With essays on YouTube and iTunes as well as radio, television, and
film, OuterSpeares is the first book to examine the full spectrum of past
and present adaptations, and one that offers a unique perspective on
the transcultural and transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the
contemporary world.
dan iel f is chlin is a University Research Chair in the School of

English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
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OuterSpeares:
Shakespeare, Intermedia,
and the Limits of Adaptation
EDITED BY DANIEL FISCHLIN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo
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© University of Toronto Press 2014

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4785-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4426-1593-9 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-

based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, intermedia, and the limits of adaptation/edited

by Daniel Fischlin.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4785-5 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1593-9 (pbk.)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Adaptations. 2. Shakespeare, William,

1564–1616 – Dramatic production. I. Fischlin, Daniel, 1957–, editor
PR3100.O98 2014 822.3'.3 C2014-904024-5
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing
activities.
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In memoriam
Kenny Doren
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 30)
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits

of Adaptation 3
Daniel Fis ch lin
Part One: “Strange Invention”: Shakespeare in the New Media
YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention 53

C hristy De smet
“Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone

and in the Cloud 75
Jennifer L. Ailles
Part Two: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”:

Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia
Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation

of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror 115
Don Moore
Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy

of Adaptation: An Interview with Tom Magill 152
Daniel Fis ch
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from viii Contents
Part Three: “All the Uses of This World”: TV, Radio, Popular Music,
Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia
Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Shakespearean Adaptation 205

K im Fedderson and J. Micha el Ric hardson
Your Master’s Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial

Authority on 1930s American Radio 230
Andrew Bretz
Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular

Music 257
Daniel Fis ch lin
“Playing the Race Bard”: How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold (at)
the 2006 Stratford Shakespeare Festival 290
James McKin non
Part Four: “Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to

Speak”: The Limits of Adaptation?
Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American

Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916) 321
Mon ika Smialkowska
Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital 347

Sujata Iyengar
Beyond Adaptation 372

Mar k Fortier
Contributors 387
Index 393
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Illustrations
1.1 The Beatles in “Pyramus and Thisbe” 57

1.2 “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy” 59
1.3 The Nightmare before Christmas 65
1.4 Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet 66
1.5 Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Hamlet 67
8.1 Harlem Duet poster, Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel
Shawn Williams (Othello) 300

9.1 and 9.2 Caliban’s community participants display their
gymnastic prowess 326, 327
9.3 Pantomime scene of Hercules and the Sphinx from
Caliban 333
9.4 The masked figure representing War in Caliban 339
9.5 Sample pages from the printed program of Caliban
by the Yellow Sands 341
10.1 Romeo and Juliet votive holder 359
10.2 Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009) 365
11.1 Kill Shakespeare 383
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Acknowledgments
This book results from many circumstances, not the least of which are
years spent developing multimedia and intermedial ways of teaching
Shakespeare via some of the technologies deployed on the Canadian
Adaptations of Shakespeare (CASP) website. Ongoing work on that
site has afforded me a unique opportunity to explore various forms
of online intermediality, from multimedia galleries and literacy games
through to mobile technologies associated with apps. Along this jour-

ney I have encountered many talented individuals in a variety of dis-
ciplines, without whom this book would never have happened. These
include Mat Buntin, John Campbell, Kenny Doren, Brad Eccles, Darina
Griffin, Arni Mikelsons, Max Summerlee, and a host of other media and
IT creative thinkers who have broadened my own view of what is pos-
sible when thinking through the relationship between new media and
older forms of literacy associated with Shakespeare.
The specific impetus for the book arose out of an international
graduate student conference organized and held at the University of
Guelph in November 2011. The conference sought to frame problems
of intermediality and Shakespeare in ways that were true to the emerg-
ing realities so many of us were experiencing with Shakespeare as a
thoroughly mediated site of cultural production. Many people contrib-
uted to the success of that conference including Andrew Bretz, Mark
Kaethler, Mauricio Martinez, and Jessica Riley, four doctoral students
who played key roles in realizing the conference’s aims. The University
of Guelph, particularly the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice-
President of Research, and the Office of the Dean and Associate Dean
(Research) of the College of Arts, contributed a significant amount of
resources to the event. I thank President Alastair Summerlee, Dr Kevin
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from xii Acknowledgments
Hall, and Drs Don Bruce and Stuart McCook for their generosity and
their vision in foregrounding and supporting this transdisciplinary re-
search in the arts and humanities. A protracted period of discussion
and debate followed the conference, drawing a wider community of
participants into the discussion. That discussion and the ongoing work
elaborating the ideas that came out of the conference have resulted in
this book, the first to examine Shakespearean cultural production spe-
cifically through the theoretical lens of intermediality.
I’m especially grateful to all the contributors to OuterSpeares: the
book went through a significant set of exchanges and edits that reflect
their talents and exceptional engagement. Early work on the book
was enabled by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada Standard Research grant – and publication of the book it-
self was supported by the office of the Vice-President of Research
at the University of Guelph and by the President’s Office also at the
University of Guelph. The University Research Chair (URC) program
at the University of Guelph also helped fund this research. The four
external referees for the book provided significant, constructive input
on how to refine the manuscript, and their time and effort are deep-
ly appreciated. To my editor at University of Toronto Press, Suzanne

Rancourt, a profound thank you for her professionalism, enthusiasm,
and commitment through the publication process, as to Judy Williams,
who copyedited the manuscript with skill and insight. To Jennie Hissa
and Rachel Shoup, my superb research assistants throughout this ven-
ture, deep gratitude for your efforts and professionalism. To Martha,
Damian, Hannah, Zoë, and Esmé, as always, heartfelt thanks for the
creative and loving family space that has supported this work.
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Kenny Doren, a longtime
collaborator on the CASP site and friend who died tragically in 2012.
Kenny was a multimedia artist whose work was instrumental in shap-
ing and influencing many of the ideas found in this volume. He was a
brilliant presence in so many ways – as an artist and creative thinker,
as a technical, multimedia wizard, and as a theorist and scholar. His
light will be sorely missed, and this book is a small token honouring
his memory.
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OUTERSPEARES

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OuterSpeares:
Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits
of Adaptation
Dani el F i schli n
Prelude: Intermedia and Co-productive Form
The word “intermedia” references a vast, ongoing set of practices as-

sociated with how narratives travel in and across media, in and through
cultures. Intermedia occur when representation is reconfigured through
an array of media and cultural forms that arise out of specific contexts,
diffuse histories, technologies, and creative practices. The word inter-

media, as cultural theorist Eric Vos describes it, characterizes “artistic
phenomena that appear either to fall between established categories or
to fuse their criteria” (1997, 325). Whether through being “between”
media practices or synthesizing them, intermedial creation generates
new forms of syncretic representation. Vos, in a useful discussion of the
various definitions associated with the term, breaks these into two
forms: the first, definitions that relate to “art works (or even genres),”
and the second, definitions that delineate “systems of signs and their
qualities” (325). The former is exemplified in art forms that both fuse
and diversify their signifying strategies – so, a visual work that makes
use of music; a literary work that makes use of film; a theatrical work
that uses online technologies – or works that deploy multiple media in
concert as part of their signifying strategies. The latter definition refer-
ences, and here Vos makes use of Claus Clüver’s and Leo Hoek’s work,
semiotic structures in which the various media present are inseparable,
mutually dependent, interactive, and syncretic, a form of “productive
and receptive simultaneity” (326) that arises from the confluence of me-
dia that are relationally contingent to each other. The word intermedia,
then, addresses co-productive forms of representation that are what
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 4 Daniel Fischlin
they are as a result of the simultaneous commingling of discursive and

technical fields that arise in given historical circumstances.
OuterSpeares examines these notions of what constitutes intermedial-
ity through the specific lens of Shakespearean adaptations, where
Shakespeare is a primary and often contentious site for the production
of intermedial representations in both of the senses described above.
Besides the perhaps too obvious pun on Shakespeare’s name, the title
of this book, OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adap-
tation, addresses the centrality of Shakespeare to dominant modes of
exemplary narrative in literary and theatrical terms. But the title also
points towards the ways in which adapted forms of Shakespeare are
challenging that centrality via tactics that take us from traditional
Shakespeare-centric interpretation to the “outerspeares,” the “outer
spheres,” the marginal or exploratory sites where non-traditional inter-
pretations of non-traditional forms of the Shakespeare effect are in evi-
dence. These sites are where Shakespeare becomes a radically different
entity and an emblem of how intermedial adaptation produces differ-
ence and innovative forms of narrative through the interproductive
simultaneity of diverse media forms. These innovative forms reflect a
new economy of relations between and across media. And they force
reflection of the power relations that intermedia reveal as they diffuse
narratives across new sites in which struggles between centre and mar-
gin are renegotiated. It is important to remember, as does performance
theorist Philip Auslander, that the
analysis of intermedial performances cannot rest on assumptions about

the inherent qualities of different media and consequent assumptions
about how they may combine with each other, however attractive such
assumptions may be. It is not enough, for instance, to suppose that be-
cause theatre and film can be seen as representing different parts of the
psyche, they can work together as equal partners when that partnership
takes place in a cultural context in which film is clearly privileged over
theatre, a privileging that is bound to affect audience perception of the
hybrid. It is simply not the case that all media have the same cultural pres-
ence and carry the same cultural authority, and any consideration of inter-
mediality must take these issues into account. Intermediality must be con-
sidered in terms of “cultural economy,” a phrase I use to describe a realm
of inquiry that includes both the real economic relations among cultural
forms, and the relative degrees of cultural prestige and power enjoyed by
different forms. (2000, 3–4)
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Introduction 5
In short, the place of Shakespeare in the general cultural economy shifts

in relation to the prestige and power of the media through which his
presence is diffused. OuterSpeares tells part of this story with regard to
how intermedial forms of Shakespearean presence define new econo-
mies of relations that are unthinkable apart from the media contexts in
which they operate.
Early modern scholar Stephen Greenblatt, in an essay entitled “The
Interart Moment,” makes Shakespeare a central part of his essay’s nar-
rative, telling us that “If you study Shakespeare … it [is] probably al-
ways absurd to treat [his texts] … as a master set of texts, words on a
page unrelated to any other form of expression … the plays repeatedly
and insistently call attention to the fact that they are not simply being
read but being seen, that words and images are conjoined together”
(1997, 14). Likewise, the acoustic dimensions of Shakespeare’s texts in-
evitably point us towards the soundscapes those texts create and on
which they rely, as do the stage directions, which indicate movements
and gestural forms that are also inextricably linked to how the plays
make meaning. Greenblatt argues, and remember he is writing in the
late 1990s on the cusp of the massive transformation associated with
online media, that “The dominant media of our time – television, film,
and popular music – depend, as did the Elizabethan theater, upon the
intersection of arts: words, images, music, dance. Our great art forms
are for the most part collaborative enterprises that depend upon cre-
ators with different areas of expertise talking and working with one
another, and it is long overdue that scholars begin to do the same” (15).
This book takes its cue, in part, from Greenblatt’s notion that we need
to understand how multiple art forms and media conjoin to tell stories,
to represent multiple forms of reality in multilayered and deeply sedi-
mented intensities in which the melding of media plays a crucial role.
Shakespeare, then, is no longer just textual or theatrical in any con-
ventional sense of the terms. Rather, as Pascale Aebischer and Nigel
Wheale argue, “many of today’s Shakespeares appear not in editions
and conservative theatrical productions but in a plethora of contempo-
rary formats – novel, horror, screenplay, musical – in foreign perfor-
mance traditions – kathakali, theerukootu, and kudiattam, for example
– and in a bewildering range of media forms, from film via video to
DVD, CD-ROM, and the internet” (2003, 4). Aebischer and Wheale also
note how Shakespeare is “increasingly decentred” in productions “that
use his plays and name as pretexts for cultural and ideological negotia-
tions that are more often relevant to their immediate context than to
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Shakespeare’s plays themselves” (3). This decentring is at the crux of

the title of this book, with “outerspeares” reinforcing the move from the
centrality of Shakespeare in adaptive practices (where his work is the
“source”) to the proliferation of differential production as the keynote
for such practices in which the adaptation displaces, revisions, and re-
shapes the source.
New forms of representation that arise from new forms of media in-
evitably require that we develop the literacy to read these representa-
tions adequately. Why this matters is complicated. If we take, for
instance, the German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler’s notion of dis-
course networks, those networks reveal to us who we are and how we
create meaning. As David E. Wellbery makes clear in his foreword to
the English translation of Kittler’s seminal work, Discourse Networks
1800/1900, “A notation system, or as we have chosen to translate, a dis-
course network has the exterior character – the outsideness – of a tech-
nology. In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments
with which ‘man’ produces his meanings … Rather, they set the frame-
work within which something like ‘meaning,’ indeed, something like
‘man,’ become possible at all” (1990, xii). Or, as Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young puts it in his book on Kittler and the media, “the crux of the
matter is that media-historical resonance has a profound cognitive impact”
(2011, 108). Given this profound cognitive impact, it follows then that
the uses of media to make meaning are profoundly tied to notions of
intermediated subjectivity and agency that are increasingly the central
questions of the contemporary moment. The impact of narratives that
mutate through intermedial filters and fusions produces resonances
that do indeed matter for how they translate identity, history, and sto-
ry into telling representations that are an aspect of the creative self-
innovation at the core of what it means to be human. The “outsideness”
of new forms of technology associated with discourse networks in turn
reveals new potential forms of interiority and cognition.
In the case of OuterSpeares, because much of the scholarship is
Canadian, and because my own experience working across multiple
media has been via the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare (CASP)
website, it is a key feature of this book that in addition to being the first
to address Shakespeare through a specifically intermedial theoretical
framework, it also does so with significant attention to Canadian ad-
aptations, thus perhaps adding to the book’s uniqueness. So, indeed,
yes, there are any number of collections on Shakespearean appropria-
tions and adaptations by many media, but none with this specifically
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intermedial approach and theoretical framework coming out of a spe-

cific set of scholarly practices and research methodologies located in,
but not exclusive to, a specific national site. Given the new technologies
available (and in the making), concepts of presence, virtuality, liveness,
intermediation, and even performance need to be rethought when ad-
dressing what constitutes an adaptation of a Shakespearean play, or
any other work, for that matter. Today, as perhaps never before, content
and narrative forms are created across multiple platforms, sometimes
simultaneously. With the new trans- and intermedia come real chal-
lenges to both adaptations and adaptation theory that this volume ad-
dresses through its theoretical excursions and its wide range of case
studies. In the latter, “Shakespeare” becomes a mobile, even disruptive,
global cultural brand, the site of cultural as well as technological inter-
mediation, and an unavoidable site where many of these intermedial
energies are gathered and laid bare for better or for worse.
A key precept throughout is that media are themselves always al-
ready cultural – they embed and embody symbols, values, aspirations,
imagination, narrative, semiotics, and technologies that arise from spe-
cific sets of circumstances: “culture is indeed multimodal as it makes
use of technology as well as symbolic forms that employ simultane-

ously several material-semiotic resources” (López-Varela Azcárate and
Zepetnek 2008, 66). Moreover, intermediality in such an expansive con-
text, and echoing Greenblatt’s sentiments discussed earlier, “can be de-
fined as the ability to read and write critically across varied symbol
systems and across various disciplines and scholarly as well as general
discursive practices” (López-Varela Azcárate and Zepetnek 2008, 66–7).
Necessarily, the production of new media relies on antecedent practices,
wherein adaptive strategies and new technologies combine to create a
new medium, a new set of symbologies and semiotic practices that are
culturally present, active, and meaningful. The case of mobile devices
and the software applications that serve as portals for specific functions,
like reading texts (think Kindle or Kobo), experiencing our geophysical
relationship to the planet (think Google Earth), or interfacing with mu-
sic in new ways (think iTunes or SoundCloud), all point to how new
interpellations of older forms rely on adaptation to platforms unimagi-
nable in past circumstances. In this sense adaptation cannot be discussed
without addressing intermodal relations and transpositions in which
media and genre are key defining elements in the revisioning process.
Julie Sanders notes how “Adaptation can be a transpositional prac-
tice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode … yet it can also
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be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accre-

tion, and interpolation” (2006, 18). Using French literary theorist Gérard
Genette’s notion of hypertextuality, Sanders argues that adaptation is
“frequently a specific process involving the transition from one genre to
another: novels into film; drama into musical; the dramatization of
prose narrative and prose fiction; or the inverse movement of making
drama into prose narrative” (19). Intermedial adaptations, in which
multimodal forms of narrative fuse in spaces that radically remediate
traditional narratives, challenge critics to go beyond genre as the defin-
ing determinant of what it means to adapt. In this sense, intermedial
adaptation is a form of hyper-adaptation, especially so when multi- or
intercultural contexts are also foregrounded as part of the multimodal
approach to revisioning.
The Québécois director and dramaturge Robert Lepage and his pro-
duction company Ex Machina are a compelling example of how theatri-
cal production makes manifest this principle. Lepage’s project entails
not only a multicultural context in which adaptation or recycling (fre-
quently of Shakespearean texts) is evident, but also multiple forms of
performance practice synced with new technologies in startling new
ways. Which is to say, his work is thoroughly intermedial for how it

collides cultures, antecedent cultural forms, and new technologies in
contexts in which adaptation and recycling are all key features. Thus
Lepage’s 2011 version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest saw him working in
an outdoor intercultural setting of the First Nations (Huron-Wendat)
village Wendake with the Huron-Wendat nation supplemented by
sophisticated sound and lighting technologies that blurred the distinc-
tion between the stage and the “natural” setting of the village as it was
intermediated by Lepage’s vision.
The allegory of colonial first contact plays out in Lepage’s version of
the play in ways that depend on the actual cultural setting in which the
play is staged and on the range of old and new technologies and dra-
maturgical devices brought to bear on the production. Lepage deployed
Huron-Wendat actors dressed in traditional garb and speaking their
language in the production. Steeve Wadohandik Gros-Louis played
King Alonso of Naples, as an instance of this multicultural mix-up, and
Gros-Louis’s well-known dance troupe, Sandokwa (meaning “eagle”),
played a key role in the production, an intervention remarkable for
how it made spectacular the cultural spaces being intermediated.
Further, Lepage’s production was
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inspired by a Joseph Légaré painting (c. 1826), “Edmund Kean Reciting

Before the Hurons,” that depicts Edmund Kean (1787–1833), the famous
English actor, performing Shakespeare in Wendake in the 1800s. Kean,
who in 1823 had been the first actor of his period to perform King Lear with
its original tragic ending (thus undoing the adaptive work of Nahum
Tate’s revisioning, which saw Cordelia marrying Edgar and Lear retaking
his throne), was much admired by the Hurons who made him an honorary
chief and gave him the name “Alanienouidet,” meaning “strong wind in
drifting snow.” (Windspeaker 2011)
The through-line from Kean and his connection to English produc-

tions of Shakespeare, to Légaré’s visual depiction of Kean in a multicul-
tural (French Canadian and First Nations) Canadian context, to
Lepage’s contemporary restaging in light of all these antecedent cul-
tural collisions via various media tells a remarkable story about how
narratives travel. Lepage’s production, in short, mixed media, lan-
guages, and cultural contexts in ways that made it profoundly interme-
dial. That The Tempest also dates to the approximate founding of
Lepage’s hometown, Québec City, further amplifies how culture and
media interface to produce sedimented new relations that intermedial

representations can heighten and amplify. And this is but one example
from many such revisionings, adaptations, and devisings in which
Shakespeare is implicated as an object of intermedial refashioning.
Another example from a very different cultural context would be the
work of Chinese director Lin Zhaohua, described by Marcus Cheng
Chye Tan as “China’s most significant and prominent director of the
post–Cultural Revolution age” (2012, 92). Tan’s analysis of Lin’s 2001
production of Richard III identifies its modes as intercultural, interme-
dial, and postmodern forms of Shakespearean adaptation. For Tan,
“Lin’s notion of interculturality is not a mutual ‘exchange’ of cultural
forms and performance practices; it is neither hybridity nor an excava-
tory interculturalism of Chinese forms for a contemporary concern.
Instead Lin’s practice … [is] an ‘unconscious’ relation of cultural texts
that further accentuates his characteristic style of ‘no-style.’ It is an
appropriation of a ‘global’ text for a ‘local’ concern – unintentional or
otherwise” (93). In this example, cultural transposition figures as a key
aspect of the form intermediality takes. That Lin’s glocal (both global
and local) adaptation plays with unconscious relations in ways that
are not immediately transparent but that are nonetheless part of the
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interpretative schema of the production tells us something about how

intermediality and diffused intentionality are now part of the frame-
work in which adaptations occur. Often audiences exposed to this form
of adaptation have no necessary knowledge of the source text, much
like high school students who watch the 1999 romantic comedy Ten
Things I Hate about You without necessarily knowing anything about its
derivation from The Taming of the Shrew. Intermediality refigures in
powerful ways that obscure, intentionally or not, these originary rela-
tions. It does so by foregrounding the medium as opposed to the source,
with the medium more definitive of the narrative than the source text.
This is yet another form of the “outerspeares” effect associated with the
distancing that occurs between source and adaptation as the former
is intermediated.
This volume, then, asks a number of questions about intermedial ad-
aptation through its focus on Shakespeare as a crucial site where these
practices are intensely present. How effective are intermedial adapta-
tions in addressing interpretive nuances and forms that shape and alter
meaning with such efficacy? Can a tweet possibly compare to a theatri-
cal monologue? A Facebook posting to a witty stichomythic exchange?
A chat-room conversation to a conventionally published essay? A vi-

sual mashup to a DJ sample? A photonovel to a computer game or vid-
eo installation in which different narrative forms are transmediated?1
How does intermediation effect emplotment strategies in which differ-
ent forms of narrative are at stake? What are the reception effects, the
cognitive impacts of the aesthetics of intermedial representations by
comparison with more traditional forms? How do the intermedia-
tions across a range of texts, media, and cultures lead to new produc-
tive and creative forms that redefine how representation and signifi-
cation work in and across these new forms? How does the struggle
between conventional orthodoxies of interpretation and challenging
new approaches manifest itself via intermedial adaptations?
This book provides a varied range of answers to these sorts of ques-
tions and does so through an exceptional assortment of case studies
that expand the breadth of what has traditionally been meant by inter-
media. Thus, the book features work on YouTube and mobile comput-
ing Shakespeares along with work on Shakespeare on radio and TV,
on Shakespeare and popular music, on the Shakescrafting movement
and patchwork Shakespeare, and on Shakespearean film as under-
stood through the filters of intermedial theory, among multiple other
sites of intermediation. The through-line in all these sites consists not
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only of Shakespeare as a fetishized site of cultural devising and revis-

ing but also of how collided intermedia inflect meaning in ways that
profoundly influence how we apprehend our always already mediat-
ed realities.
“The Earlier Revision Has Been Revoked”: Shakespeare

Goes Intermedial
Sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way.

Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games ends its first
book with a compelling apocalyptic scenario where the “star-cross’d
lovers,” Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of District Twelve, are
about to commit onscreen suicide before an enormous televisual audi-
ence that has bought into the instantly recognizable Shakespearean
situation. Throughout the book there are repeated references to Katniss
and Peeta as memes of the “star-cross’d lovers,” that is, as signifiers of
a deeply embedded cultural figuration, of the Romeo and Juliet trope,
itself a familiar narrative structure with a long history that precedes
Shakespeare. Katniss and Peeta’s identification with the lovers of yore
translates into higher media ratings for the Hunger Games, what the
blurb on the back of the novel calls “a fight to the death on live TV”
involving male and female contestants between the ages of twelve and
eighteen picked by a lottery system. The Romeo and Juliet meme pro-
vides an identifiable storyline that the media audience watching the
Hunger Games can buy into. The meme also furnishes Katniss and
Peeta with a survival mechanism: they “play” star-crossed lovers in or-
der to outlast the other contestants by getting sponsorships associated
with their popularity, which is enhanced by the Shakespearean roles
they enact, mutatis mutandis. The meme also provides a recognizable
literary origin for The Hunger Games’s adapted storyline, piggybacking
Collins’s work of pop culture onto the canonical status associated with
Shakespeare. As Katniss says about the “star-crossed lovers” trope,
“They eat that stuff up in the Capitol” (2008, 136). Later in the book,
more explicitly, she says: “If I want to keep Peeta alive, I’ve got to give
the audience something more to care about. Star-crossed lovers desper-
ate to get home together” (261). The familiar Shakespearean trope, then,
is at the core of the plot machinations by both the characters in the
novel, strategically manipulating their own storyline for survival, and
by Collins, the author of the novel, inflecting the novel with an unmis-
takable core narrative associated with Shakespeare.2
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As the novel draws to a close and Katniss and Peeta face the cynical
interference of Seneca Crane, the Head Game Master, who changes the
rules from the last two people left standing from the same District being
able to survive to only one person making it out of the Games alive:
“The earlier revision has been revoked. Closer examination of the rule
book has disclosed that only one winner may be allowed” (2008, 342).
The storyline device is meant to generate even more tension for the
media audience and to boost ratings for the Hunger Games as the ulti-
mate embodiment of the parallels between the Capitol’s hegemony
over the Districts and the ideology of live TV. Further, the device is a
realpolitik manoeuvre to put an end to the potentially revolutionary
energies that Katniss and Peeta emblematize as they fight for survival
against the brutally totalitarian social engineering of the Capitol. As a
revision of a rule that has already been revised, the change in rules
signifies the arbitrariness of set principles, origins, and fixity in the
name of expediency. This arbitrariness serves, in a larger context, as a
reminder of what “governs” adaptation, which is to say expediency in
the face of what the Game Master decides is needed to satisfy his live
TV audience.
But Katniss and Peeta reach a unique, spontaneous solution that re-
plays the dénouement of The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Both choose
suicide. One dystopia echoes another in this climactic moment in the
book, as the inexorable Shakespearean logic that leads to Romeo’s and
Juliet’s deaths seems about to be replayed. Just as Katniss and Peeta
are about to ingest the Nightlock’s poison berries in defiance of the
rule change, and thus deprive the Games of any victor at all, “the fran-
tic voice of Claudius Templesmith shouts above them. ‘Stop! Stop!
Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the victors of the
Seventy-fourth Hunger Games …’” (2008, 345). The moment decisively
adapts the Shakespearean original, showing that indeed the “earlier
revision has been revoked” and that adaptation to changed circum-
stances is the ultimate key to survival. The suicidal deaths of Romeo
and Juliet are refashioned in Katniss’s and Peeta’s non-end. And, it
must be emphasized: the power of media to intervene is what stops
the supposed lovers from following through on their pact. It is un-
thinkable that the Games not have a victor and that such a scenario
should play out on live TV before an expectant audience. So a disem-
bodied voice interposes; the live audience enamoured of the pair is
spared an unimaginable ending; and the power of media as a means
of reshaping reality is reaffirmed. The moment encapsulates a very
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specific set of circumstances governing how Shakespearean adaptation

and intermediality intersect, a topic this book explores in a range of
interventions that tells us how widespread, if not how long-standing,
this protean form of adaptation is.
To place the scene described above in perspective: The Hunger Games
entails a mass audience reading the novel that in turn imagines a mass
televisual audience as a key component in the live reality TV show sce-
nario of the Games themselves. The latter scenario is replayed visually
in the filmed version of The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross, 2012), which
restages this complex intermediation of audience watching audience
watching audience as Collins rewrites and manipulates the Romeo and
Juliet meme in a way that is instantly recognizable and a key structuring
device in her plot.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is intermedially present in multiple
ways in this example: as a global brand around which certain expecta-
tions regarding youth culture and tragedy are present and easily trans-
latable to the televisual, to film, to live reality TV, to text, and so forth;
as a plot backdrop across these multiple media that lets Collins spring
the clinamen, the swerve away from the expected outcome, which al-
lows her heroes to perdure; and as a trope for the endlessly malleable
adaptive power residing in deeply embedded cultural narratives, the
powerful structure of memes circulating across cultural and interme-
dial contexts in unexpected ways.
In The Hunger Games, indeed, a little Shakespeare goes a long way:
the trope of the “star-crossed” lovers (used six times throughout the
first book in the trilogy)3 is given an alternative twist, and the certain
death of the lovers is transmuted into anarchic life. Peeta and Katniss’s
willingness to die for each other, paradoxically, gives them life – a trope
of adaptation’s complex relation to source. Infidelity in that relation po-
tentially activates the adaptation’s own capacity to become autono-
mous, if imbricated in an unavoidable relationship to a source that is
not necessarily stable.4
Shakespeare’s “original” ending, then, is revoked and the power of
revision, which is to say the power of adaptation to do things to texts
in and across multiple media, is evoked. All the world is indeed a televi-
sual stage, and Katniss and Peeta, as canny youth, know how to play
to that stage in sophisticated, spectacular ways that make them avatars
perhaps of today’s youth culture, thoroughly embedded in a media
web where media interventions across multiple traditional and non-
traditional platforms (from TV and radio through to online social
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networks) produce new forms of identity through convergence, revi-

sion, and adaptation. Shakespeare is ineluctably situated in that web as
an effect subject to ongoing interventions that are as much a function of
the media in which “he” appears as those media are a function of the
diverse forms of culture that find expression across an increasingly
wide array of media platforms. Media diversity necessarily entails in-
termedial adaptations, with even the transposition of a familiar story
from one medium into another leading to adaptive changes that derive
from media culture.
The Hunger Games is far from unique. A 2012 Thai film adaptation of
Macbeth entitled Shakespeare Must Die was banned for telling the story
of a theatre company working in a fictional country (resembling
Thailand) doing a production of Macbeth. One of the key characters in
the production is a dictator named Dear Leader, based on the Thai
leader Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown by a military coup in
2006. The film makes use of a famous photo from the 1976 student up-
rising in Bangkok depicting a demonstrator being lynched and uses a
range of referents to make its politics obvious to viewers. These in-
clude “the attire of a murderer in the film, who wore a bright red hood-
ed cloak – the same colour worn by the pro-Thaksin demonstrators

known as the ‘Red Shirts’” (Doksone 2012). The transposition of
Shakespeare into film media that reflect meta-theatrical, and highly
politicized, contexts shows the signifying flexibility of such adaptive
intermediations. Censorship happens here because the intermedium is
so powerful, so charged with potential to activate and disseminate not
only Shakespeare’s iconic, global brand but also the range of symbolo-
gies to which that brand can be put to use in intercultural contexts.
A 2012 Romeo and Juliet, staged at the National Theater in April 2012
in Baghdad, shows how artfully such intercultural transpositions can
occur, with the modulation from Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers” to
the Iraqis’ “doomed cross-sectarian love affair” being a key distinguish-
ing feature of the adaptation. Tim Arango’s coverage of the production
notes how
It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a
suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family,
but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of
“Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians,
and the American reconstruction effort … Its story line of a doomed cross-
sectarian love affair manages to touch on nearly every element of the re-
cent collective
WESTERN Iraqi experience. (Arango 2012)
RESERVE UNIV
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With the Capulets represented as Sunnis via the red-and-white keffiyeh

worn by Juliet’s father, and the Montagues as Shiites via Romeo’s fa-
ther’s black-and-white scarf, the adaptation recapitulates the binaries
of religious strife even as it imagines an Iraq that has gone beyond co-
lonial exploitation, dictatorships, war, invasion, and attempts at recon-
struction. As Arango reports, Sarwa Malik, the actor who plays Juliet as
a Sunni, is herself Shiite and Kurdish, and someone who married across
religious lines (her husband is Sunni). These sorts of contextual and
cultural reworkings are a key component in how adaptations do their
work in the world. Crossing borders, imagining alternatives, reinscrib-
ing histories – these are all techniques that adaptation activates in inter-
cultural contexts that play with the tension that exists in familiar
Shakespearean storylines remade in new contexts. Remaking in this
way is both an act of defamiliarization to the Shakespearean original
and an act of refamiliarization to the audience that sees itself newly rep-
resented in the adapted context. Shakespearean culture, in short, inter-
mediates between and across cultures to produce new meanings. The
Iraqi example reminds us that intermedial adaptation is as much about
technologies of representation as about the content and cultural con-
texts that are translated from one performance space to another.

A 2012 adaptation of Hamlet in Toronto, Hamlet Live, proposed a “ live
performance without boundaries” (Hamlet Live n.d.) involving live stream-
ing of the play, but also a chat room where audience members could
interact as the play was unfolding live on the stage and the internet.5
The Hamlet Live site explains:
The Hamlet Live team mean[s] to take this classic, and most famous of sto-
ries, and broadcast it to anyone with the desire to watch, whenever, and
wherever they want. Not only do they want to bring this tale to anyone
anywhere, but they want to do it with the highest possible quality: they
want multiple cameras, multiple angles, and an editor, live on the job,
editing as they go!
They want this to be the most widely viewed performance of Hamlet …
in history. (Hamlet Live n.d.)
In yet another riff that links Shakespeare with a dystopian, post-

apocalyptic future, the producers of the show imagine that
In 2080, the world is quite a different place. Violent solar flares in the early
21st Century triggered an unparalleled nuclear meltdown across the
globe,
WESTERN leaving vast quantities of land desolate – and dangerous. Some of
RESERVE UNIV
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the more organized nations, Denmark among them, were able to produce
the effort and resources necessary to prevent their reactors from melting
down, only to have to rush to their own defense against dislocated and
desperate populations seeking new homes. A brutal war, replete with ev-
ery kind of atrocity, the fuel of nightmares, ensued, engulfing what habit-
able parts of the world that were left in implacable death. Only now,
thanks to mass slaughter and the efficient and remorseless measures of a
handful of generals has the war finally come to a close. Denmark has done
well under the martial leadership of King Hamlet, though his sudden
passing at the very height of his glory has left a nation in mourning. His
brother, Claudius, with the voice of the people at his back, has stepped
forth and assumed the imperial mantle and married the former King’s
Queen, Gertrude. It is during this transition that we find the young
Hamlet, the son of the late King, a warrior prince and imperial candidate
by his own right, puzzling over the grief in his heart. “The time is out of
joint,” he remarks; it is only when his father comes to him as a ghost and
accuses his uncle of murdering him that Hamlet realizes just how out of
joint the time is and “That ever [he] was born to set it right.” Now Hamlet
“with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love” must
“sweep” to his revenge. And vengeance will be had. (Hamlet Live n.d.)
The adaptation replays Hamlet within this newly reimagined apocalyp-

tic context, using new media techniques to represent the live play on a
live streaming internet site, while also being live-edited and responded
to in the moment by the variously embodied audiences via chat-room
technology. Intermedial interventions abound in this adaptation and
they deploy an array of techniques that give new meaning to the spec-
tacle of spectacle. In addition to YouTube channel dissemination, and
the creation of accounts on social networking sites like Facebook and
Twitter, the Hamlet Live team used the online IndieGogo funding plat-
form to help underwrite their transmedia, digital broadcast vision of
Hamlet involving stationary and roaming cameras, a simulcast control
room director live-editing the show, and even a social media manager.
All these digital techniques and adaptive interventions reinforce
Christopher Baugh’s observation that “The possibilities for the creation
and manipulation of the stage image that the computer provides is [sic]
becoming, essentially, a new source of spectacle that may well prove to
be analogous to the Renaissance discovery of the perspective scene”
(cited in Darroch 2007, 98).6 The play of the play literally out- or over-
reaches its imagined physical limits with live-streaming, to cite the case
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of the Hamlet Live production, yet another example of the kind of “out-
erspeares” practice this volume examines. In so doing, Hamlet Live in-
vited an instantaneous potentially global audience into an embodied
performance where no more than a few hundred people can physically
be present. Virtuality confers interpretative permeability. The irreduc-
ible text – vessel for content never previously imagined, vessel for inter-
medial representations yet to be invented – becomes that much more
irreducible, that much more open to interpretive reshaping, adaptive
rescripting.
Instant response techniques like live chat-rooms during a play’s per-
formance, or streaming Twitter accounts used by performers and audi-
ence alike, radically change the nature of the multiple forms of
interaction that a traditional staging proffers. These new forms of inter-
activity via social networking and virtual presencing are profoundly
adaptive of (and challenging to) traditional notions of embodied per-
formance. But at the same time they remind us of the degree to which
the work of the imagination takes multiple forms both embodied and
virtual. A reader silently reading a Shakespeare play in a forgotten cor-
ner of a library is engaging in an intimate, difficult-to-know, virtual re-
lationship wherein the embodied text by the writer and the embodied
act of reading transmute and interweave, ineluctably leading us back
into the disembodied acts of imagination that lie behind both the cre-
ation of the work and its reception. Which is to say that the space in
which the reader’s reception of the text and the text’s signifying range
intermix is a virtual space. As critic Yong Li Lan makes clear, digitized
performances of Shakespeare thrive
on the absence of aura. Yet if we trace the displacement of the auratic back-
wards, from the digital image to the photographic record of the actor, to
the actor’s body, we are faced with an even deeper paradox of liveness as
bringing-to-life (i.e. the performance), of a role, a character. The original
Macbeth is a virtual character, not an actual one: he is created by the rep-
resentation, or personation, of the actor. It is … the pleasure of the acting
as well as the acted that the audience enjoys, and precisely the incomplete
fusion, the double presence, of actor and character in the theatre that is
asserted by film theorists as the incompleteness of representation in the
theatre as compared with film. The virtual image of the actor cannot be
simply opposed to his “reality” on the stage, which as Deleuze sugges-
tively puts it always has “one part of itself in the virtual into which it [is]
plunged as though into an objective dimension”; instead, it presents itself
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as part of a chain of productions by which an original is constituted as

“there.” Virtuality, like the degree of transparency revealed in the image,
which the software adjusts, is intrinsic to the performance. (2003, 58)
In such a context the “original Macbeth” or the “original” of any other

Shakespearean character is always predicated on virtuality. It is the
“chain of productions” that produces the “original” as an always al-
ready overwritten, contingent entity. And if virtuality is always intrin-
sic to the performance, so too is it intrinsic to the reception of the
performance and to the media of the performance. Performance, me-
dium, and reception interweave their relations through a combination
of material embodiments and intertextual hauntings and inflections
that remain fundamentally irreducible. Jean-Marc Larrue argues, “on
peut difficilement prétendre aujourd’hui que la présence et le direct
sont la nécessité ultime … qui peut, hors de tout doute, caractériser la
pratique théâtrale et fixer son identité” (2008, 28) [“we cannot easily
pretend today that presence and liveness are the ultimate requirement
… that can, without any doubt, characterize theatrical practice and fix
its identity”]. Presence and liveness acquire new meaning as they are
intermediated. In this sense, intermediality reconfirms how virtual all

forms of theatrical representation are in terms of their disembodied
embodiments of thoughts, ideas, emotions, characters, histories, and so
forth. Intermedial adaptation reinforces the fundamentally mysterious
and enigmatic ways in which representations take shape imaginatively.
These constructions are disseminated through multiple, frequently
overlaid imaginaries in which meaning gathers force as it remains un-
settled and always already potentially in the process of being remade.
Intermedial adaptations push the virtual boundaries of physical texts
via their technologies, thereby reinforcing and reinscribing the imagi-
nary as a site that holds to limits with the greatest of difficulty. In dis-
cussing digital performance, Kurt Vanhoutte argues that the “embodied
self is extended, hybridized and delimited through technologies” (2011,
46). But what remains unsaid in this formulation is that the technology
is in a sense always a pale reflection of the imagination that creates it,
deploys it, or uses it to try to replicate the irreducible acts of imagi-
nation that generate digital or embodied artefacts. The extended self
that uses technology as a prosthetic is, in this sense, always less than
the virtual imaginary out of which both arise, both are made possible
– the creative non-self that refuses easy containment or definition. This
idea is a key to understanding adaptation in general as an irreducible
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principle of how the imaginary creates possibility in new and unex-

pected ways, or in wholly conventional predictable ways. The continu-
um of what the imagination is capable of producing is far too vast to
reduce down to formulaic notions of authentic sources being adapted
according to fidelity tropes that are easily fractured by the power of the
imagination. Similarly, the potential embedded in imaginative acts is
far too great to predict with any accuracy how those acts will shape
themselves within a supposedly proscribed set of theoretical limita-
tions. The essayists in this book show how quickly and unpredictably
the transformation of Shakespeare via intermedial means has led to a
remarkable range of adaptive content-creation across multiple plat-
forms, many of which no one could have predicted (from film, radio,
and television through to the internet and mobile media platforms like
touchscreen tablets and cellphones with a range of messaging features
and softwares).
The creative self improvises new forms as surely as it replicates old
clichés. There is no certainty around how this process works, nor is the
process necessarily predictable when it comes to what any one act of
the imagination may produce in a given set of contingent circumstanc-
es. Canadian theatre critic Bruce Barton argues, in specific relation to

intimacy and intermediality, that
in the intermedial space, with its insistence on momentary intensity and

complete attention, intimate interaction is unavoidable. Within the inter-
medial space the informed spectator anticipates the heightened self-dis-
closure of increased visibility, engagement, perhaps even interactivity.
Intermedial intimacy is, thus, not generated through the portrayal of shared
cultural attitudes and beliefs (a relationship that reinforces “timeless” and
“universal” values), but rather through the performance of shared percep-
tual frames and dynamics (interaction that posits ambiguity and de/reori-
entation as the constants of contemporary existence). (2011, 46)
Similarly, essayists in this volume show, via ample close readings

and case studies, that “ambiguity and de/reorientation” in intermedial
Shakespearean adaptations are almost always at stake in complex and
sometimes discomfiting ways. Intermedial adaptation proffers new
forms of visibility, intimacy, self-disclosure, interactivity, and perfor-
mativity – and with these come new expectations having to do with
reception and interpretation. Both the Thai and the Canadian exam-
ples cited earlier challenge us to rethink how intermedial adaptations,
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transmuted via new media, generate the potential to challenge radi-

cally our sense of what constitutes the limits, if any, of adaptation. In
both examples, as in The Hunger Games example, culture and media in-
tersect as the crucibles that intermediate adaptation.
From this understanding it is possible to formulate a sort of
McLuhanesque notion of media as an expression of culture, culture as
an expression of media in which the medium is the message, but the
message, too, is the medium. Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “The ef-
fects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new
poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world”
(1995, 273) is here readily applicable. New media reconstruct realities,
adapt them to new circumstances, and in turn reshape the cultures that
deploy them. Intermedial adaptation in a new media context changes
perceptions, and is as much about cultural transformation as it is about
deploying new technologies.
Media and culture, then, as the essayists in this book make clear, are
indissociable. And as they shapeshift under the pressures of ideology,
commerce, aesthetics, the imagination, technological innovation – and
any number of other factors for that matter – new cultural forms emerge
in ways that extend, ambiguate, and reorient the relation of source text
to its adaptations. Dialogue no longer suffices between original and re-
make. Polylogical and diverse intertexts haunt this basic relationship
with the possibility of interpretative fragmentation, recombination,
and convergence disrupting the one-to-one correspondences tradition-
ally thought to govern how an adaptation relates to its source. The fact
of the matter is that adaptation is an inconvenient trope for doing things
to other things: it inevitably entails play and change, imagination and
reformulation. Or, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “Transposition to another
medium, or even moving within the same one, always means change
or, in the language of the new media, ‘reformatting’” (2006, 16). But re-
formatting changes more than just the format. Reformatting changes
meaning, charges it with new valences, creates new signifying poten-
tial, new ways of reception that all impact ultimately on the web of
meaning in which any cultural artefact is implicated.
The relations of presence and virtuality that Hamlet Live playfully at-
tends to, like the politico-cultural resonances of recent Thai politics in
Shakespeare Must Die, point to an adaptation effect that Diana Brydon
and Irena Makaryk (2002) have called in specific relation to Canadian
adaptations, borrowing from Coriolanus, “a world elsewhere.”7 This
“elsewhere” is culturally determined, a function of the intersection
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of any range of factors from nation and ethnicity through to internet,

techno-sphere, and intermedial presencings. Makaryk’s online essay
“A World Elsewhere”8 concludes by referencing the global reach of the
World Wide Web in relation to the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare and
how its rediscovery became the nexus for a rich set of nested interme-
diations all adding meaning to the elusive issue of Shakespearean iden-
tity in a particularly Canadian context:
A presence since the eighteenth century in theatricals, in satires and paro-

dies, adaptations and other re-writings, Shakespeare today is the property
of both high and low culture, stage, classroom, text, intertext, and webtext.
Thoroughly permeating all aspects of Canadian culture, Shakespeare is a
ready-made, immediately recognizable source of meaning for any number
of endeavours, but especially as a symbol of English studies …
The question of a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare, shaped by ten-
sions between English and French, by its [Canada’s] relations to the First
Nations, to new immigrant groups, and to its elephantine neighbour to
the south, is now locked into the global context of the World Wide Web.
Numerous Canadian web-sites and chat groups contribute to the global
reach of the Shakespeare industry. The image of the recently discovered

so-called Sanders portrait, purportedly of Shakespeare, in the family of
a retired Ontario engineer was instantly transmitted across newspapers
and Internet sites, giving rise to new speculation about the face of genius,
the authority of the Bard, and our relationship to him. His authority and
centrality assisted by the combined forces of his entrenchment in the can-
ons of high and low culture, of academia and techno-sphere, Shakespeare
– like Hamlet’s Ghost, here, there and everywhere – both reigns supreme
in Canada’s multiple, transitional spaces, and still continues to elude us.
(Makaryk n.d.)
The rediscovery of the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare was quickly fol-

lowed by a book (Stephanie Nolen’s 2002 Shakespeare’s Face) and later
(2008) a movie, director Anne Henderson’s Battle of Wills. The film, in
addition to unravelling some of the story behind the authentication
process, addresses the politics of representing and controlling the sup-
posedly “authentic” image of the Bard, especially when long-established
vested interests like those of the National Portrait Gallery in London in
its Chandos Portrait are faced with a challenger that has undergone
significantly greater scrutiny in terms of scientific and genealogical re-
search. Hence a film about an image of Shakespeare that was widely
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broadcast in North American markets took on a freight of its own, be-

coming in its own way yet another intervention in the Shakespearean
canon in which adaptation and intermediality are notably at stake. And
underlying the remarkable story of the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare
as it has played out in the media is the significance of the “image” as an
indicator of Shakespeare’s global brand status, as if the “real” image of
Shakespeare adds meaning to what we already know about the Bard
through traditional textual means. The desire to know the Bard in this
way reflects on a broader desire to make meaning intermedially, that is,
through the range of technologies and media forms available in the
here and now. Makaryk’s nuanced read of how Shakespeare and new
technologies intersect (in a specifically Canadian context) shows us that
meaning is always in transition as a function of new media. Spaces of
meaning are “transitional” and elusive – they are a by-product of a rich
sphere of interwoven, nested contexts that defy reduction.
The global reach of the Shakespeare brand inevitably intersects with
the global reach of sophisticated new communications technologies
and media. Intermedial adaptation revisits the relationship between
the virtual and the present – between what is represented via means
other than live embodiment and the materiality of physical spectacle. It

asks that we attend to the “world elsewhere,” the elusive otherness that
arises out of a fundamental relation between source text and adapta-
tion, the two being mutually “elsewhere” to each other even though
they are also ineluctably connected. This paradox of connection and
disassociation lies at the vexatious heart of figuring what adaptation’s
supposed limits are and how those limitations are often imagined
in terms of intertextual and intermedial conventions that are unstable
and irreducible. The essayists in this volume consistently point to
Shakespearean intermediations’ mobility, resistance to fixed meaning,
and uncertain potential to disrupt and ambiguate received wisdom and
orthodoxies of interpretation. The limits of adaptation in such contexts
are virtually impossible to delimit or circumscribe, especially as new
technologies intermix with new interpretive possibilities in hitherto un-
foreseen ways.
“Brave New World”: Essays in Intermediality

and New Frontiers for Adaptation Studies
Shakespeare’s writing and storytelling are so embedded in the cultural

fabric of global literature that when media technologies change and
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evolve, new ways of relating to the Bard follow closely behind. The es-
says in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation
generally depict a globalized, digitized media environment that has
truly become, in Shakespearean terms, a “brave new world.”9 The well-
worn phrase from The Tempest (5.1) has a rich history of adaptive use
that includes, in one genealogy, the Canadian First Nations theatre
group De-ba-jeh-mu-jig’s 2000 production New World Brave.10 Since its
inception in 1986, De-ba-jeh-mu-jig has staged over thirty productions
by well-known aboriginal playwrights, including Drew Hayden Taylor,
Tomson Highway, and Shirley Cheechoo. De-ba-jeh-mu-jig is located in
the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve No. 26, which is situated
on the eastern side of Manitoulin Island, the largest lake-island in the
world, and stretches across both Georgian Bay and Lake Huron in
Ontario, Canada. The company was established to give Native youth
the opportunity to see themselves and their lives reflected on the stage,
in the characters, in the stories, and in the experiences portrayed. New
World Brave, which has nothing directly to do with The Tempest save for
its punning alteration of the one key trope from the play, is a collective
creation (like several others in De-ba-jeh-mu-jig’s repertoire), which
takes the problem of envisioning a future for aboriginal culture and ad-
dresses key issues facing aboriginal communities across Canada. It is,
in short, a cultural intermediation.
Haunted by the Shakespearean trope and its invocation of colonial
and power relations of dominance and alterity, New World Brave marks
a space where the spectre of adaptation is to be found in the details of
how cultures recycle and repurpose clichés and outworn tropes. But
New World Brave fits into a larger genealogy of adaptations relating
The Tempest to First Nations and aboriginal cultures. The adaptation of
this single line traverses another key adaptive text, Aldous Huxley’s
dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) set in 2540 CE, which itself
has an important connection to aboriginal culture. The central charac-
ter, John, “is the result of an accidental contraception failure. His par-
ents [Thomas, the director of the Central London Hatchery and
Conditioning Centre, and Linda] were visiting a ‘savage reservation’
when his mother got lost; she was stranded inside the reservation and
gave birth to him there. He grew up with the lifestyle of the Zuni Native
American tribe and a religion that is a blend of Zuni and Christian
beliefs. The culture shock which results when the ‘savage’ is brought
into regimented society provides the vehicle by which Huxley points
out that society’s flaws” (“Brave New World” n.d.). James V. Spickard
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argues that “Ruth Benedict featured [the Zuni] in Patterns of Culture,

perhaps the most famous anthropology book of all time – a book based
as much on her critique of modern life as it was on Zuni reality. At
about the same time, Aldous Huxley used the Zuni as the paradigmat-
ic, primitive Other to the Whites’ Brave New World. Each projected a
later era’s Euro-American concerns on a Zuni world” (Spickard n.d.).
The projection of the “savage” into the space of so-called civil society is
a key feature in the way in which The Tempest has been adapted, espe-
cially in relation to Caliban as a symbolic register of the collision be-
tween different cultures. Significantly, this adaptation has usually been
accomplished from the point of view of settler or European culture,
something that New World Brave importantly reverses and something
that is implicit in the underlying message of Huxley’s Brave New World.
When the Warden describes the Reservation it is in the familiar racist
terms associated with the “brave new world”: “about sixty thousand
Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages … no communication
whatever with the civilized world … no conditioning … monstrous
superstitions … Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship … ex-
tinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan …” (Huxley
2000, 103).
Further, in Huxley’s dystopia, the Savage, John, has been deeply
shaped by Shakespeare (he has only read The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare and he quotes Shakespeare with ease), “which sets him fur-
ther aside from the vast majority of humanity in Huxley’s dystopia …
[where most] are illiterate, and Shakespeare’s works are banned and un-
known in this society to everyone but the World Controllers” (“Brave
New World” n.d.) – the latter being a projected outcome that Huxley saw
in the industrialization of American society by Henry Ford. In Huxley’s
work, then, the theme of aboriginal “place,” the use of Shakespeare as a
cultural signifier, and the problems of dystopic (American industrial-
ized) modernity are all addressed. New World Brave similarly takes on
these issues, however indirectly – and one might even argue that this
indirection is the way in which Native culture writes itself back into the
cultural narrative, thus reclaiming its centrality even as it is depicted
as marginal. And, ironically, New World Brave does so by making
Shakespeare marginal to its own focus on aboriginal issues, even as the
play’s title makes a point of reinscribing Shakespeare within the newly
mediated contexts of First Nations culture.
The adaptive transformation of the Shakespeare line effected by New
World Brave, then, may appear barely significant but holds enormous
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symbolic power in relation to the work of the play, which seeks healing
through theatrical creation. As I’ve already indicated, no other, implicit
or explicit reference to Shakespeare occurs in the play. Nonetheless, the
intertextual overwriting of Shakespeare’s line is suggestive of a recla-
mation of language and culture from the distorting gaze of European,
settler culture, of the ways in which even faint echoes have a role in
shaping meaning into new forms.
I dwell on this example from The Tempest for a number of reasons.
First, it reinforces how intermedial adaptation is not solely a function
of technologies. Cultural intermediations produce new meanings as
surely as do new technologies. Second, it reminds us that the genealo-
gy of adaptations is often nebulous and spectrally intertextual, a web
of meaning waiting to be made out of convergences and unthought
relations that continue to be created and identified across multiple
spaces and times. Third, in its particular attention to a key trope from
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, these readings remind us that Shakespeare’s
last play features a powerful magician, Prospero, who has the power to
change reality, whether through his magic (symbolized in his staff) or
through his knowledge (symbolized through his books). The play pre-
sciently addresses the very nature of intermediated realities via tech-

nologies (books, magic spells, and so forth) that come about as the
result of unanticipated convergences and new forms of knowledge and
interpretation.
Shakespearean scholar Mark Fortier’s essay “‘In No Recognizable
Way’ The Tempest” recounts his experience watching a summer park
production in Toronto of The Tempest set in the Queen Charlotte Islands,
one that “explicitly addressed the power of the white man over native
people in the new and third worlds” (1994, 67). As he watches the play,
a 747 flies overhead, obscuring the words being spoken on the stage.
The interruption, or what Fortier calls the convergence, leads him to
reflect,
The Tempest and the jet had a more overdetermined relationship. If seren-
dipity was at work that night, so were many other forces, some of which
are hardly chance at all, but historical propulsion such that The Tempest
and the 747 were sure to run across each other sometime, and to have the
timbre of their convergence marked in particular ways. (1994, 60)
The technology of the 747 intervenes in a Shakespearean play adapt-

ed to First Nations’ contexts in which precisely such technological
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interventions allow for the island’s Native cultures, embodied in

Caliban and Ariel, to be subjugated. Hence, in the readings above, we
have three very different contexts for reworking The Tempest. Yet all ad-
dress colonial relations involving settler and aboriginal cultures; all do
things to the original Shakespearean text (i.e., in the most expansive
sense of the term, they are adaptive of it); and all deploy different forms
of intermediality – some determined by the aesthetic form chosen (nov-
el) by a creator, some cultural (First Nations adaptation), and some the
“historical propulsion” imagined by Fortier that brings together unpre-
dictable convergences. Intermedial refashionings occur in relation to all
these factors. Such influences, in multiple interwoven contexts, contrib-
ute to the proliferation of meaning that is so frequently at stake in (and
a product of) adaptive reworkings. Moreover, they push at the so-called
limits of adaptation by articulating new ways of doing things to the
precedent text.
The three texts in play here are but one short strand in the incredibly
rich and diverse play of Shakespearean reworkings and productions
globally across many different media and cultures. It is worth remem-
bering that there are significant, cumulative aesthetic and market econ-
omies that arise from such adaptations across much vaster webs of
production and intertextuality. How much money in how many differ-
ent markets has Huxley’s Brave New World generated – especially in
light of the fact that it was ranked by the Modern Library as fifth “on its
list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century” (“Brave
New World” n.d.)? How much money have the various radio, film, and
TV adaptations of the novel in turn generated? How much money is
involved if one totals up every production and every adaptation of The
Tempest ever made from Shakespeare’s moment to the present? As I say
at the beginning of this essay, sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a
long way.
Since the publication of Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt’s
Intermediality in Theatre and Performance in 2006, the first book to use an
intermedial approach to study theatrical discourses,11 there has been a
growing sense that the intersection of new media and theatre is produc-
ing radical new forms of expression. That this is also the case for theatri-
cal adaptation, in and of itself a long-established genre, is also evident. In
light of these emergent forms of aesthetic exploration, this book explores
how generations of what have been called “new” media are changing
(and have changed) the ways we understand Shakespeare and, in the
process, the ways we are transforming (and have transformed) our un-
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derstandings of history, culture, and media itself. The global branding

of Shakespeare as an icon of literary achievement and master narra-
tives (often deemed “universal”) has made Shakespeare a natural tar-
get for new media transpositions. This targeting has produced a rich
and varied set of Shakespearean adaptations, intertexts, transposi-
tions, translations, devisings, and mutations, across multiple media and
multiple platforms, all of which are subsumed under (and in relation
to) the Shakespeare effect, which I define elsewhere as a “function of
Shakespeare’s cultural pervasiveness, in which echoes, resonances, and
direct integration of that effect are in evidence in a given play” or adap-
tation or cultural artefact (2002, 335).
A focus throughout the book, then, is Shakespearean adaptation
and the limits, or lack thereof, when Shakespeare is mediated through
radical new contexts and forms to produce the Shakespeare effect.
Adaptation is a defining mode of being “in” language and culture – but
it is also a slippery and protean process firmly tied to multiple, diverse
forms of imagining how stories mean and how stories relate to each
other in and across multiple contexts, voicings, histories, and the media
platforms by which these get transmitted. As I have argued earlier on,
attempts to limit adaptation’s signifying potential will ultimately fail

because to do so unnaturally restricts the underlying nature of unset-
tled and unsettling acts of the imagination that shapeshift across a wide
continuum ranging from convention (fidelity) to anarchy (infidelity
and spectral presencing).
The new media have consistently and across a range of historical
contexts refigured Shakespeare. This book is particularly interested in
the still understudied notion of how adaptation and “intermedia” in-
tersect. The latter is a concept employed in the mid-1960s by Fluxus
artist Dick Higgins. In “Statement on Intermedia,” a 1966 essay first
published in the Something Else Newsletter, Higgins drew attention to
the interdisciplinary, border-crossing activities and forms that occur be-
tween and across genres and diverse forms of artistic expression – mu-
sic, theatre, painting, new media, and so forth. Conceptual fusion is a
key aspect of intermedia in Higgins’s sense, exemplified in concrete
poetry, “which fuses text and visual art” (1994, 72), or sound poetry,
which fuses soundscapes, music, and text.
Ken Friedman describes how “Higgins coined the term ‘intermedia’
to describe the tendency of an increasing number of the most interest-
ing artists to cross the boundaries of recognized media or to fuse the
boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered
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art forms. With characteristic modesty, Higgins noted that Samuel

Taylor Coleridge had used the term over a century and a half before
he himself independently rediscovered it” (2005, 51). These border-
crossing explorations of media became prevalent in the 1960s but have
since exploded as the result of dramatic shifts in the role new media –
like social networking, the internet, Cloud computing, mobile devices,
and the like – play in the day-to-day lives of people with access to these
forms of technology. Higgins understood in 1966 the breakdown of me-
dia boundaries as having political, activist valences and a social utility
that fused art, aesthetics, and the potential for change in the world.
For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this
situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their tradi-
tional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The
idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire
world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in
saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry.
This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media.
A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.
Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the inter-
media (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by
formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new
formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of
what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact,
for what are we going to use them? (1996, 729; emphasis mine)
Higgins clearly understood intermedial creation as having a social util-

ity, and one might well ask what the social utility of new, hybridized
forms of expression can be used for beyond simply telling a story in
more intensely mediated ways. In that light, Higgins’s brief “Statement
on Intermedia” ended with the following admonition to further thought
and action: “Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor
movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to
say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicat-
ing. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources
of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than
ever. But we must now take the first steps.” Higgins’s comments re-
mind us that adaptation is never a neutral activity, and especially not
when it occurs as a function of powerful new communications tech-
nologies. The battle against sterility and the need to create new sources
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of information lie at the heart of intermedial theory in this ur-moment

in its history. And what is clear is that adaptation, and in particular
Shakespearean adaptation, using intermedial techniques has had an
impact on making familiar stories work in radically new contexts, some
of which I discuss earlier on. In short, adaptation has played and con-
tinues to play a role in transmitting information across boundaries that
would not normally be crossed.
For Higgins, confronting social issues like militarization or labour
inequality via these new aesthetic means seemed an obvious direction
to take with regard to the uses of intermedia. But, as many of the es-
sayists in this book show, the politics of intermedial adaptation are
never so unidirectional, never so easily directed towards simply social
justice issues. Deploying intermedial adaptive techniques within a
Shakespearean framework is fraught with problems. Competing inter-
pretive interests are often split between those ready to applaud inter-
medial interventions as a brave, new, and inevitable direction to follow
and those horrified at how these techniques bastardize the imagined
purity of the source texts and the nuanced effects they are capable of
generating. As Hutcheon reminds us, “the critical truisms that particu-
larly beg for testing – not to mention debunking – are those concerning
how different media can deal with elements like point of view, interior-
ity/exteriority, time, irony, ambiguity, metaphors and symbols, and si-
lences and absences” (2006, xv).
New media read in light of Hutcheon’s admonition to test truisms
about them need to be understood in relation to their historical loca-
tion, the specific contexts out of which they arise and without which
they would not be thinkable. The essays in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare,
Media, and the Limits of Adaptation offer a wide perspective on how me-
dia shift and change over time. Essays explore “historical” notions of
Shakespeare via the different media with which he has come to be as-
sociated. They do so via the concepts of intermedia and interculture,
which the book generally posits as theoretically interrelated terms. As I
outline earlier, media is a form of culture, and culture expresses itself
through diverse media. The two are thoroughly, necessarily intercon-
nected and contingent. When new media hybridize platforms for story-
telling there is an axiomatic intercultural relationship that is also being
worked through: media cultures clashing are just that – a form of inter-
cultural expression where the very platform is itself an aspect of a wid-
er set of cultural convergences that may include ethnicity, language,
religion, historical circumstance, and so forth.
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The book is especially interested in how media change and what the
effects of those changes are in specific relation to Shakespearean adap-
tation. And it does so because Shakespeare’s iconic place in global cul-
ture makes how his work is adapted using techniques associated with
intermedia a key, hyperactive site for understanding how intermedia
and intercultural expression operate. Diana E. Henderson notes how
“The digital revolution and its multimedia consequences … have al-
lowed new production possibilities and have prompted allied explora-
tions of print culture and the circulation of information” (2008, 6).
Moreover, she argues that “awareness of new media as one dimension
of a radically changing culture has also led to historically nuanced
reconsiderations of old media and of Shakespeare’s locations more gen-
erally in a ‘pre-literate’ culture” (6). These considerations are worth
noting because they outline the feedback loop that occurs as media
evolve over time, transposing content to new platforms in ways that
reshape the “original” content while also remaining in relation to that
“origin” as an inevitable outcome of how stories travel intermedially.
This phenomenon of the feedback loop is not necessarily new.
Stephen Orgel, for instance, studies the ways in which eighteenth-
century illustrations affected how Shakespeare circulated in that his-

torical moment, concluding: “The market for Shakespeare had become
a market for theatrical stars. But it had become a market for artistic in-
novation as well. Paradoxically, depictions of Shakespeare also moved
increasingly away from the stage, towards creative realizations of the
dramatic action unconstrained by actors or theatres” (2007, 74). This
movement away from the theatre as the sole or even dominant form of
conveying Shakespearean narrative has a long history associated with
adaptation, and perhaps an equally long history associated with how
adaptation makes use of new and alternative media to tell stories.12 So,
even in eighteenth-century illustrative practices, shifts in the contexts
and technologies associated with Shakespearean meaning were creat-
ing new forms that were at once linked to the theatre but moving away
from its contexts via new forms of representation and dissemination.
A more recent example from a rich field of potential examples dates
from April/May 2010, when the Royal Shakespeare Company collabo-
rated with the Mudlark Production Company to present a version of
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, called Such Tweet Sorrow. During the
five-week performance, actors portraying the six main characters of the
play (Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, Tybalt, Mercutio, and the Nurse –
given the name Jess) submitted improvised, real-time updates on the
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social networking site Twitter to express how their characters’ thoughts

and feelings were progressing. Actors responded to each other and the
audience, as well as to events going on in the world.
Others forms of social media, as with Hamlet Live, were used (such as
YouTube) to upload pictures, music, and video. The online audience
was able to “follow” the characters and watch the story unfold on their
computer screens. Although the performance is now over, the Live
Timeline has been posted onto the RSC website for the world’s continu-
ous viewing pleasure and as a reminder that Shakespeare now lives in
and across multiple forms of media. The Mudlark site took pains to
note the relations between the intermedial technologies and platforms
they used and the adaptive gestures that ensued for this version of
Romeo and Juliet. Thus, Such Tweet Sorrow
played out on Twitter and other online social platforms, reaching a global
audience of thousands and receiving coverage all over the world …
The audience were able to engage with the characters via “@” messag-
ing them on Twitter, or finding them elsewhere on the Web. For example,
Romeo’s XBox gamertag was discovered and people queued to speak to
him (or shoot him in a Call of Duty deathmatch).

Where this Twitter-play differed from other similar attempts at using
the micro-blogging medium as a storytelling platform was in its narrative
structure. Celebrated online storyteller Tim Wright and playwright Bethan
Marlow collaborated on a story “grid” where the character’s lives were
mapped out over the five weeks. There was no direct use of Shakespeare’s
words. No “wherefore art thou @romeo.” The characters tweeted as nor-
mal people would do. Juliet’s tweets were quick and often, her elder sister
“Nurse” Jess more mature and reflective. (“Such Tweet Sorrow” n.d. )
Shakespeare, in such a context, is resolutely intermedial, and this in-

termediality reflects on significant cultural shifts redefining how
Shakespeare gets “done” across a vast range of new sites. Hence, the
“brave new world” of virtual realities, post-/transnational identities,
and unprecedented constructs of communication and meaning that
shapeshift interculturally across different media cannot be ignored.
These new constructs are having a profound influence on how
Shakespeare’s presence in these economies is being reshaped. And they
demonstrate the effect of the feedback loop that occurs when familiar
stories are retold intermedially across new platforms and with new
forms of reception and interaction possible.
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American theatre scholar W.B. Worthen has argued, “Despite the

analogies between print and digital media as technologies of dramatic
storage, Shakespeare’s participation in a digital global monoculture is
not participation in a culture of signification or performance, but in a
culture of information” (2008, 61). From the perspective of intermedial
studies, this statement both is and is not accurate. Digital cultures, as in
the example just cited, and as in case studies throughout the book, can
and do convey both performance and information, as if the two are
distinguishable or so easily separated conceptually. Intermedial theory
might argue that performance is a form of information and that the in-
termedial presentation of information is a form of performance: both
require “spectacle” conceived of in the widest senses of the term in its
etymological sense of a specially prepared or arranged display, or as
something to be viewed. Performance takes on new modes of represen-
tation and signification in a digital context, where display and viewing
occur as a result of new platforms that literally perform information in
new and unpredictable ways.
It is worth remembering that information is indeed transmitted via
these novel intermedial platforms. Dramatic storage, too, occurs – but
in radical new forms whose accessibility and diversity are considerably

different from print media. Think, for instance, the search-ability of a
Google Books as opposed to a card-indexed physical library. Think the
Cloud, with its multiple forms of data integrated across many media, as
opposed to stand-alone databases. That said, in the context of under-
standing new media, as in an ongoing revisionary relationship and
feedback loop with precedent media, we must remind ourselves that
similar arguments were being made about print media when it first ap-
peared, with accessibility and the potential for a diversity of (mis)inter-
pretations key concerns of those struggling to theorize its effects,
especially in relation to the Bible. As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, “It was
printing, not Protestantism, which outmoded the medieval Vulgate and
introduced a new drive to tap mass markets. Regardless of what hap-
pened in Wittenberg or Zürich, regardless of other issues taken up at
Trent; sooner or later, the Church would have to come to terms with
the effect on the Bible of copy-editing and trilingual scholarship on the
one hand and expanding book-markets on the other” (1979, 353).
Monocultures give way to fractured and sometimes fractious subcul-
tures, as the history of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe
shows, and as the history of Shakespearean adaptations also shows
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when source texts intermingle with the new media technologies made
possible by the digital revolution.
Similar questions and concerns arise with new digital performance
events like Such Tweet Sorrow. How does one come to terms with the
literary and dramatic mediation of tweeting a Shakespearean play?
What does a YouTube synopsis of such a play reveal about new forms
of being spectacular in the digital world? What information gets con-
veyed to what markets when media convergences translate traditional
print media and theatre to diverse digital platforms? Again, Higgins’s
observations prove prescient, especially in regard to how intermedial
forms subvert sterile, ossified notions of aesthetic process and interpre-
tation. These new forms that adapt and revise older media platforms
generate impure (from an orthodox point of view) but fertile new
grounds for making meaning. Hybridization and intermingling be-
come the intermedial norm, recapitulating, if you will, the ways in
which intercultural exchange moves from the supposed ideal of pure
source culture to the so-called impure hybridization that results from
border crossing.
Early modern and postcolonial scholar Ania Loomba has argued
that “At a very obvious level, every culture can be said to be hybrid –
in fact even ‘authentic’ identities are the result of ongoing processes of
selection, cutting and mixing of cultural vocabularies. In practice, hy-
bridity and authenticity are rarely either/or positions” (1998, 146–7).
Shakespearean discourses emerged as, at least, a partial response to the
hybridization that imperial and colonial cultures in Europe had inevi-
tably produced over an extended time frame in relation to Europe,
Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. As colonial and imperial
cultures in Europe sought to renew themselves via the exploitation of
the Americas, further forms of hybrid interminglings were sure to
happen. These forms of border-crossing hybridization, by the time of
Shakespeare, already had extensive histories. Such histories also apply
to the various “new” media that were generated, as successive itera-
tions of media platforms reshaped themselves in relation to new tech-
nologies, new interpretive paradigms, and new imaginings of making
meaning adaptively. In the current globalized and digitized media en-
vironment, then, the concepts of “intermingling” and “hybridization”
speak not only to a distant past but also to postnational and increas-
ingly virtual futures, defined by the ongoing collision of cultures (inter-
cultures) and media (intermedia).13
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As conceptions of the world have changed, so has Shakespeare

accommodated new attitudes to culture, cultural negotiations, and
emergent forms of expression. This accommodation is something
Shakespeare has always done, a role he has always played, as Fischlin
and Fortier point out in their argument that “Shakespeare’s writing
practice was based [in part] on borrowing from earlier materials” (2000,
9). Shakespeare, in other words, has always intermediated other forms
of expression, other intertexts. Those intermediations are a defining as-
pect of what continues to demarcate Shakespeare’s iconic presence in
and across a variety of media. As with the key line from The Hunger
Games used as an epigraph to the second part of this introduction, ear-
lier revisions are always up for revocation.
Wild Adaptation Revisited: Intermedial Refashioning
Shakespeare’s continual, pervasive adaptation across an array of cul-

tural contexts and media platforms, then, necessitates consideration of
the ways meaning is assigned to literary texts, and how meaning is
located in the particulars of these cultural events. Transcultural, inter-
cultural, multicultural, and cross-, mixed-, or trans- and intermedia

adaptations of Shakespeare reconfigure the relationship between tex-
tual autonomy and historical particulars, pushing beyond conventional
understandings of the literary event and the complexities of historical
time. In this rich context of shifting strategies for making meaning,
OuterSpeares focuses on the intermedial refashioning, the radical re-
shaping that multiple forms of media sampling engage to produce new
forms of knowledge associated with what Mark Fortier identifies as
“wild adaptation,” a form of anarchic “engagement with prior texts
that cannot be policed and refuses containment by reductive defini-
tional paradigms” (2007, n.p.).
The book is organized around two central axes: the first addresses
new media and the implications of new media for Shakespeare studies
in relation to adaptation; and the second speaks to a range of different
older (formerly “new”) media in which intermedial effects associated
with adaptation are evident. Within these two broad areas of inquiry,
OuterSpeares’ four parts include a first part that examines new digital
media with especial attention to YouTube and mobile computing forms
related to apps; a second part on film adaptations of Shakespeare that
reference post-9/11 tropes as well as radical forms of dramaturgy that
pursue social justice outcomes (in specific reference to Mickey B,
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Northern Irish actor, director, and dramaturge Tom Magill’s filmic pris-
on adaptation of Macbeth); a third part on older forms of media still
with us – television, radio, popular music, and theatre – in which
Shakespeare’s insistent presence continues to be felt; and a final part
that opens up debate on questions relating to the limits and uses of
adaptation in a range of historical contexts.
In no way can a single book do justice to vast range of adaptive, in-
termedial practices associated with Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the book
does try to make clear, within the contexts of what I have already ar-
gued throughout this Introduction, that intermediality has played and
will continue to play a significant role in testing what we mean by
Shakespearean adaptation – and that the proliferation of meaning via
this form of intervention produces startling, unsettling ways of under-
standing the Shakespeare effect.
The opening section of the book, “‘Strange Invention’: Shakespeare
in the New Media,” addresses some of the radical shifts that have oc-
curred in early twenty-first-century intermedial forms associated with
digital media, social networking, and the rise of mobile devices. Christy
Desmet’s lead essay examines the proliferation of Shakespeare within
the contexts of the massively successful video-sharing site YouTube,

created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees (Steve Chen, Chad
Hurley, and Jawed Karim) and now owned and operated by Google
(who acquired the company in 2006 for $1.65 billion). A site of interme-
dial mashups, video calls and responses, citation, amateur interven-
tion, and a range of adaptive responses to Shakespearean source texts
(from unsophisticated school projects through to the Second City
Network Sassy Gay Friend meme), YouTube adaptations of Shakespeare
include, as Desmet’s wide-ranging essay shows, ample paratexts that
further intervene in the process of adapting Shakespeare to this new
medium. The layering of visual culture on literary and theatrical cul-
ture also includes, thanks to the format in YouTube that allows for re-
sponses to uploaded videos, the potential for commentary that further
complicates the representations of Shakespeare found in this medium.
And as Desmet concludes, Shakespearean reinvention and adaptation
using YouTube’s remarkable archive of Shakespearean materials allows
for a radically new form of adaptation in which mashup and sampling
culture are foregrounded. The YouTube mashup becomes a trope for
intermediality in the digital age, with convergence and the role of ama-
teur creation playing key roles in how conventional notions of adapta-
tion are reinscribed in this intermedium.
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Similar to Desmet, Jennifer Ailles describes in sharp relief the mas-

sive shifts in how Shakespearean meaning is created via digital means.
Ailles’s focus is on mobile devices (phones, tablets) that function in re-
lation to Cloud computing, an intermixture of software/application,
platform, and infrastructure that allows for remote computing and
storage of massive amounts of data for end-users who need not be teth-
ered or stationary to access data. Shakespeare has itinerant, nomadic
presence in the software and data structures of the Cloud. Moreover, as
Ailles cogently argues, mobile Shakespeares are transformative of tra-
ditional boundaries between the Shakespearean text and its audience.
The implications for this mobile form of Shakespearean intermediality
are significant, and especially so for adaptation theory. What do these
new forms that allow for highly fluid intermedial mashups disarticu-
lated from conventional notions of space and time mean for theories of
adaptation predicated on a source text’s seemingly stable relation to its
epigone?
Part two of the book, “‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’:
Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia,” features two essays
with somewhat unconventional takes on the already well explored top-
ic of Shakespearean film adaptations. Both essays identify violence as a

key trope in two film texts that have a great deal more to tell us about
the uses of Shakespearean adaptation generally. Don Moore’s nuanced
reading of Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest in light of visual
tropes associated with 9/11 takes a not terribly successful film and
reads it against the grain of global struggles to reimagine discourses of
hegemony and resistance. Unabashedly tackling the politics of repre-
sentation, Moore’s essay reminds us that both the medium and the
message can be intensely political and subject to the nuances and pres-
sures that artful close readings of intermedial texts provide. His essay
situates Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation in relation to what he calls
“melted” media, a form of allusive intermedial representation in which
multiple narratives converge and, in this particular case, do so in spe-
cific relations to global structures of hegemony diffused through
Shakespearean adaptation. In that sense Moore’s essay is a timely re-
minder that the very choice of intermedial adaptation as a form has a
purpose and a function that require deciphering.
By contrast with Moore’s more global reading, the essay/interview
involving Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley studies the
very specific localized case of Mickey B, Magill’s filmic prison adapta-
tion of Macbeth. With particular attention on how theatrical dramaturgy
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translates to the screen, and on how the violent offenders who star in
the film and who played key roles in shaping the radical adaptive ges-
tures the film makes are represented, the essay/interview understands
intermediality as a function of both cultural and contextual crossovers
– from lifers in a notorious maximum security prison who become
Shakespearean actors and inflect the Shakespearean source with their
own unique identities through to Boalian dramaturgical techniques de-
ployed in a film context that carries forward the social justice agenda of
the Theatre of the Oppressed in the fraught contexts of Northern Ireland.
Intermediality for Magill functions via cultural crossovers, which in
turn shapeshift how the medium represents meaning. The extended in-
terview with Magill gets at much material not available anywhere else,
including stories about Magill’s own past as a youth offender, his ex-
tended relation to Augusto Boal (as his representative in Northern
Ireland), the conditions under which Mickey B was made, and a range
of other reflections that Magill is generously making available here for
the first time. Throughout there is a clear sense that artistic interven-
tions in discourses of violence and oppression can produce meaningful
change, forge new alliances, and build constructive strategies for over-
coming cycles of violence and oppression in the worst of circumstances.

Magill’s intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare, then, operates in this
wider context of theatre pedagogy, dramaturgy, and social activism as
means to empowerment and transformation.
Part three of the book, “‘All the Uses of This World’: TV, Radio,
Popular Music, Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia,” takes on inter-
medial adaptation associated with older forms of “new” media, ex-
ploring televisual adaptation, radio, popular music, and theatre. The
express purpose of this section is to show the feedback loop that exists
between intermedial expression (even in older forms of media) and the
creation of new meaning as a function of adaptation. Kim Fedderson
and J. Michael Richardson’s essay studies television adaptation from
the point of view of pedagogy. Taking the acclaimed Canadian TV se-
ries Slings & Arrows (2003–7) as their point of departure, Fedderson
and Richardson argue that the Bardolatry it deploys depends on the
audience’s capacity to make connections between source and adapta-
tion in ways that reinforce conventional relations to Shakespeare that
are closely tied to the Stratford Festival’s conflicted investment in
Shakespearean tradition: as a mark of that conflicted relationship be-
tween tradition and new modalities, the Stratford Festival in 2012 took
“Shakespeare” out of its official name after having reinserted it in 2008.
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Fedderson and Richardson see Slings & Arrows as “pedagogically use-

ful” because the series redeploys Shakespearean conventions in a con-
temporary medium. Intermedial adaptation, in this context, resuscitates
the Shakespearean oeuvre, closing the distance between the medium
and the source text, thus making that oeuvre more readily available for
pedagogical purposes. The pedagogy of using contemporary popular
culture media to reintroduce classical texts is not without its problems,
and, as Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin Wetmore, and Robert York make clear,
“the youth culture industry looks to Shakespeare for source material”
even as the “education industry looks to the youth-culture industry for
pedagogical tools” (2006, 16). Fedderson and Richardson’s essay places
key issues of effective pedagogies in relation to debates in which inter-
media play a crucial role.
By contrast, Andrew Bretz explores radio adaptations of Shakespeare
in the 1930s, arguing for how radio adaptations drew their authority
from other media like the theatre and the phonograph recording, part
of a complex intermedial exchange in which the legitimation of radio
as its own independent form was at stake. Bretz’s claims situate
Shakespearean adaptations in the story of how radio’s intermediality
was constructed, and the ways in which the radio medium established
an authoritative voice for itself. Moreover, Bretz’s focus on the use of
the intercessory narrator, a kind of disembodied choric presence, to
mediate Shakespearean radio makes a powerful intervention into un-
derstanding precisely how intermedial radio adaptations produced
meaning in relation to the Shakespeare effect. The story of how new
forms of media like radio sought to gain a measure of authority for
themselves involves Shakespearean adaptations, which transferred the
cultural capital of Shakespeare into the new medium as part of an elab-
orate dynamic of empowerment and dissemination.
My essay on popular music and Shakespearean adaptations theo-
rizes intermediality in relation to adaptation and provides a range of
close readings of popular music’s adaptation of Shakespeare, from rap
and hip hop through to jazz, Broadway, and movie musicals. The essay
shows how both Shakespeare and popular music coexist as collided
entities in a global context, mutually generating meaning for each oth-
er in the crucible of contemporary popular cultures. The essay also
pays close attention to historical antecedents from Shakespeare’s own
moment when emergent forms of intermediality were already part of
the texture of theatrical representations. Situated in a vast and nebu-
lous field of musical activities associated with alternative, mass, and
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popular cultures, Shakespeare has an ongoing presence and multiple

functions in determining how youth make meaning via popular song
in which Shakespeare’s presence is persistently present.
The last essay in part three examines the reception contexts of
African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, an award-
winning adaptation of Othello with a fascinating, complicated stage
history. James McKinnon’s essay asks that we rethink the notion of the
intermedial in terms of marketing and reception contexts that influ-
ence how meaning gets made in relation to Shakespearean adaptation.
McKinnon “does not analyse Harlem Duet as Djanet Sears’s response to
Shakespeare. Rather than viewing the play as the product of the adap-
tive work of a particular author or auteur … [he considers] the con-
tinuing and diffuse process of adaptation, which neither begins nor
ends with a particular author, but permeates the play’s reception.”
McKinnon’s argument adds a new, important theoretical twist to think-
ing about intermediation. In this context the marketing/advertising of
theatre deploys intermedial techniques that in turn influence the on-
going work of adaptation, the unsettled process of creating new con-
texts that transmute the source. In the case of the racial and ethnic
identity politics associated with the first play by an African Canadian

playwright to be staged at the Stratford Festival in its more than fifty-
year history, the creation of meaning via means, like advertising, that
exceed the play itself make McKinnon’s readings especially perti-
nent, more so in the context of understanding the massive economies
in which advertising is implicated (in the US alone advertising reve-
nues were estimated at some $153 billion [Wayne Friedman n.d.]).
Intermediality, here, becomes a trope for reception and marketing con-
texts that generate their own adaptive effects, their own economies in
which the racial politics of a play like Harlem Duet are implicated. The
essays in this section reinforce – in contradiction to Hamlet’s notion of
the unprofitability of “all the uses of this world” (1.2.337–8) – how re-
examination of older media as well as the new contexts in which they
appear, inflected by their relation to mass media, advertising, and new
reception contexts, yields valuable new insights into the multilayered
structures of meaning associated with Shakespearean adaptation.
The last part of the book, “‘Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am
Privileged to Speak’: The Limits of Adaptation?,” poses the question
of what adaptation means in the varied intermedial contexts in which
it occurs, and what forms of cultural capital circulate as a function
of the answer to that question. Monika Smialkowska reads American
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celebrations of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 via the

multiple forms of media that were deployed to showcase Shakespeare’s
cultural presence in that historical moment. What Smialkowska calls
“patchwork Shakespeare” references the astonishingly wide variety
of ways in which Shakespeare was remade in the name of his tercen-
tenary, and reminds us that playing in and across media via structures
of adaptation is something that has been going on in relation to
Shakespeare for a very long time. Smialkowska’s argument replays
many of the theoretical enigmas discussed throughout the book in rela-
tion to later manifestations of intermedial adaptation and prompts us
to remember that intermedial adaptation has a long history and is not
unique to our current historical moment.
By contrast with Smialkowska’s case study of the 1916 Shakespeare
Tercentenary, Sujata Iyengar reads Shakespearean adaptation through
the lens of the cultural capital produced through what she calls the
“Shakescrafting movement,” in which the Shakespeare brand, a kind of
all-purpose aesthetic public commons site, is intermediated by both
academics and craft workers to create alternative economies. Iyengar’s
inquiry extends to “Shakescrafts,” which use Shakespearean texts, sto-
ries, and quotes to produce intermediated versions of the brand in

ways that travel between the high and low culture divide. For Iyengar,
Shakespeare is the source of an “inexhaustible vein” closely related to
a key lexical intervention that Iyengar makes in expanding the theo-
retical notion of adaptation. Iyengar identifies much of what is done
to Shakespeare as “upcycling,” a concept coming out of the work of
William McDonough and Michael Braungart. In “upcycling” the di-
minished value of sources is remade into something of greater value,
rather than being “downcycled,” or made worth less than what these
sources began as. Iyengar’s essay unpacks the feedback loop discussed
earlier in this Introduction between source and revision – between old
and new media, between valued and unvalued artefacts – and address-
es the aesthetic utility of that dialectic in ways that make explicit how
cultural capital and equity are constructed via the ceaseless remakings
of adaptors and intermediators.
The final essay of the volume sees Mark Fortier taking on the prob-
lem of what it might mean to go “beyond adaptation.” Fortier’s con-
trarian and theoretically provocative insights set the tone for the book’s
conclusion, which argues for an unlimited field of adaptation in which
nothing can ever truly be wholly new. Using the analogy of Darwin’s
finches, Fortier opines that adaptation is governed by situational speci-
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ficities and by modes of adaptation that follow general principles. The

argument advocates at once for the unlimited play of adaptation even
as that unlimited play is defined by context-specific determinants that
make each case its own particular version of a revision. Fortier’s read-
ing of the graphic novel series Kill Shakespeare, itself an intermedial ad-
aptation, at the end of his set of epigrammatic reflections on adaptation
generally, concludes that we cannot escape adaptation when we speak
“of or through” Shakespeare. To which we might add that so long as we
speak of Shakespeare it will be in the particular languages, technolo-
gies, historical contexts, and reception economies out of which mean-
ing is made and remade. As a result it is impossible to escape beyond
adaptation when adaptation is always already the mode by which the
Shakespeare effect is intermediated as part of an ongoing process of
call and response to other such intermediations.
OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation is
unique, then, in being the first book explicitly devoted to Shakespeare
and intermedial adaptations. Previous Shakespearean scholarship has
attended to film adaptation (see Boose and Burt 1997, Crowl 2007,
and Rothwell 2004, for instance), theatrical adaptation (see Fischlin
and Fortier 2000, Kidnie 2009), national adaptation (see Brydon and
Makaryk 2002, Johnson 1996, and Kishi and Bradshaw 2005, for exam-
ple), and various aspects of Shakespeare’s relations to other media
(Hansen 2010 and Sanders 2006 and 2007).14 None, however, encom-
passes the particular range of case studies and theoretical reflections to
be found here, written in the aftermath of a radical transformation of
media and their convergence brought on by the so-called digital revo-
lution. Michèle Willems asks, “How far does [film] influence horizons
of expectation and lead spectators to accept and expect intertextual (or
intermedia) references in new representations of Shakespeare?” (2007,
45). Willems’s comment suggests that there is a nascent awareness in
recent scholarship of the importance of intermedia to Shakespearean
intertexts and to adaptation writ large. Film is perhaps the most obvi-
ous, traditional site where intermediation between image and text oc-
curs. But, as this book makes clear, there are many other forms of
intermedial Shakespeare than those associated solely with film. That
said, no book currently available explicitly examines the boundary in-
terfaces that are shaping meaning across multiple forms of media in
which Shakespeare is present. In this context of emergent and not fully
realized scholarship, OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits
of Adaptation makes a distinct intervention in an area that has only been
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examined fragmentarily or not at all by current scholarship. It does so

in a way that, while far from comprehensive, constructively maps out
some of the key terrain in which Shakespeare intermediates and is in-
termediated, in the name of being made anew as the limits of adapta-
tion fall away before the technologies of the imagination, the imagination
of technology.
Indeed, sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way.
NOTES
1 For further examples of interart/intermedial forms see Karin Wenz’s (n.d.)

discussion of transmedialization. Wenz’s examination of Friederike
Anders’s “Woman in White” notes how it is an “example of a video instal-
lation transferred to the WWW [World Wide Web] and thereby trans-
formed into a hypertext. The work consists of a photonovel, a narration in
images and words and two databases connected to this novel: the identila-
dor, which gives information about the possible identities of the woman
and the eventilador, which is an archive of events. These databases con-
nected to image and video databases are at the center of the online version
of the ‘Woman in White.’”
2 The phrase appears in the Prologue to The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and
is spoken by the Chorus:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (Emphasis mine)
Of note is how so many of the tropes active in the Chorus’s Prologue,
besides that of the “star-cross’d lovers,” readily transfer to The Hunger
Games, including notions of “new mutiny,” “civil blood,” “parents’ strife,”
and “death-mark’d
WESTERN RESERVE UNIV love.”
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3 See Collins 2008, 135–6, 165, 247, 261, 281.

4 The Hunger Games is hardly beholden to only Shakespeare for its key
sources. A key precedent movie text to the novels is the Japanese constella-
tion of novels and films, set in a Japan that is part of a totalitarian Republic
of Greater East Asia. Battle Royale, the best-selling novel written by
Koushun Takami (1999), replicates the story of youth compelled to fight
each other to the death as a means of terrorizing the general population
and making insurgency against the totalitarian regime unthinkable. The
narrative of failed adult culture punishing youth via war games that turns
them into terrorists or freedom fighters is common to both Battle Royale
and The Hunger Games, and an obvious riff on The Tragedy of Romeo and
Juliet’s depiction of the alienation between youth and adult cultures. Many
other parallels exist between Collins’s epigonic work and Takami’s, in-
cluding various aspects of the Romeo and Juliet plot leitmotif focusing on
the two survivors Shuya and Noriko and the notable adaptive turnaround
that sees the two lovers surviving the “games.” Battle Royale the novel also
followed a similar intermedial path as The Hunger Games into film, with
two films based on it coming out in 2000 and 2003: Battle Royale and Battle
Royale II: Requiem (directed by Kinji Kenta Fukasaku). Other intermedial
adaptations of the Battle Royale narrative include manga and Filipino the-
atre versions.
5 I am indebted to doctoral student Cynthia Ing for this reference and for
having been able to read an in-progress essay she is writing on this pro-
duction and new forms of theatre intermediality.
6 The comment is in line with other researchers who argue similar sorts of
things about theatre specifically. In a 2006 editorial for Canadian Theatre
Review, Catherine Graham discusses Peter M. Boenisch’s notion that inter-
medial theatre fulfils a similar function to ancient Greek theatre, which, as
argued by Derrick De Kerckhove, “[promulgates] the cognitive strategies
for a newly literate culture” (Graham 2006, 4). Graham cites Boenisch’s
view that theatre “has been a genuinely intermedial form of art from the
start … [and] today once more functions as a ‘training centre’ for new
modes of perception,” which Graham situates in “an increasingly interac-
tive universe” (4). These comments echo Linda Hutcheon’s more general
observation regarding technology and adaptation: “Technology, too, has
probably always framed, not to mention driven adaptation, in that new
media have constantly opened the door for new possibilities” (2006, 29).
Similarly, Michael Darroch’s extended reading of Marie Brassard’s work
relies on McLuhan’s observation that “‘Artists in various fields … are al-
ways the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release
the power of another.’ In accordance with his belief that new media will
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engender a new form of orality, thereby rupturing the predominance of vi-

sual media since the advent of print, sound media have reinstated orality
into the theatrical process, as practiced by Brassard” (Darroch 2008, 111).
7 The phrase appears in Coriolanus 3.3 and ends Coriolanus’s famous speech
upon being banished from Rome:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:

There is a world elsewhere.
[Exeunt CORIOLANUS, COMINIUS, MENENIUS,
Senators, and Patricians]
8 Makaryk’s essay appears as both the Introduction to Shakespeare in Canada:
A World Elsewhere (co-edited by Makaryk and Diana Brydon) and as a
stand-alone essay archived on the Internet Shakespeare Editions site host-
ed at the University of Victoria. There are interesting variations between
the two versions of the essay and here I cite from the online version.
9 Miranda’s famous lines (4 of her total of 49 in the play) are spoken in 5.1,
when Alonso reunites with Ferdinand:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
10 Much of the material that follows, mutatis mutandis, is taken from my short
note on “New World Brave” found on the Canadian Adaptations of
Shakespeare Project (CASP) site: http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/
spotlight/s_p_nwb.cfm.
11 Larrue states that Chapple and Kattenbelt’s book “marquait ainsi une pre-
mière percée majeure de l’intermédialité auprès des théoriciens du théâtre
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et confirmait … l’urgence de revoir le fonctionnement du théâtre et son

histoire” (2008, 29) [“marked the first major intervention in intermediality
by theatre theorists and confirmed … the urgent need to reexamine the
function of theatre and its history”; translation mine].
12 Douglas Lanier offers an intriguing summary of more recent develop-
ments in relation to mass media and Shakespeare: “The advent of modern
mass media in the early twentieth century (particularly film and radio) led
to the displacement of the stage as the dominant popular performance me-
dium. The theatre was the medium closely identified with Shakespeare
and served in many ways as the basis for his claim to popularity, and its
move from a dominant to a residual form within the panoply of pop
cultural offerings precipitated a decisive shift in the meaning of the
Shakespeare trademark in popular culture, a meaning which accentuated
nascent tensions and contradictions in the field ‘Shakespeare.’ This shift in
significance was played out against the backdrop of the disciplinary insti-
tutionalization of English in the academy (with Shakespeare at its symbol-
ic center), the cult of the modern with its narratives of technological
progress and fears about dehumanization and urbanization, and concerns
about newly dominant forms of popular culture which, so critics feared,
presaged the fall of traditional artistic canons and the rise of working-
class, immigrant, and (particularly in Europe) American cultural clout”
(2007, 95).
13 It is useful to situate these comments in the context of Katerina Krtilova’s
brief synopsis of intermedial relations writ large: “Intermedial relations
have always been part of our culture: images and texts, for example have
interacted from ancient times until today. Religious practice always in-
volved different ‘media’ – a Catholic mass, for example, can be considered
an intermedial event par excellence. On the other hand, intermedia can
only be analyzed as ‘(inter)media’ from a certain theoretical perspective
that is only a few decades old. It is true that media have always existed,
but it is also true that there weren’t any ‘media’ before media theory. This
ambiguity about the subject matter of media theory is essential for media
theories based on philosophies of poststructuralism, deconstruction,
Foucauldian archaeology, or systems theory, summed up in the notion of
media or ‘the medial’ as in between (the German Dazwischen): something in
the middle, at the same time means and mediation (Mitte, Mittel, and
Vermittlung)” (2012, 37).
14 I would note that in addition to these works there are many other contrib-
utors to the rich critical literature on Shakespeare in and across specific
media and on Shakespearean adaptation. These would include Richard
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Burt’s Shakespeare after Mass Media (2002) as well as his Shakespeares after
Shakespeare (2006–7); Douglas Lanier’s Shakespeare and Modern Popular
Culture (2002), and the collectively written book Shakespeare and Youth
Culture (2006) by Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, and Robert L. York.
The literature on Shakespearean appropriations and adaptations in popu-
lar culture is large and ever-expanding, and readers might well take note
of how these works form part of an ongoing attempt to address how the
Shakespeare effect continues to travel and mutate as a function of different
media.
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PART ONE
“Strange Invention”:
Shakespeare in the New Media
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YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation,

and Rhetorics of Invention
Chr ist y De sm e t
Shakespeare-themed videos are plentiful on YouTube, where a rich

range of offerings – clips ripped from commercial DVDs, actors’ audi-
tion videos, serious amateur art films, clever mashups, and irrepress-
ible teen parodies – circulate constantly.1 Despite the many differences
among them, YouTube creations tend to be derivative, citing liberally
from one another and from Shakespeare’s plays in other media, a clear
indication of the intermedial contexts that YouTube makes possible.

Some, adhering to a hacker belief that “information wants to be free,”
preface their work with a cheery “No copyright infringement intend-
ed!” Many, although by no means all, could be considered as part of
Lawrence Lessig’s “amateur culture” (2006), in which casual borrowing
is matched with joyful invention. As such, the site seems virtually to
breed appropriation as an artistic practice, even an Aristotelian habit
of mind.
Getting inside those habits of mind is no easy task, however. Videos
on YouTube come to us equipped with ample paratexts. Authors add
descriptions and choose meta-tags to guide user searches; viewers add
their own comments or begin a dialogue with the author; new artists
post video replies; and the YouTube interface classifies videos accord-
ing to subject matter (groups), creator (channels), and communities.
Copiousness of information, although typical for Web 2.0 applications,
nevertheless fails to provide reliable insight into the invention process-
es practised by YouTube Shakespeare artists. The disembodied com-
ments attached to videos are of uncertain provenance, often off-hand,
and sometimes sparse; in some cases, both videos and comments
date several years back, making communication with either authors or
commenters untenable.2 Because YouTube’s audience for Shakespeare
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 54 Christy Desmet
adaptations skews young, furthermore, many efforts are school proj-

ects that profess a certain degree of ideological naïvety: typically, these
school-sponsored efforts either thank the teacher effusively or strike a
pose of self-deprecating cool (“We put this video together in only two
hours”). Other efforts, which take a more traditionally “serious” stance
towards their art, offer the opaque filmic surface and stylistic polish of
commercial production.
The Long Zoom, or a Focus on Genre
A formalistic reading of the videos themselves can provide internal evi-

dence of invention, but the emphasis on individual artists and videos in
most extant criticism of YouTube Shakespeare (and other new media)
works against the structural logic of the database that informs Web 2.0
applications.3 This essay, instead, begins with popular science writer
Steven Johnson’s discussion of innovation in Where Good Ideas Come
From. “Good ideas,” Johnson observes, “are not conjured out of thin
air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition
of which expands (and occasionally, contracts) over time” (2010, 35).
Inventions therefore do not spring fully formed from the heads of in-
dividual geniuses, but are the (often dispersed) product(s) of an envi-
ronment that contains “a wide and diverse sample of spare parts” and
encourages “novel ways of recombining those parts” (41). Johnson’s
paradigm for such environments is the city, and what he imagines as
the virtual city of YouTube is one of his principal examples. This model
for invention as taking place in an environment that encourages novel
combinations among copious pre-existing parts suggests, furthermore,
the need for a different critical approach, what he calls the “long zoom”
perspective. This essay seeks such a perspective by examining not
merely individual artists and videos but the (de)formation of genres to
focus on the collective why and how of YouTube Shakespeare as a phe-
nomenon. To a large extent, a “long zoom” or generic focus on YouTube
invention works against the narrower sense of “intermediality” at play
in the scholarly literature, which often emphasizes its kinship with the
structuralist concept of “intertextuality” and so frequently works to un-
ravel semiotic references between and among specific artistic entities in
different media.4 To this extent, it might be said that invention in
YouTube Shakespeare highlights the “limits” of intermediality as a con-
cept and analytic practice.
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from YouTube Shakespeare 55
Genre, as I am thinking of it in this essay, is less a taxonomy or cata-

logue of traits than a form of praxis, what Lisa Gitelman (2006) identi-
fies as a collection of “social protocols” associated with a particular
technology (passim). Genre, according to Carolyn Miller (1984), is akin
to Kenneth Burke’s “symbolic action,” a strategy that evolves to encom-
pass the situation in which it arose. Genre as symbolic action depends
heavily on context, offering readers or users a way of “acting together”
(Miller 1984) to create the kind of implicit, ad hoc, and often transient
communities familiar from social media. Genre as symbolic action also
requires sizeable economies of scale and speed. In Miller’s formulation,
“Genre is a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typi-
fication of rhetorical action” (1984, 163); these “typified rhetorical ac-
tions” take place as well in “recurrent situations” (31; emphases mine).
Finally, as John Frowe argues, genre presupposes mediation: a genre is
a “mediating structure between texts and the situations in which and on
which they operate” (2007; emphasis mine). To summarize, genres take
shape in recurrent situations (such as repeated uploadings to YouTube
of videos on common subjects); genres operate on a large scale, as
YouTube certainly does; and genre, like a Web 2.0 interface, acts as a
mediating structure between individual videos and the YouTube data-

base. In the sections that follow, I sketch out the beginnings of a rhetoric
of invention for YouTube Shakespeare by identifying and analysing
two prominent and complementary genres, curating and mashup, that
satisfy broad cultural motives within the YouTube community. In each
case, I move between the long zoom perspective and a shorter focus,
relying on genre’s function as mediator between “private intentions
and social exigence” that connects “the private with the public, the sin-
gular with the recurrent” (Miller 1984, 163).
Curating the Bard
Built on a capacious database, YouTube stores videos of all kinds

quickly and easily. Like many Web 2.0 phenomena, YouTube also
mixes scholarship with creative art. Not surprisingly, then, a good bit
of energy within YouTube Shakespeare, as within the application gen-
erally, is devoted to curation as a genre. YouTube archivists collect
and catalogue relevant materials that previously have been difficult
to access or that just catch someone’s fancy. Many of the examples are
comic and a fair number come from the TV era of the 1960s and 1970s.
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Just as fifty-something men upload and comment on recordings of

their favourite songs on archaic 45’s, so too do Shakespeare aficiona-
dos upload footage ranging from the Gilligan’s Island Hamlet episode
and Moonlighting’s The Taming of the Shrew to the Beatles’ version
of “Pyramus and Thisbe” (“Gilligan’s Island Clips [Hamlet]” 2010;
“Moonlighting Taming of the Shrew” 2006; and “Around the Beatles
rare Apr-28-64” 2010).
As the most basic form of participation in Shakespeare YouTube cul-
ture, curating the Bard might hardly be considered invention at all.
Uploading an existing video is either simple appropriation (theft) or
pure mimesis (copying) – in either case a replication of pre-existing ob-
jects, often multiple times. Within YouTube, however, encounters be-
tween users and database by way of the application’s interface involve
a “filtering action.” Filtering, at least in institutional contexts, involves
conscious choice on the part of curators, decisions about what to in-
clude and exclude, where and how to display artefacts, and so forth
(Graham and Cook 2010, 45). Even in the most de-centred forms of cu-
rating new media art, the audience-as-curator is not a completely ran-
dom collection of users. User-curators of avant-garde new media art
tend to be friends and collaborators, or at the very least, like-minded

patrons who have chosen to visit a certain exhibit or museum (Graham
and Cook 2010, 268–75, passim). The ethos of the dispersed YouTube
Shakespeare community, by contrast, is strongly influenced by contin-
gent factors, the simple reality of who has collected Shakespeareana of
what kinds and is motivated to share it. Nevertheless, the collected acts
of curating Shakespeare do create an “exhibit” of sorts.
YouTube’s Secret Sharers
While YouTube Shakespeare may well qualify as an audience-curated

space, there are also a number of other “actors” at work that influence
the filtering process in this Web 2.0 application. Take, as an example,
the Beatles’ 1964 “Pyramus and Thisbe” sketch, which has been avail-
able steadily since 2006 in copies of varying quality (“Around the
Beatles rare Apr-28-64” 2010).
The first peripheral set of “participants” are viewer comments and
the user-generated metadata or tags that help YouTube categorize
videos and thus provide the application with the data necessary to
suggest related videos and push advertisements to individual users.
For 4 February 2012, here are the first three sample sets of metadata
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1.1 The Beatles in “Pyramus and Thisbe” (“Around the Beatles” 2010)
that come up on a search for “beatles pyramus and thisbe,” as filtered

by “relevance.”
Based on the relationship between time of upload and page views,
the three samples of “Pyramus and Thisbe” seem to attract viewers at
a roughly steady rate. (The third example has by far the fewest views,
but was uploaded most recently.) A general paucity of tagging within
the first two examples suggests an amateur stance, in Lessig’s sense
of the amateur as an artist who appropriates and/or remixes others’
work (2006); although a generous number of appended comments sig-
nals the existence of like-minded antiquarians, the authors seem un-
worried about promoting their selections in the YouTube universe.
The third example, although offering a substantially larger body of
tags from far-flung domains, nevertheless places itself outside main-
stream media and culture. The tag “macca” (a nickname for Paul
McCartney in the British tabloid press) takes viewers to the poster’s
site on deviantart.com, which turns out to be a Beatles fan site starring
four cross-dressed adolescent German girls, who play the Fab Four in
historically correct costume and strike authentic postures in their trib-
ute videos. Again, however, the video’s general ethos is amateur; there
is more authorial self-display at work here, but as in the previous two
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Example 1 Example 2 Example 3

Title “The Beatles perform “Beatles “The story of Pyramus and Thisbe!
Shakespeare, in colour” Shakespeare” John/Paul Music Video ♥”
Upload date 3 August 2008 19 March 2006 5 October 2011
Views 228,528 370,183 208
Category Entertainment Comedy Comedy
Tags pyramus and thisbe, the beatles, Beatles, John Lennon, Paul
thuhisabee, midsummer Shakespeare McCartney, Macca, Johnny,
night’s dream Paulie, Ringo Starr, George
Harrison, Slash, Love,
Shakespeare, Pyramus and
Thisbe, Romeo, Julia, Juliet,
Kissing you
examples, also a sense of participation in some larger, and in this case

rather esoteric, community.
Another, partially occluded actor in every instance of YouTube
Shakespeare invention is the site’s bureaucracy. Videos are flagged and
removed because of direct complaints from copyright holders or for

reasons of obscenity.5 When I was attending closely to YouTube
Shakespeare in 2007–8, YouTube aggressively disabled Shakespeare
videos that used copyrighted video footage and, even more often, pop-
ular music tracks. The saga of one particularly beautiful and clever
mashup, purportedly originating in Turkey, engaged Shakespeare fans
vigorously with YouTube’s policing mechanisms. “Hamlet is back …
and he is not happy” featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet and
drew substantially on clips from his performance in the young boy’s
imaginary remake of that play in Last Action Hero; Arnold and his ac-
tion film are then remixed with other material to create an imaginary
James Cameron epic (“Hamlet Is Back” 2008). Although a nearly
seamless blending of short clips from a wide range of sources, the
video was repeatedly removed for copyright violation. While YouTube
Shakespeareans rarely get involved in internet politics, in this case
there was a collective expression of outrage and a concerted effort to
keep the video circulating by way of repeated uploads.
The most mysterious actor in YouTube invention, however, is its al-
gorithm, or the mathematical formula for linking and ranking videos
that is employed by the YouTube administration. In the commercial
world, users often try to “game” the YouTube algorithm – for instance,
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1.2 “Hamlet is back . . . and he is not happy” (“Hamlet Is Back” 2008)

tagging a video with the term “porn” in order to draw more views,
even though the tag has nothing at all to do with the video’s content.
YouTube’s administrators respond by adjusting the algorithm, and
blogs, in turn, record hackers’ research into YouTube’s silent adjust-
ments in an effort to stay one step ahead of “the man.”6 The amount of
“buzz” surrounding the face-off between hackers and YouTube imbues
the site with an aura of secrecy, making the unreadable algorithm a fo-
cus for conspiracy theories.7 The algorithm is nevertheless an impor-
tant factor for invention on YouTube generally and for curating in
particular. As Kevin Slavin shows in his TEDGlobal talk (2011), algo-
rithms in our culture are quickly achieving the status of computerized
persons; they use math “to decide stuff,” “talk” primarily to one an-
other, and are, in effect, unreadable by most humans: “we are writing
code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control,” he
warns. The algorithm, then, is every YouTube participant’s, every vid-
eo’s secret sharer.8
Invention as Linking
Curating Shakespeare as a collective form of invention on YouTube in-

volves not one individual or even many individuals in different places
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– the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing – but the kind of distributed cog-

nition described by Edwin Hutchins (1993) in the navigational systems
of large ships. The knowledge needed to run the ship is distributed in
ever-shifting patterns across a team of navigators, and careful coordi-
nation among members is essential. When navigating a large ship, cre-
ating knowledge is a matter of linking information, agents, and actions
with one another. On YouTube, by analogy, the action of curating the
Bard also is distributed across many actors: in the case of the Beatles’
“Pyramus and Thisbe,” the Fab Four themselves, the team that pro-
duced their video, the original person who uploaded the video to
YouTube, subsequent uploaders, the viewers and commenters who af-
fect the video’s page rank, each video’s meta-tags, the YouTube bu-
reaucracy – and, finally, that shadowy, posthuman agent that is the
algorithm. Linking as social action informs curation as a YouTube
Shakespeare genre.
Linking has, from the start, been fundamental to the web. Nicholas
Barbules (1997) notes how hyperlinks can function rhetorically as meta-
phors, linking dissimilar things to raise a potential similarity between
them. Through repetition, metaphorical linkage can become metonym-
ic, based on a tacit and eventually conventional association between

one sign and another. With metonymy, in particular, what might look
like a random assemblage of data (e.g., web pages) makes sense when
the common element that guides their association clicks into place;
Barbules offers the example of a page on “vacation spots” that is linked
to one on “how to avoid pickpockets.” What Barbules does not observe
in his discussion of Web 1.0 linking, which is seen as being governed by
the choices of either the author (who makes the hyperlinks) or reader
(who chooses whether and in what order they will be followed), is just
how easily virtual tropes can devolve into chaos in the multi-agent
invention of Web 2.0. Metonymy is just one step away from acciden-
tal collision, metaphor always faced with the possibility of blank
incomprehension.
For an example, we can return to the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe.”
In rhetorical terms, a search engine works primarily through metaphor
or analogy, a hierarchical or vertical linking of items that prompts a
recognition of similarity between them. Thus, a search on “beatles
Shakespeare” on 10 February 2012 yielded nine copies, one with
Spanish subtitles, plus a small string of less relevant videos. A search on
“beatles pyramus and thisbe” gave similar results, with a few other
performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1 thrown in for good
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measure. These linkages are metaphoric. Metonymy, the complemen-

tary trope by which only partial, conventional, or strained links are reg-
istered, is encountered before we leave the first page of related videos.
At number 30, a clip of the prime minister’s stirring speech from the
2003 film Love, Actually does contain “beatles” and “Shakespeare”
among its tags, which refer to this eloquent riff from the PM: “We may
be a small country but we’re a great one, too – the country of Shakespeare,
Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s
right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that.” But it is far more
difficult to comprehend why these same two search terms, along with
“beckham,” would be attached to “Top 10 Curious Facts about the
British Royal Family,” a video that has nothing to do with any of these
three subjects but garnered 936 comments, many of them vituperative
and many subsequently removed. Perhaps gaming the algorithm was
among the author’s motivations.
While, in rhetorical theory, metaphor and metonymy are set against
one another in a binary that often proves slippery, on YouTube the dif-
ference between them becomes more granular and may be construed as
a matter of degree more than of kind. For the Beatles’ “Pyramus and
Thisbe” sketch, in seventh position among the related videos we find

another relic of 1960s pop culture, Peter Sellers imitating Laurence
Olivier as Richard III; in this parody, Sellers muses no longer that “Now
is the winter of our discontent” but – substituting for Shakespeare an-
other text from the Beatles – “It’s been a hard day’s night.” Sellers’s imi-
tation of Olivier’s deportment and delivery is perfect. Both skits date to
1964, Sellers’s performance having taken place on the television show
“Music of Lennon and McCartney.” The appearance of these two vid-
eos on YouTube, at least judging by the oldest remaining copies, is also
roughly contemporaneous; “Pyramus and Thisbe” was uploaded on 19
March 2006 and the Richard III parody on 6 September 2006. There are
usually about the same number of copies available for both skits, and
both elicit copious, appreciative, and generally intelligent comments
from viewers.
Other evidence, however, suggests that the Beatles’ performance
grabs more viewer attention than the Sellers “Richard III.” The
“Pyramus and Thisbe” episode has been re-uploaded steadily since
2006, most recently on 25 April 2013. The Sellers piece was uploaded
most recently three years previously; it remains available for discov-
ery, but is not actively generating archival work. One user comment
on “Richard III,” which reveals that the poster is a secondary school
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student who failed to understand the parody created through Sellers’s

“poetic” delivery, suggests that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is simply
better known as a Shakespeare play than Richard III – perhaps, in part,
because of the former’s traditional place in the US literary curriculum.
Finally, the broadest conceptual link between these two antiquarian
videos is not Shakespeare at all, but what the category tags suggest is
the posters’ primary interest: comedy and entertainment. “Pyramus
and Thisbe” thus gains cultural capital by association with the Beatles,
rather than the reverse. In the same vein, Sellers is appreciated as a
comic in his own right, at least according to the comments, but he too
acquires attention less because of his own fame than because of the
Beatles’ enduring popularity among music fans and impersonators. In
a final twist of algorithmic fate, the two pieces may become associated
with one another simply because Sellers performed his imitation for a
Beatles television special; thus, descriptions appended to the videos
naturally triangulate the terms “Beatles,” “Shakespeare,” and “Sellers.”
For all of the reasons examined above, cause and effect relations are
muddied, as knowledge of Sellers seems to depend on knowledge
about the Beatles, and knowledge of Shakespeare on the pop culture
icons, rather than the reverse. This analysis contradicts one of the tacit
assumptions of appropriation studies, which is that Shakespeare’s cul-
tural capital inspires pop culture parodies.9 Zooming out from the ar-
chived video to a generic perspective thus complicates and compounds
the motives for curating Shakespeare as an artistic/scholarly activity.
Shakespeare Mashups
Roman Jakobson (1971) famously showed how metaphor and metony-

my complement one another as master tropes through which the world
may be experienced. If curating works through metaphor, or vertical
analogies, on YouTube, the Shakespeare mashup, which exploits the
large cache of ready-made materials and examples for imitation avail-
able there, works primarily through metonymy. A mashup is created
from one or more video clips rolled over a soundtrack from a different,
usually discordant, source. When classic mashups are working at their
best, there are moments of perfectly timed ironic disjunction between
what is going on in the video and soundtrack. These moments coalesce
into a multimedia narrative in which the soundtrack – both aurally and
conceptually, by virtue of its source – supports an inverted reading of
the original film’s ethos.
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Within the mashup, we see distinctly the operations of intermedi-

ality in the more constricted sense articulated by Irina Rajewsky: as
a critical category for the “concrete analysis of specific individual
media products or configurations – a category that of course is use-
ful only in so far as those configurations manifest some form of in-
termedial strategy, constitutional element, or condition” (2005, 62).
Rajewsky defines intermediality in these terms: as a transposition of
material from one medium to another; as an artistic combination of
media; and as self-conscious reference to a semiotic entity in another
medium (as when a film refers rhetorically to novelistic technique or
vice versa). Most of all, by implication, intermedial artefacts must
achieve a delicate balance between self-conscious reference to anoth-
er medium – a kind of technical quotation – and maintaining what
Rajewsky call the “illusion of another medium’s specific practices”
(55). YouTube Shakespeare generally and the mashups in particular
exhibit to a high degree both the self-conscious citation of artworks in
other media and the commitment to an illusion of another medium;
the ability to rip and burn from DVDs, in particular, preserves the il-
lusion of a seamless transfer from one medium to another (i.e.,
YouTube’s flash video format). Paradoxically, while taking the gener-

ic “long view” of YouTube Shakespeare highlights the “limits” of in-
termediality as a concept and practice, zooming in on Shakespeare
mashups shows clearly the dynamics of intermedial production and
reception. YouTube Shakespeare both does and does not epitomize
intermediality as a phenomenon.
A hybrid artefact, the mashup stands midway between curating (fil-
tering, framing, and replication of others’ material) and what we con-
sider individual creativity (making an “original” art object) and so
tends to reflect self-consciously on its artistic status. Mashups are
prominent in the world of YouTube Shakespeare and, over time, have
developed into a less precise form in which an array of clips, sometimes
from many sources and sometimes from just one, are mixed to create a
new narrative. Many early examples fell victim to copyright com-
plaints, but in the wake of the unsuccessful Viacom copyright suit,
Shakespeare mashups are making a comeback.10
Results from a 10 February 2012 search on “Shakespeare mashup”
revealed a predominance of Hamlet examples, while a more refined
search on “Hamlet mashup” produced a still smaller subset, including
a venerable, four-year-old copy of Cathead Theatre’s enactment of
Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Within this
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group, we find several on the theme of “To be or not to be” that display
high production values, access to a wide range of professional Hamlets
available on DVD, and knowledge of less familiar pop-culture appro-
priations of Shakespeare. A quite recent arrival on the YouTube scene,
Geoff Klock’s “Hamlet Mash Up” (2011) is an expert piece of appropria-
tion. Offering no description and minimal tags (oddly, to People &
Blogs), the video remixes nearly sixty different clips featuring brief
lines from Hamlet, organized roughly according to the play’s plot. The
filmmaker’s cleverness resembles that of Eric Faden in “A Fair(y) Use
Tale” (2007), a ten-minute lecture-parody on fair use and copyright
that is constructed entirely out of snippets – single words to a phrase –
gleaned from Disney cartoon sources. On his blog, Klock, who lays
claim to an Oxford DPhil, discusses appropriation and its discontents;
he compares, for instance, Quentin Tarantino’s “repurposing” of mate-
rials from movies to John Milton’s recycling of epic poetry. The final
credits to “Hamlet Mash Up” carefully list all sources with dates and
episode numbers, not only providing a proper bibliography but also
inviting viewers to “identify that clip.” “Hamlet Mash Up” is, in the
end, as much a piece of scholarship as of art.
Adhering to mashup aesthetics, the video keeps the play’s storyline

moving briskly, providing smooth transitions from one clip to anoth-
er, maintaining high-quality audio and video and unifying the whole
with a common texture and colour saturation. While the sequence
roughly follows the chronology of Hamlet’s events, there is a certain
amount of lingering over “To be or not to be,” so that the video’s
rhythm becomes contrapuntal, echoing particular lines and circling
back to previous sections of the speech. The video also offers a critique
of – or perhaps just a riff on – Shakespeare’s place on the border be-
tween high art and popular culture. In one particularly striking in-
stance, the video juxtaposes a shot of cartoon character Jack Skellington
from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), who sings,
“And since I am dead, I can take off my head, to recite Shakespearean
quotation,” with Kenneth Branagh in the graveyard, intoning, “Yorick.
I knew him, Horatio.” Jack’s insouciance punctures Branagh’s high
seriousness while simultaneously insisting on the animation’s own
artistic status.
In this way, “Hamlet Mashup” meditates on, even as it represents,
appropriation as a YouTube practice and on relations among different
registers of film and television.
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1.3 The Nightmare before Christmas (“Hamlet Mash Up” 2011)

Sampling and Combining as Invention
While the basic function of linking has been endemic to the Web from its
inception, other rhetorical operations have become important for Web
2.0, in which the application’s interface mediates between an underly-
ing database and the featured utterances, narratives, and objects that
form its public face. In some ways, the mashup mirrors in little the
operations of YouTube as a whole. One of its principal rhetorical
moves is sampling – or “selection according to a criterion,” as John
Unsworth (2000) puts it – that is most familiar to users from the com-
mon search engine. Sampling or synecdoche, in rhetorical terms, is at
the heart of the genre, beginning in the age of film (as in Last Action
Hero’s appropriation of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet) and continuing in
Shakespeare 2.0 (as in “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy,” which
appropriates Last Action Hero and through it, the Olivier film). This
can be illustrated by a second Hamlet mashup, which followed Klock’s
by six months. “Hamlet – the Mashup!!!” (2011) draws on much of the
same material as the former video; while the second does not respond
overtly to the first by using YouTube’s “video response” function, there
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1.4 Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet (“Hamlet Mash Up” 2011)

is an economy of invention created through their reliance on a common

“archive” of Shakespeare sources from television and film. Both Hamlet
mashups, for instance, draw on The Simpsons to mock Shakespeare’s ca-
nonical stature, although they work with different clips from the same
episode and use them to different ends. The possibility that the second
filmmaker appropriates material from as well as takes inspiration from
Klock is suggested, although by no means confirmed, by the fact that
both videos conclude with exactly the same clip of Sesame Street’s Cookie
Monster rhapsodizing over Danish princes and pastries.
Repeated sampling creates a repertoire of video clips that is readily
available to subsequent artists and, as a side effect, begins constructing
a mini-canon of Shakespearean appropriations. For mashup, the art lies
in combining and recombining these elements into new configurations.
While Klock’s compositional style is musical, the second mashup works
more directly by ironic juxtaposition, mocking high art pretension with
commentary from popular sources. For instance, the video opens with
Monty Python’s Hamlet on the psychiatrist’s couch, complaining that
“All anyone wants me to say is ‘To be or not to be,’” until Terry Jones’s
Hamlet in a blond wig and crown is succeeded by an equally blond
Kenneth Branagh reciting the speech in front of a mirror.
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1.5 Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Hamlet (“Monty Python – Hamlet” 2011)
Adam Long of the Reduced Shakespeare Company avers that the “To
be or not to be” speech “just weakens” Hamlet’s “character. It makes
him wishy-washy”; Long’s pronouncement is followed by Monster-
piece Theater’s Hamlet, in which Muppet Elmo commiserates with Mel
Gibson’s emo-Hamlet, who weeps over “words, words, words.” (To be
fair, this Hamlet is emotionally volatile, moving from happiness to
sorrow to rage in short order.) Jones’s Hamlet, in a return to the Monty
Python episode, professes to his shrink a desire to do “something
different” – become a “private dick”; his commentary is succeeded by a
glimpse of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Last Action Hero, cigar in
mouth and automatic weapon in hand, deciding “Not to be” and then
creating mayhem. Through the interplay of sampling and combining,
the second Hamlet video responds to the first by deforming and reform-
ing the mini-genre of “To be or not to be” mashup.
By “zooming in” to a pair of videos on the same theme, I have con-
structed the narrative of their relationship in terms of artistic imitation,
as if filmmaker 2 were directly stealing from, modelling on, or answer-
ing filmmaker 1. Keeping in mind the number of secret sharers at work
in the formation of genres on YouTube, however, ascribing choice and
intention to one video just because it is uploaded after another video
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may be just a version of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. As Lauren
Shohet has discussed, “YouTube works as the dark double of other ar-
chives: its principles of selection are determined entirely by users and
uses” (2010, 73). The second video therefore is “answerable” to the first
only in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of that term, as being dialogically en-
gaged with a language that is already “half someone else’s” (1990; 1981,
293). For as the examination of curating YouTube Shakespeare suggests,
inventing YouTube involves distributed cognition at all levels, includ-
ing canon or archive formation.
Methodological Reflection
The analysis offered here applies specifically to the videos discussed in

the essay and the YouTube genres to which they may be traced. A study
of invention in YouTube Shakespeare therefore can be neither for all
time nor for all places. If, as anthropologist Michael Wesch (2008) has
suggested, ethnography is the native science of Web 2.0, then ethnog-
raphies of YouTube Shakespeare must honour the limitations on that
practice recommended long ago by Clifford Geertz, who argued that in
“thick description” of culture as an “acted document” (1973, 10), theo-

ry needs to “stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case
in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstrac-
tion” (24). The same might be said for the fluid genres emerging from
YouTube and their vicissitudes over time and digital space. YouTube
Shakespeare genres will come, and they will go. What is happening in
that corner of the application, furthermore, may differ radically from
what is happening at another YouTube site. As Geertz cautions, in thick
description “theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpreta-
tions they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much in-
terest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if
they are not general, they are not theoretical), but because, stated inde-
pendently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or va-
cant” (25). And so, a thousand YouTube ethnographies can, will, and
must flourish, with no definitive end in sight so long as the application
may last.
Conclusion
Steven Johnson, implicitly responding to the activist mantra “Infor-

mation wants to be free,” writes that “Good ideas may not want to be
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free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to rein-
vent themselves by crossing conceptual borders” (2010, 22). Infor-
mation acts in much the same way in YouTube Shakespeare; through
repeated acts of sampling, linking, and combining, genres of You-
Tube appropriation emerge that satisfy varying motives and provide
different strategies for a wide range of circumstances. That reinven-
tion is central to YouTube and to the forays of its users into Shake-
spearean territory is suggested by an earlier Hamlet mashup, uploaded
in 2008.
“Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” (2008) is a demonstration
piece that shows off the potential of YouTube as a hermetically sealed
repository of Shakespeare-related clips that can readily be combined
and recombined with one another. While many YouTube artists take
their clips from DVDs (some ripped in an inexpert way), “Hamlet ‘To
Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” presents itself as “an exercise to demonstrate
the wide variety of Shakespeare-related video that can be found on
YouTube and how easy it is to mess about with it.” The video, the film-
maker claims, took “3 hours to produce from searching t’ube [sic],
downloading, importing into iMovie and editing” (“Hamlet ‘To Be or
Not to Be’ Mashup” 2008). All of the footage – twenty clips complete
with URLs listed in the video’s description – is taken directly from
YouTube itself. While the author strikes a hacker pose, foregrounding
the ease and short time of production and thanking “all the people I
ripped off for this. Hope you don’t mind,” he also plays the scholar, al-
lowing viewers to follow the artistic trail to his sources: straightforward
rips of Branagh, Kevin Kline, Derek Jacobi, and Alexander Fodor’s ex-
perimental Hamlet film; several clips of differing quality declaring
themselves as school projects; a pretty good Lego staging; an adoles-
cent reading the soliloquy as Borat (“Ay, there’s the rubber ducky”);
and a US teen and Barcelona singer performing original songs with
Hamlet’s lyrics (“Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” 2008). The video
description suggests a possible submission to the Royal Shakespeare
Company; but although I could find discussion of collaboration with
that group by the filmmaker, I have seen no evidence of further
Shakespearean activity on his part. I did find one of this artist’s sources
(the Lego “To be or not to be,” with a skull reciting the speech) on the
Royal Shakespeare Company’s site Bardbox, the brainchild of film the-
orist Luke McKernan – a linking out to another archive of videos care-
fully selected for their “quality.” Nevertheless, the problem of YouTube
as an archive, as articulated by Shohet (2010) and implicitly redressed
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by Bardbox – a lack of reliance on expert opinion for filtering – may

prove in the end to be the site’s greatest strength.
Johnson writes: “The computer scientist Christopher Langton ob-
served several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to
gravitate toward the ‘edge of chaos’: the fertile zone between too much
order and too much anarchy” (2010, 52). Innovation takes place most
readily on this border between order and anarchy because “a good
idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons – thousands of
them – fire in sync with one another for the first time.” Such a network
needs to be large and dense (“you can’t have an epiphany with only
three neurons firing”) and “plastic, capable of adapting to new con-
figurations” (Johnson 2010, 46, 47). YouTube, one of Johnson’s prime
examples of a virtual environment conducive to innovation, fulfils
both of these requirements precisely because of its unwieldy size and
rapid but uneven reconfiguration. Innovation occurs when the envi-
ronment assembles an “eclectic collection” of building blocks, “spare
parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations” (Johnson
2010, 42). The trick to having good ideas, according to Johnson, “is not
to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The
trick is to get more parts on the table” (42). This is exactly the lesson
provided by the “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” constructed
entirely from YouTube’s cache of available materials – its spare parts, if
you will. Reinventing Shakespeare by sampling, linking, and combin-
ing YouTube’s collection of “spare parts” provides an alternative inter-
medial paradigm for Shakespearean appropriation, one in which the
mashup becomes not a sideshow, but the main event on the digital
Shake-scene.
NOTES
1 For a comprehensive overview of digital Shakespeare and discussion of

the role videos and multimedia play in this domain, see Best 2011, espe-
cially 565 and 573.
2 I do not engage with either commenters or creators of YouTube videos in
this essay, although I have in the past for other portions of my research;
concerning the videos I discuss here, the commentary tends to be sparse
and does not engage with issues of invention or creativity. For a look at
other venues in which comments can exert a direct and decisive influence
over production, particularly in blog fiction, see Page 2010. Commentary
can also
WESTERN be important
RESERVE UNIV to some Shakespearean videos and to research on
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them. For an essay that productively analyses some often incendiary user
comments in YouTube Othellos, see Thompson 2010. For another account
of some difficulties facing social media research that involves direct con-
tact with Shakespearean adapters, see Iyengar and Desmet 2012; not only
are many artists under the age of eighteen, but many guard their privacy
and are averse to participating in research.
3 For a discussion of code as Foucault’s panopticon in databases created
through markup language, see Desmet and Iyengar 2009. Later in this es-
say, however, I characterize the YouTube algorithm as more of an active
agent in the application.
4 For a nuanced definition of “intermediality” in this narrower sense, see
Rajewsky 2005.
5 For a 2007 review of YouTube’s engagement with the copyright controver-
sy, see Hilderbrand. For an update on Viacom’s unsuccessful attempt to
sue YouTube for copyright violation, see Liedtke 2010.
6 For a good overview of YouTube’s current business model and a useful
perspective on the role played by its algorithm, see Seabrook 2012.
7 On the affinity between Web 2.0 and conspiracy theories, see Krapp 2011,
especially chapter 2, “Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?”
8 In concluding my analysis of YouTube’s backstage participants here, I am

leaving out the “political economy” of YouTube and its recent entrance
into a more capitalist system with Google’s purchase of the company and
insertion of advertisements into the social mix (see Wasko and Erickson
2009). This economic and political shift in YouTube’s orientation and stat-
ed purpose is significant, but none of the examples I discuss here have
advertisements attached to them.
9 Wes Folkerth (2000), discussing the cultural dynamics of this Beatles skit,
concludes that at the time of the original television performance (1964),
the Beatles adapted Shakespearean comedy to suit their own class identity
and comic ethos. A more recent essay by Louise Geddes (2012) discusses
the translation of this skit to YouTube, but in the end proves more interest-
ed in its historical context and thus is content to explain the YouTube after-
life of the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe” in terms of its stage and
television origins.
10 Viacom, depicting YouTube’s founders as cyber “pirates,” sued Google, as
YouTube’s parent company, for $1 billion in damages on the grounds that
they illegally tolerated copyrighted material on the site. In January 2012, a
federal judge ruled that YouTube was not guilty, citing a “12-year-old law
that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as
long as they promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation”
(Liedtke 2010). The parties settled in 2014, with no financial implications.
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“Is There an App for That?”:

Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone
and in the Cloud
Jenni fe r L. Ail le s
In many cases a mobile phone is more of an educational tool than a book.

– Steve Vosloo
In today’s world, we all inhabit the intermedial – we are surrounded by news-

papers, films, television. We live in-between the arts and media – intermedial-
ity is the modern way to experience life.
– Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt
Forty Billion Apps and Counting
The world is a mobile place and Shakespeare is at the heart of it. This
rapid proliferation of mobile devices and apps, short for applications,
in the past few years has radically altered how Shakespearean texts,
performances, and adaptations are created, encountered, researched,
and circulated globally.1 While Shakespeare’s texts have been readily
available online for years,2 they are now easily accessed on ereaders
and tablets through stand-alone content apps and web apps that link to
the internet or sync via network Cloud storage. The user is no longer
tied to the laptop or desktop computer to access Shakespeare’s works,
but can read them almost anywhere electronic devices can be taken.
Aside from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, along with a significant amount of
the canon, now being portable, a host of multimedia paratexts are also
readily available – dictionaries, concordances, scholarly articles, imag-
es, audio and video recordings of performances, and related social
commentary – which enrich our reception and understanding of these
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 76 Jennifer L. Ailles
works. In fact the overabundance of material and the hyperconnected-

ness of digital media have raised an extensive debate about what even
constitutes a primary “text,” let alone a “book.” There have been a
number of articles published on Shakespeare on the web,3 but an over-
view of the new intermedia field of mobile Shakespeare and its ramifi-
cations for Shakespearean pedagogy, scholarship, and the creation and
circulation of adaptations is needed. Intermediality, according to Freda
Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, “is a powerful and potentially radical
force, which operates in-between performer and audience; in-between
theatre, performance and other media; and in-between realities” (2006,
12). Mobile computing and, especially, mobile Shakespeares are trans-
formative intermedial forces; they bridge boundaries not only between
performers and audiences through the digital media, but also between
content creators and mobile users: they literally and figuratively change
realities.
Mobile Shakespeare exists as texts on cellphones, as books on elec-
tronic readers, and as apps on tablets, but may also take the form of
films and videos on YouTube (discussed elsewhere in this volume),
paintings and photographs on Flickr, and audio clips on iTunes. All of
these media raise questions about what is included and excluded from
mobile Shakespeare, what constitutes an adaptation versus a perfor-
mance, and who creates the various digital interfaces and thus controls
the distribution, contextualization, and rhetoric surrounding the pre-
sentation and reception of the Bard in the mobile landscape. What does
that mobile landscape, one based in intermedial spaces, at the intersec-
tion between the material device and the web and the invisible Cloud
of data, even look like? To begin answering this question, the first half
of this essay surveys the current state of mobile Shakespeare from
ereaders and apps to MOOCs. The rapidity with which the mobile digi-
tal realm expands and morphs, as demonstrated by the meteoric growth
and proliferation of apps and mobile users, is a marker of its intermedi-
ality, and as such, this first section can only be a brief snapshot, a screen-
shot, if you will, of the range and possibility of digital Shakespeare
captured in a particular, ever-morphing moment.
Shakespeare’s works are central to pedagogical curriculums around
the world. Thus at the heart of any discussion of mobile Shakespeare is
the issue of literacy – both the ability to read and the ability to operate
technology – and the issue of access to web-equipped devices and suf-
ficient internet service. Literacy and access to technology are both con-
tingent on and contribute to the digital divide between the Global
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from “Is There an App for That?” 77
North and South. The second part of this essay, then, via some particu-
larly exemplary case studies, examines how mobile Shakespeare is be-
ing used to bridge this geopolitical divide through social networking
learning and literacy initiatives. Projects, such as the m4Lit, or Yoza
Cellphone Stories, in South Africa, foster literacy and nation building
through m-novels, while the highly sophisticated cross-platform pro-
ductions of Such Tweet Sorrow, a Twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet,
and the equally ambitious “myShakespeare,” a panchronic digital flow
project backed by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World
Shakespeare Festival 2012, create new intermedial experiences that al-
ter the barriers among content creators, performers, audiences, and
mobile users.
eShakespeare eReaders
Shakespeare’s complete works are readily available on mobile devices

through a wide variety of ereaders and apps.4 There are two main types
of apps: native and web apps. A native app is designed to run on a par-
ticular device (i.e., a game, music player, or calculator) whereas a web
app is accessed via the internet and can be run on almost any web-en-
abled device (such as YouTube, Skype, or Facebook). Native apps can
be used when a device is offline, while web apps require internet access
to work. The line between the two types of apps is blurring, since most
web apps have native app portals on the various mobile devices that
may partially store online material in caches and/or incorporate real-
time connectivity that hides the web aspects, making them transparent,
while native apps will push and sync material with Cloud servers when
connected to the web so that the latest material is available offline. Most
apps are simple and focus on a particular task, function, or presentation
of material. Some are on dedicated devices, such as the original Kindle
or Nook ereaders, while the rest operate on non-dedicated mobile
phones and tablets. Some apps even operate on non-mobile desktop
computers. Other apps have apps themselves, such as Facebook’s in-
app App Center, which was launched late spring 2012.5 According to
mobiThinking (2012), a mobile marketing tracker, “On average US fea-
ture-phone users have 10 apps on board and smartphone users have
22 apps (of which iPhone users have the most with 37).”6 In general,
apps are cheap enough to allow for impulse buys, they offer fast access
to highly selected and curated task-oriented programs and material,
and they extend and sometimes replace the functionality of desktop
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computers through their portability. The wide spread of apps, which

increases and diversifies every day, allows for each user to person-
alize and customize her mobile device according to her needs and
interests.7
Readers and users can access Shakespeare’s works on all of the ma-
jor ereaders, either on the dedicated devices with native apps or as
web apps that work across mobile platforms. For example, Kindle,
Nook, and Google Play are all available on Apple mobile devices
along with Apple’s own iBooks. The Bard’s works appear in the form
of digital editions of traditional hard copy books, such as The Oxford
Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd edition, edited by Stanley Wells
and Gary Taylor), single-volume editions (mainly Penguin/Pelican/
Signet Shakespeare, Modern Library RSC Shakespeare, and Dover
Thrift Editions), and free editions drawn from those already circulat-
ing on the web as part of Project Gutenberg or library copies scanned
as part of Google’s digitization project. At the time of this writing,
Penguin is the only publisher whose Shakespeare editions are avail-
able for Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Google’s Google
Play/Google Books for Android, and Apple’s iTunes/iBooks. By con-
trast, The Oxford Shakespeare is available for every platform except

iBooks. The Riverside, Norton, Arden, and Bedford Shakespeare edi-
tions are not available for digital download on any of the four plat-
forms, while the Folger Shakespeare is only available for the Nook.8
There are numerous self-published editions of the plays, especially on
Amazon, so that it is very difficult for a non-academic to find quality
editions with supplemental material – most are just repackaged free
online editions.9
Ereaders present the texts in two main formats: scanned PDF copies
of hard copy books or flowing ePub text that allows the user to alter the
font type and size for easier reading on a variety of screen dimensions.
Google’s scanned PDF format, while harder to see on a small screen, is
functionally useful to scholars who want to see the printed edition of a
play in its original published form, along with any marginalia. Some
ereaders present the flowing text using a book-based aesthetic with
pages that can be “turned,” while the rest just present the works in a
more or less steady stream of text that can be scrolled. The most com-
prehensive ereader app for scholars is Shakespeare Pro, and its corre-
sponding free version Shakespeare, by Readdle and PlayShakespeare.
com. Both the Pro and the free versions have all the plays and poems of
Shakespeare, along with three plays whose attribution is contentious:
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Edward III, Sir Thomas More, a collaborative play which Shakespeare is

argued to have contributed to, and Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald,
arguably an adaptation of the lost Cardenio by Shakespeare and John
Fletcher. In addition, the Pro edition contains Charles and Mary Lamb’s
Tales from Shakespeare, which adapt the plays for younger readers. While
the lite, or free, version has a searchable concordance and is a useful
app for simply reading the texts, the Pro edition has numerous features
that make it a wonderful asset for scholars. Besides including copies of
the First Folio or Quarto editions for almost all of the texts, using origi-
nal spelling and font, including the long “s,” the Pro edition has line
numbers and lets the user track and highlight particular characters. It
also allows bookmarks, textual copying, and note creation, and it has
a fully searchable integrated glossary based on the online version of
David and Ben Crystal’s lexicon, Shakespeare’s Words. Ben Crystal af-
firms, “The book and the site seem to have become the go-to glossary
for the profession and indeed for non-professionals too. Last year, I ne-
gotiated a deal with playshakespeare.com, who run the Shakespeare
App for the iPhone, iPad, iPod. Now the glossary that underpins their
complete works is powered by our database” (quoted in Lanir 2011).10
The Shakespeare Pro app highlights what the best ereaders have: high-
quality content that is presented in a clean design and that allows the
user to adjust visual settings, in-app dictionaries, search functionality,
and note and highlighting features that allow the user to annotate the
content for further study.
Ereader editions of Shakespeare’s written texts use the traditional
conventions of book formatting and editing to present the texts, but
they also directly challenge the notion of the discrete book through the
free flow of text, the openness to instantaneous upgrading via Cloud
syncing, and the incorporation of other media via the eplatform.
Beyond eReaders: Shakespeare Apps
At the time of this writing there were over two hundred apps in the
iTunes App Store that were connected in some capacity to “Shakespeare,”
in addition to the various ereaders discussed previously. Shakespeare
apps cover a wide range of topics and aspects of Bard culture from quo-
tation collections to festival playbills and games and adaptations to
educational learning apps.11 Many of these apps are duplicated in the
Google Play App Store for Android devices, while others have been
released exclusively on the Apple platform.
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All of these apps, including those that function as ereaders, are part
of the larger history of Shakespeare’s works being adapted to new
modes of popular culture entertainment and, increasingly, education.
Their development reveals how the mobile apps inspire new interme-
dia forms of adaptation that capitalize on the technological innovations
of sophisticated mobile devices. Mobile apps are often seen as passive
delivery content systems, but they actually require the user to be an
active participant in the achievement of the apps’ performative goals.
The user must select, input, stroke, tap, shake, tilt, rotate, walk, talk to,
listen, record, take pictures or film video, and share with the mobile
device for the app to “complete” its performance. The reliance on the
user’s corporeality in digital mobile app functioning challenges the bi-
nary between the performer and the audience and raises the question
of who the actor is – an issue that is also at the heart of Such Tweet
Sorrow, which I discuss at length below. The confluence of the virtual
app content and the actual user interaction demonstrates a central fea-
ture of Dick Higgins’s original sense of intermedia: hybridity between
art and life (Friedman 2002, 246). In this sense the mobile app enables
the user to become a part of the art and the art to become part of the
user’s life, raising the larger issue of what constitutes an “actor” in the
intermediated digital realm.
This hybridity is evident in the numerous Shakespearean quote
collections or quote generators available to meet the user’s every
Shakespearean need and allow the user to act a part in a Shakespearean
work or bring Shakespeare more firmly into the user’s life. Shakespeare
in Love features love quotations from the plays and sonnets, while
William Shakespeare Inspirational Quotes “enhance[s] your productivity
and peace of mind” by inspiring the user with the Bard’s famous phras-
es. Laugh Shaker makes use of mobile devices’ built-in accelerometers
and gyroscopes to let users “shake” their devices to produce a new hu-
morous quote. Shakes Pear – Organic Shakespeare Quotes also uses the
same shaking motion to randomly select passages, but accompanies
them with an image of a pear – though not necessarily “a pop’rin pear”
(Romeo and Juliet 2.1.38). There are numerous apps providing samples
of invective and abuse, including Bard You, Ye Olde Insulter, and
Shakespearean Insults – several of which are modelled on the infamous
“Shakespeare Insult Kit,” which lets the user combine various insults
from the plays into new curses and then share them with friends. The
Shakespeare Convertor moves beyond insults and quotations to let the
user convert user-generated phrases into Shakespearean, as well as
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translating various sixteenth-century English words and phrases into

twenty-first-century language. For those wishing to learn more than a
few quotes, Realtime Music Solutions produces a series of Sides apps
that allows the user to learn all of a character’s part by first listening to
professional stage actors read lines from many of Shakespeare’s plays
and then rehearsing them, karaoke-style, while the app reads the lines
of the other characters. The premium version of The Sides Winter’s Tale
app, for example, also allows users to record themselves and their cast
mates for production-specific rehearsal – a feature that might be useful
for budding thespians.
A number of apps are dedicated to marketing and increasing audi-
ence enjoyment of Shakespearean festivals and groups that perform
live adaptations and stagings of Shakespeare’s plays.12 Vancouver’s
resident Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach, and the world-famous
Stratford Shakespeare Festival are two well-known festivals that make
use of apps to support their production seasons – both present their
playbills, festival production information, in-app ticket sales, and trav-
el information, along with photos and other media, in accessible for-
mats designed especially for mobile phones. The Stratford app, in
particular, contains a wealth of material taken from the annual hard

copy playbill that makes the app indispensable to a visitor to Stratford.
Broadway across America’s West Side Story app, supporting the Portland,
Oregon 3–8 January 2012 revival of the musical adaptation of Romeo and
Juliet, also makes productive use of the digital playbill format on the
iPad. At first glance, the West Side Story playbill looks like a scanned
copy of a standard playbill, but as the user scrolls vertically or horizon-
tally through the various pages, the playbill expands to include longer
interviews, videos, and images. One of the more interesting features of
the playbill is how it incorporates ads: instead of being flashy and in-
trusive, many of the ads, whether for cars, local restaurants, or a young
performing artist group, have “Easter egg” icons that the user clicks to
reveal images and videos associated with the ad. Though few in num-
ber at the moment, these digital app playbills demonstrate some of the
possibilities of the portable digital medium to provide information and
records of performances as well as immersive intermedia that augment
the theatre-going event.
Notably, though, the Royal Shakespeare Company does not have a
significant app presence at the time of this writing, even though they
have been at the forefront of using mobile media in their productions
– something I will discuss more in the second half of this paper. The
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only RSC app is Adelaide Road, based on a 2011 live show and workshop
written by poet Aoife Mannix and directed by Ola Animashawun. The
app provides an “interactive theatrical journey,” derived from As You
Like It, which allows the user to take advantage of the GPS in her phone
to access readings geospatially linked to specific locations along
Adelaide Road in London. Though there was an associated live perfor-
mance, this app allows the user to recreate and participate in part of the
production that continues despite the cast being in absentia. Every inter-
active “walk” thus becomes a new and distinct presentation, an app-
based intermedial performance that extends the theatrical season as
long as the app exists and is deployed.13
While there are numerous Shakespearean adaptations available via
aggregate apps, such as ereaders, film-sites, music players, fine art digi-
tal collections, and other user-generated sites such as YouTube, a few
adaptations of Shakespearean source texts have their own mobile apps.
Opera: Macbeth, for instance, presents the synopsis, character list, and
the libretto in Italian and English for Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic adapta-
tion. The app does not contain a musical recording of the opera, but it
allows the user to sync her reading of the libretto with recordings
played in iTunes. Verdi’s Otello is also available from the same compa-
ny. Hamlet! is a short animated adventure puzzle game that takes a
modern-day scientist and makes him travel back to Shakespeare’s time
to save Ophelia from Claudius’s evil grip. Shakespeare Made Easy re-
packages Edith Nesbit’s short story adaptations of sixteen of the plays
with short videos giving some context to Shakespeare’s life and writ-
ing. Ave!Comics and Self Made Hero’s Manga Shakespeare app is a
gateway app that allows the user to buy the fourteen graphic novels
adapted by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by a variety of artists.
These adaptations recast King Lear as a Native American in the mid-
eighteenth century facing European expansion on the frontier, Romeo
as a rock star in Tokyo whose family is part of the Yakuza or Japanese
“mafia,” and Hamlet as a still brooding youth whose native Denmark
is now devastated by climate change.14 Similarly, the highly acclaimed
Kill Shakespeare graphic comic book series by Canadians Anthony Del
Col, Conor McCreery, and Andy Belanger is also available through the
Comics gateway app.
Thumbnail Theater: Macbeth by Michael Mills Productions, Canada’s
oldest commercial animation company, is another adaptation that has
expanded its audience through a digital app presence. Based on the
animated TV show of the same name, the app is part of a series of TV
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adaptations that teach Shakespeare through “edutainment” or

“[e]ducational entertainment that is lively, humorous and designed to
encourage knowledge of the classics” (Michael Mills Productions 1995–
2011). The animated and graphic novel adaptations are highly accessi-
ble formats that are used in educational settings to encourage student
interest in Shakespeare. The Toronto School Board bought the TV ver-
sion of Thumbnail Theater: Macbeth for inclusion in the public school cur-
riculum and the accompanying app is also used as a standalone or in
the classroom. Having these highly visual and “hip” adaptations made
available to the general user and to students presents Shakespeare’s
works as being a part of everyday digital lives.
Mobile Education and the Flipped Shakespearean Classroom
By far the largest group of Shakespeare apps is educational and many

of them try to make Shakespeare more approachable for public and
high school students. These apps provide a putatively dynamic and
interactive learning experience that is personalized and that can be
incorporated into formal curricula. According to a 2011 international
study commissioned by the RSC and the British Council, “[a]pproxi-

mately 50% of schoolchildren across the world, at least 64 million each
year, are studying Shakespeare at school. Thirteen times the population
of England when Shakespeare was alive now learn about him every
year” (RSC, “Wiki Shakespeare” 2011). It is not surprising given this
reality that the majority of apps are dedicated to facilitating this study.
Educators, especially at the high school level, are encouraged to use
and integrate these educational Shakespeare apps as part of “flipped
classrooms,” hybrid learning environments that use digital materials,
especially interactive modular lessons created by an instructor or short
videos produced by a content management system such as the Khan
Academyor iTunes U (both have their own apps), to teach course mate-
rial. In the traditional classroom model, lessons are presented in class
by the instructor and reinforced through homework. The flipped or “in-
verted” classroom alters that model by having the primary lessons pre-
sented, or heavily reinforced, in a digital format accessed outside of the
classroom space in an effort to free up in-class time to focus on prob-
lems and discussion instead of lectures and content lessons. The flip-
ping of the traditional classroom is part of what Klaus-Peter Busse
refers to as “[i]ntermedial learning.” Intermedial learning is “open, de-
terminedly non-linear and polymedial” and “lack[s] a medial centre”
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(2005, 269). Busse argues that “[t]he point [of intermedial learning] is
not to search for a medial center in art education [or any other subject]
which is to provide meanings but to enable teaching situations where
the constitution of meaning occurs as a result of the de-centring pro-
cess” (269). Though Busse is discussing art education, his description is
apt for how students learn about Shakespeare’s works and adaptations
in environments where the hierarchical lecture has been dislocated via
digital intermedia strategies.
The two biggest elements driving the flipped classroom movement
are poor completion rates in high schools following traditional peda-
gogical models and the availability of digital teaching materials online
and through mobile apps and learning management systems – many of
which are already being accessed by students as part of “free-range
learning.” Free-range learning occurs when students look for online
materials to supplement those assigned in class. According to a National
Science Foundation study on undergraduate online study habits led by
Glenda Morgan, students “generally shop around for content in places
educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to
materials from other universities … they prefer recognized ‘brands’”
(quoted in Parry 2012). Students engage in free-range learning for a

variety of reasons, including taking an interest in a topic, doing home-
work or studying for writing papers, or “dissatisfaction with their own
professors” (Morgan, quoted in Parry 2012).15 The variety of mobile
apps and materials that students employ in free-range learning is con-
nected to the breadth of resources and methods at the heart of interme-
dial learning. Busse argues that “[t]hese methods provide rhizomes
within which students can move. To a significant degree, intermedial
learning is a type of deconstructive learning by processing texts and
images” (2005, 269).
Facilitating this rhizomatic free-range learning, both CliffsNotes
and SparkNotes have brought their ubiquitous study guides to the
mobile platform for the most popular plays.16 Julius Caesar – CliffsNotes,
for example, offers two time-based study options – the “Cram Plan”
and the “Full Study Plan” – and promises the user: “Learn faster, study
better, and score higher with CliffsNotes Apps.” SparkNotes, whose
motto is “When your books and teachers don’t make sense, we do,”
has two available apps. The first is a free app, SparkNotes, which con-
tains fifty study guides in a native app, including all of Shakespeare’s
works, with the ability to download from the rest of the SparkNotes
online catalogue through the web. The second SparkNotes app is No
FearWESTERN RESERVE UNIV based on the book series, which “puts Shakespeare’s
Shakespeare,
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language side by side with a modern-English translation – the kind of

English people actually speak today.” No Fear Shakespeare is a gateway
app that allows the user to buy eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays. The
gateway app follows the “freemium” model where the main app is a
free app that requires the user to make further purchases in-app to ac-
cess content related to particular plays.17
Shakespeare in Bits by MindConnex Learning also follows the freemi-
um model. The app currently links to four plays – Romeo and Juliet,
Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Julius Caesar
coming soon. The app is notable in that it has won a number of awards18
for its use of animation, voiced by professional actors such as Fiona
Shaw, Kate Beckinsale, and Michael Sheen, to present the full-length
plays side-by-side with the text. The animation uses Shakespeare’s
original text and is presented in approximately one-minute segments,
or “bits,” allowing the user to focus in on smaller sections of the works
rather than being overwhelmed by a whole scene. In his acceptance
speech for the “Cool Tool Award for Best Content Provider Solution,”
Michael Cordner, CEO of MindConnex, averred:
The edtech industry is such an exciting place to be right now but it funda-
mentally comes down to making technology that engages and enhances
the learning experience for students and teachers. Shakespeare In Bits
achieves this by bringing Shakespeare to life in the classroom and in the
minds of the students – helping them to get to grips with 400 year old lit-
erature in a way that engages them from a visual, aural and textual per-
spective, and on a platform that they are extremely comfortable using.
(MindConnex 2012)
The app, and its associated learning management system, have also
been adopted by schools as part of their curriculum. MindConnex
“signed its first school district deal in Canada with Chinook’s Edge
School Division for its online, subscription-based Shakespeare in Bits
Live! service” (“820 students” 2011). The agreement enables teachers to
use the program in the classroom and students to revisit the material
outside of the classroom.
Going beyond the K-12 demographic, Romeo+Juliet: The Shakespeare
App by InteractiveReaders Inc., based on the Canadian Adaptations of
Shakespeare Project’s Interactive Folio: Romeo and Juliet, developed by
Daniel Fischlin and the CASP research team at the University of
Guelph, includes video talks by prominent Shakespearean academ-
ics WESTERN
on various aspects of the play as well as linking, via the web, to
RESERVE UNIV
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scholarly articles on adaptation, textual sources Shakespeare drew on

while adapting Romeo and Juliet for the stage, and various Canadian
adaptations of the play – all housed on the Canadian Adaptations of
Shakespeare Project webpage. Shakespeare’s The Tempest for iPad by
Luminary Digital Media is another scholarly-based app, developed
by Elliott Visconsi and Katherine Rowe, which presents a high-level
access point into studying the play. The app also contains lectures from
noted Shakespeareans, along with illustrations and audiovisual mate-
rials from the Folger Shakespeare Library Master Class. Both of these
apps demonstrate how educational apps can incorporate a more so-
phisticated and scholarly approach to studying the plays instead of as-
suming that Shakespeare’s works are too hard and must be “made
easy” or broken into “bits” to be understood.
Apple is taking a primary role in providing “branded” content for
use by students and educators interested in intermedial learning in the
form of iTunes U, which was relaunched in 2012.19 iTunes U, which has
had over one billion downloads as of February 2013 (Apple, “iTunes U”
2013), includes lecture podcasts and videos on Shakespeare from
Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Open University, the
Huntington, Yale University, and the University of Warwick, among

many others. In the spring of 2012, Apple also released a new version of
iBooks 2 and an associated non-mobile app, iBooks Author, to allow for
textbooks and Shakespearean adaptations to be created and sold exclu-
sively on the Apple platform. These books, especially the textbooks cre-
ated on the app, allow for the standard text to have interactive images,
videos, and high-resolution graphics that allow concepts and lessons to
come “alive” for students. The market for etextbooks and online educa-
tion is growing substantially and Apple is aggressively promoting its
platform, especially the iPad, as a complete learning management sys-
tem rather than just a content management system. iTunes U allows in-
structors around the world to house all of their Shakespearean course
materials, including customized etextbooks, assignments, video and
podcast lectures, and even tests, so that students can have access to all
of their course materials in one mobile location – downloading updates
from the Cloud.20
Shakespearean MOOCs
While iTunes U promotes itself as at the forefront of highly personalized

mobile learning, it is also setting itself up to be a MOOC. MOOCs, or
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Massively Open Online Courses, are the latest iteration in the online
movement, but they move beyond the traditional online, blended, or
flipped classroom course in terms of sheer scale and the lack of interac-
tion between the online instructor and the students and their reliance
on the full range of intermedial technologies. MOOCs bring to mind
the MMOGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and MMORPGs,
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, such as World of
Warcraft, which, incidentally, contains numerous references to
Shakespeare’s works, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet,
within the gaming environment. MOOCs take the online platform and
let it run independently of bricks-and-mortar schools. Once a course is
set up on the learning management system, it runs with little to no in-
teraction between the students and the instructor.21
After a number of independent test courses, several major universi-
ties have now joined together to offer their own “branded” MOOC
course platforms, including edX (created by MIT and Harvard in 2012)
and Coursera (formed with Princeton University, Stanford University,
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, and
University of California, Berkeley in 2012).22 edX’s original mandate
outlines the stakes involved in MOOCs by “offer[ing] Harvard and

MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions
aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of on-
line learners and to improve education for everyone” (edX 2012). edX is
based on MITx, which launched earlier in the spring of 2012. The first
course offered was “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics” and drew 120,000
registrants in the first month of offering (Kolowich 2012). MIT has been
committed to online open access education for a long time. Since 2002
MIT has housed an online archive of “virtually all” past courses (over
two thousand as of 2012), including a wide range of Shakespeare-
related courses, as part of its MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) web-based
archive. OCW video lectures are available via the MIT OpenCourseWare
Lecture Hall app. In the first year of classes, Coursera grew to 62 partner
universities from around the world offering 328 classes, while edX has
expanded to 12 universities and a significantly more focused course
list. Though there are more computer science courses available as
MOOCs, the number of humanities classes is rising. It is hard to imag-
ine that MOOCShakespeare will be long in coming, considering the
leading role Shakespearean works and adaptations play at the heart of
the literary canon and in how that canon is now being disseminated
through mobile, intermedial learning strategies.
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MOOCs inevitably raise contentious questions regarding the need

for traditional campuses and highly trained faculty teaching in pro-
grams with high tuition rates.23 Arguably, course content can be estab-
lished by one or two academic experts and a team of IT professionals
who set up and maintain the course online platform or its affiliated
app. After the initial set-up has been accomplished, all that is needed is
periodic content updating – especially if the assignments and grading
are done by computer or through peer evaluation, both of which are
prominent features of MOOCs. Though this model is seemingly more
easily applied to math and science courses, it is also being applied to
the humanities and courses in which writing and discussion seminars
are the central teaching model. Gerald Sussman, a professor of electri-
cal engineering and co-instructor of “6.002x” at MITx, addresses this
issue: “The goal of developing virtual laboratories and software that
automatically assesses students’ ability to vanquish complex problems
and tasks is not to eliminate the need for real, live professors; it is to
figure out what parts of the face-to-face delivery model can be auto-
mated so professors and students can double-down on the pieces of
an MIT education that are orientated to apprenticeship” (quoted in
Kolowich 2012). But the reality is that the value of education is highly
debatable, and systems of delivery that separate the content from for-
mal institutions, even while using the brand of those institutions, add
to the idea that people can educate themselves via these intermedial
forms of technology without the need for guidance from a trained edu-
cator. The proliferation of free-range learning, and now MOOCs, has
led to a rise in calls for certification for online learning, especially for
online learning beyond the classroom. For those who finish the MOOC
classes, edX plans to award certificates with the MIT “brand,” while
several colleges have already started accepting transfer credits.24 Many
K-12 schools that incorporate online and flipped classroom models
have already started awarding points or rewards, such as badges, for
completing tasks like memorizing a sonnet, passing a quiz, or watching
a particular number of Shakespeare videos. The awarding of badges is
part of a “gamification” model that awards users/players/students for
performing a particular task.25 This self-learning ideal recognizes the
learning that takes place outside of a formal setting, but it assumes that
the online and mobile users, the non-student students, are already liter-
ate and motivated enough to complete the courses. In fact, the vast ma-
jority of those who start MOOCs do not finish them.26 Furthermore, the
move to digital auto-education also assumes that users/(non)-students
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have access to the technology required to access online courses, such as

high-speed broadband and high-resolution computers and, increas-
ingly, iPads.
Accessing Shakespeare in the Cloud
Accessing Shakespeare via this broad-based education requires sub-

stantial literacy and material resources. Ereaders and educational apps
offer the utopian promise of education, and ultimately, democratic
agency, for all – a supposed “great equalizer across boundaries of abil-
ity, resources and education” (Gahran 2012). But the more sophisticat-
ed and interactive the intermedial educational platforms are, and the
more they operate in the digital Cloud, the higher the problem of con-
stant connectivity is and the need to have constant access to the web.
This problem is especially acute for educational apps and courses that
need to work in tandem with the web for downloading course content,
posting to discussion boards, submitting assignments, and completing
exams.
Literacy refers to “a competence of skill, which gains higher status by
virtue of an analogy with books, reading, and authorship. Phrases such

as ‘computer literacy’ or ‘digital literacy’ equate the use of digital me-
dia software, computers, networks and other technologies with the
ability to read and write. Such usage, by implication, sets technology
users apart, ensconced in the ranks of the ‘literate,’ in an implicit con-
trast with the ‘illiterate’” (Walton 2009, 6). Digital access requires read-
ing ability and technological literacy. Apps, in particular, try to lower
the threshold for participation, in comparison to computers, by keeping
the technical apparatus and coding hidden behind the user interface of
the mobile platform. The level of technological literacy seems low to
operate a smartphone or tablet, as demonstrated through the prolifer-
ation of apps aimed at and operated by young children (and by the
lawsuit mentioned in an earlier note about children making in-app pur-
chases). But the cultural and technological literacy that is required to
support mobile devices is incredibly high and complex. Mobile devices
rely on an intensely complicated infrastructure of equipment, internet
access, networked Cloud data storage, and the requisite electricity to
power it all.27
Access to that technological infrastructure varies greatly across the
globe. According to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union,
“In developing countries, 25% of homes have a computer and 20% have
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Internet access, compared to 20% and 13%, respectively, 3 years ago [in
2008]” (ITU 2011, 2). “Over the last five years, developing countries
have increased their share of the world’s total number of Internet users
from 44% in 2006, to 62% in 2011” (1), but cost is still a huge barrier: “In
31 countries – all of them highly industrialized economies – an entry-
level broadband connection costs on average the equivalent of 1% or
less of average monthly GNI per capita, while in 19 countries – most of
them least developed countries – a broadband connection costs on av-
erage more than 100% of monthly GNI per capita” (7). Even in the
United States there is a problem of bandwidth “spectrum crunch” – the
wireless spectrum allotted to commercial usage is a finite resource and
it is being taxed by the increase in mobile wireless usage, leading to
data caps and service outages. According to Cisco’s Mobile Visual
Networking Index, the mobile industry’s most comprehensive annual
study,
Global mobile data traffic is just about doubling every year, and will con-
tinue to do so through at least 2016 … The iPhone, for instance, uses
24 times as much spectrum as an old-fashioned cell phone, and the iPad
uses 122 times as much, according to the Federal FCC. AT&T says wireless
data traffic on its network has grown 20,000% since the iPhone debuted in
2007. (Quoted in Goldman 2012)
Ironically, the same technology that increases literacy and access to in-
termedial education for the masses also creates barriers for others
through the sheer volume of usage. Added to the crunch is the “band-
width divide” – only two-thirds of American households have access to
the high-speed broadband needed to download the video lectures that
are a hallmark of MOOCs (Young 2013).28 Those living in rural or tech-
nology-poor areas are increasingly left with impoverished internet
options.
Beyond reading and technical literacy, Marion Walton points out a
third Freireian sense. She states that “‘reading the word’ is a critical
ability, which reciprocally entails ‘reading the world.’ This critical ap-
proach to literacy has an explicit political agenda which situates read-
ing and writing as part of a process of questioning and social activism.”
Walton goes on to argue, “When knowledge of technology is described
as ‘literacy’ in this way, it is not only seen as a basic requirement for
participation and inclusion in modern society, but also as a prerequisite
for agency, and thus an important democratic right to which all are
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entitled” (2009, 6). Digital literacy is thus at the heart of nation building,
the democratic process, economic development, education, and global
and local (glocal) citizenship. Having access to mobile technology has
allowed for the instantaneous circulation of news throughout the digi-
tal Cloud in the form of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube postings. These
developments have proven particularly relevant in the Arab Spring
and Occupation movements and protests. Shakespearean adaptation
has even found its place within the Occupy movement with activists
reading scenes from the plays at protests and then posting videos of
those recordings on the web.29
The works of Shakespeare have long played a role in literacy and na-
tion building. Now the technology of mobile Shakespeare is at the heart
of many educational movements and experiments. I will focus in the
second part of this paper on two such examples – one from the Global
South and the other from the Global North. Yoza Cellphone Stories in
South Africa show how mobile technology is bridging the digital di-
vide and increasing literacy by bringing Shakespeare to new audiences;
and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Such Tweet
Sorrow and “myShakespeare” from the World Shakespeare Festival
2012 showcase how mobile Shakespeare is part of a panchronic digital

flow of information. From the supposedly simplistic to the incredibly
complex, these case studies show how intermediality is truly a “radical
force” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006, 12) that bridges and creates new
interpretive realities.
mShakespeare in South Africa
The ability to access Shakespeare’s works on a mobile phone may seem

only a convenience, but for places where literacy is a major issue and
computers or tablets cost too much and books are scarce, a mobile
phone offers a ready, if sometimes the only, option. In 2010, a widely
cited study by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and
Donald J. Treiman was published in the journal Research in Social
Stratification and Mobility. The study, “Family Scholarly Culture and
Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations,” addresses
the compelling connection between the number of books in a home and
the amount of education that a child completes. According to the study,
Children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more school-
ing than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’
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education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having

university educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advan-
tage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father. It holds
equally in rich nations and in poor; in the past and in the present; under
Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid. (Evans et al. 2010, “Abstract”)
In response to the report, Steve Vosloo, the founder of m4Lit (Mobile

Phones for Literacy), which became Yoza Cellphone Stories in South
Africa, raised the question: “But what happens when there are no
books?,” arguing, “In developing countries the pixels versus paper de-
bate is often an irrelevant luxury … The low level of literacy amongst
South African youth is a recognized problem.” Moreover, Vosloo avers,
“While it is a very complex problem, one contributing factor is that
books are unaffordable, and therefore unavailable, to many students.
The lack of books extends to homes – in 2006, 51% of South African
households owned no leisure books – and to schools – only 7% of pub-
lic schools in South Africa have functional libraries of any kind” (Vosloo
2010).30 Further, “Computers (desktops and laptops) are still not acces-
sible to [South African teens], with only 63.9% of [survey] respondents
having ever used one. Neither are computers an everyday part of their
media landscape, since only 18% reported having used a desktop com-
puter [recently], and an equally small group reporting having a com-
puter at home” (Walton 2009, 32). What South Africans do have access
to, especially the teens, are cellphones – “stats indicating that 90% of
urban youth have their own cellphone” (Yoza Project 2010). UN studies
reveal that “[w]hile people in developed countries usually use mobile-
broadband networks in addition to a fixed-broadband connection,
mobile-broadband is often the only access method available to people
in developing countries” (ITU 2011, 4).
The m4Lit project began in 2009, based on a Japanese project for teens
reading and writing novels on their cellphones. Japanese teens started
this mobile intermedial usage in response to travelling on “crowded
public transportation, with passengers crammed so closely together
that it [was] impossible to open a book” (Clark 2009); they created a
new form of text and reading in response to the physical limitations
they faced by using new media technologies. The Japanese mobile or
m-novels were written in SMS, Short Messaging Service or Textspeak,
and the original chapters contained less than one hundred words to
fit the character limit of the SMS transmission system. David Crystal
notes, “The brevity of the SMS genre disallows complex formal pattern-
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ing – of, say, the kind we might find in a sonnet. It isn’t so easy to in-
clude more than a couple of images, such as similes, simply because
there isn’t the space. Writers have nonetheless tried to extend the po-
tential of the medium. The SMS novel, for example, operates on a
screen-by-screen basis” (Crystal 2008a). The technical restrictions of the
format result in short sentences, frequent abbreviations, and lots of dia-
logue.31 As the number of characters and words that can be sent in a
single text message has increased, so too has the length of chapters,
with full sentences, that can be sent via SMS.32
m4Lit’s goal was to get South African youth reading and encourage
indigenous language use. The original project published the first stories
in English and isiXhosa, while the Yoza Cellphone Stories, launched in
2010, have also added stories in Afrikaans.33 The first two stories in the
m4Lit Project were read over 34,000 times in the first seven months –
“[t]o put this in context, a book is considered a best seller in South
Africa if 3,000 copies are sold. Over 4,000 entries were received in the
writing competitions and over 4,000 comments were left by readers on
individual chapters” (Yoza Project 2010–12).
While Yoza contains numerous indigenous texts, it also contains a
“classics” section with Shakespearean texts pulled from the public do-
main. Shakespeare is mentioned in numerous write-ups about the proj-
ect as being one of the selling points for improving literacy and helping
with school work: “School prescribed work Macbeth is one of the first
titles selected for Yoza Classics. The idea is not necessarily that teens
will read the whole of Macbeth on their cellphones, but if they have to
read Act 1; Scene 1 for homework and they don’t have a textbook, then
they can do so on their phones” (Yoza Project 2010). Shakespeare’s works
are compulsory as part of English language study for all fourteen- to
sixteen-year olds. Similar to the apps intended for curriculum inclu-
sion, the selection of Shakespearean texts included in the Classics sec-
tion centres on familiar plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and
Romeo and Juliet. The SMS format lends itself surprisingly well to plays,
with Shakespeare’s texts divided into chapters according to standard
act and scene divisions.34
The project encourages readers to comment on the story, and this is
where there is an abundance of textspeak. Readers exclaim: “Omg, ro-
meo nd juliet is a golden oldie nd knwin dat we hv access 2 it is awe-
sum” (Yoza Cellphone Stories 2010c) or “King lear may b a shaksperien
buk bt its actually quite a gud buk, think 0f a m0dern day thriller with
l0ads 0f family feuds nd a killer ending” (Yoza Cellphone Stories 2010b).
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Though there is considerable resistance to mobile texting in educational

settings, mainly because it is seen as an intrusive distraction, its combi-
nation of spoken and written discourse, that is of phonocentric and
logocentric strategies, makes it a useful language tool. Crystal draws on
recent studies to point out that texting actually improves reading liter-
acy rather than reducing it. Crystal argues that users
could not be good at texting if they had not already developed consider-
able literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated
forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate
to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative
spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you
must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you
are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (“be right back”), you must
have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.
(2008a)
These comments focus on how users ask questions and make connec-
tions with each other. This connectivity, a form of intermediated shift in
how meaning is created, is a key feature of mobile devices: “With chap-

ter comments left by our readers for all to see, reading moves from a
solitary exercise to a more social one. While reading a book on one’s
own is a very enjoyable pastime, a more social experience has huge
potential for those who need help with texts through annotations”
(Vosloo 2010). Vosloo calls these digital paratexts a “sort of marginalia.”
These marginalia become a part of the permanent digital archive of the
Shakespearean work – one that is not isolated to the individual Yoza
edition, but is a part of the entire Shakespearean web archive for each
play. To encourage a broader distribution of the stories and increase
interaction between readers, the Yoza Cellphone Story links are also
published via social graphs or social networks, including Facebook and
MXit,35 an online instant messenger service that is “Africa’s biggest so-
cial network” with over 750,000,000 messages sent per day (Mxit 2012).36
Also available under the Classics section is an adaptation of Romeo
and Juliet by Mark Dornford-May entitled Romeo + Khunjulwa, released
by the Van Schaik Bookstore for Yoza. The story is set in contemporary
Cape Town where fighting between the rival parties, CAPU and
MONTA, has led to a “State of Emergency.” Divided into twenty chap-
ters, the story is retold in a mixture of reports from the “Instant News
Service from Crossingstar.com,” diary entries written in prose, and
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phone text SMS exchanges between the various characters. One reader
of Dornford-May’s story compares it to the 2008 TV series Shakespeare in
Mzansi uGugu no Andile, a six-part drama directed by Minky Schlesinger
for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC/SABC1) that
was later turned into a feature film, Gugu & Andile, by Luna Films/
Firework Media. Set in 1993, just before the first democratic elections in
South Africa, it centres on a “star-crossed” couple from different Zulu
(Gugu) and Xhosa (Andile) tribes. The Shakespeare in Mzansi series also
included adaptations of Macbeth (Entabeni and Death of a Queen), Julius
Caesar (Jolile ka Kheza), and King Lear (Izingane zoBaba) – all demonstrat-
ing that “Shakespeare [can] be adapted to South Africa today, speak[ing]
to the hearts of South Africans about South Africans” (Schlesinger
quoted in Mushakavanhu 2010). These adaptations focus on the themes
of the “futility of war, and the hope for reconciliation [which are] …
vital issues in contemporary South Africa” (Schlesinger, quoted in
Mushakavanhu 2010). The series was filmed using the languages of isi-
Zulu and isiXhosa for the local black audiences. Similar to the m4Lit
and Yoza projects’ efforts, the film series was also part of a concerted
effort of nation building by increasing South African content for South
Africans, a familiar strategy of doing so via the Bard’s cultural capital

adapted into new national contexts.37
In this example, where intermediated Shakespeares are prominent,
South Africa, and the m4Lit project in particular, are part of a more
generalized fight against the prejudice and dominance of the Global
North and Western World. Part of that fight has to do with the way in
which media travel from privileged access to computers in the West
through to access to mobile devices in the majoritarian world. Walton
argues
Studies of children’s “new literacies” in the global north have yet to con-
sider the distinct features of literacy associated with mobile phone use for
the majority of the world. Scholars who investigate “digital literacy” have
tended to assume that all young people have (or should have) access to
computers, and that “new literacies” develop primarily through children’s
extensive out-of-school experience in using computers to access the
Internet, digital media, and games. (2009, 3)
While access to computers and the internet leads to certain techno-

logical literacies and allows many to cross the digital divide, “innova-
tive uses of mobile technology are not always viewed as positively,
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particularly when they do not follow the North American or European

model” (Walton 2009, 2). Walton argues further:
Unlike computer skills, the digital literacies associated with mobile phone
use are not considered generally desirable or necessary … the relatively
slow adoption of mobile communication in the United States meant that
skills in mobile communication tended to be regarded as culturally spe-
cific preferences, or as exotic peculiarities rather than as essential “mobile
literacies.” (Walton 2009, 2–3)
Or, in other words, cellphone or m-literacy in the Global South has

been undervalued and misunderstood because of the Global North’s
m-illiteracy. Instead, the Yoza Cellphone Stories and their counterparts
around the world demonstrate the rich literacy and creativity of
Shakespearean adaptation that mobile technology has allowed.
By skipping computers and moving directly to mobile cellphone use,
Africa is on pace to become the first “post-PC” continent.38 The free and
low-cost mobile offerings provided by MOOCs open up a world of pos-
sibility for students in South Africa who can move from the Yoza
Cellphone Stories to reading, creating, and engaging with criticism and

scholarship about Shakespeare’s works, all while interacting with
scholars and students from around the world. Until the technological
requirements needed to access the digital material are more universally
available, the students in technologically poorer areas, whether in
Africa or North America, can at least use if not create intermedia to
bridge the digital divide via their mobile phones.
Panchronic Shakespeare
In the spring of 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark
Production Company performed an intermedial adaptation of Romeo
and Juliet, directed by Roxana Silbert, entitled Such Tweet Sorrow. The
cast figured six actors playing the parts of Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio,
Tybalt, Jess the nurse, who is also Juliet and Tybalt’s older sister, and
Lawrence Friar, an internet café owner and small-scale drug dealer. An
added character is Jago Mosca, performed by unnamed actor(s), a stu-
dent in Juliet’s class who is all-seeing. The five-week performance “was
performed entirely via Twitter. Six actors and actresses tweeted the per-
formance over five weeks, and anyone with an Internet connection
could follow the performance at any time by visiting the performance
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website or the individual characters’ Twitter profiles” (Way 2011, 401).

The performers were also linked to Facebook and uploaded videos to
YouTube, along with integrated musical playlists, twitpics, audio tracks
of dialogue and music, and blog posts – all posted to their mobile
Twitter feeds. Audience members could interact with cast members via
other online platforms such as chatting with Romeo via Xbox or play-
ing against him in Call of Duty. The cast was given a script overview
each day, but left to decide how to post their lines/actions/events in
real time on the social network. This open interaction between the ac-
tors and the audience and between audience members exemplifies in-
termediality as a “force [that] operates in-between performer and
audience” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006, 12). It brings the characters
into the twenty-first century and makes them as real as any other per-
son with a digital life. Arguably, we are all characters and actors in the
intermedial digital field.39
The RSC has followed Such Tweet Sorrow’s cross-platform produc-
tion with a potentially even more ambitious project for the World
Shakespeare Festival 2012. Beyond the usual festival- and company-
related materials posted on the main website, the World Shakespeare
Festival 2012 site has several notable features under the “myShake-
speare” tab. According to the page, “myShakespeare is a place to con-
sider what Shakespeare means to us today. A creative space to share
our thoughts and ideas, revealing how his words and characters con-
tinue to influence and reflect human life.” “myShakespeare” collects
and tracks a number of Shakespearean vectors from April through
November 2012: it consists of a gallery of user and commissioned
artwork, performances, and soundscapes; blog, Twitter, and Facebook
social networking connections; and “Banquo,” a dynamic data visual-
ization stream that “show[s] global, Shakespeare-related social media
by the hour, taken from Twitter, Flickr, and eBay” (RSC 2012a). These
last three all have web apps that sync via the Cloud. The data visualiza-
tion is named “Banquo” after the ghost in Macbeth, “to draw parallels
between the way social media leaves a lasting impression of our com-
ments, ideas, thoughts and activity that remain in cyberspace long after
they initially existed” (RSC 2012a). It is a social revenant, an emblem of
what the Introduction to this volume describes in its discussion of
Kittler’s discourse networks as a cognitive resonance arising from in-
termediated forms of memory and history.
Such Tweet Sorrow and “Banquo,” along with the Adelaide Road app,
also raise questions about time and the flow of information in a digital
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medium. In Such Tweet Sorrow the content of the tweets and other post-
ings was created by the actors, who decided what to post based on their
script prompts, while the actual archival website was controlled by the
director and design company to allow the audience to view the timeline
synchronically, as things were posted live, or diachronically, in retro-
spect. The material can be viewed asynchronically, outside of any linear
order, since various parts of the materials were posted on several social
media networks. Once posted, these materials were open, and still are,
to reposting and/or adaptation by anyone across these same social
media networks. David Crystal addresses the problem of how we
can conceptualize time in the production and reception of a text with
the concept of the “panchronic” or “panchronicity.” Crystal argues,
“Ferdinand de Saussure’s classical distinction between synchronic and
diachronic does not adapt well to these kinds of [internet] communica-
tion, where everything is diachronic, time-stampable to a micro-level
… But with many electronically mediated texts there is no finished
product. And in many cases, time ceases to be chronological” (Crystal
2011, 8). If one inserts new material into an old blog posting or updates
a Wiki page, then, according to Crystal,
a chronological anomaly has been introduced into an original text. This is

a new take on the grammatical notion of “future in the past” – or perhaps
better, “back to the future.” … A text which contains such futurisms can-
not be described as synchronic for it cannot be seen as a single état de
langue: it is a conflation of language from two or more états de langue. Nor
can it be described as diachronic, for the aim is not to show language
change between these different états. Such texts, whose identity is depen-
dent on features from different time-frames, I propose to call panchronic.
(Crystal 2011, 9)40
The concept of the panchronic works well for describing the interme-
dial multi-platform, multi-time, multi-spaced text(s) exemplified by
Such Tweet Sorrow.
“Banquo” is also panchronic. It provides a constant stream of data
from around the world in live time that is also, simultaneously, always
already a record of the past(s) that are/is still present. Tweets stream by
quickly, while Flickr images and eBay auction listings move more slow-
ly across the screen. The user can select which day she wants to look at
as well as whether to focus on a particular genre – say all comedies – or
track a single play or two, which is a distinctive feature for anyone
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interested in the circulation of a particular work. Any item in the data

stream can be moved around the screen, either when the stream is
paused or in mid-stream, and clicked on to access the original posting
website page, which is still active in the present time, outside of the
stream. There is also a running graph along the top of the stream show-
ing the rise and fall of the postings, which range roughly from five hun-
dred to one thousand discrete postings each day. Tied to the panchronic
is a sense of “flow,” which Stephen Downes likens to an almost organic
stream of consciousness:
Flow is what happens when your content and your data becomes unman-
ageable. Flow is what happens when all you can do is watch it as it goes
by – it is too massive to store, it is too detailed to comprehend. Flow is
when we cease to think of things like contents and communications and
even people and environments as things and start thinking of them as (for
lack of a better word) media – like the water in a river, like the electricity
in our pipes, like the air in the sky. (Downes 2012)
Flow is an almost pure circulation of data. “Banquo” comes close to

embodying this pure flow of data. Where it falls short is in the necessity
of curation for focus and manageability through the use of algorithms
to mine the websites for the appropriate Shakespearean content. Left
uncurated, the digital flow of Shakespearean references, including user
comments such as the textspeak from the Yoza Cellphone Stories,
would create what Clifford E. Wulfman calls the “hypervariorum” –
“the explicit linking of all that has been thought and said in print [writ
large] about a canonical work … the ‘perpetual commentary,’ in which
new knowledge depends [on] an engagement with all previous knowl-
edge” (2009, 21–2).
The hypervariorum of perpetual commentary is the ultimate dream
for many Shakespearean scholars, and the “Banquo” data visualiza-
tion, which is also a form of intermediation, gives a sample of its poten-
tial to allow new critical and creative connections across cultures.
“Banquo” also reveals how unwieldy that flow of panchronic material
is, since it demands the highest levels of reading, technological, and
world literacy to make any sense of the data. For most users, in the
Global North or South, mobile apps that curate the Shakespearean ma-
terial into small and containable “bits” and maintain intermedial sim-
plicity are both necessary and desirable – especially for those engaged
in flipped classroom or MOOC educational curriculums. In terms of
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Shakespearean adaptation, the unending stream of panchronic digital

flows expands the concept of adaptation to include almost any cultural
iteration of the digital Bard. It also challenges the very notion of adapta-
tion because it breaks down what constitutes an original text that can be
adapted. How can there be an original when digital time is panchronic
and the texts are circulating in multiple variations that not only allow
perpetual alterations that undermine the linear sense of before and af-
ter but also are not locatable in a discrete geospatial position?
The landscape of mobile Shakespeare is currently one of unending
organic flow, held in check by curated apps. As the socially networked
Web 2.0 continues to morph into the semantic panchronic Web 3.0, in-
termediality will continue to change and alter the relations among con-
tent creators, performers, audiences, and mobile users.
NOTES
1 I would like to thank Eric Hengstebeck for his thoughtful comments on

various drafts of this essay. As of March 2013, 15.11% of all global website
access came via an app on a handheld mobile device (StatCounter 2013).

This rate is growing rapidly: it increased from 9.94% in April 2012
(StatCounter 2012) to 15.11% in less than a year. According to the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for infor-
mation and communication technologies, there were almost 6 billion
mobile-cellular subscriptions around the world by the end of 2011 (that’s
87% of the world’s population) and 1.2 billion active mobile-broadband
subscriptions for 2G and 3G (17% of the word’s population). ITU states:
“Mobile-broadband subscriptions have grown 45% annually over the last
four years and today [end of 2011] there are twice as many mobile-broad-
band as fixed-broadband subscriptions” (2011, 2). The number of subscrip-
tions is expected to reach seven billion by early 2014 (ITU 2013).
2 See Cook’s “Shakespeare on the Internet” (2009b) and corresponding
“Selected Guide to Shakespeare on the Internet” (2009a) for an overview
of websites dedicated to the Bard (www.shaksper.net).
3 See Shakespeare 4.3 (September 2008), edited by Alan Galey and Ray
Siemens, College Literature 36.1 (Winter 2009), and Shakespeare Quarterly
61.3 (Fall 2010), edited by Katherine Rowe, for some recent overviews of
the field.
4 According to Apple, there are “over 775, 000 apps for iPhone, iPad and
iPod touch users worldwide” (Apple 2013a). In January of 2013 Apple
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announced that the 40 billionth app had been downloaded from its App
Store. This number has grown at an extraordinary pace. The 25 billionth
app was downloaded in early March 2012 (Apple 2012), so almost half of
the total number of apps downloaded happened just in 2012 (Apple 2013a).
Over 25 billion Android apps have also been downloads. Download num-
bers are as of September 2012 for Android (Rosenberg 2012); these are up
from 11 billion in January 2012 (Crider 2012). In addition, mobile and tab-
let users have downloaded billions of apps for BlackBerry (McInnes 2012)
and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platforms – though their markets account
for only a small fraction of the mobile market, which is dominated by
Apple and Android (ABI Research 2013). In total, there have been approxi-
mately 10 apps downloaded per person on the globe since Apple first
launched the App Store in July 2008. Those numbers will only increase as
millions of apps are downloaded daily while millions of mobile devices go
online and the world becomes more connected via portable devices.
5 The Facebook App Center is “platform-agnostic,” meaning that it is not
tied to a particular platform like Android or Apple’s iOS. With a user-base
of around a billion, and requiring only internet access to log on, Facebook’s
App Center has the potential to reach huge numbers of people as earlier
game apps such as Farmville and Cow Clicker have spread across the social
platform.
6 Feature phones are usually those phones without full keyboards, video
screens, cameras, or the enhanced capabilities such as those found on an
iPhone. Feature phones tend to have fewer apps, most of which are native
apps. The difference between smartphones and feature phones is lessening
as more feature phones contain web apps and photo and video capabilities.
7 In fact most apps are downloaded and forgotten. A study by Localytics
(January 2010) found that over one-quarter of all apps are downloaded,
tried once, and then discarded (cited on mobiThinking 2012). The dispos-
ability of apps is a result of the low or no cost price-point, the inability to
sample apps before purchase and downloading, and the overabundance
of poorly designed apps.
8 In May 2012 the Folger Shakespeare Library announced that they were
making the texts of the Folger Shakespeare series, minus all paratextual
material, free online for non-commercial usage. See press release (Folger
Shakespeare Library 2012) for more information.
9 Amazon’s storefront search makes it hard to find particular editions be-
cause it will list a related Kindle edition under any title that does not have
its own digital edition for sale. For example, someone wanting to purchase
the Kindle edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by David
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Bevington (now in its 6th edition) is given the Project Gutenberg edition
for $1.99 – a text available free online. Since the Kindle edition is presented
with exactly the same product description from the back cover of the
Bevington edition, a buyer would only know of the bait and switch if she
clicked on the “Look Inside” preview, where the text clearly states is it a
Project Gutenberg edition, or if she took the time to read some of the cus-
tomer reviews, which point out that the etext is not the Bevington edition.
10 See www.shakespeareswords.com for more on David and Ben Crystal’s
glossary.
11 Some apps are one-note jokes or are so limited in their function to be al-
most useless. For example, iKing Shakespearean leads the user through a se-
ries of questions to find out which Shakespeare King you are and also lets
you know how many other “kings” there are in the world.
12 For an overview of Shakespeare festival websites, please see Ailles 2002.
13 See the Adelaide Road project website on the RSC website for more infor-
mation: www.rsc.org.uk.
14 Though they are not incorporated into the Manga Shakespeare app, the
associated website (mangashakespeare.com) and a social network
(mangashakespeare.com) provide educational support materials, manga
instruction, and behind the scenes information on the creation of the se-
ries. The app would be a significant resource for students and educators if
these materials and links were included.
15 There are numerous online resources for the “flipped classroom” but “The
Flipped Classroom” (2011) infographic by Knewton provides a very clear
overview of the teaching model.
16 CliffsNotes has guides for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, King
Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Julius Caesar.
17 At its most extreme, the “freemium” model led to a 2011 class-action law-
suit against Apple for luring kids into “addictive” games that follow in-app
purchase models that allow children, and others, to download a free app
and start playing a game/accessing free content that then requires them to
make further purchases via virtual and real currency to continue the game,
buy game accessories, or access the full content. The so-called freemium
games can lead to credit card charges of hundreds of dollars. See “United
States District Court Northern District of California San Jose Division Case
No. 5:11-CV-1758 EJD” (2012) for more on the class-action suit.
18 Shakespeare in Bits has been named “Best in eLearning” Nokia Digital
Media Awards 2012, 2012 “Readers’ Choice Award” for best K-12 product
from eSchool Media, and “Cool Tool Award for best Content Provider
Solution” from EdTech Digest, 17 April 2012, among others.
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19 iTunes U was originally launched in 2007.

20 Barnes & Noble and Microsoft also teamed up in late spring 2012 to pro-
mote the adoption of ereaders and etextbooks in classrooms, especially at
the college level.
21 See Downes 2012, a talk on the history of online learning generations.
Downes ran the first MOOC in 2008, along with George Siemens, on
“Connectivisim and Connective Knowledge” for the University of
Manitoba’s Certificate in Adult Education.
22 Udacityis an independent educational organization that also offers
MOOCs in computers and robotics. It was launched in February 2012 by
three roboticists, David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun, after
Thrun taught an experimental MOOC at Stanford in the fall of 201l.
23 The MIT OCW site reveals how much it costs to set up their archive of
course content: “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000
to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licens-
ing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution. Courses
with video content cost about twice as much” (ocw.mit.edu).
24 See Kolowich 2013 and Jaschik 2013. At the time of this writing, Senate Bill
520 was introduced in the California Legislature, requiring transfer credit
for MOOCs and other online courses in a bid to help increase student ac-
cess to classes and relieve the overburdened state system. See Gardner and
Young 2013.
25 See O’Brien 2011 and Fain 2012 for more on these developments.
26 The dropout rate is as high as 90%. This extremely high rate of attrition is
attributed, so far, to the free nature of MOOCs, the lack of prerequisites,
and the lack of personal interaction with faculty. There are also a high
number of students, including faculty and researchers, sampling the
classes to see what MOOCs can offer. See Rivard 2013.
27 See Manovich 2001 for more on the various technological and intermedial
aspects of digital media.
28 See Young 2013 and Lennett and Kehl 2013 for more on the digital divide
in the United States and its effects on online learning.
29 For an example of Occupy Shakespeare, see Barclay 2011.
30 Access to physical books in the United States is beginning to be an issue
for different reasons. The move to internet buying over the past decade
has led to the widespread closing of physical bookstores. While physical
books can still be bought, ebooks are outpacing hardcopy sales and per-
sonal and public libraries are being culled as they are supplanted by
digital resources. Furthermore, the cost of digital books and journals is
surprisingly high – especially for libraries – and this has led to a further
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imbalance in holdings. For example, the US government sued Apple and

book publishers HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Hachette over
price fixing. These companies all followed a model endorsed by the late
Steve Jobs, focusing on the agency model of pricing where the publisher
sets a price and the seller gets a 30% stake versus the wholesale model
where the publisher sets the price for the seller and the seller then sets
their own retail price. In another example, Libraries Online Incorporated
(LION), “a consortium of twenty-five Connecticut public, academic, and
school libraries, has imposed a moratorium on the purchase of ebooks
from Random House … in response to the March 1 [2012] price hike put in
place by Random House that doubled and sometimes tripled the price of
ebooks for libraries” (Kelley 2012).
31 See Crystal 2008b for an in-depth study of the use of texting and Clark
2009 for more on the rise of the m-novels in Japan and potential for US
markets.
32 An early US trial Twitter version of the m-novel, launched in 2008, called
Quillpill, produced a number of texts. The site Textnovel, also launched in
2008 and still operating, features “ongoing serial narrations … each chap-
ter is usually only up to 100 to 200 words in length” (Textnovel 2010). There
are a number of Shakespearean adaptations on the site, including

“Remembering Romeo” by Becky Hill, a serial novel in progress, and
“Fleance’s Story,” a four-chapter young adult short story inspired by
Macbeth from the Short Story Collection by Lady Charlotte (2009).
33 For an extensive review of indigenous literacies and the origins of the
m4Lit project in South Africa, see Ana Deumert’s report (2010), in collabo-
ration with Steve Vosloo and Marion Walton.
34 See Depraetere 2011 for a quick take on the success of Yoza and m4Lit.
35 “In South Africa English-based textspeak is commonly referred to as ‘MXit
language’ (as it is used most frequently by users of the mobile instant mes-
saging service MXit). Textspeak is not only found in English. An example of
isiXhosa textspeak is given in the title of this report: klk cc > kaloku sisi (‘now
my sister’)” (Deumert 2010, 21).
36 See Walton 2009 – a report prepared for the Shuttleworth Foundation.
37 “uGugu no Andile had the highest Audience Ratings of any drama on
South African television for the full 6 weeks of broadcast. This was in the
region of 4 million viewers (or one tenth of the population) every week”
(Schlesinger, quoted in Mushakavanhu 2010. The film version won several
awards, including three African Movie Academy Awards and a SAFTA,
and was named Best South African Film. For more on the series and the
adaptive process involved in the creation of Shakespeare in Mzansi uGugu
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no Andile, see Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s interview with the director, Minky

Schlesinger (Mushakavanhu 2010), and a report by Kethiwe Ngcobo,
Head of Drama, South African Broadcasting Corporation, and Minki
Thulu, Content Buyer, South African Broadcasting Corporation (Ngcobo
and Thulu 2009).
38 For more on the rise of smartphones and feature phones using more than
SMS, see “The beginning of Africa’s long, slow transition away from SMS
– new browser kids on the block making mobile Internet access easier” in
Balancing Act: Telecoms, Internet and Broadcast in Africa (January 2012).
39 See the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark Production Company’s
Such Tweet Sorrow website www.suchtweetsorrow.com and the archived
Twitter feed twitter.com/#!/Such_Tweet/such-tweet-sorrow along with
Way 2011 for more on the RSC production.
40 For more on the panchronic, see Crystal 2011.
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PART TWO
“These Violent Delights

Have Violent Ends”:
Shakespearean Adaptation
and Film Intermedia
Adaptation
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Melted into Media:

Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation
of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and
the War on Terror
Don M oor e
The television, … films, a whole certain literature shows a force of the state that
doesn’t exist. The only thing on which the state rests is illusion, the presumed
absence of resistance, and passiveness.
– Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri
Julie Taymor’s filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2010)

may give filmgoers with memories of the terrorist attacks in New York
City on September 11, 2001 an eerie déjà-vu. For example, unlike
Shakespeare’s play, Taymor’s film doesn’t start in the midst of a raging
tempest. Instead, much like Manhattan on the morning of the “9/11”
terrorist attacks, Taymor’s film starts out forebodingly calm. In the
background are the sea and a blue skyline. In the foreground is a dark
sand tower balancing in the palm of Miranda’s hand. The silence finally
breaks with a tense, slow crescendo of high-pitched violins and one or
two ominous thunderclaps. Suddenly, we hear a deafening “crack!” of
thunder as the tempest explodes on to the screen. Similar to watching
first one plane, then a second hit the World Trade Center, the tempest
erupts like a catastrophic, yet undoubtedly calculated, event, throwing
the peaceful scene into confusion and chaos. Sudden gusts of rain melt
the sand tower, causing it to implode, much as the World Trade Center
towers did on September 11, 2001.
Like a rescue worker jolted into action by an alarm, Miranda reacts to
the sudden violence of the storm by racing up the hill towards her
mother, Prospera. The sorceress is perched on a precipice overlooking
the sea, arms and wand outstretched like an angry statue (of liberty?).
A series of jump-cuts then alternates back and forth between Miranda’s
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rescue mission and shots of the terrifying carnage Prospera rains down
on the ship caught directly in the eye of her perfect storm. The passen-
gers on the ship are trapped, terrified, and helpless. Struggling, seem-
ingly in vain, to survive, at least three passengers hurtle over the side of
the vessel into the sea. This image of passengers jumping to their ap-
parent deaths is unmistakably reminiscent of the infamous 9/11 falling
man suicide photo.
Another post-9/11 motif unfolds on the ship when Antonio, trapped
in the ship’s burning quarterdeck, holds a flaming cross and curses at
devils who he says are “flying about.” All at once, a giant wave crashes
in through the windows of the quarterdeck, causing a fiery explosion.
Antonio is flung across the room, which is now engulfed in flames. This
is a “post-9/11” image, in that it is reminiscent of how two planes didn’t
just smash in through the windows of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001 but also incinerated inside the building like jet-fuel-
laden bombs. Such post-9/11 images, however, can only be represented
in fictional recreations like this one from Taymor’s Tempest or Frédéric
Beigbeder’s novel Windows on the World (2003). In regard to the produc-
tion of a discourse of “9/11,” therefore, these fictional accounts become
intermedial sources for interpreting “real world” events, at least in the

mass media archive struggling to make sense of the unthinkable.
Nearing the end of the opening scene from The Tempest, we jump cut
once more to a full-screen shot of the screaming face of Prospera, the
perpetrator of the tempest attack. Her outfit is like a giant bird costume
made of shimmering blue feathers. She holds her magic staff out in
front of her with both hands as she screams, as if riding a hang glider
on a terrorist suicide mission against the helpless ship. The close-up of
Helen Mirren’s face depicts all the rage, fear, and insane murderous
determination that are staple Hollywood stereotypes of mad geniuses,
suicide bombers, and terrorists.
This scene and others in Julie Taymor’s Tempest contain what I provi-
sionally call generic elements of “post-9/11 Global Cinema.” By this, I
don’t mean to suggest that Taymor intentionally constructed her film to
be an allegory about the attacks on the United States on September 11,
2001 – attacks widely referred to as, though not definitively reducible
to, that dubiously iconic name/date 9/11. Nor do I mean to suggest that
the film is really all about post-9/11 empire-building or the global war
on terror. What I do propose, however, is that, particularly for Western
audiences living at this point in history, Taymor’s film possesses a post-
9/11 melted mediality. In other words, Taymor’s Tempest’s intermedial
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(meaning cross-generic and/or mixed media) evocations of key dis-

courses, images, and generic motifs related to 9/11 are melted into the
film’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. This post-9/11 melted medial-
ity situates Taymor’s film simultaneously within a number of post-
9/11-related discourses. These include the “hyperreal” contexts of
contemporary globalization/empire, global media spectacle, and the
“black arts” of the war on terror, as well as The Tempest’s more tradi-
tional early modern contexts.
The film exemplifies some of the ways in which seemingly “older”
postcolonial questions and theories have become urgently current in
the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US and the so-called
war on terror launched in retaliation. To give an example: From the
perspective of a North American audience viewing the film at the time
of its release, certain key aspects of Taymor’s Tempest are identifiable
as post-9/11 generic elements. These elements include the film’s ex-
plicit colonialist allegory with its evocation of cultural clashes; the
extra-geographical, perhaps even “simulacral,” indeterminacy of its
mystical island setting as the scene for encountering difference;
Prospera’s magical powers to deceive, to produce often terrorizing
(even terrorist) spectacles, and to alter “reality”; and distinctive images

that echo post-9/11 realities such as an imploding tower and terrorist
attacks from the air – among other unmistakably post-9/11 motifs evi-
dent in the film. These very elements are also intermedial, spectral re-
mainders/reminders of issues long associated with the production,
adaptation, and criticism of The Tempest.
So how do we read these aspects of the film? Undoubtedly, the an-
swer will vary with different audiences and contexts. While such ele-
ments are identifiable at the time of the film’s release in 2010 as
“post-9/11,” they are not reducible to, or even universally recognizable
as, generic elements of post-9/11 global cinema. In fact, they evoke a
number of different historical, political, and colonialist contexts from
the early modern period to the present, all of which intermedially melt
together within the film’s post-9/11 contexts. A defining element of
9/11, however, is the massive intermedial (re)production of discourses
that surround and in fact comprise that event. This is a discursive pro-
duction and remediation that evokes the rhetoric of colonial and impe-
rial intervention in ways analogous to The Tempest. Indeed, as Antonio
Negri suggests in the epigraph to this essay, contemporary hegemonic
power structures depend upon such intermedially circulated dis-
courses and cultural narratives for maintaining the illusion of their
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“naturalness,” their centrality, contrasted with the seeming power-

lessness of the dominated. Reading the events and ongoing effects of
September 11, 2001/“9/11” through Taymor’s Tempest instructively
shows how contemporary mass media illusions and globally net-
worked political spectacles are not new ideological strategies for in-
terpellating docile, willing subjects, but merely the latest versions of
long-practised weapons of hegemonic power. A Shakespearean lesson
intermedially transmitted via Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation of The
Tempest, then, is that recognition of the dreamlike qualities of hegemon-
ic power in whatever spectral form they may take can also reveal pos-
sible avenues of resistance to power.
9/11 as Intermedial Phenomenon
After Prospera’s destruction of King Alonso’s ship in a fiery explosion,

she repairs to a secret underground cave with angular staircases and an
odd postmodern design. From the top point of the cave flows a rock
slope that resembles water or lava. At the end of the slope is a small
semicircular pool that acts as a kind of portal through which Prospera
communicates with and calls forth Ariel, her spirit slave. Ariel recounts
to his mistress in detail how he orchestrated the tempest and launched
it against Alonso’s ship to maximum terrifying effect. Then, at a differ-
ent location on the coast of the enchanted island, we then see the King
and three other members of his train magically rise unharmed from the
ocean, their clothes dry and spotless. The water in this scene is not only
a symbol of redemption and renewal, but also a symbol of illusion and
intermedial spectacle in the film. The strange postmodern cave pool
resonates with Plato’s allegory of the cave with its shadowy reflections
of reality, which the prison-dwellers are forced to watch. Water is thus
a kind of tele-technological medium for both creating and witnessing
the terrorist spectacle of the attack on the ship. But it also functions to
“premediate,” or prepare the filmgoer for the worst by acting as a me-
dium (like Taymor’s post-9/11 film?) for delivering the victims of the
tempest unharmed to shore in order to work through their problems
and redeem themselves by the film’s end.
Intermediality is related to the concept of remediation. Jay Bolter
and Richard Grusin, in their book Remediation: Understanding New
Media, define remediation as having to do with “the particular ways
in which [different forms of “new media”] refashion older media and
the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the
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challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 15). Put differently,
Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation concerns the ways in which
a “melting together” of otherwise diverse forms of media creates new,
or more accurately, reconfigured generic effects and forms. As such,
questions related to remediation cannot be separated from intermedi-
ality. This relationship between the remediated and the intermediated
has to do with the ways in which remediation (and thus, by extension,
intermediality) can be understood to operate within a semiotic logic of
supplementarity. Remediation involves the supplemental referencing
or reintroduction of one media form within another, which always al-
ready points beyond the structural limits of either form. This supple-
mental structure of remediation results in the disruption and/or
reconfiguration of both in relation to each other, and likewise refuses
any definitive relationship of copy to “origin”/mediation to “source.”
In McLuhanesque terms one might say that inasmuch as media are
structured like a linguistic sign system based on supplementarity (ref-
erential signification) with no access to origins, the medium both
structures and is implicated by the message, which is always already a
medium. Instead of referentiality, this interaction creates what I call
melted intermediality.
An example of this type of intermedial interaction is Taymor’s
Tempest’s remediation of the colonized figure of Caliban within the post-
9/11 inflected, simulacral realm of the film. The signifier “Shakespeare”
has often been deployed in colonialist contexts to signify “the ultimate
guarantor of greatness and aesthetic value” and as a sign of imperial
culture (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 11). By exploiting Caliban, a refer-
ence to early modern colonialism, in a film that evokes a contemporary,
post-9/11 historical context, Taymor’s Tempest does two things at once.
First, it throws into question the “post” in postcolonialist views that
imply colonialism is over with. At the same time, it also opens up the
possibility that the early modern European colonialist enterprise
Caliban symbolically represents is still ongoing in a remediated form.
In fact, cultural colonialism in the form of media spectacle is arguably
part and parcel of the current discursive productions of 9/11 and the
war on terror – a media spectacle that, for better or worse, includes
Taymor’s Tempest.
Sonia Baelo-Allué describes 9/11 as a “cultural trauma and an inter-
medial phenomenon” (Baelo-Allué 2011, 184). The implications of this
provocative description are at least threefold. Most obvious is how the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the US are the most
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filmed and photographed disaster in history. A second implication is

that “9/11” is a predominantly media-centric event in regard to its pro-
duction of such immediate global impacts and massive, ongoing geo-
political effects. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Baelo-Allué’s
description, however, is its reference to the ways in which even eyewit-
ness and journalistic accounts of 9/11, struggling to comprehend and
remediate an overwhelmingly wide range of intermedial accounts of
the event, have often done so by drawing upon “the conventions of fic-
tion (plot, point of view, interior monologue, etc.)” (184–5). Reading
Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest as an intermedial post-9/11
allegory is thus a particularly post-9/11 approach to working through
the tangled, traumatic web of discourses surrounding September 11,
2001 and the war on terror.
Richard Grusin’s more recent book Premediation: Affect and Mediality
after 9/11 (2010) goes even further, suggesting that the cultural trauma
experienced as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in
the US can be understood as a kind of poverty in the ability of existing
media structures at the time to premediate that disaster. Grusin’s con-
cept of premediation evokes the Bush administration’s military policy
of “pre-emptive strikes.” Premediation, however, focuses on media

pre-emption strategies designed to ameliorate the cultural shock for
American audiences by having already prepared and proliferated an
adequate and ready media archive of images and storylines through
which to comprehend and “spin” cataclysmic events such as 9/11. In
Taymor’s Tempest, for example, the premedial effect is to work through
and resolve political strife, which is seen as the root historical cause of
the terrorist violence in the film. Prospera’s “unofficial or unauthorized
use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims” is the
dictionary definition of terrorism (OED). Perhaps more importantly,
the spectacular and hypermediated aspects of those acts satisfy the
Hollywood stereotype of a terrorist attack, even if Prospera doesn’t
necessarily fit Hollywood’s racial or political stereotypes of “terrorist.”
The allegorical references to post-9/11 terrorist violence thus interme-
dially connect contemporary world events to the political strife in the
film, giving the filmgoer a sense of hope and relief when a happy end-
ing is finally produced. On the other hand, the film’s images of terrorist
violence and destruction also premediate the filmgoer’s sensibilities, by
proleptically preparing and thus lessening the “shock and awe” of pos-
sible real world terrorist events.
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A similar post-9/11 premediatory narrative runs through John

Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic film The Road (2009). Based on Cormac
McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the film offers us a glimpse into
how humanity might cope after an unspecified apocalyptic event,
which wipes out most human and animal life. There are similar cold-
war narratives of nuclear holocaust survivors, but the uncertainty of
the cause of the disaster in The Road is particularly post-9/11 in that it
draws on the terror of an unforeseeable and unexpected catastrophic
event. The film, like Taymor’s Tempest, is also rife with religious sym-
bolism and moments in which humans reconnect with each other and
the preciousness of human life in the face of humanity’s destruction.
The Road’s post-9/11 premedial gesture, however, is more of a dire
warning than The Tempest’s resolution of conflict and restoration of
“freedom” to all by the end of the film. Nonetheless, this “resolution”
seems complexly jaded, particularly in the contexts of a postcolonial
reading of The Tempest.
Grusin argues that, in the US, the dominant strategy related to pre-
mediation since September 11, 2001 and in particular leading up to the
Iraq war is the perpetuation of “an almost constant, low level of fear
or anxiety about another terrorist attack” (Grusin 2010, 2). This type of
premediation strategy allows hegemonic global power more easily to
control and manage messages and information being transmitted via
global mass media and communications networks, and thus more ef-
fectively anticipate the shock and awe of events like 9/11. Premediation
can also limit the possibility that such events be read subversively
as blowback, as for example happened with the revelation in the mass
media of disastrous consequences resulting from the US govern-
ment’s previously unpublicized covert actions and/or secret foreign
policy decisions in the war against terror. A case in point: Osama Bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda forces, widely acknowledged to be the perpetra-
tors of the 9/11 attacks, were armed and trained by the US govern-
ment several decades earlier when they were viewed as allies against
Russian expansionism in Afghanistan. What’s more, the US has a
long history of both economic and militaristic adventurism in the
Middle East, as well as close ties with Israel, a country viewed by
many as a perpetrator of state terrorism against Palestinian Arabs.1
Nonetheless, the Bush administration was at a loss to answer the
inanely simplistic question raised in the popular US media immedi-
ately after the 9/11 attacks: “Why do they hate us?” David Simpson
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connects many of these incendiary dots and more in his book 9/11: The
Culture of Memorialization, pointing out that
not only are the events of Abu Ghraib the events of American prisons, but
bin Laden wealth is/was deeply implicated in the U.S. economy, Osama
himself was a former ally in the war against the USSR in Afghanistan,
Saddam himself was an ally whom America supported in his war against
Iran (and who in 1988 gassed some of his own citizens, the Kurds – one of
the crimes produced against him in 2003 – with weapons financed by
American support). Every imagining of the other is an encounter with the
self: they are us. (2006, 135–6)
Simpson makes the intriguing point here that given this tangled web of
historical alliances, geo-politico-economic intrigue, and disastrous for-
eign policy decisions, the US government’s war on terror, in a certain
way, is a war against itself. This is why the intermedial campaign of
mass deception is such a key aspect of this war, in order to clarify, medi-
ate, and manage its many contradictions and hidden realities.
Taymor’s film undoubtedly draws upon and contributes to the cul-
tural archive of images and storylines that comprises the popular dis-
course associated with 9/11. Imploding towers, fiery attacks from the
air, and helpless victims jumping from burning structures are only the
most recognizably post-9/11 images among many more subtle and/or
allegorical post-9/11 motifs in the film. The film constructs these im-
ages, however, by recontextualizing them (and perhaps, in the mode of
premediation, the discursive production of similar “future” 9/11s) in
relation to Shakespeare’s early modern contexts. Indeed, Grusin’s logic
of premediation reminds us that the “future” is always already concep-
tualized in the past. That is why so many have noted that part of the
symbolic importance of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 en-
tailed targeting the very logical coherence of “globalization.” The at-
tacks disrupted a key hegemonic conceptual apparatus through which
we were supposed to be able to filter and comprehend an event like
“9/11,” thus resulting in what Walter Benjamin once called a cultural
“shock.” Taymor’s Tempest also disrupts hegemonic discourses via its
intermedial references, by making productive connections between the
politics of early modern colonialism and the supposedly “world chang-
ing” events of September 11, 2001. In this way, Taymor’s Tempest illumi-
nates some of the hidden histories and ongoing cultural traumas to
which 9/11 is connected. Hence, Taymor’s film is not unlike a range of
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similar “post-9/11 films” that both mediate and intermediate the dis-
cursive aspects of 9/11.
Post-9/11 Global Cinema
What do I mean by calling Taymor’s Tempest a “post-9/11 film”? My

understanding of “post-9/11 global cinema” is necessarily conflicted.
On the one hand, there is an impulse prevalent in many such films to
represent 9/11 as a kind of moral or even theological justification in it-
self for violently defending the values, ideologies, and discourses long
associated with Western globalization. An example of this more dog-
matic world view is on display, for instance, in the political speeches of
former President George W. Bush. In those public performances, he of-
ten characterized “the terrorists” as being a kind of pure evil that must
be rooted out, at all costs and by all means necessary, in order to protect
freedom, troped as “good” and even as “God’s gift to the world.” The
theocratic interpretation of 9/11, of which Bush’s rhetoric is an example
par excellence, is that 9/11 represents a definitive historical break, usurp-
ing “Auschwitz” as the new moral benchmark of “the ultimate evil”
against which our most significant “moral” legislations and guidelines

are measured. These legislations include the four treaties and three
protocols collectively known as the Geneva Conventions, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and international genocide legislation
like the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (CPPCG), which came into effect in 1951 as the result of ef-
forts made by the United Nations General Assembly. A strong indica-
tion that such an ethical shift may have occurred (at least for some) is
evidenced by the fact that the first two and possibly even the third
aforementioned human rights protections, which were largely inaugu-
rated as a result of the experiences of the Holocaust/Shoah, were sus-
pended and/or contravened in conjunction with the war on terror and
the exercise of various extra-legal measures taken by the US govern-
ment. This was the case at prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo
Bay and with the Israeli government against Palestinians, among other
examples globally.2 These suspensions and/or contraventions were all
done in the name of the exceptionalist moral authority arising from the
singularity of “9/11.”
Such a contemporary post-9/11 ethico-political shift is evoked in
Taymor’s Tempest by the plight of Caliban, the former ruler-to-be of the
island kingdom. Prospera’s colonialist occupation not only deprives
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Caliban of his throne but also restricts his movements in a manner rem-
iniscent of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians, which renowned
international human rights law expert Dr Francis Boyle likens to the
now defunct South African apartheid system (Boyle 2008, 28–9) and
characterizes as an act of genocide (Boyle 2012). In Caliban’s case, the
situation also resembles that of a forced labour camp. The physical
abuse and colonialist subjugation of Caliban – abuses that would now
be considered violations of international human rights law but may
also allegorically allude to the genocidal reality of early modern colo-
nialist subjugation – are justified by Prospera as necessary measures to
protect the security of both herself and her daughter from a creature
whom she doesn’t even consider “human.” Prospera’s excuse resem-
bles not only the US government’s justification after the terrorist attacks
of 9/11 for its illegal military actions, torture of prisoners, and rolling
back the human rights of its own citizens under the Patriot Act in the
name of national “security,” but also Israel’s use of the post-9/11 rheto-
ric of war on terror for justifying its ongoing state terrorist campaign
against Palestinians.
Since September 11, 2001, a number of different governments and
groups around the world have invoked the mystical moral authority of
“9/11” for justifying various policies and actions, including question-
able interpretations, revisions, and even rescissions of basic human
rights protections. The effects are dramatic and globally wide-reaching
in their political, legal, and cultural ramifications. One such effect is in
relation to the post–Second World War orientation of the “ethical limit”
associated with the Holocaust/Shoah. That conflict, it is important to
remember, had its own particular historical, religious, industrial, and
geopolitical specificities. Nonetheless, the conventions and human
rights codes founded in the name of Auschwitz were directed beyond
those specific events towards more “universal” application with impor-
tant, yet often limited successes.3
By contrast, the geopolitical, religious, and even geographical con-
texts of “9/11” are different from those associated with the Holocaust/
Shoah. We now live, for instance, in what is often described as a global-
ized, post-industrial, thoroughly networked, and differently, yet none-
theless still racially and ethnically, polarized historical context. Indeed,
not only were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 directed against
global capitalism, those particular attacks could not have occurred
without the teletechnologies and intermediated network structures of
globalization. Yet the overshadowing in popular discourse of the idea
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of the Holocaust/Shoah as a grounding ethical symbol by a war against

“terror” (inferring a war against the worst conceivable contemporary
form of human “evil”) as the new contemporary moral limit term is
risky on at least three counts. The first is the perpetuation of a disas-
trous historical amnesia in regard to the lessons of the Holocaust/
Shoah; the second is that of opening the door to reductive reinvocations
of a universalizing ethical rhetoric that polarizes and excludes; and the
third is that such a rhetorical shift risks the unjust association of long-
standing Orientalist stereotypes of Arab-Muslim terrorists with reduc-
tive notions of “ultimate evil” in the form of an impossibly abstract and
recklessly reactionary concept of generalized “terror” embodied in a
demonic other.
Taymor’s Tempest reflects such a historical shift in how we negotiate
our post-9/11 global ethical climate in a few subtle ways, one of which
is the film’s setting. It is historically early modern, yet nonetheless
contains many postmodern aesthetic, architectural, and intermedial
qualities evoking a contemporary post-9/11 context that informs how
the action and politics of the film can be interpreted. Another is cloth-
ing style and architecture. One of the best examples of the clash be-
tween the early modern and postmodern in the film is the scene in
which Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano are foiled in their attempt to
assassinate Prospera. In a previous scene, they stumble on a cache of
Prospera’s and Miranda’s clothing, some of which they are now wear-
ing. The clothes are early modern in style, but the wearing of these
clothes transgresses class, gender, and even standards of aesthetic
taste, making a mockery of their vain attempt to rise above their
“proper” social status and usurp power from Prospera. The carni-
valesque impropriety of Trinculo’s and Stephano’s clothing, however,
is never really commented on in the film, perhaps because Taymor’s
Tempest’s audience possess more “postmodern,” ironic sensibilities
with regard to fashion and sexual propriety. What’s more, Prospera
leads them into her cave-bunker with its markedly postmodern archi-
tecture. This includes the already mentioned magical crystal ball-like
pool, two long angular staircases, and sharply angled walls that defy
functional logic and seem to turn the world topsy-turvy for the occu-
pants. As such, we recognize the early modern Shakespearean ele-
ments of this scene, but the postmodern details remind us that we are
rereading the events in a more contemporary context.
Another symbolic reflection of a contemporary ethical shift is the “vi-
olence” in the film, which largely derives from illusion and spectacle. In
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other words, it is “hyperreal” violence, as opposed to “real” in any ear-

ly modern or even modernist sense. Even so, this violence has real and
often devastating effects for the characters in the film. Prospera’s attack
on her countrymen’s ship, for example, is more spectacle and illusion
than “real,” and yet the attack has real and devastating effects. What’s
more, most of the violence in the film can be read as terrorist violence,
given the fact that Prospera – perpetrator of most violent acts in the film
– is technically “stateless,” and thus never really (legally) at war with
anyone. Further, even if we accept the legitimacy of her own self-pro-
claimed rule over the island kingdom, her acts of torture against Caliban
would constitute a form of state terrorism. Even her methods of doing
violence seem calculated above all to terrorize in spectacular fashion, as
evidenced in her unleashing the horrifyingly violent, yet ultimately
non-lethal tempest on King Alonso’s vessel.
Yet another reflection in Taymor’s Tempest of our contemporary
post-9/11 geopolitical order is that the power to control people and
to create fear circulates in the film through information-based tele-
technologies emblematized by Prospera’s knowledge-based magic.
The island’s biopolitical order evokes the intermedial network struc-
tures of post-9/11 globalization in a film that stages intermediality

within an early modern context. The landscape of the film is eerily
“hyperreal,” its appearance shifting and changing according to
Prospera’s “magical” mediation of her surroundings. Within this land-
scape, moral codes and political alliances also shift and change at the
whim of Prospera’s political ambitions, and in response to challenges
to her authority. Indeed, like our contemporary post-9/11 world, the
film’s island setting is a world in which power and violence are in-
voked by appearances and mediated spectacles, which triumph over
the well-oiled political machinery of state that Prospera exposes as it-
self illusory via her magic and control of illusion. Power and the moral
authority it lends are thus decentred in the film, and instead circulate
most prominently as the illusion of authority conjured and maintained
through intermedially maintained “magic.” As such, no one “proper-
ly” possesses power, and Prospera’s position is always in question,
always open to challenge. God is on no one’s side. The illusion of
Godlike omnipotence is the real source of power in the film. This is on
display, for example, in Prospera’s control of the weather as a terrorist
weapon against the corrupt states of Milan and Naples. As a result, the
source of moral legitimacy in the film is always in question. Taymor’s
Tempest embodies the clash between an early modern conception of
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transcendental theologically based moral law and a more postmodern

view of biopolitical power structures and moral relativism that is nev-
er neatly resolved.
On the Other Hand … 9/11 as Limit Term
As opposed to simply a moral justification for maintaining Western he-

gemonic “world order,” 9/11 is alternatively represented in many
“post-9/11 films” as “a limit event, an event so traumatic that it shatters
the symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal pro-
cesses of meaning-making and cognition” (Versulys 2006, 1; emphasis
mine). A host of scholars point out that in our current era of global me-
dia spectacle, the products of mass media such as cinema, internet con-
tent, video games, and so on play dominant roles in the hegemonic
process of making meaning.4 This process was interrupted by the events
of 9/11 in such a way that we will never definitively know its meaning
because the very event itself disrupted the discourses and conceptual
norms (such as the master narrative of “globalization”) that we have
long taken for granted as apparatuses that can allow us to understand
such an event as “9/11” (Derrida 2003, 85–136).

Taymor’s Tempest intermedially recontextualizes 9/11 by melting to-
gether a range of historical references. These include representations
and remediated images related to colonialism, empire building, and
political intrigue driven by knowledge-based technologies that span
the early modern period to the post-9/11 era. The film contrasts and
contextualizes these references, thus helping to demystify the politics
of September 11, 2001 in relation to, and in many ways as a continua-
tion of, early modern colonialism and empire building. As such,
Taymor’s Tempest repoliticizes the seeming “magical” spectacle of glob-
al media in and through which the discourse of 9/11 is most domi-
nantly disseminated, and privides a unique lens through which to
reconsider those earlier, yet in many ways still ongoing, early modern
colonial projects. The sand castle that melts in Miranda’s hand in the
very first scene of the film, for instance, is an image blending an early
modern symbol of castles and the implosion of a monarchic power
structure within an unmistakably post-9/11 image resembling the de-
struction of the World Trade Center towers. Such a complex tropology
evokes inevitable comparisons between the two historical political situ-
ations in ways that productively interrogate both contexts via how each
makes meaning in and through the other.
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Motifs and Generic Elements of the (Non-)Genre

of Post-9/11 Cinema
My understanding of post-9/11 global cinema is that it is a collection of

identifiable (if irreducible) generic aspects and motifs, a non-genre in
the sense that post-9/11 global cinema refuses the idea that there could
ever be such a thing as a stable post-9/11 film genre made up of a de-
finitive archive of films. My concept of post-9/11 cinema, then, as a
(non-)genre is informed by critical theory – specifically deconstructive
approaches to genre studies suspicious of definable archives and on-
tologizable artistic elements like those evoked by the very notion of
“film genre.” Such concepts are most interesting when understood via
the “totalizing” gestures and genres that are left out of their conceptual
apparatuses. Like the irreducible name-date “9/11,” it is impossible to
know definitively what “post-9/11 cinema” might mean. Yet post-9/11
global cinema signifies the indelible ways in which particular cinematic
elements and motifs generic to the discourse of 9/11 are now unmistak-
ably identifiable as such, and regularly show up in a range of films
made both before and after September 11, 2001. These are cinematic
evocations of 9/11 with important and irreducible ideological and dis-

cursive effects. In fact, as opposed to identifying a particular “genre
film” that more or less fits in to the category “post-9/11 global cinema,”
my argument is based on a set of conventions and motifs evident in a
range of films and genres. These motifs are visible to contemporary
filmgoers who recognize these generic elements as “post-9/11” and not
necessarily because those films were ever made to fit a particular ge-
neric category. Such is the case with Julie Taymor’s Tempest – it is not a
post-9/11 film per se, but most definitely a post-9/11 film in that it can-
not help but be recognized as such .
What’s more, these post-9/11 generic elements are themselves con-
tradictory. On the one hand, they include reductive generic stereotypes
now unmistakably recognizable as post-9/11 (think exploding towers;
airline hijackings; orientalist Hollywood stereotypes of Arab terrorists,
dating back to action films, war movies, and even news reportage from
the early 1980s; the spectacular destruction of New York City involving
the Manhattan skyline; and so on). On the other hand, these very same
motifs often signal eruptions of the ethical, political, ideological, and
conceptual limits of our understanding of 9/11. Such evocations of the
limit, when they show up as generic elements in post-9/11 cinema, like-
wise refuse definitive and/or reductively dogmatic renderings of what
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“9/11” might possibly mean. Julie Taymor’s Tempest deploys such post-
9/11 motifs in its intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, thus
hybridizing and transforming the meanings of both its Shakespearean
and post-9/11 content to produce new insights.
Globalization, Intermediality, Diffused War, and Taymor’s Tempest
One such post-9/11 motif in Taymor’s Tempest is its magical island

setting. Many aspects of this extra-geographical, almost “simulacral”
island landscape allude to the post-9/11 context of globalization and
the ways in which intermediality, a tele-technological aspect of glo-
balization, is now central to human experience. The island is mostly
barren desert landscape, with next to no architecture except for
modestly furnished caves. Prospera and Miranda live in one such
cave, which they have decorated with a few belongings as well as
Prospera’s potions and equipment for her sorcery. Like the cave with
the magic pool I discuss briefly earlier, Prospera and Miranda’s liv-
ing quarters are also evocative of Plato’s allegory of the cave, such
that Prospera’s magical equipment – her books as well as a tree of
glass spheres filled with liquid – represents the sources of illusion

and hyperreal spectacle on the island. In Baudrillardian terms, the
island is a kind of “desert of the real.” It is literally mostly desert
landscape scattered with a few trees and caves, on which Prospera’s
knowledge-based magic is projected in the form of hyperreal illu-
sions that shape the reality of the island and its occupants. In other
words, the seeming “depthless surfaces” that Baudrillard associates
with “postmodern Reality” and what is loosely termed “globaliza-
tion” are allegorically represented by the island landscape, which
melds the real with the virtual to the point that they are indistin-
guishable from one another. In The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity
Pact, Baudrillard developes these themes in relation to “9/11” and
contemporary cinema. He observes that
the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic
form that has taken over everything – social and political life, the land-
scape, war, etc. – the form of life totally scripted for the screen. This is no
doubt why cinema is disappearing: because it has passed into reality.
Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disap-
pearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its
specificity. (2005, 125)
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For Baudrillard, the world used to be thought of or experienced as

“real.” But largely because of what we loosely understand as “global-
ization” (and in particular its technological forms as “media”), it is
ceasing to be so. And while the world is not yet fully virtual, for
Baudrillard it is fast becoming that way (Baudrillard 2005, 34). In other
words, the tele-technologies and media-dominated culture of contem-
porary globalization have created an experience of the world that has
become the dominant form of reality. This Baudrillardian critique of
our globalized contemporary world is allegorized by Taymor’s
Tempest’s island setting, which, like Taymor’s film itself, is a kind of
intermedial “hub” through which part of the global discursive produc-
tion of “9/11” is transmitted.
The tele-technologies, media systems, and network structures of glo-
balization, according to media theorist Andrew Hoskins, are part of
what he calls a contemporary “diffused war.” Hoskins coins this term
to describe the ways in which global media systems, military infra-
structures, governments, and networked tele-technologies now must
collude with each other in order for global militarism to function. This
complex interdependence of media, military, political, and global tele-
technological systems makes possible more diffuse causal relations be-

tween cause and effect. This diffusion of the relations between cause
and effect, in turn, creates greater uncertainty for policymakers in the
conduct of war, as well as greater uncertainty for those trying by vari-
ous means to make sense of what might actually be going on. In short,
in an age in which media spectacle and reality are increasingly difficult
to tell apart, the symbolic violence of the cinema is itself a key node in
the diffused global network systems waging the “war on terror.” In this
sense, films like Taymor’s Tempest can be understood not merely as re-
flections, but as integral parts of those overwhelmingly media-driven
spectacles of post-9/11 terrorism, the global war on terror, and the
discourse(s) of 9/11.
A clear example of one such post-9/11 motif appears in the very first
moments of Taymor’s film: a close-up shot of a black sand castle tower
falling down as a result of the tempest Prospera has conjured. But as the
camera pulls back to a medium shot, we realize that what we really are
gazing at is a sand castle held in the palm of Prospera’s daughter
Miranda’s hand. Miranda is watching the destruction of the miniature
castle almost like a meta-theatrical news bulletin transmitted literally
via a handheld device. The “news report” is a recounting of the storm
and its terrifying destruction of the vessel carrying the entire Italian
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monarchy, as symbolized by the sand castle – an event that Miranda is

standing in the very middle of, yet chooses to watch on her handheld
sand tower, itself a metonymy of mobile devices and tele-technologies
that intermediate experience.
But this isn’t just any tower. It’s a castle made of sand, which figures the
unreliability of its form and message as a metatheatrical/intermedial
device; the deceptive and shifting political situation of the Italian mon-
archy that it symbolizes; and finally, the fact that the monarchic struc-
ture rests in the palm of Miranda’s hand. The camera then pans out to
an even longer shot, framing the tempest over the sea as well as the
tempest-tossed Italian ship. But even this wide establishing shot, meant
to reorient the viewer in relation to the continuity of action onscreen,
we later discover, is itself a deceptive spectacle, much like the handheld
media device of the sand castle. The spectacle is an illusion created and
maintained by Prospera’s “black arts” and her slave Ariel’s magic. This
very first scene of the film, following classic Hollywood structure, thus
resembles a proleptic revelation of the entire plot in one brief opening
sequence. And this sequence is replete with unmistakably post-9/11
allegorical elements such as the imploding sand tower, the terrorist at-
tack on the ship, and the sailors jumping over the side of the vessel.
Many of these elements link the deceptive qualities of media and new-
media spectacles to the magical powers of Prospera, her efforts to in-
doctrinate her own daughter, and her attempt to manipulate the Italian
political situation in her favour with the magical conjurations that pro-
duce a terrorist spectacle via her attack on hegemony.
Media spectacle, like that produced by the global film industry, is it-
self a key element of what is now called “global terrorism.” From the
video messages of Osama Bin Laden, to recreations of the events of
9/11 in movies like Paul Greengrass’s United 93, to more allegorical
representations of mediatized terror in Taymor’s Tempest, cinema is a
powerful intermedial purveyor of symbolic violence. As such, it is also
a vehicle par excellence for “illegitimate” forms of global terrorism as
well as “legitimized” terrorisms, such as the state-sanctioned retribu-
tive violence of the war on terror.
The most filmed and photographed events in history, the real 9/11
terrorist attacks have even been compared to a bad movie, as if the ac-
tual event was unbelievable by cinematic standards.5 The mediation of
9/11 is such a key element of its cultural ethos, suggests Baudrillard,
that “this terrorist violence is not ‘real.’ It is worse in a way: it is sym-
bolic” (Baudrillard 2001). Baudrillard goes even further, likening the
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terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001 to a piece of

cinema, provocatively suggesting that “in this singular event, in this
disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that fascinate 20th century
masses are joined: the white magic of movies and the black magic of
terrorism” (Baudrillard 2001). In these ways, post-9/11 cinema can be
understood as both a reflection and an extension of the discursive pro-
ductions of the spectral “disaster movies” of 9/11, global terrorism, and
the war on terror. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film about
the hunting and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, is a recent ex-
ample of a film that not only depicts particular aspects of the war on
terror, but is controversial for its creative embellishment of the histori-
cal record of that event. In fact, a United States Congressional Committee
was set up to investigate the extent to which the CIA was involved in
script development, possibly for the purpose of slanting the narrativ-
ization of those events in the popular media.
In Taymor’s film, the tempest brought down upon the Italian ship is
a magical act of terrorism against Prospera’s brother, the reigning duke
of Milan, and his entourage. The tempest is framed in the film as a play
within a play, in such a way that the audience of Taymor’s film is made
to identify with Miranda’s own “hypermediated” gaze, and thus iden-

tify with her perspective on the events occurring around her. Miranda,
like many of us who witnessed September 11, 2001, seems to need to
watch the disaster unfold through media. Hence, she watches via the
handheld media device of the sand castle as a means by which to com-
prehend and filter events before she is able to respond or take any ac-
tion. Indeed, she is interpellated as an actor in the unfolding events via
her mediated gaze at the terrifying spectacle created by her mother.
This intermedial moment is reminiscent of the ways in which 9/11
“happened” for most people around the world on television, perhaps
in even more impactful ways than on the ground. Even though Miranda
is already caught up in the middle of the unfolding disaster, she seems
paralysed without the filter of media to guide her judgments and ac-
tions. What’s more, Miranda’s media filters, which include the melting
sand castle and the spectacle of the storm, are completely the product of
her mother’s knowledge-based magic, itself a trope for technologies
that can produce terror.
After Prospera allays the storm at the pleading request of her daugh-
ter, she then questions Ariel as to whether or not he/she carried out the
tempest exactly as per Prospera’s instructions. Ariel’s recounting of
events is illustrated in the film by visually stunning, stylized shots of
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Ariel, his/her body aflame, setting fire to the ship, which eventually
explodes and goes down in a spectacular fireball. As it sinks, its smoul-
dering remnants create a cloud of smoke over the water, an image eerily
reminiscent of the post-9/11 images of the destruction of the World
Trade Center as witnessed over and over again on the news from the
perspective of the Jersey City waterfront. Prospera’s conspiracy with
Ariel has uncanny parallels with conspiracy theories about 9/11 re-
garding the possibility that elements of the US government perhaps
orchestrated the attacks against its own cities and buildings for nefari-
ous political purposes. Prospera, for instance, recruits Ariel into the role
of magical terrorist, trained and armed to strike a symbolic blow against
her own countrymen. This reading is reinforced in the film by the im-
age of Ariel, body set aflame, throwing fireballs down at the ship from
the sky. This image reproduces the logic of the suicide bomber, or of the
pilots who flew the hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center, in-
cinerating both the planes and themselves in the process. Perhaps even
more disturbing, however, are the ways in which Prospera’s and Ariel’s
actions are eerily reminiscent of the historical fact that many Al Qaeda
terrorists were originally armed and trained by the US government,
that is, were a by-product of an intercultural relationship involving the

very parties who were to become adversaries.
Another example of the film’s contemporary post-9/11 references is
the theatrically “unnatural” geometry of the tempest. This “postmod-
ern” storm ravages the Italian ship in the first scene of the film. We view
the events from Miranda’s perspective as she stands atop a rocky vista
and watches the storm take place directly centre stage. In fact, every
storm cloud seems choreographed to align exactly over the only vessel
on the water. And the vessel itself remains oddly stationary at the very
centre of the horizon in spite of the raging wind. Every lightning bolt
hits its mark. Every gust of wind seems destined to strike, inevitably,
the deck of the doomed ship. From a post-9/11 perspective, Ariel’s
attack seems like a mocking parody of the supposed accuracy of
“smart bombs” as propagandized by the US government during the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars. What’s more, we find out later that this real
event is nothing more than a theatrical spectacle orchestrated by
Prospera. In this scene, cinema-like spectacle has indeed become reality
in Baudrillardian fashion, such that the effects of this real event can best
be described as “hyperreal” or “simulacral.” This hyperreality is evi-
denced by the ways in which no one perishes in the storm, the passen-
gers later rise up out of the water and walk on shore in a prearranged
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fashion, and the ship seems utterly destroyed, yet somehow eventually
ends up safe and sound floating in a hidden bay. In other words, events
really occur, but it is difficult to describe the “realities” that unfold as
happening in a “realistic” way. Indeed, the most affective events in the
film are precisely those that are simulacral as opposed to “the real.”
This simulacral situation is made possible in the context of globaliza-
tion by the dominance of tele-technology and mediatized images over
most other forms of life and experience, at least for the “global citizens”
living in the West whose reality is ineluctably defined by intermediated
forms of representation.
Globalization is also evoked by Prospera’s knowledge-based magic
through which she manages and manipulates events on the island – her
magic is precisely the power to mediate reality. In more explicitly
Foucauldian terms, Prospera is adept at manipulating truths and the
appearance of reality explicitly for the strategic purpose of manipulat-
ing the power dynamics of her own political situation. Her books and
magical knowledge give the appearance that she has omnipotent powers.
If this were actually the case, however, it would pose problems with
regard to the dramatic conflict in the film, as well as in Shakespeare’s
play. There are several clues throughout the film that contradict a read-
ing of Prospera as omnipotent sorceress. First, she is always strangely
on edge in the film, always paranoid that someone will get to her, find
out too much, or try to assassinate her. This paranoia is at odds with the
powers her magic seems to give her, and raises the stakes for Prospera
(and also for Shakespeare’s Prospero) in regard to maintaining the illu-
sion of being all-powerful as a means, or tactic, for holding on to politi-
cal power. What is the nature of Prospera’s (and Prospero’s) power?
What is actually contained in his/her books? Is there a parallel to be
drawn between the magical power of Prospera’s/Prospero’s books and
the post-9/11 power dynamics of intermedial political spectacle in the
way in which Taymor adapts Shakespeare’s play? Do such questions,
intermedially raised by the film, retroactively complicate, or perhaps
centralize, the political and postcolonial allegory of the play as opposed
to the popular notion that, as Shakespeare’s last play, it is really about
the aesthetic power of theatrical and artistic genius?
Prospera’s paranoia, as depicted by Taymor, may also be read as a
particularly post-9/11 motif, such that the threat of terrorist violence, as
represented by 9/11, is not just a threat to buildings, people, and planes,
but more radically still to the “system of interpretation, the axiomatic,
logic, rhetoric, concepts, and evaluations that are supposed to allow
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one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like ‘September

11’” (Derrida 2003, 93). In short, 9/11 poses a threat to hegemonic re-
gimes of knowledge and truth, such as the almost magical-seeming
“universality” of globalization as a world system predicated on an in-
evitable logic of imperial expansion. This is why Prospera so desper-
ately tries to maintain her own mystique as an omnipotent, omniscient
magician, even to the extent of threatening to torture Caliban and oth-
ers on her island kingdom. Even Ariel, for whom Prospera seems to
have an almost romantic affection, is nonetheless threatened with rein-
sertion back into the tree trunk, where he/she was imprisoned origi-
nally by the witch Sycorax, if he/she doesn’t obey. Prospera is also
accused of being a witch practising “black arts” by her Italian country-
men, and has thus become a version of her own worst enemy. What’s
more, her offers of freedom that come at the end of the film are all in-
separable from how Prospera herself enslaved all those she offers to set
free. As a sorceress of intermedial spectacle and illusion, this notion of
freedom as slavery thus resonates with what Baudrillard, referring to
Disneyland, once called the American social enslavement to the “hy-
perreal order and to the order of simulation” (Baudrillard 1994, 10).
Prospera’s magical enslavement of even her “free” subjects allegorical-

ly mirrors the ways in which, in our contemporary post-9/11 media
sphere, “freedom” often amounts to the choice to spend our leisure
time being entertained by and consuming the very media products that
structure our work environments. In this sense, the terms of our free-
dom reproduce our ideological enslavement to global capitalism as a
form of pleasure, a scene rescripted by Taymor’s adaptation in no un-
certain terms.
Ideological Training in Taymor’s Tempest
Prospera’s magic, when not being used to inflict or threaten torture (yet
another post-9/11 motif in the film), is most potent in its ability to de-
ceive. Very often, the target of this deception is Prospera’s daughter,
Miranda. A manipulator and political strategist extraordinaire, Prospera
specifically directs most of her efforts in the film towards the ideologi-
cal training of her daughter. Miranda is in fact the only “legitimate”
citizen under Prospera’s rule on the island. Miranda’s training over the
course of her entire upbringing is towards a “correct” interpretation of
Prospera’s place in Italian politics. This includes understanding the his-
torical injustices that Prospera says she suffered at the hands of her own
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family and political rivals. During Prospera’s political rant to Miranda

at the beginning of the film, Prospera commands her – and seemingly,
by extension, the film’s audience – to “mark me!” “Dost thou attend
me?” “Thou attends’t not!” (Garber 2004). The filmgoing audience is
co-implicated as recipients of Prospera’s indoctrination strategies by
the film’s framing of this scene through Miranda’s perspective. We too
are encouraged to identify as ideal citizens of this allegorical island,
and thus, perhaps, to also identify with the ways in which the island
represents our own ideological training, our alienation, as citizens of
the post-9/11 global media sphere.
Midway through Prospera’s rant, however, a remarkable thing hap-
pens. Prospera asks Miranda to “sit down, and be attentive. Canst thou
remember/A time before we came unto this cell?/I do not think thou
canst, for then thou was not/Out three years old.” The question ap-
pears to be rhetorical, since Prospera answers it before Miranda has a
chance to utter a word. Miranda, however, does answer. She tells her
mother that she can certainly remember something. At this revelation,
Prospera is visibly taken aback. Indeed, by all appearances she is upset
that Miranda, only three years old at the time, may have her own
memories of their former life as the ruling family of Milan. Prospera’s

first impulse is to interrogate her daughter to learn if some “other
house or person” might have had an influence over the messages and
memories Miranda has of her childhood and subsequent life on the
island. Prospera then demands that Miranda tell her “By what? By
any other house or person?/Of any thing the image tell me that/Hath
kept with thy remembrance.” Miranda replies: “’Tis far off,/And rather
like a dream.” Once again we have the image of memory as dreamlike,
a central theme of the movie. Judging from her reaction, Prospera clear-
ly prefers to be in the position of relaying historical details to her daugh-
ter as opposed to receiving them from her after the fact. Being surprised
with the revelation of a hazy, dreamlike memory Prospera can handle.
She draws the line, however, when Miranda asks later on in the scene if
she might be allowed to “read her [mother’s] books one day.” Prospera
replies to this request with a silent, suspicious stare – and soon after
hypnotizes her daughter with a magical spell. This spell immediately
lulls Miranda to sleep, perchance to dream happier, or at least more
ideologically “correct,” dreams.
This scene, read as a post-9/11 political allegory, evokes the most fa-
mous lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These are the lines that sug-
gest life itself may be an illusion, “such stuff/As dreams are made on,
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and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156–8). The parallelism
among ideology, illusion, and life as a kind of dream, circumscribed in
Prospera’s enchantment of her own daughter, is evocative of the fanta-
sy factory of global media so integral to the ideological, political, and
militaristic strategies of “diffused war” on terror. The global war on
terrorism is a hot war, but arguably above all else, it is a media war for
the hearts and minds of both the enemy and the folks back home whose
patriotism may be in question.
Stephen Duncombe suggests in Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive
Politics in an Age of Fantasy that the future of progressive politics on
the left may depend, not only on debunking and decoding the media-
driven myth-making of the right, but also on learning from those strate-
gies and dreaming bigger – or, at least, more ethical – dreams. But where
Duncombe calls for a kind of “open spectacle” in which “leaders are
still needed … to set the stage for participation” (Duncombe 2007, 134–
5), Prospera’s leadership is the opposite. Her political dreamscape re-
lies on the manipulation and careful management of her daughter’s
ideas and memories, as well as on the terrifying spectacle of apparent
techno-militaristic superiority to enforce her ideological will and main-
tain the illusion of her political sovereignty.

By the end of the film, after granting “freedom” (yet another post-
9/11 motif via the ethico-political rhetoric of President George W.
Bush)6 to all her formerly enslaved subjects, Prospera would rather
crack her wand and destroy her books than reveal the secrets behind
the ideological spell she has woven around her daughter and everyone
else within her magical island realm. This point is driven home in the
very last scene of the film, which depicts the cracking of Prospera’s “big
stick” into hundreds of shards that, as they fall into the sea, are depict-
ed as hundreds of sinking books. This last image underscores political
theorist Carl Schmitt’s point that ideological systems are inextricable
from the exceptional forces of law that back them up and thus make
them seem coherent.
Prospera’s paranoid efforts to manage and control Miranda’s access
to knowledge and to other people from outside their private, “magi-
cally” managed universe raise doubts about the veracity of Prospera’s
political claims. Miranda is brought up by her mother as a barefoot
innocent. Dressed in white, she is reminiscent of a striking Hollywood
beauty. Miranda is, in many ways, a “Snow White” figure and the
ideal, subjugated subject of Prospera’s magical kingdom. Miranda’s
dress and appearance may even draw a post-9/11 parallel between her
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mother’s island kingdom and the time-arrested utopic American

bourgeois magic kingdom inspired by Walt Disney. The Disney cor-
poration is a Hollywood “dream-factory,” which has manifested its
utopic vision of America by constructing a Disney-inspired private
community, Celebration USA. Another post-9/11 “Disney-like” reso-
nance for the context of Taymor’s film is the way in which the Bush
administration consulted with marketing experts and top Hollywood
film executives regarding the management of the media aspects of the
war on terror.7 And this tactic of involving Hollywood directly in war
on terror propaganda has been replayed more recently with Argo and
Zero Dark Thirty , two films with very particular hegemonic contexts in
which the CIA was directly involved in script development.8 In many
ways, therefore, Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation of The Tempest is impli-
cated with the actual events, if we understand 9/11 as also being a kind
of adaptive, intermedial spectacle produced within the conventions
and with the cooperation of Hollywood, itself in collusion with the in-
terests of hegemonic structures like the CIA.
Post-9/11 Postcolonialism
If the central motif in The Tempest is the indistinguishability between

“real life” and dreams, another related aspect of this spectacle of decep-
tion is the almost equally hazy relationship between freedom and
bondage. Every character in the film is, in one way or another, a pris-
oner or slave to someone. Prospera, when she ruled Milan, was arrest-
ed, exiled, and sent with her then infant daughter to the island she now
rules. Had she not arrived there, Caliban would likely be ruler of the
island. He was in line to take over the island after inheriting it from his
mother, Sycorax. But instead Caliban becomes the slave of Prospera.
Ariel is technically the slave of Prospera; yet Ariel’s “bondage” seems
much closer to freedom than does Caliban’s servitude, the two perhaps
mapping out a continuum of points along a colonial matrix of limited
agency and subjugation. This complex economy of slavery on display
in the film is further complicated by the arrival of Ferdinand, the Prince
of Naples and Prospera’s preferred suitor for Miranda. When Ferdinand
appears on the island, his love affair with Miranda (carefully arranged
and orchestrated by Prospera) causes him to find pleasure in carrying
heavy logs for the sorceress and her daughter. The carrying of heavy
logs, however, is one of the tasks most hated by Caliban, who is re-
quired to do it as part of the terms of his enslavement. Perhaps another
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subtle inference here regards the ways in which love-bonds may also
constitute a kind of consensual servitude, or colonization of the heart.
By the end of The Tempest, therefore, the concepts of “freedom” and
“slavery” begin to subtend and overlap with each other in irreducible
ways. This is a freedom akin to the kind offered by the “blue pill” from
the sci-fi classic The Matrix: its effect is to “free” personal enjoyment by
hiding the fact that one is, nonetheless, completely enslaved within the
virtual dreamscape of the matrix itself.
As such, the magical, simulacral images and spectacles that provide
the ideologically driven mise-en-scène of the island setting resonate
strongly with the deceptive, post-9/11 spectacles of the war on terror.
Daniel Fischlin argues in his essay “Terrorism, Security, and Selective
Rights in an Age of Retributive Fear” that even the name “war on ter-
ror” is a deceptive, rhetorical abstraction, which is not even legally pos-
sible. Nonetheless, the trope effectively obscures various forms of
state-sponsored terror tactics, excessive retributive violence, and the
wholesale rollback of basic human rights. Even worse, the war on ter-
ror, on close examination, seems in many ways indistinguishable from
a war of terror, meaning a war fought by means of state terrorism
(Fischlin 2008, 253–8). Post-9/11 military campaigns such as the inva-

sion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were ostensibly launched to
bring freedom to those countries. They are in many ways indistinguish-
able from the violent colonialist conquests for the purposes of military,
political, and economic control of those regions. And these contempo-
rary neocolonialist enterprises are intermedially resonant with those
sixteenth-century forms of colonialism that feature as intertexts for
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, particularly in regard to its intertextual reso-
nances with Montaigne’s writings about European colonialism.9
An intriguing question raised by Taymor’s Tempest, therefore, is
whether or not “the ‘post’ in postcolonial [is] the same as the ‘post’ in
post-9/11” (Ball 2008, 296). Most critics reject the “post” in postcolo-
nialism, calling it premature in that colonialism, while it has shifted and
changed, is still going strong. Does the false “past tense” signalled by
the “post” in postcolonial studies, however, also resonate with a similar
false notion that we are somehow “post”-9/11? In other words, does
the “post” in post-9/11 give the false impressions that, first, we can
definitively label, understand, and move on from that so-called event,
and second, that it is not still going on in many important ways?
A second aspect of this question of the “post” relates to the ways in
which, since September 11, 2001, many seemingly “older” postcolonial
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topics of the so-called margin, such as racism, gender inequality, ethnic

strife, and religious unrest, have once again become remediated and
recentralized in the wake of the global war on terror. Another way of
looking at this, however, is that 9/11 merely brought back into focus
ongoing racisms, sexisms, and ethnic and religious prejudices that, to a
large extent, had been obscured from “popular” view by the dreamlike
ideological spectacles and mainstream narratives of globalization.
Other contributors to this consensual hallucination of global capitalist
utopia are global mass media, transnational capitalism, and mobile
technologies of surveillance and communication, which reinforce (of-
ten intermedially) aspects of the current “world order.”
Taymor’s Tempest, adapted from a play with obvious references to
European colonialism, recontextualizes these older “post”-colonial ref-
erences in relation to the post-9/11 neocolonial context of the war on
terror. This is a context that was described, even by the latest Bush ad-
ministration, in terms of American “empire.” The intersection of neoco-
lonialism with the state-sanctioned violence of the war on terror is
articulated in shockingly bald-faced terms in a now infamous 2004 New
York Times article by journalist and author Ron Suskind. During the in-
terview, Suskind questions the moral justification and accountability of

the former Bush administration’s foreign policy. In response, the inter-
viewee – an aide of then President George W. Bush – scoffs at Suskind’s
concerns, declaring that “[the United States is] an empire now, and when
we act, we create our own reality … We’re history’s actors … and you,
all of you [journalists], will be left to just study what we do” (Suskind
2002, 10; emphasis mine; second ellipsis in original). Such a statement,
made almost twenty-five years after Edward Said wrote his classic
postcolonialist text Orientalism (1978), is a textbook example of the
very Western militaristic, historical-revisionist, and cultural-imperialist
strategies of colonial conquest that Said rigorously details in his pio-
neering work. What’s more, in relation to Taymor’s Tempest, the Bush
administration aide’s reference to “creating reality” as an imperialist
strategy is troublingly evocative of the political strategies employed by
Prospera via her magical revision of her own political legacy in order to
regain power as Duchess of Milan. In fact, as an intermedial adaptation
of the spectacle of 9/11, the film itself can be understood to metatheatri-
cally restage the events of 9/11 as a film within a film within a film.
Taymor’s film, then, restages the logic of imperialism within the un-
avoidable contexts of post-9/11 notions of empire, a restaging that
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grounds, if not governs, how the film means in that context. It is, in
short, inextricably a part of the representational logic of post-9/11’s il-
lusive realities.
Caliban, the Postmodern Subaltern
Yet another post-9/11/postcolonial reference in Taymor’s film is the ra-

cially ambiguous and dehumanized figure of Caliban, one of the en-
slaved subalterns living on the magical island. In the film, Caliban is
played by Djimon Hounsou, a well-known black actor originally from
Cotonou, Benin. For the role, Hounsou’s body is thickly layered with a
kind of textured prosthetic skin makeup, the colouring of which is part
black, part tan, and part white. Around the left side of his head, he has a
white circular depression in the prosthetic skin that covers half his face
and seems to depict the moon. This is a clear reference to his mother be-
ing a witch. The rough and varied texture of much of his body makeup
evokes and echoes the earthen landscape of the island itself. If we con-
sider the landscape as a kind of intermedial hub against which Prospera
projects her magical influence over her subjects, Caliban’s skin texture
– which literally blends him into that landscape – can be read as a post-
9/11 reference to the ways in which ideological control currently oper-
ates via mass media spectacle. In this spectacle, global tele-technological
network structures interpellate subjects as intermedial nodes within its
biopolitical systems of control. Caliban’s texturing echoes primitivist,
tribal motifs that tie him to “the land.” His exaggerated, muscular, and
dancelike movements evoke a primitivist tribal aesthetic. But Caliban
also has ratlike features – his fingers are elongated and pointed, and he
eats his food in quick nibbles. These ratlike qualities of Caliban’s appear-
ance evoke a danger that, in Prospera’s eyes, is connected to diseases of
the blood. Prospera is especially afraid of Caliban’s potential contami-
nation of Prospera’s royal bloodlines should he successfully “infect”
Miranda by mating with her, and in Caliban’s words, successfully “[peo-
ple] the island with Calibans.” What’s more, Caliban’s distorted physi-
cal traits seem designed not only to animalize him, but also to throw into
question the specificity of his race. As such, his bodily aesthetics evoke
another colonialist erasure related to the ways in which the very concept
of race is radically contingent on its particular context of articulation – or
intermediation – and impossibly complicated in relation to diasporic
migrations within the post-9/11 context of globalization.
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As is well documented in the scholarship, Shakespeare’s play puta-

tively draws on Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (1580),
particularly in regard to the character Caliban. Caliban’s name is a pos-
sible anagram variant of “cannibal” that is derived from “Carib,” a
West Indian cannibal nation Montaigne references in his essay (Garber
2004, 854). What is particularly poignant about Montaigne’s observa-
tions is that he obscures the distinction between so-called civilized
European cultures and those cultures deemed to be “savage” nations.
Montaigne proposes that “there is nothing savage or barbarous about
those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not
accustomed to” (Montaigne “Of Cannibals,” quoted in Garber 2004,
854). This intertextual reference to Montaigne, via Shakespeare, which
Taymor’s film continues to transmit, underlines the uncanny parallels
among Caliban’s position as ursurped royalty-turned-slave, Prospera’s
own political misfortunes in Milan, and her dubious claim to be the is-
land’s ruler. Taymor’s Tempest’s post-9/11 context heightens this politi-
cal and representational ambiguity by evoking not only Montaigne’s
observations on European colonialism but also the scandalous politics
of deception and media manipulation of the war on terror. And ad-
dressing Caliban’s post-9/11 resonances as a marker of the savage “oth-

er” cannot be separated from the intensification of racial profiling at
airports and borders, particularly by the US, after the terrorist attacks.
This type of profiling has evoked widespread outrage, but also a dis-
turbing resurgence in racial and religious polarization in the US and
around the world.
Caliban is marked as ethnically different in Taymor’s film and is
clearly targeted by Prospera because of that difference. As a result
Caliban becomes an object of torture by Prospera specifically, for his
attempt to rape Miranda. Caliban is also depicted as living in a sandy,
barren part of the island, often hiding from Prospera in his cave. This
image of an animal-man hiding in caves because of the fear of violent
retribution from Prospera thus evokes the Bush administration’s post-
9/11 rhetoric leading up to the Afghanistan invasion, such that they
would seek out the Taliban in their caves and bomb them back to the
Stone Age. These same Taliban were, like Caliban, also depicted as sub-
human brutalizers of women by the US government. Like Prospera’s
banishment of Caliban to a cave – where he is safely away from any
unauthorized sexual, familial, and thus political union with her daugh-
ter – the Bush administration’s rhetoric dehumanized the Taliban and
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Al Qaeda. It also forestalled any discussion of the possible legitimacy to

the underlying political messages behind the Taliban’s and Al Qaeda’s
radical terrorist acts. By characterizing these groups as being akin to
Stone Age cave dwellers and thus uncivilized, illegitimate savages, the
Bush administration constructed its enemies as less than human and
thus ineligible for international human rights protections or the basic
guarantees outlined in the Geneva Conventions regarding the rules of
war and fair treatment of prisoners. This post-9/11 form of orientalism
strongly resonates with Taymor’s depiction of Caliban in that his ste-
reotypical traits and primitivist costume and movements also border
on a kind of unsettlingly racist portrayal of “savages” that undermines
some of the more complex and well-thought-out aspects of Taymor’s
film. At the end of the day, we are left wondering to what extent the ani-
malistic and tribalistic depiction of Caliban represents Prospera’s own
colonialist impulses and to what extent Taymor’s film itself perpetuates
a form of intermedially produced racist symbolic violence via these
same images. The power of the media to transform a singularity like
Caliban into a metonymy for an irreducible multitude of people is the
power to reduce meaning via overdetermined intermedial forms that
reinforce this kind of reductive logic.
Taymor’s Tempest’s Post-9/11 Feminist Utopia
The most prominent revision in Taymor’s film adaptation of

Shakespeare’s play is the casting of a woman – Helen Mirren – to play
the part of Prospera, the deposed Duchess of Milan. This feminization
of the role, like so many other aspects of the film, has clear post-9/11
resonances. In an interview, Mirren comments on this casting decision:
we can see now in extreme fundamentalist states – whatever religion they

are – that they want to exclude women from education. That’s the first
thing they do. An educated woman is a dangerous thing. An educated fe-
male sex is dangerous for the status quo. I love the fact that in making
Prospero a woman we could present that history and those issues. (Singh
2011)
As a post-9/11 motif, the gendering of Prospera as female thus seems

to evoke a response to the pre-invasion Afghanistan Taliban govern-
ment’s notoriously harsh treatment of women. This treatment included
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denying Afghan women over the age of eight an education on pain of

execution. The Bush administration and its allies capitalized on the bru-
tal rights realities associated with fundamentalism and used them to
win popular support for the American-led invasion of that country.
Taymor’s film is in sync with the gender politics that were ostensibly at
stake in justifying the war, even if the film’s own politics point to a
much wider notion of gender fluidity deployed in many contemporary
adaptations of Shakespeare. The choice to cast a woman in the power-
ful role of Prospera may also resonate with the US media’s casting of
Private Jessica Lynch as a kind of “beautiful Rambo” or “girl-next-door
American heroine” in connection with her capture and subsequent res-
cue from a Baghdad hospital during the invasion of Iraq.
Private First Class Lynch was serving as a unit supply specialist in
the 507th Maintenance Company. Her convoy took a wrong turn and
was ambushed by Iraqi forces during the Battle of Nasiriyah. Nine of
her comrades were killed, and Lynch was seriously injured. Iraqi forces
captured Lynch and she was held at an Iraqi hospital until her rescue by
US Special Operations Forces on 1 April 2003 (Kampfner 2003). The
rescue mission made headlines around the world. Lynch’s story, how-
ever, was distorted in the American mass media. It was originally re-
ported that she had gone down shooting, and the severity of her
treatment at the hands of the Iraqis was also exaggerated. Thus, Lynch
was made out to be a young, beautiful girl who represented wholesome
American values, but who fought fiercely alongside her comrades.
Hers was the first successful rescue of an American prisoner since
Vietnam. Lynch subsequently denied the original version of her own
story, and the idea that she was a “Rambo-like” hero (Kampfner 2003).
In both the mythologization of Private Lynch and Mirren’s feminized
depiction of Prospera, femininity is coded as representing utopic, dem-
ocratic values and even vulnerability that justifies extraordinary mili-
tary responses to any attack on that supposed vulnerability. These
values, however, must be enforced via the justifiable evil of state-sanc-
tioned violence as meted out by Mirren’s Prospera in the forms of tor-
ture, conquest, and even terrorism against her own citizens. In short,
rewriting Prospero as Prospera realigns the character with a feminist
mythology that justifies many of that character’s violent and/or venge-
ful actions. Her enslavement of Caliban, for example, is seen as par-
tially justified because he brutalizes women – much as Prospera’s own
family treated her brutally by casting her and her young child out of
their home and setting them adrift in a leaky boat.
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Conclusion
Reading Julie Taymor’s Tempest as a post-9/11 film offers a way of look-

ing at Prospera’s magical powers of persuasion and the odd out-of-
place-ness of the setting in a way that may clarify many of the dramatic
elements often underread in Shakespeare’s version of the play. Two
somewhat “standard” readings of Shakespeare’s Tempest are, on the one
hand, to see Prospero as a kind of stand-in for the magical power of
Shakespeare himself as playwright and master manipulator of reality in
the realm of the theatre, or, on the other hand, to view the play as a kind
of colonial allegory in which Prospero’s magic lends him seemingly
omnipotent and omniscient powers over his island kingdom and its
inhabitants. Yet both these readings undermine the dramatic potential
of the play by lending too much weight to the argument-ending om-
nipotence of Prospero’s magic. Helen Mirren’s Prospera, however, pos-
sesses no such magical omnipotence – only the power to manipulate
(or pre-mediate) the political realities of her island via her knowledge-
based “black arts.” As such, the drama of this film (and retroactively,
Shakespeare’s play via intermedial resonance with Taymor’s adapta-
tion) comes from Prospera’s ever-present paranoia that her/his “magic”

will be found out. This fear extends to her suspicion of her own daugh-
ter, the only ideal citizen of Prospera’s island kingdom. Ironically,
Taymor’s intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is particularly
effective as a way of demonstrating how media convergence(s) and
mass media entertainments (like Taymor’s film) can act as a distraction
from and/or obfuscation of dominant political narratives.
Reading the film as a post-9/11 allegory allows us to learn from the
lessons Shakespeare teaches. One such lesson is that ideological ma-
nipulation requires a compliant de-historicization of events in order to
maintain the magical veneer of realism of global intermedially framed
“truths.” This lesson is particularly important when considering the
ways in which such post-9/11 “truths” are deployed as weapons in
contemporary “diffused war,” such as the US-led war on terror. In the
case of Taymor’s intermedial post-9/11 adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Tempest, those weapons of diffused war that the film itself embodies – a
deployment of post-9/11 images, motifs, and discourse that inflects
and shapes our mass mediated perceptions of the “truth” about
September 11, 2001 and the war on terror – are also the very ones that
the film allows us to read in an ironic mode. In this way, Taymor’s
Tempest helps us to gain a better understanding of how post-9/11
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intermediality operates not only as a production of hegemonic dis-

courses like “9/11” but also as a way of recontextualizing and learning
from those same discourses by reading them as what Marx, in “The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), called the bor-
rowed “names, battle slogans, and costumes” out of which contem-
porary “history” is made. Part of this lesson is to recognize that, since
September 11, 2001, these borrowed names, slogans, and costumes are
still employed by hegemonic power, but in melted medial forms that
may be difficult to recognize in the hypermediated spectacles of post-
9/11 mass culture. Reading Taymor’s Tempest, which as I have shown is
profoundly implicated in the proliferation of melted intermedial
discourse(s) of post-9/11, helps indentify how Shakespearean adapta-
tion functions in relation to hegemonic structures that continue to
“make” history via the power of intermediation.
NOTES
1 US ties with Israel extend as far back as the founding of that state, the US
government under President Truman being the first to recognize Israel’s

legitimacy. For many years, the US has supported Israel with massive
monetary and military aid. In regard to the strategic importance of US-
Israeli relations, late US Senator Jesse Helms liked to refer to Israel as
“America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East” (Pipes and Clawson 1995).
2 Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy, in their book The Concise Guide to
Global Human Rights (2007), point out that “the legitimacy of rights as a
moral force is compromised as soon as those who set themselves up as
leaders in the sustenance and promotion of rights commit violations or
abuses of rights” (2007, 133). They are referring here in part to the disas-
trous human rights violations of the United States government, perpetrat-
ed since the founding of that country in a number of different conflicts and
covert actions all around the world. They are also referring to the way in
which, historically, the US government seems to selectively punish certain
governments and groups for perpetuating human rights abuses, while al-
lowing others to commit equally horrendous violations with impunity or
even with US support. One such example of the US government’s disre-
gard for basic human rights law in connection with its war on terror is its
Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Human rights watchdog agencies
such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United
Nations have all condemned this facility on several grounds: the indefinite
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incarceration of prisoners without trial (in some cases for periods of more
than ten years without being charged with a crime); the use of torture or
methods tantamount to torture; and the inhumane living conditions of
prisoners at the facility. Giorgio Agamben, in his book State of Exception,
proposes that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are contemporary examples
of the “homo sacer,” or people divested of their basic humanity and thus
able to be exterminated, like lice, without being sacrificed or killed.
Agamben argues that the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorist sus-
pects and “enemy combatants” “radically erase[d] any legal status of the
individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being.
Not only [did] the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of
POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they [did] not even have the
status of people charged with a crime according to American laws”
(Agamben 2005, 3). In short, after September 11, 2001, the Bush adminis-
tration gave itself the exceptionalist ability to suspend the law. In the case
of Guantánamo Bay, this means that prisoners not only lose their human
rights, but even the right to be recognized as legal humans with rights.
What about possible contraventions of the UN’s 1948 genocide con-
vention perpetrated under the banner of the supposed extra-legal moral
authority of “9/11”? According to the research of Dr Francis Boyle,

Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois in Champaign
and internationally renowned legal expert on issues concerning the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the case can be made that indeed there have
been genocidal actions perpetrated by the Israeli government against
Palestinians under the banner of the war on terror. Boyle cites “the 1948
Genocide Convention [which] clearly says that one instance of genocide
is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about
the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part … And that’s
exactly what has been done to Gaza, since the imposition of the blockade
by Israel; then the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom
were civilians, in Operation Cast Lead. And that also raises the element in
the Genocide Convention, of murder, torture, and things of that nature”
(Boyle 2012). Thus, according to Boyle’s expert legal opinion, we might
also conclude that the Israeli government’s adoption of the rhetoric of
“war against terror” in the popular media after September 11, 2001 as a
tactic for justifying their military actions against Palestinians amounts
to invoking “9/11” for the purpose of contravening the United Nation’s
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
For example, on 1 April 2002, CNN quoted then Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, who declared in a nationally televised address: “Citizens
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of Israel, the state of Israel is in a war – a war against terrorism … It’s a

war that has been imposed upon us. It is not one that we have chosen to
undertake. It is a war for our home” (Sharon 2002). All of these statements
unmistakably echo the post-9/11 rhetoric of then President George W.
Bush, amounting to a thinly veiled attempt to align the Sharon govern-
ment’s genocidal actions and military aggression against Palestinians with
the US-led war on terror.
3 One important critic of the “universalizing” rhetoric of post-Holocaust/
Shoah human rights legislation is Hannah Arendt. In her landmark book
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she writes that many Jews who had
suffered the horrors of the Holocaust/Shoah and were in dire need of in-
ternational human rights protections had fled oppressive national situa-
tions, and thus were without citizenship and/or recognition as humans
with rights. As Arendt explains, the intelligibility of the very concepts of
humanity and human rights (in regard to International human rights
laws) entirely hinges on their particular, heterogeneous political articula-
tions through the juridical and political apparatuses of citizenship. Only
through citizenship, she asserts, is humanity recognized and in fact perfor-
matively inaugurated as such. National and international citizenship is so
closely tied to the concept and juridical infrastructures of human rights

that a lack of citizenship left these migrant Jews without even the right to
have rights. Yet at the same time, many of these same Jews had an abso-
lute reluctance to be repatriated, a situation which constituted a complex
disavowal of citizenship. While the universalizing rhetoric of international
human rights supposedly restored the recourse to justice, humanitarian
relief, and “human” rights to the victims of Nazi fascism in the wake of
the Second World War, as it turns out, this was not the case for those indi-
viduals who needed them most.
4 The most famous articulation of this idea was in the Situationist manifesto
The Society of the Spectacle (1972) by Guy Debord, but also see the more re-
cent work of Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Robert McChesney, Douglas
Kellner, and Stephen Duncombe, amongst many others whose work has
mapped the intersections and intermedial links between politics and pop-
ular culture.
5 See Dixon 2004, where producer Lawrence Wright comments that “the
events of 9/11 were ‘cinematic in a kind of super-real way. It was too
Hollywood. We could have never used [the tower attacks] in The Siege. It
would be too impossible’” (9).
6 Amongst many other references to “freedom” in his post-9/11 ethico-
political rhetoric, President George W. Bush, on 4 November 2004,
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famously said in regard to the war on terror that “freedom is not

America’s gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty’s gift to each man
and woman in this world” (Bush 2004).
7 See, for example, Rutherford 2004, which details the mass media and mar-
keting techniques employed by the US government to wage its “real time”
propaganda war in connection with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. See
also CNN’s article of 12 November 2001, which discusses a meeting that
Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, had with Hollywood executives to
“discuss ways the industry might spread the message of patriotism and
tolerance” (“Bush Advisor Meets Hollywood Execs” 2001).
8 CIA officials, including Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director at the
time and now the agency’s acting chief, are known to have consulted with
Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal in
the making of that film (Hosenball 2013). The film has come under attack
by that US government committee, as well as many film critics, for ap-
pearing to justify CIA torture tactics that extracted the information that
supposedly led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Argo likewise paints
what many critics deem to be an inaccurate and biased pro-CIA version of
the operation to free hostages during the 1979 Iranian hostage-taking crisis
(Fletcher 2012).
9 In particular, see Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals.
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Record Straight.” Toronto Star, 7 October. Accessed 30 March 2013.
Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare after All. New York: Anchor.
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Palgrave Macmillan.
Hosenball, Mark. 2013. “U.S. Senate Panel to Examine CIA Contacts with
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article/2013/01/03/us-usa-ciafilm-idUSBRE90200420130103. Accessed
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Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/15/iraq.usa2. Accessed
30 March 2013.
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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
ch01.htm. Accessed 30 March 2013.
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Trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazilitt. Penn State Electronic
Classics Series. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/montaigne/
Montaigne-1.pdf. Accessed 11 May 2012.
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Setting the Record Straight.” Daniel Pipes Middle East Forum, March. http://
www.danielpipes.org/6342/jesse-helms-setting-the-record-straight.
Accessed 30 March 2013.
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Iraq. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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und drei Corollarien (1963). The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Tempest. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Walter
Cohen et al.
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Transgression and Transformation:

Mickey B and the Dramaturgy
of Adaptation
An Interview with Tom Magill
Dani el F i schli n, T om M ag il l, J e ssi c a R i l e y
1. Intermediation and Intermediality in Mickey B
Directed and dramaturged by Tom Magill in 2007, Mickey B is a feature-

length film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth developed and per-
formed by maximum-security prisoners inside Maghaberry Prison in
Northern Ireland. Initially met with suspicion and local media contro-
versy – before November 2009, public screenings could only take place
with prior permission from the Northern Ireland Prison Service (Wray
2011, 340) – Mickey B has gone on to critical acclaim, winning awards
such as the 2008 Roger Graef Award for Outstanding Achievement in
Film and receiving praise from Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Rea, Ken
Loach, and Linda Smith, among others. Mickey B has screened at multiple
international film festivals and academic conferences, from the EPOS
International Film Festival in Israel to the 38th annual conference of the
Shakespeare Association of America in Chicago. The film, as the extend-
ed interview below makes clear, establishes two contexts for its material
production: that activist theatre rooted in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the
Oppressed can be converted into ideologically charged film; and that
adaptations in which cultural and media hybrids and crossovers occur
can provide rich opportunities for arts-based, community-facing projects
seeking to address pressing social issues.
Magill is a filmmaker with a background in social theatre as Boal’s
official representative in Northern Ireland. A former young offender
who served time in England’s Bedford Prison before going on to ac-
claim as an actor,1 Magill is a longtime prisoners’ rights activist and
co-founder of the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC). Through
his work at ESC, Magill encourages people to “explore their own
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Transgression and Transformation: Tom Magill 153
stories through the medium of film.” Mickey B, developed collabora-

tively in a radically dialectic instance of “Prison Shakespeare,”2 adapts
Shakespeare’s Macbeth across media and through the dual lenses of the
collaborators’ localized, personal experiences and the more global, his-
torical context of the political travails of Northern Ireland in the strug-
gle for decolonization. The film’s prison setting allegorizes the clash of
the regional and the global as a key aspect of its ethical compass: the
modernized language and local slang, along with the use of prison and
gang personalities only accessible within the film’s specific context, ef-
fectively resonate with Northern Irish experiences of the extended con-
flict known as The Troubles. In turn, these resonances generate the
potential for the film to mirror and illuminate wider instances of com-
munities facing the challenges and the pernicious effects of coloniza-
tion and violent conflict, including the struggle to escape stereotypes
and reductive readings of complex situations.
Mickey B, then, like many of the other adaptations of Shakespeare
examined in this book, is situated at the juncture of intermediation and
intermediality. Not only does it adapt techniques rooted in Boal’s
Theatre of the Oppressed to the medium of film, it also actively repre-
sents cultural differences as a key context for its performative, inter-

medial affect. In this latter sense we understand intermediality to
include the crossing of cultural boundaries – English to Irish, puta-
tively “high” to “low” class structures, straight culture to gang culture,
and free to incarceral culture – recognizing that the transgression of
these boundaries invariably entails multiple forms of intermediation
that arise out of difference. Here, as elsewhere in the book, intermedia-
tion is understood as a dual process in which media hybridity may
also entail cultural crossovers that are generative of diverse, unpre-
dictable, adaptive possibilities. The formal aspects of intermedial
crossovers are impossible without the substantive content of the cul-
tures that shape those media into a unique hybrid, an effect we refer to
as “differently intermedial.”
Michael Darroch pointedly asks, in a cautionary argument about the
jargon of intermediality, “In what ways could theatre, as a point of con-
vergence between bodies, tools, buildings, texts, images, voices, sounds
and even smells, ever be anything but intermedial?” (2007, 97). The
point is well taken and reminds us that the convergence of multiple
intermediations, whether in theatre, film, or social media and digital
technologies, is a defining aspect of creative undertakings that are pro-
foundly adaptive to the circumstances of production. Theatre and film
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 154 Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley
are always already intermedial in that sense. But here we argue for a
more expansive notion of intermediality that ties media to context,
form to content, terms missing from Darroch’s rundown of the various
convergences that inform any theatrical production. When intermedia-
tion occurs, as it does in Mickey B, it must be understood through spe-
cific historical and cultural contexts that themselves intermediate the
media of their transmission. Intermediality, in this sense, is as much
about the choice of form and medium as it is about the content that
these reflect and mediate. All contribute to the ways in which an adap-
tation is intermediated into something other than the putative source
text. And, in practice, the multiple forms of intermediation that operate
on texts via intertexts, nested histories, chance interventions, spectral
hauntings, calculated interventions, and so forth all make any one-to-
one correspondence between a “source” and its others radically reduc-
tive of these mediating factors.3
In a telling interview with Sarah Werner, Magill notes:
The Canadians got Mickey B. Outside Northern Ireland the film screens
differently. People abroad often remark upon the distinctive accents of the
prisoners and how different they are to the representations that appear
in films about Northern Ireland’s conflict. Audiences abroad don’t have
the “cultural capital” to read the films as a local audience would. This
means they often miss the parallels in the film – e.g. the assassination of
Macduff’s family [in Mickey B] draws heavily upon the assassination of
the wife of Irish National Liberation Army leader Dominic McGlinchey,
Mary McGlinchey, bathing her two children at home …
I think that getting the prison context to fit the story of Macbeth and
then being true to the local prison culture has given us a global audience.
I have found that people globally are interested in the conflict in Ireland,
particularly if they have an experience of conflict within their own society.
The film had a very warm reception in both Korea and Israel, where it
played with Korean and Hebrew subtitles. The film has also been trans-
lated into German and French, and is currently undergoing a Portuguese
translation. I think there is something of real interest in the film to colonial
cultures or cultures that have been colonised. (Werner 2011, n.p.)
Magill’s comments here are instructive. “Cultural capital” determines

the interpretation of media. Translation effects rooted in cultural and
historical specificities that are not solely invested in either media or
language are a key aspect of adaptation. Adaptation creates meaning
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through these translation effects, which mobilize substantive context,

potentially via intermedial forms that further contribute to interpretive
pressures that proliferate new, alternative forms of representation.
Mickey B’s adaptive techniques, understood in this light, push at the
limits of what can be done, intermedially, to Shakespearean source
texts. In the film intermediation is associated with an array of contexts
– cultural, historical, textual – that collide and hybridize but remain
unstable and ambiguous. In rewriting English Shakespeare into the
very specific language of prisoners from Northern Ireland, for in-
stance, a remarkable form of cultural intermediation occurs convert-
ing the language of the oppressor into the language of the oppressed.
Moreover, the film’s political contexts may be said to intermediate, to
weigh heavily on and disturb the Shakespearean original, even to “re-
wright” Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.
The effect of that intermediation raises the question of who is doing
what to whom. What happens when adaptation inverts the politics of
context, in this case from imperial England to (dis)possessed Northern
Ireland? Examined in this light, Mickey B’s disruption of the master
narrative associated with Macbeth can be understood as a result of its
border-crossing, medium-shifting techniques and transparent deploy-

ment of the interpretive and production contexts out of which it devel-
oped. As meaning proliferates through different intermediations,
reductive readings are subverted, and more expansive, transformative
semiotic potentials are revealed in a process that Peter M. Boenisch de-
scribes in the following way:
Instead of closing down the multiple semantic potential offered into one
coherent meaning, intermedial performances derail the message by com-
municating gaps, splits and fissures, and broadcasting detours, inconsis-
tencies and contradictions. Therefore, intermedial effects ultimately inflect
the attention from the real worlds of the message created by the perfor-
mance, towards the very reality of media, mediation and the performance
itself. The usually transparent viewing conventions of observing media
are made palpable, and the workings of mediation exposed. Thus, inter-
mediality manages to stimulate exceptional, disturbing and potentially
radical observations, rather than merely communicating or transporting
them as messages, as media would traditionally do. (2006, 115)
In short, the unique set of historical and contextual markers that

determine Mickey B’s intermedial presence in relation to canonic
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Shakespearean productions is resolutely transformative in its produc-

tion of intermedial transgression.
Can maximum-security prisoners “perform” Shakespeare credibly?
Can a film be made in severely constrained prison circumstances where
even the “literacy” of the performers and their capacity to engage with
arts-based practices are at issue? What is productively, transformative-
ly exposed about the performers and their situated, lived contributions
to the intermedial product? What is exposed in the source text, whose
perceived inviolability is intermedially disrupted in new and revelato-
ry ways? What is the activist potential for the process of this interme-
dial collision – the processual work of developing the adaptation itself
– to transform the participants as well as to expose the “gaps, splits
and fissures,” the “inconsistencies and contradictions” that mark how
the Shakespeare effect goes out into the world to do its work? Through
creative engagement with the Bard, can prisoners transform their ab-
jected, criminal status into something else, potentially becoming posi-
tive role models for the ways in which arts-based activism produces
real change in the world? Can a film version of such a performance,
made under remarkably austere conditions and faced with numerous
constraints, do justice not only to the Shakespearean source text but

also to the ever-growing canon of intermediated film adaptations of
Shakespeare, one in which huge economies are at stake (as the 2011 ani-
mation Gnomeo and Juliet, with worldwide revenues reported at close to
$200 million, clearly demonstrates)?4
Intermediality invokes, as has already been suggested elsewhere in
this book, the notion of travelling – or, in some instances, dissonantly
colliding – across mediatized boundaries; often, when we use the term
intermedial, it is to describe the rearticulations that are produced by
processes in which one medium supplants or is intermixed with an-
other. But the social, political, and historical contexts out of which inter-
medial forms arise, the specific sites in which processes of adaptation
occur, also contribute to the choices that produce intermedial effects.
Is it possible to separate the choice of medium from the cultural con-
texts that inform that medium? Our sense is that it is not, and that
Mickey B represents an especially telling instance of how the interme-
dial crossovers to film from theatre (Boalean, Shakespearean, even the
traditionally theatrical genre of “Prison Shakespeare”) resonate within
the specific circumstances out of which this intermediation develops. In
the case of Mickey B, Shakespeare remade on film is also, inextricably,
Shakespeare remade in Northern Ireland, and thus, as Daniel Fischlin
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and Mark Fortier argue, “Even as the Shakespeare effect becomes an

instrument of colonial hegemony, it also facilitates a form of transcul-
tural exchange that produces a new literary and performative hybrid”
(2000, 13). As Mickey B demonstrates, both cross-media and cross-
cultural intermediality can be seen to operate simultaneously, even in-
extricably. Both forms of intermediation represent compelling ways in
which adaptation needs to be understood as a construction that is fun-
damentally protean. How this expanded sense of the intermedial affect
reconstitutes meaning is a key factor in thinking through the limits of
what can be done to Shakespeare in the name of adaptation, especially
in a global, digital age marked by increasingly dense modes of inter-
medial representation.
2. Dialectical Dramaturgy: Intermediality

and Mutual Transformation
Mickey B’s complex roots in the history of Northern Ireland and the in-
carceral system that has arisen to address paramilitary violence be-
tween Republican and Loyalist forces make it inevitably a profoundly
intermediated text. With his origins in a Loyalist upbringing that was

fundamentally reshaped by his own experiences in prison – particu-
larly the encounters with IRA hunger strikers that changed his “hate”
to “compassion” – the unique cultural and political background that
Magill brings to the work of adaptation as both dramaturge and direc-
tor cannot be left out of the narrative of how cultural difference is medi-
ated in Mickey B. The film quite literally stages intermediation via
arts-based learning practices as one nuanced response to violence and
its aftermath. The prisoners’ linguistic and dramaturgical interventions
via the adaptation of Shakespeare’s source text unleash considerable
energy in the film, an energy that speaks back to the creators’ own
Northern Irish and prison contexts, to a broader, global audience, and
to received assumptions about Shakespeare’s source text.
Indeed, while the interview below demonstrates Magill’s desire to
make the “variety of knowledge” he finds in Shakespeare’s works “ac-
cessible,” it is also evident – and essential – that his desire to unlock for
others the transformative potential he found in his own experiences of
reading and playing Shakespeare’s drama is bound up in a transgres-
sive, revisionist, dialectical imperative. As Magill puts it, the aim of his
work (in adapting Mickey B and in the ESC’s next planned project, an
adaptation of The Tempest entitled Prospero’s Prison) is to “challenge
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the conventions” associated with “enclosed, hermetically sealed” treat-

ments of Shakespeare; for Magill, access to Shakespeare’s plays is, sig-
nificantly, linked to the “opportunity to participate with the text.”
Participation with the source text lies at the core of Magill’s drama-
turgical process, highlighting an impulse not only to learn from the
play but also to speak back to it, to be transformed but also to enact
transformation in a dialectical exchange that arises out of both his ad-
miration for Shakespeare and his commitment to the social, political,
and cultural situatedness of his production context. The wisdom Magill
perceives in the works of Shakespeare isn’t static, inviolable, or sacred.
Rather, it is generative, dynamic, and adaptable. Magill’s reverence for
Shakespeare doesn’t hinder the egalitarian, collaborative imperative of
his development process. Rather, the dynamic of questioning, of mu-
tual transformation, that marks his Boalean methodology extends to
the dialectic with the Bard that Mickey B’s linguistic and dramaturgical
innovations enact.
As Magill tells us, many key reimaginings of the source text arose out
of the dynamics of both the development process and its differently
intermedial contexts. Reimagining the Witches as Bookies, for instance,
arose directly from insights offered by Magill’s collaborators. Inte-

grating their own personal, lived experiences into the adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and thus working across historical and cultural
constraints, this rescripting is also an act of interpretation, speaking
back to and illuminating the source text even as it transposes and an-
chors the adaptation in its cultural context. Likewise, the prisoners’ col-
laborative input at the level of the project’s adaptation into film, as this
interview makes clear, arose out of their direct experiences, their own
readings of media culture, their own histories and perception of con-
temporary resonances. Indeed the dramaturgical relevance of these
contexts extends even to the minute specificities of some of the film’s
most powerful sound and visual effects.
The depiction of the murder of Duncan, for example, which drew
directly on the prisoners’ desire to generate realistic sounds and images
that resonated with their own lived experiences of violence, provides a
clear illustration of how this film evolved out of the intermedial trans-
position from theatrical tradition (Shakespeare places the murder off-
stage) to cinematic convention (with its own traditions of graphic
depiction of violence), but also from lived experience to fictional repre-
sentation. The intervention arose, as Magill explains, out of the differ-
ently intermedial application to the source text of the prisoner-actors’
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lived experience of sectarian and gang violence in Northern Ireland.

The specific cultural context feeding into what is shown in the film de-
termines non-linguistic meaning at the level of sound and image, in-
flecting the source text in unpredictable yet compelling ways.
Censorship too – and the inherent potential, in transgressive inter-
mediality, to operate productively against restrictions, within the
Boenischian “gaps” and “fissures” of meaning that intermediality gen-
erates – is clearly a key context that informs the adaptation of the source
text in Mickey B. In the interview, Magill provides a stark sense, for
example, of the restrictions imposed by the prison on the script devel-
opment process, specifically the restrictions that arose out of the poten-
tial contemporary, local resonance of Ladyboy’s suicide. Here, the
triumph of Mickey B over the censors may be seen as a success jointly
bolstered by the power of the film medium and of the Shakespeare
effect. As Magill notes, the inclusion of the suicide was defended in the
face of censorship on the grounds of its centrality to the original –
Shakespeare’s revered source text. Beyond this, the intermediality of
the project allowed for further evasion of censorship, with the cinema-
tography actually generating a clearer sense of the contemporary rele-
vance of the suicide scene. As Ramona Wray observes in her analysis of

the film, “At the moment of Ladyboy/Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Mickey
B is insistently dialogic. Its Shakespearean frames of reference high-
light precisely the concerns the institution has endeavored to repress”
(2011, 359).
That the scene plays out in larger contexts relating to prison suicides
generally is a chilling reminder of the power of art to replay and dis-
rupt key tropes associated with issues of crime and punishment that
challenge our shared humanity. In the specific contexts of Northern
Ireland’s prison system, the scene is especially disturbing and resonant.
A 2010–11 report by Pauline McCabe, the Prisoner Ombudsman for
Northern Ireland, notes that of the “29 deaths in Northern Ireland pris-
ons since September 2005” (2011, 18), ten were by suicide, the second
highest killer of prisoners after natural causes and illness (of which
there were twelve). Sixteen of the total number of deaths occurred
in Maghaberry Prison, the location for the filming of Mickey B. The
Ombudsman’s report identified “gaps in the Self Harm and Suicide
Policy” (20) in Northern Ireland and was especially specific about sys-
temic failures in relation to the case of Colin Bell, a vulnerable prisoner
who in 2008 committed suicide while detained at Maghaberry.5 The re-
turn of the repressed narrative of suicide via Mickey B’s insistent need
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to confront difficult prison realities heightens the dialectic of the film

between source and adaptation, and between text and context. The film
engages an adaptive process that is mutually transformative, with the
disempowered and voiceless being given intermedial presence even as
that presence transforms the Shakespearean source in ways that reso-
nate beyond its original contexts.
A considerable set of dialectic dramaturgical innovations arise in
connection to the film’s dénouement. In Mickey B, Malcolm’s ascension
is reimagined as a conditional victory, dependent upon his concession
of control of the jail to the “screws” and “buckets” (prison warders and
prison guards), whose help he requires to defeat Mickey B and whose
aid must be repaid with the reinstatement of state representatives in the
jail and the displacement of the prisoners (himself, to some extent, in-
cluded) from their previous position of absolute control over the wings.
Closural shots, establishing the prisoners’ confinement to their cells
and showing Malcolm playing chess with the “screws,” starkly remind
viewers of the new disposition of powers after the death of Mickey B.
Malcolm’s realpolitik has already created new alignments, new poten-
tial injustices, and new prospects for further tragedy. By highlighting
the re-emergence of the oppressive custodial figures, wrenching control

out of the hands of the prisoners, and reinstating the forces of the state
hegemons in “Birnham” jail, Malcolm’s ascendance, often read in the
source text as unquestionably restorative, offers instead, in Mickey B, a
more complicated picture of the bleak reality – lived experientially by
so many of the film’s collaborators – of prison life.
The film’s ending is revisionist also in the definitive emphasis Magill
places on the disproportionate suffering of the socially subordinate
Duffer. Cinematic emphasis, in the final moments of Mickey B, on
Duffer’s visible disillusionment and anger in response both to his ter-
rible loss and to the concessions made by Malcolm in the film’s revised
ending, offer what Magill speaks of in the interview below as an chance
to address Macduff/Duffer’s oppression. Further, this pointed recogni-
tion of Duffer’s suffering and resentment establishes the sense of an
ongoing cycle of retributive violence that Magill envisions beyond the
film’s final moments. Once again, this definitive interpretive response
to latent potential in Shakespeare’s ending clearly arises out of the
film’s Northern Irish and prison contexts, and out of the class con-
sciousness that informs not only Magill’s reading of Macbeth but also
his practice in developing Mickey B. Indeed, Magill’s renovated dé-
nouement reflects the imperative behind the work as process: a belief in
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the cyclical, self-perpetuating nature of violence without reflection,

a problem for which he sees creative acts of self-expression and self-
reflection as an essential countermeasure. The establishment of violent
retribution as a cycle that extends beyond and disrupts the closure of
Mickey B may be understood, then, like Magill’s other dramaturgical
interventions into Macbeth’s ending, to enact a critique or dialectic re-
sponse not just to the source text – an interpretive intervention – but
also to the material context of the film’s production, producing a politi-
cally and culturally intermedial intervention as well.
Finally, as we note above, Mickey B has come to speak widely, across
cultural and geographical boundaries. This despite the barriers pre-
sented by the transposition of the play’s language into the parlance of
Northern Irish prisoners, a choice that Magill describes in our inter-
view as emerging from a by-and-for-prisoners adaptive logic. If the lan-
guage of the prison setting presents a barrier to wider spectatorship
(partially mitigated by the inclusion of subtitles), it is worth noting that
the logic of adaptation informing Mickey B also included more explic-
itly reception-oriented modifications of the source text, such as the
innovative addition of a choric narrator in the character of Steeky. The
Steeky character, as Magill explains below, was originally conceived as

a sort of ferryman, easing the passage of spectators across the interme-
dial border and into the prison world of both the film’s production and
fictional setting. Once again, this dramaturgical intervention arises in
response to the project’s intermedial imperatives and ultimately engag-
es dialectically with both the source text and the sociopolitical context
of the film’s production.
Notably, Wray has identified Steeky as an analogue of the Porter in
Macbeth (2011, 356). In fact, Shakespeare’s Porter may be conceived as
split into two characters in Mickey B: Steeky and Peeper. Serving as the
“minder” of Mickey B’s cell block, Peeper has a much more limited
role that may be understood to correspond with the Porter’s function
as the keeper of the castle gate in the Macbeth plot. What Wray’s align-
ment of the Porter with the choric Steeky productively highlights,
however, is the position of privilege within which Steeky-as-narrator
uniquely operates. The dynamic of privileged proximity between char-
acter and audience that scholars have identified with the Porter in his
single scene in Macbeth is uniquely generative of a liminal point of
access and interactivity between the real world of the spectator and
the fictional world represented on stage (or, in the case of Mickey B,
on screen).6 Significantly, the transposition of this position of privilege,
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and its attendant influence on reception, to the character of Steeky in

Mickey B expands the presence of the liminal figure and his shaping
influence on audience response.
Originally conceived as an intermedial intermediary, Steeky actually
extends beyond his ostensible spectator-ferrying function in the film’s
opening and closing moments. In a moment of considerable signifi-
cance to the film’s interpretive affect, Steeky’s mediating presence also
asserts itself in the midst of the film, when he appears, following Mickey
B’s vengeful pronouncement, “Duffer, you’re fucked,” in the moments
immediately preceding the murder of Duffer’s family. An omniscient
narrator here more than ever, Steeky helps shape spectatorial response
to the subsequent action: His face registers remorse as we transition
into the murder scene and his utterance, “some pay more than others,”
reinforces Magill’s class-conscious reading of Shakespeare’s Macduff.
Some do indeed pay more than their fair share. Thus the film’s narrator,
initially arising in response to the culturally intermedial challenges of
the film’s reception by a wider, non-prisoner audience, also contributes
to the communication of the film’s political, contextual, dialectic re-
sponse to Shakespeare, both cinematically (through the affective close-
up on his face) and textually (through the articulation of Magill’s take

on Macduff via Steeky’s pronouncement).
If Magill and his collaborators have, as he states below, “added an-
other character to Shakespeare,” this addition is only one of many revi-
sions – even transgressions – that productively adapt the source text,
speaking back to Shakespeare and to the culture out of which their cre-
ative project emerges. In what follows, then, Magill provides in-depth
answers to a range of questions that address Mickey B’s intermedial
politics, his own dramaturgical strategies in negotiating the transition
from stage (or page) to film, and the broad range of local and global
circumstances that make Mickey B an exemplar for the ways in which
Shakespearean adaptation, understood in the contexts of its produc-
tion, can generate new ways of seeing ourselves. These contexts, when
deployed cannily, as they are in Mickey B, generate mutually transfor-
mative forms of intermediation. And they heighten how the unsettled
and unsettling dialogue between source text and adaptation creates
uniquely hybridized meanings, exposing the productive tension that is
generated by speaking against the grain of a tradition in which fidelity
to the source and its authenticity is always in question, always amena-
ble to renegotiation.
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3. Incarcerating Macbeth: Liberating Shakespeare in Prison7
DF: Can you discuss how you came to your relationship with
Shakespeare?
TM: I was in a YP Centre (a young prisoners’ centre) and I had a
choice about whether to scrub floors or do education. And I said,
“Okay, I’ll do the education.” I did my first exams in prison. I did
English language, English literature, and Greek literature in transla-
tion in prison. And then I was looking – they had a little cupboard,
and that was the library – and I looked in it on a Friday. I wanted
something to read over the weekend, and I’d read most of the stuff
in there – Conrad, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoyevsky,
Joyce – I just went through it and read as much as I could.
But then I picked up this little Penguin thing and it was marked
differently and I said, “What’s this?” and the teacher said, “That’s
Shakespeare. You won’t be able to read Shakespeare” and I said,
“Who fucking won’t.” So I took it away. And it was Othello and
I read it over the weekend. It gave me a headache – I’m totally se-
rious about that, because I was like, “What does this mean?” – but
within that text I recognized this character, Iago. And I thought,

“I know you, I’ve met you, I know this character.” I recognized
so much in terms of the jealousy and what’s motivating Iago and
that’s what I understood, because I’d been that jealous and it had
landed me in a lot of problems. And I thought, “Whoa, you can
actually learn about yourself through reading these books.” So
that’s where it started. And I thought, “I’m going to master this.”
Years later a drama teacher said, “I want to do Shakespeare”
and I said, “Yeah, I’ve read Shakespeare.” He said, “I want to
do Hamlet and we want you to play Hamlet” and I said, “You
want me to play Hamlet? Okay, I’ll try.” And I learned so much
from doing it. When you get into Shakespeare, it opens up such a
world inside of you that you can learn about yourself by playing
these characters and explore yourself, learn more about yourself
and other people – but essentially about yourself – which is so
liberating. Sometimes, the power of the words would trigger
something in me and I would weep. And it was a huge release
for me. I realized the power of good writing and I wanted to be
a writer. I wanted to write meaningfully, to bring about similar
releases for other people.
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JR: Why Macbeth? What process did you use to make the deci-
sion about which Shakespeare play to adapt? Was that process
collaborative?
TM: We had a process in the prison called “pitching sessions” where
once a month anyone in the drama group could sit on a chair at
the end of the room and pitch an idea for a new project for two
minutes. Then the group would debate the pros and cons of the
pitch and it would get buy-in or not through consensus. I pitched
Macbeth in this way and there was hostility as soon as I said
Shakespeare. But I pushed through it and gave them a short syn-
opsis of the Macbeth story. They liked the story and the themes
and began to debate it working in a prison culture.
JR: In adapting Macbeth to Mickey B, how did the conditions of
production – working in a prison context as well in the medium
of film – contribute to the interpretive choices you made in
response to ambiguities in Shakespeare’s text? In Ladyboy, for ex-
ample, you offer an interpretation of Lady Macbeth as the driving
force towards violence, working in collusion with the Witches/
Bookies. How did this decision (or other interpretative choices,
such as the reading of the Witches as Bookies rather than as more

ambiguous agents of fate) come about?
TM: Initially we had talked about doing Mickey B as a theatre piece
for funding reasons but it was quickly discounted. For me, theatre
is about delayed gratification and film is about instant gratifica-
tion. Prison culture is a culture of instant gratification – violence,
drugs, and so forth.
In theatre you delay your gratification through the rehearsal
process until you have the pleasure of a live audience giving you
feedback for your performance. In film you get instant feedback
from the director and from watching yourself on the playback
monitor. Film is also a permanent record of your performance
– you can hold it in your hand and replay it. Theatre, after the
performance, is memories, ephemera, reviews, and illusory
impressions.
The conditions of production in the prison and also in post-
conflict Northern Ireland contributed enormously to the in-
terpretative choices I made in response to the ambiguities in
Shakespeare’s text. In relation to the Witches, I didn’t have an
answer to the problem of how to represent them. I posed it as a
problem to the cast and they came up with the Bookies. I loved
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the idea. Changing the Witches to Bookies fit perfectly for me,
both in a prison context and in a Northern Irish context.
Instead of ambiguous potential agents of fate driving the action
we have an anonymous élite making money from collusion and
insider dealing. That is a much better fit, both for me and for the
prisoners who suggested the idea, in terms of how the world here
actually works. There’s a popular phrase that circulates around
the jail: “Collusion is not an illusion.” (Understood locally as a
reference to alleged collusion between state security forces and
Loyalist paramilitaries in assassinating Republican targets.) And
then with the Bookies in place, the next question was “Who is col-
luding with them and why?”
I got the idea of linking Lady Macbeth and the Witches from
Michael Bogdanov, the British theatre director associated with the
English Shakespeare Company and someone known for his work
with new plays, adaptations, and modern reinterpretations of
Shakespeare. When I worked with Michael as his assistant direc-
tor, he was talking about doubling parts for a Macbeth production
and Hecate and Lady Macbeth was one possibility mooted for
such a doubling. I liked his idea of joining those forces together

and I stored the idea for a later date. For me Lady Macbeth is the
initial driving force of the Macbeth story. She pulls the strings and
is in control. That is until the Macduff family murders, which for
her is a bridge too far. It sends her over the edge into madness
and suicide. That’s how I read it.
Casting Lady Macbeth was a problem initially. Early on I ap-
proached a female prison officer but she declined the offer to
get involved in the film. There are no female prisoners in the jail
so my options were limited. I pitched the idea of Ladyboy as
Macbeth’s “jail bitch” to the group and they approved. It came
from my own experience as a young prisoner, witnessing an obvi-
ously gay young man’s survival strategy when he was introduced
into our prison wing. He traded sexual favours for protection
from the toughest guy on our wing and became his “jail bitch.”
Incidentally, this tough guy was also illiterate and I used to trade
my literacy skills, reading and writing his letters for tobacco and
food perks. This was my first experience of realizing that applied
knowledge is power.
Making Ladyboy a “bitch” was partly determined, then, by the
conditions of production as well as my reading of the Macbeth text
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in multiple contexts related to my own personal history. Jason,

the actor who plays Ladyboy in Mickey B, is a heterosexual man
and is, in his own words, “confident enough in my own sexual
identity to wear a dress.” Jason and I both agreed that in order to
survive in that tough macho world she [Lady Macbeth] would
have to be “tougher than the best.” So that’s what motivates her
to drive the action to claim the number one slot. She initiates the
Duncan murder and overlooks the Banquo killing. But the mas-
sacre of Macduff’s family is too much for her. How I see her is
with a tough exterior as the “queen of hate,”8 but soft inside. Her
empathy and humanity won’t let her stomach the Macduff mas-
sacre and she goes insane with the guilt that she, ultimately, was
its cause. So she might appear as an unequivocal bitch but when
you scratch the surface you find a humane and empathetic person
who takes her life because she cannot live with the knowledge of
her mistakes.
JR: The film certainly parallels many elements of plot, character, and
theme drawn from Macbeth but it also features some significant
departures from or additions to Shakespeare’s play. One example
is the ending; another is the inclusion of a narrator in the char-

acter of Steeky. I wonder if you could tell us a little more about
these dramaturgical innovations?
TM: Let’s start with the end first. I began thinking about Macduff,
and how Macduff loses everything. He pays the biggest price.
And yes it’s great that Malcolm is crowned at Scone but no big
deal as far as Macduff is concerned. And I thought, “Malcolm
has used this guy to get what he wants, and Macduff is the one
who pays the price.” And so for me it was about recognizing and
identifying with the people who have suffered the most. I wanted
to give Macduff that opportunity to say something. And for me,
what I’ve seen about violence is that it is cyclical. Ruthless ambi-
tion ends in destruction. There’s the moral – that’s what I take
from Macbeth. And if that’s true for the Macbeth story then it’ll be
true for Malcolm.
In relation to the narrator of the film, I thought it’s asking
quite a lot of people to get straight into this story if audiences
can’t identify with someone immediately. Will they identify with
Macbeth? No, they won’t, because Davey, who plays Mickey B, is
a big, tough, hard guy. Will they identify with any of the prison-
ers? What about creating a character who is not involved but
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who is almost like a chorus? So, the Steeky character is similar

to a chorus, reflecting on the action. He was an afterthought – so
we added another character to Shakespeare’s play as part of our
adaptation process and to make the alien environment in which
we set the play more accessible.
DF: And Steeky means what?
TM: It means Shakey – because he’s got the shakes.
DF: How “Shake”-spearean!
JR: The question of access we’ve been touching on here raises
the issue of language in the film as well – not only the renova-
tion of Shakespeare’s language, with a few notable lines from
Shakespeare retained, but also the choice to update the language
through the quotidian speech of the prisoners. The inclusion of
subtitles in the film points to the limitations of access to outsid-
ers that this choice necessarily creates. The linguistic innovation
of this adaptation, however, is also essential to the politics of the
film, to its situatedness in the prison context, and especially in the
context of Northern Ireland.
At the same time, the choice to employ what one scholar has
called “an often-impenetrable form of thieves’ cant” has been

celebrated as unique in Shakespeare adaptations that update
the language of the plays – resulting in a “naturalization of
Shakespearean language through the back door” – and praised as
“differently literate, but literary” (Cartelli 2010, 32, 28).9 I wonder
if you could comment on the imperatives that directed the choices
you made with language in adapting Macbeth to Mickey B, includ-
ing the lines from Shakespeare you opted to retain?
TM: The language in Mickey B, as I’ve said elsewhere, is colloquial
and rooted in the culture of Belfast prison slang. That language
is sharp and sparse. Some people have said “rich and poetic.”
Working with Bogdanov taught me that Shakespeare requires
updating and translating to be meaningful and relevant to an
audience today, particularly for spectators not familiar with
Shakespeare. I wanted to see if Shakespeare was relevant to a
contemporary prison culture. My conclusion after making Mickey
B is a resounding yes: Shakespeare is relevant to a prison culture
today – if, that is, we follow Bogdanov’s advice and update and
translate him.
For me, the Prison has replaced the Tavern. When I think of
Falstaff today I think of him in prison. That’s why I think there
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is so much relevance and scope in Prison Shakespeare. Macbeth

is a murderer. Scotland is a fortress. Both contexts adapt easily to
prison culture.
The film is set in a prison in Northern Ireland and clearly
resonates with key aspects of the Troubles.10 The characters in the
film have come through the conflict and now they are in a post-
ceasefire society. New allegiances are being formed; new enemies
are on the horizon. The recent influx of East European labour has
spawned a new battle with “The Cossacks” in a drug turf war.
Former Republican and Loyalist adversaries are re-forming into
one crew to resist the new “foreign” enemy.
Mickey B was made primarily for a prison audience. So an
imperative that directed me in the choice of language used in the
adaptation from Macbeth to Mickey B was that the language must
be familiar and accessible to our prison audience. Using prison
slang and Belfast colloquialisms was totally in keeping with that
choice. It was our way to reappropriate Shakespeare and make
him our own. So from the start it was our aim to naturalize and
understand his language in our own working-class colloquial
terms, to make what was strange and literary familiar and cred-
ible in our own terms – not in scholarly, academic terms.
When we did keep original lines it was a result of actors’ re-
quests. During the rehearsal process I remember Anto, the actor
who plays Satan, asking what the original line was at the point
where he has to tell Mickey B that Ladyboy is dead. I told him the
line – “The Queen, my lord, is dead” (5.5.16) – and he asked if he
could try saying it. And I said of course. So he did. He really liked
the line and asked could he keep it. We mulled over the pros and
cons. Mickey B was a drug “lord,” Anto argued, so the line could
be read in that punning context that mixes the honorifics of the
prison with the court. I was happy to include the original line as
I think it adds weight to the scene. Davey, who plays Mickey B,
was curious what Macbeth’s original answer was – “She should
have died hereafter” (5.5.17). He tried it and we liked it and kept
it too. So the hybrid language of the film developed quite organi-
cally during the rehearsal process. The result could be seen as
a “naturalization of Shakespearean language through the back
door.”
Remember though that we made Mickey B primarily for our-
selves. It’s ironic that our localized take on Macbeth is acquiring
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a global audience. We had no idea that Mickey B would ever see

the light of day outside the prison gates. We subtitled the film in
English because theatre studies postgraduate students from New
York University, who were working with ESC as part of their
Summer Studies Programme, could not understand the accents
of the men in the film. The subtitles do offer a point of access to
outsiders and are essential to the understanding of the politics
and location of the film in a Northern Irish jail.
Maximum-security prisons operate their security systems on
gathering information through surveillance. The eyeball and
spy-ball cameras that operate 24/7/365 recording conversations,
gestures, and groupings would have been the envy of Jeremy
Bentham and his crude Panopticon. Prisoners develop their own
jail discourse of speech and behaviour to evade this security
surveillance. In Long Kesh (Maze prison) Provisional IRA prison-
ers used the Irish language to converse with each other and plan
their resistance and escape from the surveillance of their English-
speaking jailers.
So it makes me smile when I read a phrase like “impenetrable
thieves’ cant” because the author is correct. The intention is to

scramble meaning, to include those who are included and ex-
clude those who are excluded. If we were to pause for a moment
and replace the word “thieves” with “cotton-pickers” or “slaves,”
we can begin to understand the motivation to include/exclude
racially, historically, and culturally. The “impenetrable thieves’
cant” can then be understood as a form of Creole – the so-called
degenerate language of indentured slaves (prisoners) to evade the
understanding of their colonial masters (jailers).11
Ultimately you need to remember that Mickey B is an un-
ashamedly working-class Prison Shakespeare adaptation, set in
post-conflict Northern Ireland for an audience of fellow prison-
ers. In their own words, they are the “second-class citizens,” the
“scumbags, maggots, and hoods” of society. Their language is
“differently literate” but not “literary.” It provides a glimpse into
another world with different values and different codes. I think
that’s part of the fascination with the film for people who have
no experience of crime or prison culture. Our intention in mak-
ing the film was to include those who had never seen or heard
of Shakespeare or Macbeth. Mickey B is our underclass Macbeth,
based on our experience of the Tavern and the Criminal Court.
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DF: It’s clear that one of the innovative things Mickey B does is to
think in terms of what cultural critic Boaventura de Sousa Santos
calls an ecology of knowledges. That is, Mickey B imagines and
respects forms of knowledge that exist outside of dominant
discourses, beyond what de Sousa Santos calls the abyssal line
that divides hegemony from margin. Can you talk about how
the film’s politics works to break down barriers between cultures
determined by class and privilege (and even religion)?
TM: Prison Shakespeare is a contradiction in terms. The two should
not be together: Shakespeare and prisoners, the best and the
worst, the highest and the lowest. Shakespeare is known and
remembered for the best things he did in his life – writing those
amazing plays. Prisoners are known for the worst thing they have
ever done in their lives – committing the crimes for which they
have been imprisoned.
Yet the characters that Shakespeare writes about are murderers,
rapists, thieves, child-killers, and cannibals. The people who rep-
resent those characters on stage and in film are, by and large, the
educated élite – those with the least experience of violence, mur-
der, and so forth. So putting prisoners together with Shakespeare

is not as strange as it first seems because prisoners have the expe-
rience necessary to understand the motivations driving the roles.
And if we learn how to value and respect that experience then we
can use it to excellent effect in performance and beyond.
As a young actor trying to make my way in this world, espe-
cially with my prison past, this was a hard contradiction to get
my head around. At the beginning I denied my experience and
my criminal past. Then the more parts I played the more I real-
ized that I could draw upon it as a strength. My first-hand experi-
ence of violence and imprisonment was my unique selling point
and I began to respect it and stopped being ashamed of it. It took
me a long time to reach this point of being comfortable in my own
skin and owning up to my being a former prisoner.
But when I did, I found a new kind of liberation – the liberation
of not having to pretend to be someone else. When I look around
me today at the sickness, particularly around mental health, what
I see is people not being themselves. They are afraid to tell other
people who they really are, for fear of not being good enough or
for fear of being rejected. My note to the prisoners playing the
characters in Mickey B was “You know this story, be yourself,
playRESERVE
WESTERN to yourUNIV strengths.” And when they realized that was what I
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wanted, they trusted me and played themselves. Seeing their per-

formances played back on the screen further convinced them that
being honest and truthful was the road to their best performance.
This collision of high Shakespearean culture with prison culture
produces new knowledge, new insights, new representations
and new sounds – of people saying those words, Shakespeare’s
words, who have never said them before or never said them in
this way before. I remember a woman in Israel telling me that I
had desecrated Shakespeare. I told her, “Don’t worry, the origi-
nal copy of Macbeth is still there, I didn’t burn it, I simply made
it accessible to another class of people who have been excluded
from it previously.” She wasn’t convinced. But then I had an-
other Israeli, a professor, tell me, “I thought I knew Macbeth, as
a scholar, but your film has helped me to see it differently. And
now I’ll never be able to see it quite the same again.” This is new
knowledge brought about by prisoners interpreting Shakespeare
through their own experiences. It links to Bogdanov’s description
of Mickey B as “Stunning Shakespeare forged from the scrapheap
of society.” The scrapheap can still produce new knowledge and
that may be terrifying to some. What society has written off or

thrown onto the scrapheap of the prisons and mental hospitals
can produce an interpretation of Macbeth that changes how an
Israeli professor understands the text. This is how the politics of
the film breaks down the barriers between cultures determined
by class and privilege.
In terms of religion, the Mickey B cast included a motley crew of
former Loyalist and former Republican prisoners from the UDA
(Ulster Defence Association), UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters), and
the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) – as well as ODCs
(Ordinary Decent Criminals). This was Margaret Thatcher’s
controversial term for non-political prisoners who were not op-
posing the status quo by attempting to blow up Parliament or
the Cabinet, and were simply reinforcing capitalist values by
robbing and stealing. As the actor who played Horse, one of the
Skagheads12 in the film, reflects in the documentary, “Well you’ve
got Protestants and Catholics who a couple of years ago wouldn’t
have worked together and are now getting on as happy as Larry
as the saying goes.”
DF: Can you talk about the challenges you faced in making the
film from an intermedial perspective? The film clearly called on
you RESERVE
WESTERN as a director
UNIV to work with multiple media in ways that were
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challenging – from the restrictions imposed by prison authorities,

to the film aesthetic you chose to work with, to the way in which
the film gets very close to being theatrical (in terms of its intima-
cy) while still remaining a film.
We understand for instance that although Mickey B was com-
pleted in 2007, the Northern Ireland Office, through the Northern
Ireland Prison Service, restricted the film being shown or distrib-
uted within the UK and Republic of Ireland without their prior
consent for three years after its completion. So there are all sorts
of ways in which the film challenges conventional notions of me-
dia and faced all sorts of challenges, from constraints during its
making to post-production interdiction. Can you discuss these?
TM: Mickey B is the first feature film I’ve directed and it was a huge
learning process for me. The challenges we faced were immense.
Certain influential figures within the prison regime held strong
religious beliefs and did not approve of “bad language.” We spent
one session cutting the “fucks” from the script. The cast was so
annoyed at this censorship that they threatened to pull out of
the project. Even one of the senior prison officers questioned the
regime’s concerns, saying: “When was the last time they were on
the landings? Do they not realize that prisoners swear?”
There were also issues around drug references. Originally we
had the bookies smoking a lot of “blow” (marijuana), the spoils
of their winnings. But these scenes were cut. The regime’s fear,
I suspect, was that a filmic representation of a drug-fuelled, gang-
structured jail, with prisoners jockeying for control.
There were also issues around the suicide scene in the film and
suggestions that this be cut. When we stated that Lady Macbeth’s
suicide was an essential part of the Macbeth story, the scene was
reluctantly kept, but with the proviso that we didn’t dwell on
the suicide or show where the noose was attached. I’m guessing
the sensitivities were due to the growing number of suicides in
Maghaberry Prison.
The cast was mostly lifers or long-term prisoners; many were
on a basic regime. The basic, standard, and enhanced regime op-
erates on doling out privileges that are dependent upon compli-
ance with the rules. Essentially it is a divide-and-rule strategy to
break up prisoner solidarity. Many of the cast in Mickey B were
lifers on basic – that is, non-conforming prisoners not involved
in prison work or education.
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Yet another challenge we faced was prisoners not getting over

to the education block on rehearsal days. Sometimes prisoners
were told, “The class is cancelled today, they don’t need you,”
when that was not the case. This delayed and held up our re-
hearsals. But it built an incredible resilience in the group. One
thing I’ve learned as a consequence is to work with what you
have. This was only one of a range of delaying mechanisms that
the group had to overcome in order to complete the project.
The workshop where we did the filming was next to the dog
compound. Some people took great delight in rattling the cages
of the Alsatian guard dogs whenever we were filming in order
to disrupt our work. This sound was totally beyond our control
so we had a problem. I walked around the dog compound with
Angus, the cinematographer, and decided to film the dogs bark-
ing so we could show where the source of the sound was coming
from. This is why there are so many references to dogs barking
throughout the film. Some people read the dogs as a metaphor for
aggression and violence but their presence is there from necessity.
In terms of how the film aesthetic challenges conventional no-
tions of media, I think that difference is born from my own class

background and prison experience. Intermediality for me has as
much to do with cultural collisions as it does with hybridized
media. First of all most prison documentaries are fixated upon
the crimes that prisoners have committed and have some kind
of redemption narrative. The Making of Mickey B documentary
focuses on what making the film means to the people involved.
Personally, I am more interested in what people can do as op-
posed to what they have done. In the Growing Up with Violence
documentary, I showed prisoners as victims talking about the
violence that had been inflicted upon them as a challenge to con-
ventional notions of media representation of prisoners solely as
perpetrators.
As far as intermediality is concerned, I started work in the the-
atre as an actor. Moving into film was a real challenge for me as
someone with a theatre background. When I first started making
short films, for instance, I was shooting everything in wide shots,
like a theatre set. And then I learned through many mistakes the
power of close-ups. Originally we were going to shoot Mickey B
in an actual working prison wing. But that offer was withdrawn
at a later stage and we had to construct two cells in a disused
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tailor’s workshop in the prison. So the reason for using so many

close-ups is again practical. We had to shoot tight in order to dis-
guise the poverty of our circumstances.
So, it wasn’t as if I was making aesthetic choices from an
infinite palette of possibilities. I was doing the best I could with
what I had. I also wanted to give people who have not been to
prison an experience of what prison is like. So the coldness from
the blue camera filters and the strange mixture of isolation and
enforced interaction is what I tried to convey. To survive in prison
you need to belong in order to find protection. You need to use
whatever skills or abilities you have to do this. For Ladyboy that
is her power of influence and her sexuality, for Mickey B it is his
muscle and his reputation.
4. Progressive Shakespeare, Boalean Adaptation, and the Politics

of Intermediation
DF: The progressive, activist work of the film extends far beyond the
film itself, and what makes this so fascinating is that the medium
is a starting point for imagining other realities that are hinted at

in the film and its peripheral materials. With some distance now
on the project, what has the film taught you about the political
and social uses of adapting Shakespeare in such a charged and
challenging intermedial context?
TM: When I pitched the idea of doing a modern adaptation of
Macbeth, the prison authorities had had no objections to the text
or that it was Shakespeare. I suspect they thought that Macbeth
was a dead safe, reliable bet. It was only in retrospect that they
realized the significance of what had been created. I find it incred-
ibly uplifting, as do the prisoners who were involved in creating
the film, that so many people from all over the world find mean-
ing in the film and identify with it.
Making the film has taught me the importance of following
your vision even when the battle to do so is against overwhelm-
ing odds. It’s also taught me that creativity and arts education
can transform a maximum-security prison into a film set for six
weeks. It’s taught me that even the most recalcitrant prisoners,
when given the opportunity to participate, can create something
valuable of which they can be proud. It’s reaffirmed to me that
we recreate ourselves through the process of artistic creation. It’s
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taught me that when people are creative they are much less likely
to be violent. We had no violent incidents whatsoever during our
six-week shoot.
JR: The grammar of film contributes considerably to interpretive
choices made and conveyed by Mickey B. You’ve noted elsewhere
that for the prisoners who were your collaborators on this proj-
ect, film is a crucial art form to which they had access, and with
which they were routinely and thoughtfully engaged.13 Can you
talk a bit about the dramaturgical impact of the inmates’ cin-
ematic literacy? How did it contribute to the development of the
script (its structure, plot, characters, dialogue) or to its realization
in production (stylistic choices, camerawork)?
TM: If you want to open an animated discussion with a group of
prisoners ask them what their favourite film is. The medium of
film is the medium that prisoners are most literate in. Film is not
premised upon literacy, hence its popularity as a medium in pris-
ons. There are a huge percentage of illiterate prisoners. For many,
books are out of their reach. Film fills the gap. Film is also “cool”
as a medium. Prisoners like talking about films. Films are a great
way of passing time. You can get films from the prison library to
escape for two hours of your day.
Hollywood films are the staple diet of prison viewing and
common reference points in discussing plot and character com-
parisons. Not that we had much time to do this given our short
rehearsal period. There was also consensus that films about
Northern Ireland were generally “shite” and that the cast wanted
to make a film that was “different” and “real” (authentic). So you
could say that the dramaturgical impact of their cinematic literacy
contributed to the development of the script in an oppositional
manner. They wanted something completely different from what
had been before.
We didn’t consciously choose a cinematic style. Instead the
style evolved as we adjusted to the restrictions imposed on us by
the conditions of production. But we talked with the group about
prison films that inform the Mickey B project: The Shawshank
Redemption was a favourite. Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz
was also popular. The reason for their popularity, in my view, is
both films show how successful escapes from the respective jails
are carried out. Sidney Lumet’s The Hill provided material for
discussion around representations of oppression and resistance
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within a British army camp prison. Sam, who played Duncan,

also recommended the book Animal Factory by Ed Bunker as
source material to inform the project. Many of the guys knew the
book and spoke highly of it because it was written from Bunker’s
first-hand experience.
Later, after Mickey B, I watched the film Animal Factory (2000)
directed by Steve Buscemi and was impressed by the production.
I thought after seeing it that audiences would think that I got the
Ladyboy “jail bitch” idea from this film – but that was not the
case.
During the rehearsed reading of Mickey B in the chapel of
Maghaberry prison – a reading that included postgraduate stu-
dents from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education – we had a visit
from the US Consulate in Belfast. During a break in the reading,
a representative from the Consulate shook Davey’s hand (Mickey
B) and said his performance reminded her of an American actor,
James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano on the television
show The Sopranos.
The Sopranos was screening around that time and it was a fa-
vourite show amongst the prison population. Tony Soprano – the

acting boss who becomes the street boss and finally the captain
of his own crew – in many ways shares a similar journey with
Macbeth. The comparison with Tony Soprano influenced Davey’s
interpretation of how to play the character of Mickey B, in terms
of how he conducted himself, how he walked, and how he talked.
Davey’s preference was to talk less and do more. Consequently,
we cut lots of his lines in rehearsal and in performance. So
Davey’s cinematic, historical, and political literacy, not to mention
his taste, all had a dramaturgical impact and contributed to the
development of both the script and his performance.
JR: Elsewhere, you have summed up your interpretation of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth in this way: “The moral of Macbeth is that
crime doesn’t pay … Ill-gotten gains have a brief period of enjoy-
ment” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 114). Was this the
working assumption out of which your interpretive choices arose,
or did this reading of the source text evolve out of the process of
developing Mickey B?
TM: I think the short answer to the question is that it was a two-way
process, with the definitive themes from Shakespeare’s original
informing and then being informed by the choices we made in the
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course of developing Mickey B. I was at an advantage because I

was most familiar with the Macbeth story. Yet, despite this, mak-
ing the film clarified the definitive themes of Macbeth for me and
helped me see them in stark and shocking contrast – almost as if
I was seeing them for the first time, through the virgin eyes and
experience of the cast.
It’s useful to remember that during the making of Mickey B we
had disparate stakeholder groups to satisfy, and a range of com-
plex sensitivities to negotiate. For me, the premise of Macbeth can
be summed up in one line: “Ruthless ambition leads to its own
destruction” (Lajos 2004, 20).
I didn’t start the rehearsal process with the cast by hammer-
ing out my interpretation of Macbeth . I would have lost them in
an instant using any kind of authoritarian approach. I told the
story in modern terms from my own reading of the text in line
with the above premise. Ideally, I wanted people in the cast to
make discoveries themselves, drawing on their own first-hand
experiences, in order to take part in the process of exploring
the consequences of their fictional crimes. Experiential learning
or learning through doing is, in my view, the best way to work

with people who have had negative experiences in the education
system. I know this from my own negative experience of school,
which I left at fifteen with no qualifications. What I’ve learned
through my experiences working with “difficult groups” is that
the Socratic method, teaching by asking instead of by telling, is
especially effective with groups who are anti-authoritarian. The
Socratic method and experiential learning through drama create
personal insights for people. Film adds the opportunity of seeing
yourself at a distance on screen and completes the educational
experience in a feedback loop.
From my own experience, and for many of the cast I spoke to,
crime does not pay. Ill-gotten gains have a short life. So my take
on the Macbeth story via Mickey B was basically in line with what
the cast believed were the consequences following from those
violent actions. Sam, who played Duncan, sums up the attitude in
the Making Of documentary when he says, “If you’re going to do
bad it’s going to come back at you.”
JR: You align your work at the Educational Shakespeare Company
(ESC) with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.14
Considering that alterations of plot – or more accurately of
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consequences – are central to Boal’s work, I wonder if you could

discuss how this informed the revision of Shakespeare’s dra-
maturgy in the development of Mickey B? Did working in film
require a reworking of Boal’s methodology? Can you talk about
the transfer of theatre techniques to film as a key way of thinking
about how Mickey B is intermedial?
TM: For me, working in a cinematic medium did not require a
reworking of Boal’s methodology. During the rehearsal process
we used games and exercises from Boal’s book Games for Actors
and Non-actors to create solidarity in the group. We also used
Boal’s Image Theatre techniques during the rehearsals to out-
line the Macbeth story as a visual narrative. This method is not
premised upon literacy and was truly effective in constructing
key scenes and narratives immediately. It can also show status
and motivations really clearly through proxemics and gestures.
It helped us tell the story of Macbeth in a number of simple steps
to new members of the drama group as they came on board. We
used a stills camera to photograph the actors in key scenes, and
paring the story right down to a series of tableaux enabled the ac-
tors to experience the shifts of allegiances throughout the action.

And they enjoyed this process of experiential learning, learning
through doing.
I had thoroughly tested and proved the use of Image Theatre in
Long Kesh (the Maze Prison) with ten IRA political prisoners in
the theatrical adaptation of Bobby Sands’ epic poem The Crime
of Castlereagh in H-Block 4.15 That experience convinced me of
the usefulness of Image Theatre as a technique for telling com-
plex narratives visually. I used what I had learned in H-Block 4 to
work on telling the Macbeth story in another prison setting. As a
dramatist and filmmaker I have learned to use whatever tech-
niques and methods are most appropriate, useful, and trustwor-
thy according to whatever setting I am working within and the
people I am working with.
It’s interesting to look at Boal’s work as an “alteration of
consequences.” I’ve never thought about Boal’s work in that
way before. But that’s exactly what it does – alter consequences.
I thought about Boal’s work in terms of “raising consciousness”
or as “collective problem solving” in order to empower so-called
passive spectators to become active performers in the rehearsal
for changes in their own lives.
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Boal’s work opens up choices. This is one of the things I love

about Boal’s Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre is collective, group,
problem solving – practical choice in action. People can see and
hear and feel the implications of the choices they make instantly.
Forum Theatre draws upon the collective knowledge of the group
to solve a problem. That collective knowledge is always greater
than the knowledge of one person. Theatre and filmmaking
are both collective arts, and the best directors I’ve ever worked
with – Augusto Boal, Michael Bogdanov, Franc Roddam, Peter
Kosminsky, and Chrissie Poulter – all drew on the collective
knowledge of the people around them. They didn’t pretend to
have all the answers.
What I learned from Boal was that other people are potential al-
lies and with them you can create solidarity. And once you create
solidarity through trust and mutual respect, then anything is pos-
sible. Boal also taught by example to be yourself and to be happy
being yourself. And one of the best ways to be happy is through
creativity because when we are creative then we feel empowered.
What I take from Boal is the imperative to get people to ask
questions. Especially the question: What if things were differ-

ent? How can we fight oppression? How can we make our work
relevant to an audience today? How can we help them empower
themselves through risking their own creativity? How can we use
the experiences they have, particularly the negative experiences,
to help them transform their lives and their opinion of them-
selves? Essentially, it is about creating the conditions for people
to find the tools and the confidence to use them, in order to write
their new ending and perform their new role in it.
My use of Boal came down to me realizing that “You can’t give
what you don’t have.” It’s twenty-two years since I first encoun-
tered Boal and his methods. I was thrilled back then and thought
this is exactly what I am looking for – useful theatre methods
to create social transformation. And for many years I was con-
vinced that Boal’s methodology was simply all that was needed
to continue his amazing work. Later I began to realize that Boal’s
methods per se do not guarantee good practice. Over the years,
I have been told of self-styled Boal “experts” who humiliate,
alienate, oppress, patronize, abuse, exploit, mystify, dominate,
and discriminate against members of their groups due to their
body weight, class, race, age, or gender. In these cases, those in
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“authority” are using their position, power, and knowledge to

oppress minorities in the group, which is entirely in opposition to
the spirit of Boal’s work.
The realization began to dawn on me that the values, inten-
tions, attitudes, and motivations of the person facilitating the
group are far more important than whatever methods they hap-
pen to be using. Many of the students I’ve talked to place much
too high a value on method(s) at the expense and importance of
scrutinizing the values, intentions, and motivations of the person
using the methods.
This realization has been the most radical shift I have under-
taken in deploying Boal’s methodology. The questions we need to
be asking ourselves about facilitators are:
• How did they get into their current position?

• Who benefits from the information that is being imparted?
• What is the value base of the person imparting the
information?
• What is the motivation of the person imparting the
information?
• What authority does the person imparting the knowledge
have?
• Where does their knowledge come from?
Underlying this analysis is a belief in the concept I mentioned

earlier: you cannot give what you don’t have. Essentially, it
doesn’t matter whether I am working in a cinematic or theatri-
cal medium as this concept fundamentally applies to both. Boal’s
methodology works perfectly well when it is in Boal’s control.
The problem occurs when other people apply Boal’s methods
without Boal’s values, intentions, attitude, and motivation. And
that, in my view, is what requires further scrutiny.
DF: When it comes to a classic text like Macbeth, you’ve made it
very clear that your first concern is how to make the story rel-
evant to an audience today, an approach to adaptation at the
centre of your experience working with Michael Bogdanov and
the English Shakespeare Company. Do you see a relationship
between Bogdanov’s influence on you and Boal’s?
TM: I think Boal and Bogdanov share many similarities. They
are both rule-breaking radical Tricksters challenging the
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establishment and its politics. Both challenge theatre and

Shakespeare to be relevant and useful today. From Bogdanov
I learned that we make Shakespeare relevant to an audience
today by updating and translating him, particularly to spectators
who don’t know him. Otherwise we simply exclude the major-
ity of people from his work, who don’t understand the archaic
language or cultural conventions. What is the point of preserv-
ing Shakespeare, dead in a sterile vacuum? I call this Museum
Shakespeare.
How we update and translate him is to find a relevant contem-
porary parallel setting, with similar power struggles and hierar-
chies, and relocate the story in that parallel setting. Once you give
yourself permission to change the time and place of the original,
then reworking Shakespeare’s dramaturgy follows.
Sometimes this is out of necessity because the original won’t
fit with the new setting. But other times it is simply a result of
creative inquisitiveness, of asking ‘“what if?” This “what if things
were different?” question is what I take from Boal. I said earlier
that Macduff loses the most in the Macbeth story. That’s another
way of saying that he is the most oppressed. That oppression

makes me interested in him as a character and I want to address
his loss by giving him a scene to reflect upon what has just hap-
pened. He has lost his whole family by taking Malcolm’s side and
standing up to Macbeth. Malcolm has the crown, but what does
Macduff have?
For me it doesn’t matter if that drama is live or recorded; it is
dealing with the same material, human relationships, often in
conflict. I know this is not how many people see the difference
between film and theatre. I worked in a university in Media and
Theatre Studies and saw the clear dividing line between the two.
My most interesting work there was with David Butler, from
Media Studies. We ran a joint course in the Maze prison for politi-
cal prisoners called “Culture, Identity, and Representation.”
DF: The ESC website says you have an upcoming project called
Prospero’s Prison. Can you talk a little about the decision to work
with Prison Shakespeare again in a film context?
TM: After Mickey B the next project suggested by Jennifer Marquis
Muradaz, Mickey B’s producer, was 12 Angry Men, the 1957
film directed by Sidney Lumet about the struggle of a jury to
come to a just decision that stars Henry Fonda. We began work
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on a modern version of this classic film and set it in a kangaroo

courtroom in a Northern Ireland prison. There was a lack of sup-
port for the drama group to begin another film and the project
foundered. I was open to any ideas as to the next project and
would have listened to any pitch. The idea for The Tempest came
from Mark Burnett, Renaissance Professor at Queen’s University,
Belfast. Mark has been a supporter of ESC since he first saw the
film and helped organize the screening of Mickey B for the 38th
Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Chicago. I
was happy to return to Shakespeare for the next project. For me,
Shakespeare is reliable and trustworthy and infinitely pliable as
a source text. I went back and read The Tempest and began to see
how it could be adapted.
The conditions of production in relation to making Prospero’s
Prison are very different from making Mickey B. During that
period of making Mickey B, I was paid one day per week through
the Arts Council as a visiting artist to work with the drama group
I had established in the prison. After the termination of that con-
tract, I am now working wherever I can to initiate projects. The
essential difference is that now I am working outside the prison

and on my own. I am currently (as of fall 2011) writing the treat-
ment and then the script to follow.
Not having a prison drama group to work with over a regular
period means that I am doing the adaptation alone this time. In
prison it was, oddly enough, easier as the men were there and
the drama group was a welcome escape from the mind-numbing
monotony that is prison life. Outside life is very different with
ex-prisoners working feverishly just to survive and care for their
families. They have very little time to give to the project. That’s
the reality of life after prison. Like everything in life, working on
my own now has its pluses and minuses. I miss the banter and
fun with the group and the collective process of trying things out
on our feet in the rehearsal room through improvisation. I miss
the input and the collective problem solving of the group. I miss
their support and their generosity in sharing their ideas and
experiences.
So this time I hope to use ex-prisoners as cast and doing the
production hopefully in Belfast Prison, a former prison (panop-
ticon) that is now in the process of becoming a cultural museum.
I hope to be able to raise the money to pay the ex-prisoner actors
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for their time. That is my ideal: to be able to pay them for their
time and performances. None of the actors in Mickey B could be
paid as they were serving prisoners. (Not that we had a budget to
pay them in the first place.) So my approach is two-pronged: fin-
ish the treatment/script and raise the money for the production.
JR: We notice that the reading of The Tempest that your proposed
adaptation will offer centres on the brother’s betrayal and the
question of revenge vs reconciliation (for Prospero), which is a
relatively uncommon element of emphasis, at least in contem-
porary performance traditions which tend to pick up the post-
colonial implications of the script and focus more on Caliban as
emblematic of imperial oppression.
TM: The focus for my reading of The Tempest came from my per-
ception of the current needs of my own community, particularly
regarding betrayal. Betrayal is a huge unavoidable theme in
post-conflict Northern Ireland. The Loyalist/Unionist commu-
nity feels betrayed by the British Government for [its] pander-
ing to the Nationalist/Republican agenda, “treating Loyalists as
second-class citizens” and “allowing terrorists into Government.”
Many in the Republican communities feel betrayed by Sinn

Féin’s alleged “sellout” to gain access to power and have formed
breakaway, dissident paramilitary groups to continue the armed
struggle to “get the Brits Out” of Ireland.
So in those contexts, the postcolonial themes of The Tempest
via Caliban are compelling. And postcolonialism is an area that
interests me. In 1986–7 I worked for Gbakanda Afrika Tiata with
Yulisa Amadu “Pat” Maddy, Sierra Leone’s elder statesman of
theatre and the performing arts.16 It was as Amadu’s assistant
that I began my directing career. He also encouraged me to
write.
My understanding of colonialism is that it is about extending
control over weaker peoples or areas. Indeed, Ireland is an early
example of British Colonial Plantation. So I want to address the
idea of people extending control over others in Prospero’s Prison.
But I want to try and do it in a way that will not be divisive. We
have had enough division in our community. I don’t want to
divide our community further. I want a theme that could poten-
tially unite our community in response to the urgent dilemma
I believe we’re facing. What do you do when your closest trust
and loyalty is repaid with betrayal?
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I need a dilemma that both sides of our community can relate

to – a brother’s betrayal. That’s the dilemma that many people
here are facing at the moment. That’s what we are struggling
with, that’s the cause of a lot of our hurt and wounds. Our recent
history has been that you repay betrayal with violence. But that
creates more violence, as we saw in Mickey B. It perpetuates the
cycle. That’s why I have chosen the reading of The Tempest that
I have. I think the lessons that we can learn from Shakespeare’s
play can teach us what we need to remember in order to live
together.
I had many useful conversations with Professor Mark Burnett
about this reading and he helped clarify and shape the “revenge
vs reconciliation” theme in response to betrayal. Originally, I had
come up with the term “forgiveness” as the response to betrayal.
During the conversations with Mark we questioned whether “rec-
onciliation” or “forgiveness” best describes what Prospero does at
the end of The Tempest.
5. “Shakespeare Belongs to Us All”: Transformation,

Political Dissidence, and Adaptation
DF: One of the compelling things about Mickey B is that it is a

testimony to your own history as a former prisoner and young
offender. But it also testifies to a much broader context of other
such histories specifically situated in Northern Ireland. The word
that keeps coming to my mind is “transformation” because you
underwent a radical personal transformation from young of-
fender to actor, dramaturge, and director. It sounds like this hap-
pened almost by chance, that the gods were moving chess pieces
around. But it led you into situations that took a kind of rage that
had been there in your youth and transformed it into something
really powerful and creative. You were sparked into literature and
theatre, especially as forms of creative expression, alchemical and
mutative ways of being that can potentially change you from one
thing into another.
But then I think there’s something that happened somewhere
along the way where you began to understand that these forms
of interior transformation were also outward facing, community
facing. That’s one of the energies I see most active in Mickey B:
you’ve taken this long, incredible personal journey that you’ve
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had and you’ve turned it towards others now, and it’s transfor-
mative for them and for you. I think one of the things I’m hearing
you say is that the power of theatre is profoundly transformative
and it transformed you. Then you started learning how to trans-
form others by using what you have learned. Could you talk a bit
about how Mickey B itself came to be out of that personal history
you’ve just described for us?
TM: I got a call from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the
early 90s and they asked, “Do you want to introduce drama into
Long Kesh in the Maze prison?”
DF: Can you explain the significance of that request for those who
do not necessarily know the history and importance of the Maze
in Northern Ireland?
TM: The Maze prison was basically the most secure prison in
Europe essentially because it had members of the Provisional IRA
incarcerated there, considered the deadliest terrorist organization
in the 90s. They were at war with the British because the British
had occupied their land. They were doing what they could to
remove them through armed struggle. So in 1975, the prisoners
began their campaign to achieve political prisoner status, rather

than being classified as common criminals. In their view they
were POWs – prisoners of war. They had a very structured regime
in the prison. They had their own OCs (Officers in Command);
they had their own education officers. It was so structured and
they were so organized and they worked as a unit and that’s very
important to know.
The other thing to know is that no prison officers worked in
the wings where the IRA prisoners were located. People say,
“What?” And they can’t get their head around that. When people
see Mickey B they say, “Yeah but there’s no prison officers and
we just see them patrolling in the outer gates and areas.” And I
say, “Yeah but once upon a time in Long Kesh, in the Maze, there
weren’t prison officers working on the wings. The men controlled
the wings themselves. They looked after their own discipline.
They looked after their own welfare. They looked after every-
thing. They were a self-sufficient unit.” When I was approached
by a probation officer to discuss the project, my initial reservation
was that I was an ex-prisoner myself. He said, “It doesn’t matter,
it’s not an issue, we want to use your skills.” My job was to intro-
duce drama into the H-Blocks. I worked there for about eighteen
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months and nine of those months the most significant outcome

was working with ten IRA prisoners from H-Block 4, which was a
Republican Block used to house the Provisional IRA.
Now, remember my history. I’m from a Loyalist community
(a particularly hardline form of Unionism), so essentially, the
prisoners I was working with were my enemies. Before I went
into the H-Blocks, I thought about it long and hard and I thought,
my strategy is that I will tell them the truth … exactly the truth.
So that’s what I did. I went into the H-Block and I met these guys,
and I told them who I was and where I came from. They sat down
and quizzed me as they would because of course they are going
to be looking for agents of the state trying to infiltrate the move-
ment. I remember them saying to me, “If you’re not who you say
you are, then you, my friend, are in a heap of trouble.” I said to
them, “If I wasn’t who I say I am, do you think I would be sit-
ting here talking to you?” We had that discussion and they went
“okay.” But they checked, and I know they checked so we devel-
oped a relationship.
I had just finished working with Bogdanov and the English
Shakespeare Company when I went to work in Long Kesh. I had

been Michael’s assistant director on Beowulf, his adaptation of
the Old English poem, and that was an incredible experience
working with him. So adapting a poem for the stage was in my
mind. What I said to the guys was “Okay, I’m a theatre artist and
how can I help you find your voice and tell your story?” They
said, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and they handed me
Bobby Sands’ epic poem, The Crime of Castlereagh. It deals with the
Castlereagh detention centre where thousands of prisoners (both
Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries) were “interrogated.” It
was a notorious centre for abuses involving the torture, rape, and
ill-treatment of prisoners, some of which were documented by
Amnesty International in a report published in 1993 (Amnesty
International 1993).17
DF: By interrogation you mean torture and other abuses associated
with Castlereagh?
TM: Well, it’s been alleged that they used white noise and that
people were pulled into helicopters, taken up with hooded bags
over their heads then pushed out of the helicopters. They would
only be a foot off the ground but they didn’t know that. So people
thought they were being pushed out to their deaths. I mean
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basically the IRA was trying to break down the British presence in
Ireland. So the British saw them as the enemy within, and needed
to do anything to remove them as a threat. And the IRA were
armed incredibly well and organized and had huge support in
North America. They had a lot of money, they had a lot of weap-
ons, they had firepower, so they were a formidable force.
The second part of Bobby Sands’ trilogy, “Diplock Court,”
was based on the Diplock Courts, which were basically non-jury
courts, where people would be tried without a jury.18 The third
part of Sands’ trilogy was about the H-Blocks, where people
would be caged and they wouldn’t wear prison uniforms, but
that happened in 1975, much earlier than 1981 when the hunger
strikes took place – so IRA political prisoners eventually won
the right not to wear prison uniforms. So the blanket protest was
about their refusal to wear prison uniform, clothing themselves
instead in their prison-issue blankets.
So I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time

That Britain might grant Ireland’s fight, eight hundred years of crime
That stanza is from a 1976 song called the “H-Block Song” writ-
ten by Francie Brolly, a musician and Republican politician from
Dungiven.
So when the prisoners in Long Kesh and I were working on
staging The Crime of Castlereagh we used lots of Image Theatre,
using lots of Boal’s techniques to do that, and that was an amaz-
ing experience. I was getting twelve people in my workshop
every time, and I was taking the numbers back to the authorities.
Normal classes would have been two or three and I was getting
twelve, and they said to me, “What are you doing down there?”
and I said, “Why don’t you come down and have a look?” and
they said, “Oh no, we wouldn’t go down there!” So they never
came down to have a look. And they never knew that we were
working on The Crime of Castlereagh.
Eventually, we put the play on in the H-Block and it was an in-
credible moment because about a hundred guys squeezed in, and
we had nothing. We had lockers, a mattress, a bed, sheets, and a
mop. It was absolutely Poor Theatre. And I remember, first of all,
how daunted I was when I read it; the poem is about 220 stanzas
and it’s written in the same metre as Oscar Wilde’s poem The
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Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897), written in exile after Wilde was

released from prison after having been convicted of homosexual
offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years hard labour.
I scratched my name but not for fame upon the whitened wall,
“Bobby Sands was here,” I wrote with fear in awful shaky scrawl.
I wrote it low where eyes don’t go. ’Twas but to testify,

That I was sane and not to blame should here I come to die.
That was the metre Sands wrote the poem in.

DF: Could you talk a bit about Bobby Sands and address his signifi-
cance to Northern Ireland, especially in terms of his influence as a
political dissident?
TM: Bobby Sands was the first hunger striker who became an MP
as well – the youngest MP in the history of the British Parliament
at that time. Christy Moore, the great Irish folk singer and song-
writer, has written a beautiful ballad called “The People’s Own
MP”: “He was a poet and a soldier he died courageously/And
we gave him thirty thousand votes while in captivity [sic].” So

Sands became MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone while he was
in prison, until Thatcher made it illegal for a convicted prisoner
and felon to be an MP. Sands died after sixty-six days on hunger
strike, on the 5th of May 1981. There was something like two hun-
dred thousand people at his funeral in Belfast.
Sands was the first of ten hunger strikers who died: Patsy
O’Hara, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Bobby Sands,
Kieran Doherty, Kevin Lynch, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson,
Tom McElwee, and Mickey Devine.
So ten men dead and a pivotal moment in Irish history.
It was an incredible honour to have been given the job of help-
ing these prisoners adapt Sands’ poem into theatre and another
good example of my experience with intermedial adaptation – in
this case involving the translation of the poem to the stage.
At the end of the play, in the H-Block, it was just silence, be-
cause the play was ninety minutes long and there was an incred-
ible silence at the end of it. I remember the silence stayed and
stayed, and then the one hundred men in that H-Block erupted
in this explosion of emotion, because it was very close to their
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hearts, and we had used theatre to empower people to find their

voices and tell their story.
And then the men conspired together to take their paroles at
the same time between Christmas and New Year of that same
year. They got out, the ten men, and instead of going to see their
families for the two days they were out, they came to rehearse
with me. We put the play on in St Agnes’s Parish Hall in West
Belfast (27, 28, and 29 December 1996) and six hundred people
came to see it: thirty-eight of the hunger strikers’ families were
in the front two rows, and Gerry Adams (President of Sinn Féin)
opened it. It was an incredible moment.19 And it set the seed for
what was to come in adapting Macbeth in a prison context.
So then I went to work in Maghaberry Prison after they closed
the Maze. Maghaberry Prison is a maximum-security prison, and
when they closed the Maze in 2000, a lot of the maximum-secu-
rity prisoners got moved to Maghaberry. I started working there
in 2003 – one day a week basically. We made a short film called
Inside Job. It was a fifteen-minute drama written by Sam, who
then went on to play Duncan in Mickey B. Sam was instrumental
in getting the drama group together at Maghaberry, and Sam has

been a real supporter of this work. Without Sam, I could not have
done it. Sam came from a Loyalist background and then we made
another short film, and a thirty-minute documentary called The
Big Question. It was about the impact of imprisonment on prison-
ers and their families.
The deputy governor of Maghaberry said, “What about get-
ting some of the most difficult men involved?” At that time, I was
looking for a new project. So one day I saw Sam walking down
the corridor, and I said to him, “You’d make a good Duncan.”
And Sam said, “Who’s Duncan?” And I said, “He’s the King of
Scotland.” And he said, “Fuck, that would be an improvement!”
So I told him the story of Macbeth and he said, “That’s a good
story.” And then he said, “I have just the guy for you to play
Macbeth.” That was Davey, regarded as the toughest guy in
the jail. Davey came over but initially didn’t take it seriously.
Gradually, though, he got involved. Once Davey was involved
and Sam was involved, it was easy. Davey used to say, “How
many men do you want, thirty, forty, tell me.” It was great once
we got the buy-in. But it brought its own problems because, as
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I said earlier, the twelve guys were basically called “the Dirty
Dozen.” Anyway, that’s how Mickey B got going.
DF: The film is the culmination of many different forms of media-
tion. In preproduction you’re using drawn images to storyboard
the adaptation and then you move to photographs and stills, then
it’s back to oral storytelling and then there’s all the other drama-
turgical work prior to the filming and negotiating all the differ-
ent cultural and political contexts from within and without the
prison. The film crosses over so many mediatized and mediated
contexts and it seems like the group evolved a way of figuring
out the problems of crossing these boundaries on its own. Any
thoughts on how all these forms of mediation allowed the group
to address issues of violence, oppression, and problem solving?
TM: As you know, I’m a great believer in the methods of Boal and
Freire because they’re so connected to wider struggles for liberty
from oppression and ignorance. Boal worked, for instance, on
the Alphabetization literacy theatre project in Chaclacayo, Lima.
If I’m not mistaken that project was based on Freire’s notion that
the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their
redemption. One of the ways at making that happen, as Boal and

Freire’s work has shown, is to use problem posing in an artistic
but also a political context. So I would say to the actors in Mickey
B, “How do we do this? How do we get around that?” If you
think about criminals – what is crime but another way of doing
something?
Criminals are creative because they problem solve. Creativity
comes so easily to criminals. That struck me. Creativity and
criminality are interlinked I think. It’s like, “Okay look we can’t
do this, how do we get around it,” and all of those heads together,
they would work it out. All you have to do is pose the question,
and they trusted me enough to allow me to facilitate the process.
That’s what they did. I would say, “All right guys, what about
this, how are we going to do this?” You can see some of that in
the documentary about the making of Mickey B, just tiny bits of
it. You see me working with the group and doing that. Allowing
for choice empowers people and the very fact we had to work
through so many forms of mediation to get to the final product
allowed us to play with multiple ways of telling the story, which,
ultimately, gave the guys a tremendous chance to voice the story
in their own terms.
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I learned this technique when we did the staging of The Crime

of Castlereagh. I was so overwhelmed by the staging issues: How
are we going to stage The Crime of Castlereagh on such short notice
in a church? How are we going to construct the Castlereagh hold-
ing centre in this tiny section of a classroom in the H-Blocks? So
one of the guys, Frankie, from Tyrone, who played Bobby Sands,
grabbed a big bar of soap out of the sink and started drawing
with it on the floor. And he said, “Right, there’s a corridor, there’s
a holding cell, right …” and so on. So there we are. It’s like every-
thing is possible in this form of theatre. We have infinite possibili-
ties to choose from. That was a great thing I remembered from
Boal. He said, more or less, that our dilemma as human beings
is having infinite possibilities from which to choose. Don’t limit
yourself because of your imagination. Make a virtue out of the
poverty of your diminished circumstances.
As I discuss earlier, problem posing, then, drawing on the
collective experience of the group, helped solve any number of
problems and that’s how we did it in Mickey B where the circum-
stances for making the film were severely constrained. For in-
stance, I didn’t come up with any of the adapted names in terms

of the characters in the film. Banknote, Fleecer, Ladyboy, Cowardy
Custard, Duffer, Peeper, Satan – it’s beautiful! Those were all the
guys’ ideas. I didn’t come up with the idea of Bookies standing
in for the Witches in Macbeth. That was their idea. I posed the
question: “What kind of function do the Witches have? They’re
like predicting the future. They’re like Bookies!” Beautiful! All
I did was pose the questions: “How do we do this? How do we
do that?” “I can’t think of a way to do this.” Sometimes I’d come
up with a solution and I would ask, “So what about this?” And
if they liked it they would say, “Yes” – and if they didn’t, they
would say, “Tom, that is shite.” And they would tell me frankly.
So that’s what it was, it was a co-creative dialogue that shaped
the dramaturgy. It wasn’t me as the expert, because I’m not. I
have certain skills but they had skills, so it’s a dialogue and that’s
how we did it.
DF: So Mickey B, besides adapting Macbeth, depicts violent offend-
ers who find their voice in spite of being pegged as the “Dirty
Dozen” and it’s a very powerful thing to have captured on film
and part of the overall affective impact of the adaptation. They do
in fact make a virtue of the diminished circumstances with which
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they had to create their performances. So the prisoners/actors are

speaking in their own voices and there’s something remarkable
that is happening there, not only for the speakers, but for those
who witness the performance and all the obvious violence in the
film that is tied to very real violent histories associated with the
players in the film. The language in the film is incredibly rich and
obviously very driven by actual prison discourse based on real
experience as you’ve already noted. But that realistic language
also gets at the brutal inarticulacy of some of the characters.
What are your thoughts on that now with a bit of distance from
the production? I think you’ve said that violence is the last realm
of the inarticulate. How did doing the film make those people re-
flect on their own circumstances and perhaps change them, make
them address their own violence, or the violence that they’ve ex-
perienced? There’s that very disturbing moment where you have
them actually on screen in the supplementary materials for the
film saying, “This is where I had a spike driven through my leg,
this is where I’ve been shot in the head, here’s a scar,” and they’re
showing the marks of the violence they’ve had inflicted on them.
TM: The language in the film, as we’ve discussed earlier, is the

shorthand of lived experience, summarizing wisdom in a phrase.
It is brutal in its simplicity and directness. I think in that way it is
both shocking and compelling to an outside audience.
When you don’t have education you don’t have the words to
communicate. This creates a vacuum and a silence, the silent vac-
uum of shame and denial. Self-hatred is born in this vacuum and
grows into wounded pride. The inability to defend yourself with
words leads to the expression of the only language you know –
violence and the ecstasy of repressed physical eruption. Violence
is the last realm of the inarticulate. Most people don’t want to be
violent because they know the horrific guilt that follows an act
of violence. This is a major theme I developed in Mickey B. But
for many prisoners, whom the education system has failed, their
choice of expression is very limited.
From my own experience I know that I became violent when
I had no other means of expression. That’s when I was violent:
when you have no means of expression left or none to begin with,
then you will default to violence as a retort, as an answer, or as
an expression. Jimmy Boyle, who was a prisoner in Scotland and
wrote an incredible book, called A Sense of Freedom (1977), and
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who found his own redemption through art (both writing and
sculpture), talks about violence and the art of violence and how
when you get into violence, you can enjoy it. That’s a terrible
thing to say but it’s also true and I know exactly what he’s talking
about. So you enjoy dishing out violence and then experience
a terrible comedown from it because it’s an awful thing to do. I
suppose really that’s also to do with people who self-harm and
people who harm others. There’s a price to be paid when you are
violent and it’s a terrible price. It extracts a terrible price from
you. Art and arts-based practices are one form of redemption,
one form of confronting these realities because they give people
whose only outlet has been violence another choice.
Doing the film, the men began to think about violence and
they began to examine violence at a distance. And when you put
that distance on violence then you begin to understand it. For
example, there were amazing conversations with the men about
the moment when Duncan is stabbed and the need for an accu-
rate sound of being punctured: “That’s the sound.” They had this
incredible knowledge of what the impact was. The same with the
blood splattered on the walls when Duncan is murdered. It was

the prisoners who did that because they said, “When you do this,
this is what happens.”
So, I think doing that, in a safe environment and in a fictional
environment, actually helped them to reflect upon the act itself.
Because violence is usually done not in a safe environment but
in a very, very unsafe, charged environment that is absolutely –
there’s no reflection on it at all, it’s just fight or flight, and you
almost have no conception of it because it’s instant.
And I think allowing these men – particularly these men – to
have the opportunity to reflect upon violence and how violence
comes about, what motivates violence, I think that’s really useful.
And seeing the impact of violence – I think that’s useful too be-
cause it creates understanding of causality. How many times, if I
had thought about the consequences of what I’d just said or done
would I not have done it? I think opening up that space to have
that discussion about violence, maybe for the first time in many
of their lives, was really helpful because they are much more
experts on violence. So they were leading us, and we were saying
teach us more, so they were having to think about it differently,
they were having to reframe violence, to explain it, and I think
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it actually led to much more understanding about violence than

they would have had previously.
JR: What you’ve described here reminds me of the phenomenon
you’ve referred to as the Video Feedback Loop.20 How does this
relate to your indebtedness to Boal, and to your application of his
theatrical theories to the medium of film?
TM: The Video Feedback Loop allows people to see themselves not
as they imagine they are, not how somebody has said they are,
but actually how they are. And it’s an incredible tool that might
be related to what Boal calls the “multiple mirror,” reflecting back
to you your own behaviour as well as alternative possibilities.
J R : And if what is being depicted on camera is fictional, is this
still in operation? In the case of Mickey B, you have a fictional
narrative, but through viewing the film the participants are
recognizing …
TM: … themselves. That’s very true.
JR: But at a remove?
TM: Yes, that’s the important thing – that remove. Once we put
that remove in, that distance, then things get a bit less heated
and more clear for people to negotiate with in terms of clarifying

meaning.
JR: And one way to create the conditions for this self-evaluative
distance that you’ve found is through the adaptation of
Shakespeare?
TM: I think Shakespeare is too important to be used solely as a
cultural sermon for the middle classes and the dwindling ancient
congregations at Stratford (on Avon and Ontario). For me that’s
Deadly Theatre and it’s operating in an enclosed, hermetically
sealed world that I don’t think is very healthy, that I don’t think
is very progressive, and is ultimately self-defeating. Eventually
you need new life to make things happen, to change things. And
I think Mickey B does that, and Prospero’s Prison will do that. It
will challenge the conventions and it will say anybody can do
Shakespeare given the right access and opportunity to participate
with the text.
Shakespeare’s texts are too important. We can learn so much
from these stories by engaging with them in multiple manners
– and through multiple media. These stories shouldn’t be sealed
off; people need to see them, people need to hear them, people
need to participate in them at every level of society. Shakespeare
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belongs to us all. There’s such a variety of knowledge in his story-

telling and we need to make that knowledge widely accessible in
order to keep its inherent transformative potential alive today.
NOTES
1 Magill played a lead role in Jonathan Gaunt’s anti-football (soccer) racism

play Hooligans, which won a Fringe First Award in 1986 as well as the
Perrier Pick of The Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the
world’s largest arts festival. The play was later adapted for television by
Yorkshire Television.
2 That Mickey B represents a challenge to conventional Prison Shakespeare
is a point raised by Ramona Wray, who effectively summarizes the tradi-
tional features of the genre: it tends to be strictly theatrical, to offer con-
servative readings of the plays, and to be valued in terms that understand
the experience as a unilateral exchange, with the works of Shakespeare
figured as inviolable repositories of universal wisdom and prisoners fig-
ured as unquestioning recipients of the play’s therapeutic effects (2011,
341–3). As we argue below, both the development process of Mickey B

and the resulting product are distinguished not only by their unique in-
termediality but also by the bilateral – or multilateral – engagement with
the source text that informs this collaboratively developed, radical adap-
tation. For more detailed information on the scholarly literature about
Prison Shakespeare, see Wray 2011, 341n6. Significantly, while Mickey B is
the only full feature-length film instance of Prison Shakespeare to date,
recent versions of Prison Shakespeare that introduce cinematic elements
represent an emergent genre of Shakespearean adaptation with profound-
ly intermedial implications that parallel those emerging out of Mickey B,
not only mixing theatre with film, but also prison culture with dramather-
apy and rehabilitative justice outcomes with critiques of regressive incar-
ceral policies.
Hank Rogerson’s 2005 documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars details
the story of twenty male inmates who form a Shakespeare ensemble in
a minimum-medium-security state prison in Kentucky and stage The
Tempest. In 2008 a Prison Arts Project at the notorious San Quentin Prison
in California put on a version of Much Ado About Nothing directed by
Suraya Susana Keating. In 2012 the inmates (some of them high-security
detainees) of Rome’s Rebibbia Prison and their docudrama film adap-
tation of Julius Caesar, Caesar Must Die (directed by Paolo and Vittorio
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Taviani), won the Golden Bear, the highest prize awarded, in the 62nd
Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival. Rebibbia Prison is well
known for its rehabilitative programs aimed at reintegrating inmates.
Not to be forgotten in this array of Prison Shakespeares is Hungarian-
Canadian Tibor Egervari’s Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz
(1999), “an imaginative reconstruction of what it might have meant to
stage Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz with Shylock
performed as ‘a Richard III: a “truly evil” Shylock’” (Fischlin 2004, n.p.).
In addition to these film-related examples, there are multiple others of
prisons where Shakespeare is used as a form of rehabilitative activity. These
include the Actors Shakespeare Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
which works with incarcerated youth, ages twelve to seventeen;
Shakespeare behind Bars, which was founded by Curt L. Tofteland,
director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and the first North
American Shakespeare Company, and is located in a medium-security
adult male prison performing Shakespeare’s works (this company’s
production of The Tempest is the subject of Rogerson’s film, mentioned
above, which was shown at the 2005 Sundance Festival); the prison
“Shakespeare Program” in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in
Carlisle, Indiana, which in 2010 performed an adaptation of Shakespeare’s

The Taming of the Shrew to address domestic violence issues; and
Shakespeare & Company/Shakespeare In The Courts out of Lenox,
Massachusetts, which, in collaboration with the Berkshire Juvenile Court,
helps juvenile offenders work with Shakespeare & Company’s artists,
Àfocusing on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. For a detailed, personal
Àaccount of the work done by some of these (and other) groups, drawing
on the author’s extensive observation of rehearsals and performances, as
well as interviews with inmate performers, program directors, and prison
officials, see Scott-Douglass 2007.
3 Linda Hutcheon’s work on adaptation theory hints at this connection be-
tween media and the contexts that feed into media when she states, “My
emphasis on adaptation as process (as well as product) means that the so-
cial and communication dimensions of media are important too, even
when the particular emphasis … is on form” (2006, 34).
4 See http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=gnomeoandjuliet.htm.
Multiple other examples of the massive economies associated with
Shakespearean film adaptations exist. To cite a few, director John
Madden’s 1998 Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love has netted ap-
proximately $300 million worldwide on a production budget of $25 mil-
lion, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet adaptation grossed about
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$150 million. Even lesser films like the 2006 adaptation of Twelfth Night,
She’s the Man, netted close to $60 million, while the 1999 film adaptation
of The Taming of the Shrew, Ten Things I Hate about You, grossed close to
$55 million. In a global film context that has seen hundreds of film adapta-
tions of Shakespeare, making him the “most filmed author ever in any
language” (“List of William Shakespeare Film Adaptations” 2012), the
economies associated with this form of intermedial adaptation are signifi-
cant. Conversely, the austere production conditions and other constraints
imposed on the making of Mickey B in its prison context, combined with
its participation in the tradition of rehabilitative Prison Shakespeare, po-
sition Mickey B outside of this canon of commercial and international
cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare. Amy Scott-Douglass aptly notes,
“Mickey B is an extraordinary exception to the rule in that the film insists
on being received not as a work of social improvement but, rather, as a
work of art. And it deserves to be received as such” (2010, 111). Indeed,
what ultimately sets Mickey B apart from cinematic adaptations operating
within commercial economies is its operation more predominantly within
political aesthetics.
5 See McCabe 2011. Also see McCaffrey (n.d.), who examines a number of
deaths by suicide in Northern Ireland prisons – including those of Allyn

Baxter, Samuel Carson, Frances McKeown, Roseanne Irvine, and Colin
Bell – and presents harrowing details about the treatment of the prisoners
within the prison system leading up their suicides.
6 See, for example, Weimann, who describes the Porter as the “one figure in
the play that strongly revitalizes on the Elizabethan stage an equivalent of
the unenclosed platea” (2000, 201), a space he identifies here and elsewhere
with privileged proximity between audience and “actor-character,” of lim-
inality between the fictional onstage world and the real world inhabited
by spectators. Often marked by direct address, topical allusion, or other
devices designed to engage spectators across the representational divide,
this “strange threshold position” (205) is, significantly, understood by
Weimann, quoting James C. Bulman, “to make ‘theatrical meaning a partic-
ipatory act’” (Weimann 2000, 208; emphasis added).
7 We wish to thank Esmé Nandorfy-Fischlin and Alex Desrochers for their
help in transcribing this interview. The interview itself took place in two
stages: the first as a face-to-face interview in the fall of 2011, after Magill
showed Mickey B and gave the plenary at the “Outerspeares: Transcultural/
Transmedia Adaptations of Shakespeare” conference held at the University
of Guelph, 1 November 2011; and the second in a set of email exchanges
in 2012 during which follow-up occurred.
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8 This line quoted is from the script of Mickey B.

9 Thomas Cartelli offers this assessment of the language in Mickey B in an
essay examining modern-language adaptations, for which Cartelli coins
the term “prose Shakespeare” (2010, 28). Cartelli deems Mickey B the
“unsung hero” of the genre (31), citing the effect of the “strange” prison
language in rendering the retained Shakespearean dialogue uniquely “nat-
ural” to the spectator’s ear. Moreover, following M.J. Kidnie’s notion of
the “slanting proximity” to Shakespeare’s language that arises from, in
Kidnie’s analysis, “strange television dialogue” (quoted in Cartelli 2010,
28; emphasis added), Cartelli’s argument seeks to redeem the “incompre-
hensible” prison language of Mickey B as in itself poetic and thus proxi-
mally Shakespearean. Notably, this praise privileges the reception of a
wider, non-Irish, non-convict, audience – including, arguably in large part,
the scholarly viewing community – and does not address the localized
and political imperatives, intentions, and implications of the “thieves’
cant” beyond the general recognition of the revision “apparently having
been generated by reasons other than the need for mass legibility” (28). It
is worth noting, in Magill’s response, the emphatic assertion that the pris-
on language of the film “is ‘differently literate’ but not ‘literary.’”
10 “The Troubles” (Irish: Na Trioblóidí) was a period of ethno-political con-

flict in Northern Ireland, which spilled over at various times into England,
the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the
Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by
many to have ended with the Belfast “Good Friday” Agreement of 1998.
However, sporadic violence has been ongoing since then. The principal
issues at stake in the Troubles were the constitutional status of Northern
Ireland and the relationship between the mainly Protestant Unionist
and mainly Catholic Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. The
Troubles had both political and military (or paramilitary) dimensions. Its
participants included Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, the security
forces of the United Kingdom and of the Republic of Ireland, and national-
ist and unionist politicians and political activists” (“The Troubles” 2012).
For a more detailed historical account of The Troubles, see Coogan 2002.
11 In these contexts it is useful to remember Angela Davis’s arguments for
prison abolition in Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis begins her book with refer-
ences to “historical examples of efforts to dismantle racist institutions be-
cause they have considerable relevance to our discussion of prisons and
prison abolition. It is true that slavery, lynching, and segregation acquired
such a stalwart ideological quality that many, if not most, could not fore-
see their decline and collapse … It may help us gain perspective on the
prison if we try to imagine how strange and discomforting the debates
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about the obsolescence of slavery must have been to those who took the
‘peculiar institution’ [of slavery] for granted – and especially to those who
reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist exploitation …
the prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in
clandestine ways” (2003, 24–5). Davis’s point, like Magill’s, gets at under-
lying structures of race-based or class-based power in which oppression
and marginalization are the norm.
12 Skaghead is a slang term for heroin users, as reflected in the character
name, Horse, a slang term for heroin.
13 Noting that the prisoners at Maghaberry Prison spent up to twenty-three
hours a day in their cells with televisions, Magill observes: “They watch
films, they like films, they discuss films [and] their thoughts and observa-
tions are frequently insightful” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 112).
14 The Theatre of the Oppressed refers to the range of theatrical approaches
to social and political transformation developed by Brazilian theatre-
maker and activist Augusto Boal, whose thinking was strongly influenced
by the theories of his friend and countryman Paulo Freire, author of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Theatre of the Oppressed is also the title of one of
Boal’s books on the subject.
15 See McDonnell 2008, especially 101–16 and 143–61. The book studies
grass-roots popular theatres that developed from within the working-class
Republican and Loyalist communities of Belfast and Derry during the
most recent phase of the four-hundred-year conflict between Ireland and
Britain and devotes significant attention to The Crime of Castlereagh.
16 Gbakanda Afrika Tiata was founded in “1968 by Yulisa Amadu Maddy
in Freetown, Sierra Leone [and] has worked on three continents; Africa,
Europe and the USA. Committed to its aim of increasing understanding
of Pan-African cultures through education, entertainment and elucidation,
GBAKANDA has always worked with artists from different disciplines
and cultures to develop a fusion of multicultural art forms” (The
Gbakanda Foundation 2011). This influence on Magill’s work again high-
lights intermediation as a key trope spanning multiple art forms and
cultures.
17 The report concluded, “The record shows that existing procedures and
safeguards are inadequate to prevent the ill-treatment of detainees.
International standards require that detainees be brought promptly before
a judge; however, the government has opted out of its obligations under
international standards to do so, with respect to detainees held under
emergency legislation, who may be held for up to seven days without
charge before being brought before a judge” (Amnesty International 1993,
n.p.).
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18 Diplock courts were created in response to a report submitted to the UK

parliament in December 1972 by Lord Diplock. The report addressed the
problem of Irish Republicanism via a strategy known as criminalization,
in which the state eliminated the legal distinction between political vio-
lence and normal crime, thus ensuring that political prisoners were treated
as common criminals. Diplock courts were formally instituted in Northern
Ireland on 8 August 1973 during The Troubles. Diplock courts effectively
abolished the right to trial by jury for what were called “scheduled offenc-
es” with only a judge presiding over the court. Despite being abolished in
2007, both Brian Shrivers and Colin Duffy (accused of the murder of two
British soldiers during an IRA gun attack on the Massereene army base in
Northern Ireland in 2009) were tried in a Diplock court in January 2012.
The second part of Bobby Sands’s 1981 trilogy was titled Diplock Court
(the other two being The Crime of Castlereagh and The Torture Mill –
H-Block). Sands was convicted of possession of an unlicensed gun and of
membership in an organization deemed illegal and was sentenced to four-
teen years by a Diplock court, ultimately leading to the infamous Irish
Hunger Strikes of 1981 that saw ten IRA members die protesting the crimi-
nalization policy of the UK government.
19 McDonnell and Reid aver that “One of the most politically significant the-
atrical interventions came from within the H Blocks in works created by
IRA/Republican prisoners of war, which saw the uneven evolution of per-
formance forms, from the early ‘commemorations,’ through the develop-
ment of pageant dramas in the 1980s, to the work of the mid-nineties. This
process culminated in the production The Crime at Castlereagh [sic], a re-
markable piece of political physical theatre, directed by Tom Magill, and
based on Bobby Sands’s epic trilogy comprising The Crime at Castlereagh,
Diplock Court, and Torture Mill – H Block. The IRA’s H Block theatres were
part of the broader development of a theory and praxis of cultural struggle
within the Republican movement in the period 1981–1997. They would
also provide important material for the work of community companies on
the outside” (2010, 96).
20 Magill discusses this phenomenon in an interview on dramatherapy and
social theatre, stating, “film is an extraordinary self-evaluation tool. People
watch their onscreen behaviour (either as actors in narratives, or as them-
selves in a documentary), and learn from this ‘objective’ third party van-
tage point in a way that cannot be replicated in any other medium. We call
this the ‘video playback loop’” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 112).
See also the Educational Shakespeare Company website: http://esc-film
.com/how/.
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WORKS CITED
Amnesty International. 1993. “United Kingdom (Northern Ireland): Alleged

Coerced Confessions during Ill-Treatment at Castlereagh Holding Centre of
Eight Youths from Ballymurphy, Northern Ireland.” Amnesty International.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR45/010/1993/en.
Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Boenisch, Peter M. 2006. “Aesthetic Art to Aesthetic Act: Theatre, Media,
Intermedial Performance.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance,
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Cartelli, Thomas. 2010. “Doing It Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the
Shakespeare Aftermath.” Shakespeare Studies 38: 26–36.
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New York: Palgrave.
Darroch, Michael. 2007. “Intermedial Theatre: ± Technology?” Canadian
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Fischlin, Daniel. 2004. “Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz
(1999).” Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of
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Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London:
Routledge.
Freire, Paolo. 2006. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos.
New York: Continuum.
The Gbakanda Foundation. 2011. http://gbakanda.wordpress.com/work/
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movies/?id=gnomeoandjuliet.htm.
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Magill, Tom, and Jennifer Marquis-Muradaz. 2009. “The Making of Mickey B, a
Modern Adaptation of Macbeth in a Maximum Security Prison in Northern
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McCabe, Pauline. 2011. “Annual Report (April 2010–March 2011).” The

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2012.
McDonnell, Bill. 2008. Theatres of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance and Liberation
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McDonnell, Bill, and Joe Reid. 2010. “To Speak Your Truth: Dialogues on
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castlereagh-1.
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– 2010. “Macbeth as Prison Film Noir: A Review of Mickey B.” Shakespeare
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Quarterly 62.3: 340–63.
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PART THREE
“All the Uses of This World”:

TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre,
and the Uses of Intermedia
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Slings & Arrows:

An Intermediated Shakespearean
Adaptation
Kim F edder son and J. Mic h a el R ic h ar dso n
Slings & Arrows, a three-season television series produced in Canada

between 2003 and 2007, sets itself the unfashionable task of revivifying
the Shakespearean corpus – the plays, poems, and the evolving theat-
rical, literary, and critical traditions attendant on them – and acquaint-
ing or reacquainting contemporary audiences with what it pointedly
regards as the “timeless” pleasures of Shakespeare’s art. A popular
and critical success, it is a consistently bardolatrous adaptation of

Shakespeare, deriving many of its plots, characters, conventions, and
themes from the plays and the backstage traditions informing their pro-
duction. Not surprisingly, much of its considerable comic effect de-
pends upon a passing familiarity with the plays and the histories of
their performance. Audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare, however,
are through its three seasons provided a better than Coles Notes primer
on the Bard’s greatest hits, especially as they were read in Canadian
high schools and universities, and as they were performed in regional
festivals, during the 1960s and 1970s. This romantic reconstruction of a
particular form of Canadian Shakespeare is critically interesting, as it
affords us an opportunity to examine how the carefully contrived pas-
toral space that the series constructs, and within which it situates itself,
all but insulates it from the more radical winds of contemporary criti-
cism and performance. By looking at what this remediated idyll in-
cludes (the Shakespeare of Frye and the Stratford Festival) and excludes
(Shakespeare as “the consummate dead white male” [Royster 1998,
62]), we can learn something about its approach to Shakespearean ad-
aptation. Slings & Arrows is also pedagogically useful: its redeployment
of Shakespearean conventions within a contemporary setting and me-
dium, and its often metatheatrical use of these conventions in its own
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 206 Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson
construction, foregrounds them, making them more readily apprehen-

sible by those for whom they are unfamiliar. In this respect, it can assist
us in teaching the plays themselves. It is these two aspects of Slings &
Arrows – its approach to adaptation and its remediation of a particular
conception of the Shakespearean corpus – that we will focus on.
Deliberately situating itself in that ambiguous space between sources
and adaptations – where previous authors, here Shakespeare, meet new
authors (Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney); where previ-
ous texts (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth,
and King Lear) commingle and propagate with new texts and media
(workplace sit com, soap opera, episodic melodrama, Broadway musi-
cal); and where previous contexts (the early modern England of
Shakespeare’s Globe) meet new contexts (a fictionalized version of
Ontario’s Stratford Shakespearean Festival circa 2000) – Slings & Arrows
creates an intricate little world filled with Shakespeare-inflected charac-
ters, motifs, conventions, and genres, styled inconclusively by one of its
writers as “dramedy or commerama” (McKinney, quoted in Smith
2007). In its combining high cultural forms with popular ones, and its
remediating sonnets, songs, play texts, workshops, and performances
in televisual form, Slings & Arrows reveals its affiliation with other re-
mediated Shakespeares (e.g., Shakespeare in Love, Luhrmann’s William
Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet, McKellen’s Richard III, and many other cin-
ematic adaptations over the last two decades). Unlike the first genera-
tion of intermedial artists, who frequently used new media and
intermedia to challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, the creators
of Slings & Arrows do not take issue with the canons of traditional
Western art, or their institutionalization or commercialization. With the
acknowledged assistance of the Government of Canada, the Canadian
Cable Industry, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the
Toronto Film and Television Office, the HSDC Bank Canada, and oth-
ers, the creators of Slings & Arrows have produced a commodity in-
tended for an international marketplace, within which they hope
– given the box office appeal of remediated Shakespeare projects – the
cultural capital of the Shakespeare brand still has currency. Their proj-
ect is essentially conservative, both in intention and in design. Resisting
the impetus to bash the Bard, “to decolonize and re-interrogate the
Shakespearean text” (Fortier 2002, 339), Slings & Arrows seems set upon
restoring the value of Shakespearean currency, a value that, in their
rather old-fashioned view, has been worn away by centuries of tired
repetition in small theatres and festivals around the world, and by
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Adaptation 207
contrived attempts, alternately pandering to popular tastes or current

theatrical fashions, to make the Bard relevant to contemporary
audiences.
In his “Statement on Intermedia,” Dick Higgins, taking characteristic
issue with the enthusiasm for the high cultural art that informs much of
Slings & Arrows, makes a passing reference to Hamlet’s “To be or not to
be” soliloquy: “we do not ask any more to speak magnificently of tak-
ing arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done” (1966). Slings
& Arrows, of course, takes both its title and its restorative project from
the very same speech. Over three seasons, the protagonist, Geoffrey
Tennant, confronts various “sea[s] of troubles” – business managers
who hate Shakespeare, complacent prima donnas, bored and distracted
audiences, burnt-out artistic directors, incompetent Hollywood actors,
self-serving egomaniacal directors, toadying critics, corporate merce-
naries, self-seeking government bureaucrats – which stand in the way
of producing Shakespeare’s plays in what Geoffrey would regard as a
“truthful” way. Slings & Arrows embraces a romantic liberal humanist
conception of theatre, replete with the customary essentialist and uni-
versalist notions of the power of drama: the “truths” in the plays ex-
press “the ineffable tragedy of the human spirit that still resonates even
today”; and, however remediated, they can make one “believe that love
can be rekindled, that regimes could be toppled by the simple act of
telling a story truthfully”(“Geoffrey Returns” 1.2). The refiguring of the
Shakespearean corpus we encounter does not appear overly concerned
with the ways in which this tradition has been used to buttress prevail-
ing Eurocentric social, political, and cultural conventions; indeed, it al-
most normalizes them. Certainly, there are indications within of an
awareness of contemporary critiques of Shakespeare’s works as time-
bound negotiations with prevailing early modern understandings of
race, class, gender, and various ideological purposes. As we shall see,
these concerns do not significantly trouble its genial reconstruction and
recontextualization of Shakespearean narratives.
Like other mock-heroic comedies before it – think Stephen Leacock’s
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town – the comic vision of Slings & Arrows’
well-mannered satire is only made possible by a narrowing of focus. By
limiting centre stage to the internecine struggles and intrigues, both
professional and personal, of the actors, directors, and backstage per-
sonnel of New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, larger, more serious
threats to the reanimation of the Shakespearean corpus – e.g., accusa-
tions of its complicity with hegemonic conceptions of race, nation, and
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gender – are left largely in the wings. The plays and parts of plays se-
lected for staging reinforce the comfortable provincialism of Slings &
Arrows. Throughout the three-season run, we are given glimpses of
productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the traditional thematics of which would be
familiar to anyone who came to know Shakespeare in Canadian high
schools or universities of the 1960s or 1970s. Plays more likely to en-
gage with issues related to current cultural politics, such as Othello, The
Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, are kept safely off screen, or
when referenced, as The Tempest is in the first episode of the first season,
are often undercut. In a telling irony, Geoffrey Tennant’s production of
The Tempest is undone by a power failure before getting to act 1, scene 2
– long before the spectres of the unassimilatable others begin to trouble
Prospero’s plans.
Over the course of its three-season run, the show nests a series of
mini-productions and adaptations of three of the major tragedies:
Hamlet, the tragedy in politics and love of a young man, for the first
season; Macbeth, the tragedy in political and marital life of a middle-
aged man, for the second season; and King Lear, the tragedy in politi-
cal and family life of an old man, for the third season. Each of these
tragedies is counterpointed by lighter, sometimes comic, sometimes
Shakespearean, mini-narratives or allusions that keep us pointed to-
wards the series’ ultimate comic resolution – A Midsummer Night’s
Dream in season 1, a comically resolved Romeo and Juliet motif in season
2, and a musical entitled East Hastings in season 3. The tragedies fore-
ground the threats to the happy resolution intimated by the comedic
counterpoints, but in this romance, comedy ultimately prevails. Indeed,
the overall story arc for Shakespeare as a cultural institution is rather
like the King Lear narrative’s being given a spin in the direction of ro-
mantic comedy. Like the imperious old king who does not relinquish
his sense of entitlement despite creating space for a younger genera-
tion, Shakespeare the cultural icon is ill-treated by those persons and
institutions who should be respecting and honouring his achievement.
Lear is stripped of his retinue of one hundred knights and cast out of
the homes of his daughters Goneril and Regan, while in Slings & Arrows,
Shakespeare is stripped of his majesty and high seriousness, sincere
and probing engagement of his texts being replaced by empty spec-
tacle and technological gimmickry, first by the burned-out artistic di-
rector Oliver Welles and then more forcefully by the postmodern
poseur Darren Nichols with his complete disregard for the text and
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the traditions of interpretation and performance based on it. In this

environment, in which the burned out and the disrespectful are aided
and abetted by the business manager, Richard Smith-Jones, Geoffrey
Tennant, the loyal servant to the Shakespearean estate, labours mightily
to restore Shakespeare to his rightful position: in the first season, by fir-
ing Darren Nichols from Hamlet and directing it himself; in the second
season, by challenging Henry Breedlove, the overconfidant thespian
playing Macbeth, not merely to repeat the performances on which his
reputation has been built but to do something new and “true”; and, in
the third season, by placing himself in the service of Charles Kingman
in a final production of King Lear. When Richard Smith-Jones learns
that Kingman is dying, he cancels the show. Driven from New Burbage
and left in an artistic desert that offers no official place to mount his
production, Geoffrey feels compelled, because of his sense of service
and obligation both to Shakespeare and to Kingman, to seek refuge in
the basement of a church (the show’s equivalent to the hovel that shel-
ters Lear from the storm) and to stage the play there. Learning of his
deceit, Smith-Jones fires him. Shakespeare as served by Geoffrey
Tennant is expelled from New Burbage (which dishonourably retains
“Shakespeare Festival” in its name, of course) but does not die like the
broken King Lear. Rather, as in a romantic comedy, Shakespeare is re-
stored. New Burbage may be lost to Shakespeare but he finds a new
kingdom elsewhere, in Montreal, as Geoffrey, now fully restored both
as a man and as a theatre professional, prepares to move there and es-
tablish a new theatre that will embody his vision of Shakespeare.
As the series begins, the New Burbage Shakespearean Festival has
passed its glory days, which culminated in, and were represented by, its
“definitive” two-and-a-half-performance production of Hamlet. In the
ensuing seven years, Oliver Welles, artistic director of the Festival, has
grown world-weary, old, tired, and complacent, as have his produc-
tions. They used to challenge an audience, engage them imaginatively
and intellectually, but are now, in the words an irksome critic, “comfort-
able – like an old boot” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). Oliver has tired of the
interminable quarrels with Richard Smith-Jones, the Festival’s chief
administrator, a bungling philistine, who doesn’t like Shakespeare, or
actors, and whose sole preoccupations are commercial: bums in seats.
Oliver is very much aware of and regretful about the compromises he
has made, which leads him to assess his life and career as a failure, al-
beit with a few outstanding moments such as his Hamlet, in which
Geoffrey Tennant played the lead. Following the opening night party
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for his lacklustre “tenth Dream,” he passes out in the middle of the road
and is dispatched by a truck carrying “Canada’s Best Hams.” He re-
turns, however, like the ghost of Hamlet Sr, to haunt, torment, and
guide his metaphorical son, Geoffrey Tennant.
Following the nervous breakdown he suffered midway through the
third performance of his and Oliver’s Hamlet, Geoffrey had left New
Burbage and eventually established his own company, Theatre sans
Argent (theatre without money). In contrast to Oliver’s Burbage, very
much a “Theatre avec Argent,” which has become good at making
money but has become enervated artistically, Geoffrey’s Theatre sans
Argent maintains its artistic integrity but can’t pay the rent or the utili-
ties. Eventually, the Theatre sans Argent is shut down, and following
Oliver’s death, Geoffrey, still a damaged soul and unable to perform,
returns to New Burbage as its new artistic director, where he begins a
collaboration and contestation with the ghost of Oliver. Their labour in
service to the Shakespearean corpus is their central concern. The con-
cept of service to the Shakespearean corpus is, indeed, key to the show’s
development over its three seasons. There was a considerable falling off
from this service, presumably occurring gradually over the intervening
seven years, and the show’s three seasons exemplify a return to it.
Oliver and Geoffrey in Service to “The Tradition”
Oliver had once been capable of producing works of theatrical genius

that challenged and gripped an audience, and he gets, post mortem, a
chance to do so again, to return to the proper service of Shakespeare.
In 1.1 (“Oliver’s Dream”) this service is represented intermedially by a
photograph of Oliver Welles, Geoffrey Tennant, and Ellen Fanshawe
(the company’s lead actress and Geoffrey’s love interest throughout the
series) kissing Yorick’s skull, a metonymic proxy not just for the play
Hamlet but also for its author and the traditions evolving from his work.
One might want to argue that since it is a skull they are kissing in ado-
ration, they are simply dedicating themselves to something dead, as
Darren Nichols, Geoffrey’s directorial rival, says when he picks up the
script for Hamlet and says, “Let’s read this corpse” (“Madness in Great
Ones” 1.3). But more important for the show, the skull represents not so
much death as the persistence of something after death: Oliver wants
his skull to be preserved for the company to use as Yorick’s skull, one
expression of his drive for continued influence after his passing. He can
exercise this influence only through Geoffrey, to whom he (as ghost)
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becomes a mentor, a surrogate father, a gadfly, and eventually a col-

laborator. It gradually becomes clear that the contestation between
Geoffrey and Oliver, initially suggesting a form of anxiety of influence,
is at its core an expression of the theme of succession, the generational
struggle between two different versions of essentially the same theatri-
cal tradition.
Both Geoffrey and Oliver are in service to a tradition in which
Shakespeare is regarded as the high point in Western drama, the touch-
stone by which all other dramatists are tested. In this tradition, to say
that something is “Shakespearean” is to say that it embodies or express-
es something profound, permanent, supremely important, and well-
nigh universal in “the human spirit,” and that a “truthful” production
of his plays in any medium will touch an audience deeply, putting them
in contact with feelings, experiences, and ideas that have been buried
and overwritten by the routines of our everyday life. Although some
audiences may prefer staged productions that retain Elizabethan set-
tings and costumes, there is nothing in the tradition itself that mandates
that version of fidelity to the text or the initial historical circumstances
of its dramaturgy. It acknowledges that there is more than one way to
get at the truth of Shakespeare, and some of the productions that

Geoffrey mounts in the series have a vaguely Renaissance look to them,
while others, most notably his Macbeth, have a modernized setting.
The tradition Geoffrey and Oliver both serve is essentially that also
served by Ian McKellen, whether he goes for Elizabethan costuming
and settings, for minimalist settings and costumes as in his RSC Macbeth,
or for more modernized ones as in his film version of Richard III, and
can be illuminated by some of McKellen’s commentaries on what he
was striving for. In his “Introduction” to the screenplay for Richard III,
he notes that moving the play to the screen is an act of translation, and
we would add that since translation involves primarily the change
from one system of representation to another, moving a play from the
page to the stage or any other medium is also a form of translation. For
McKellen, the important thing about translation is that it must convey
the underlying reality of the original even if the surface appearance is
radically different:
Translation is an inexact art, carrying responsibilities to respect the au-

thor’s ends, even as you willfully tamper with the means. I hadn’t asked
for Shakespeare’s permission to fashion a film from his play. The least I
could do was, change by change, cut by cut, ask myself whether he would
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have approved … Not having him present to consult, I think of his having
just left the rehearsal room, soon to return with the gentle query I’ve some-
times heard from living playwrights: “What the hell do you think you’re
doing to my play?” … [I] had to make sure that Shakespeare did not be-
come overwhelmed and that, however it was decorated, the film would
remain rooted in his words and intentions as I understood them. (McKellen
1996, 15, 27)
Here, fidelity is an avowed motive, but it is understood that there are

many ways in which fidelity can be achieved. For instance, productions
such as the Geoffrey-Oliver Macbeth, that use a new historical setting
for a play originally set elsewhere, expect that new setting to provide a
stabilizing context and hope that the intended audience will read the
setting in essentially the same way. Historical settings are chosen with
a presumption about the audience’s response to them: the intended au-
dience is expected to attach particular significances, knowable in ad-
vance, to character types, clothing, gestures, manners, etc. For example,
Ian McKellen’s Richard III, which posits an imaginary fascist takeover
of Britain, is set in the 1930s because, as McKellen explains, “the 30s
were … a decade of tyranny throughout Europe, the most recent time

when a dictatorship like Richard III’s might have overtaken the United
Kingdom, as it had done Germany, Italy, Spain, and the empire of the
Soviet Union” (1996, 13). Clearly, the reading of this Richard III depends
upon readers sharing a particular understanding of that part of the his-
tory of the 1930s. On the other hand, McKellen’s Macbeth, directed by
Trevor Nunn, both the RSC stage version and the film later made of that
production, is noteworthy for starkness and simplicity in the areas of
sets and costumes, the intention being to ensure, in McKellen’s words,
that “nothing got in the way of Shakespeare’s words and the impact
they had on the audience” (1978a). McKellen claims that this film ver-
sion accomplishes, even more effectively than previous elaborately
staged versions, what Shakespeare himself would have wished, given
that his original theatre was small enough that the actors could be
easily seen, used simple scenery, had no artificial lighting effects, and
employed workaday costumes, leaving only actors and language
(McKellen 1978b). McKellen says Shakespeare can be “overdesigned,”
and that this is the kind of “betrayal” that happens when Shakespeare
is put into a very large theatre in which the audience is too far away to
see the actors well and thus needs the spectacle of costume, set design,
and lighting effects (1978b). For him and for Nunn, an overly elaborate
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production that exploits spectacle, costumes, and scenery can seriously

distract the audience from what he sees as the core of Shakespeare –
language and characters. By attending properly to the words and the
characters, says McKellen, “you can make an audience … see what is
not just modern but eternal in these characters” (1978b). He even pre-
fers productions that do not attempt to limit the characters to a specific
historical period, and for him the chief strength of his Macbeth is what
he calls its “emptiness” – its refusal to set itself in medieval Scotland, or
indeed any readily recognizable time and place – because this means
that “any audience, watching it anywhere in the world can relate it to
their experience of politics” (1978b). Even though the mode of transla-
tion for Macbeth is quite different from that for Richard III, the justifica-
tion for it, as presented by McKellen, is quite similar in that it focuses
on the ability of the audience to grasp what McKellen sees as the es-
sence of the play and to relate to it immediately. As in his Macbeth, he is
not interested in the production’s being historically accurate, because
“Shakespeare is writing about people with particular natures,” which
in certain important respects transcend the particularities of nationality
and era (1978b). Thus the McKellen Macbeth and Richard III are ani-
mated by the same philosophy of production, but this philosophy

does not mandate either historical verisimilitude or bare stage simplic-
ity. What it does mandate is sensitivity to the language and characters,
a knowledge of how to use the available means of production to em-
power and support high-quality acting (not to overwhelm acting and
script with unnecessary spectacle), and an awareness of the capabili-
ties and needs of the audience. Verisimilitude if necessary, but not nec-
essarily verisimilitude. “Macbeth belongs to the people who are doing
it at this particular time. Even though we are aware of past traditions,
we don’t want necessarily to repeat them, but to make it very much
our own” (1978b).
McKellen’s comments capture the attitude and approach to Shake-
spearean traditions and obligations that Geoffrey and Oliver share.
Before his death, Oliver, in confessing his falling off from his obliga-
tions to this tradition, admits of his tenth Midsummer Night’s Dream
that “there isn’t a moment’s truth” in it (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). All the
discussions and arguments about the staging – whether they be ex-
changes between Geoffrey and Oliver, Geoffrey and the actors he is
directing, Geoffrey and Darren Nichols, or Geoffrey and Richard
Smith-Jones – have to do with getting the “correct” reading of a play, a
speech, a line, or a word and communicating that to the audience in
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the best way possible, the way that will be “truest” to this conception
of Shakespeare.
Oliver Welles and Geoffrey Tennant are similar in many ways be-
cause they exemplify versions of the same tradition of interpreting and
staging Shakespeare. But they also differ in crucial ways, ways that are
to a large extent generational. While the two men share the same artistic
values, Geoffrey is much younger and lacks experience as an artistic
director, a fact that some actors with different ideas about the plays
they are in try to exploit in order to resist his direction. As a young,
creative, and energetic man, not yet jaundiced by years of conflict and
compromise with those who see New Burbage as essentially a business
enterprise, Geoffrey is uncompromising, artistically demanding, ideal-
istic, and largely indifferent to the material conditions of theatrical
production, the demands of commerce, and other realities that might
interfere with the unfettered expression of his aesthetic vision. Although
he has enormous enthusiasm and love for Shakespeare, he has much
to learn about bringing a “truthful” vision of a play to fruition on the
stage. With Oliver’s haunting assistance over the three seasons of the
show, Geoffrey learns how to deal with recalcitrant or inadequate ac-
tors (for Hamlet); with actors who, having achieved a measure of re-
nown, have made it their mission to serve themselves rather than
Shakespeare and resist all direction (Henry Breedlove, the actor hired
to play Macbeth); with his own limitations as a reader and stager of
Shakespeare (and hence the need to seek the guidance of his predeces-
sors both via negotiating a reading of Macbeth with Oliver’s ghost and
taking account of the eight banker’s boxes full of notes that Oliver had
left for the play); and with those who may be imperious but whose
knowledge of and dedication to both Shakespeare and humanity re-
quire that Geoffrey serve them as much as direct them.
Geoffrey’s Hamlet
The first episode of the second season opens with the final performance
of the Hamlet that occupies the bulk of the first season and begins with
a schoolteacher, the type of browbeating teacher who contributes to the
death of Shakespeare as a cultural force, bringing a class to see the play.
He tells his class that it is one of the greatest plays ever written, so they
must “shut up and listen,” sit with their hands in their laps, and stare at
the stage until it’s over. He does not tell them to get emotionally in-
volved with the story or characters, to try to relate the play to their own
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lives, or to understand something of why the play is great. Interestingly,

these instructions and what they lack make an interesting parallel to
Gertrude’s uninvolved watching and reporting of Ophelia’s death and
Geoffrey’s finally finding a way to get Ellen to play the speech the way
he thinks it should be played, which comes up a few minutes later
in the episode. The teacher and students do not lift a finger to help
Shakespeare any more than Gertrude does to help Ophelia, and are
thus complicit in Shakespeare’s gradual demise. Backstage and during
intermission of this final performance of Hamlet, Geoffrey is still pro-
viding notes to the actors, still striving to perfect the performance, to
make it embody the truth of the play as he sees it. We stress “as he sees
it” because the show does not see the “truth” of an individual play as
being reducible to a single definitive reading, but as something open to
discussion, compromise, and rethinking, which becomes clear in the
arguments Geoffrey and Oliver have in season 2 about how to read and
stage Macbeth. The representation of these notes moves, as do teachers,
from the simple to the complex, and typify what Geoffrey has so far
learned about eliciting the performance he wants out of the actors.
First, he talks with the actors playing the guards in the opening scene,
telling them that the audience has to see and feel the cold up there in
the battlements. One of the actors immediately translates that into a
formulaic way of signifying cold on stage: stamp your feet. That is fol-
lowed by the much more complex discussion with Ellen of Gertrude’s
description of Ophelia’s death. Geoffrey starts with the observation
that Gertrude describes the death in great detail, and then proceeds
(like a teacher trying to elicit ideas out of a student) with the question
of why Gertrude does this. Ellen is reluctant to discuss the speech, since
it is the last performance of the play, but says Gertrude saw a young girl
drown and that kind of thing sticks with you, the simplest most super-
ficial kind of answer. Pressing on, Geoffrey asks her why Gertrude did
not try to save Ophelia, since she was on the scene and noted all the
details. Ellen in frustration says maybe she did not want to ruin her
dress. Geoffrey continues with more leading questions, just the way
one does in a classroom when trying to lead the students gradually to a
certain interpretation, or range of interpretations, rather than “giving
them the answer” right away. Ellen suggests that Gertrude thinks that
Ophelia was better off dead, since she was suffering. To which Geoffrey
says, “Let’s take this a little bit further,” and asks what if Ophelia didn’t
drown by accident, what if she killed herself. To which Ellen says that
Gertrude said Ophelia was mad and incapable of making rational
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judgments. Geoffrey then asks what if Gertrude were lying. He stresses

the fact that Gertrude watches Ophelia drowning and does nothing to
help her and wants to explore, with the actress, why she does this and
what psychological effect it has on Gertrude herself. The conclusion
reached is that Gertrude does believe Ophelia was better off dead; but
she also feels responsible for Ophelia’s madness and now for her death
too, and so, as a final act of mercy, she lies about her death (saying it
was an accident not a suicide) so Ophelia can be buried in consecrated
ground. Geoffrey says that since this is the last performance, it is Ellen’s
“last chance to get it right.” Like a teacher, he does have a specific con-
clusion to which he wishes to lead the student, but has learned that
simply announcing that conclusion is less effective than making it ap-
pear that the student has arrived at that conclusion herself, or demon-
strating a train of thought that leads to that conclusion. We return to the
stage and get Ellen’s new and superior rendition of the speech. The
audience is suddenly transfixed, including the students, who had ear-
lier been throwing pennies at the actors. It is clear that they now feel
they are getting something that is true, real, and timeless. Geoffrey
smiles in the wings. The browbeating schoolteacher is now asleep,
missing the very thing towards which he should have been leading his
students. These scenes show Geoffrey’s skill to date in overcoming
tired repetition, in restoring the value of Shakespearean currency.
Geoffrey’s Collaboration with Oliver on Macbeth
These scenes also show a further aspect of the tradition that Geoffrey
and Oliver serve, the notion that dramatic art is essentially a transfor-
mative experience. Indeed, at the wrapping up cast party for Hamlet,
Geoffrey announces that the next season will include Macbeth, which is
famous for being very difficult to stage effectively as well as for being a
“cursed” play. Geoffrey says in anticipation of this production that
“there will be struggle, there will be sacrifice, there will be tears, there
will be the occasional fist fight, and in the end there will be transforma-
tion” (“Season’s End” 2.1), and the series makes it clear that this trans-
formation is not in the actors alone, but is also in audiences who are
privileged to be part of a “truthful” production, and in people who
learn how to read Shakespeare attentively and sensitively rather than
merely mechanically. But, what Geoffrey probably did not anticipate,
transformation also occurs in him and in his relationship with Oliver’s
ghost. Oliver can be seen as an overbearing teacher, with Geoffrey as
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initially a reluctant student, who has to be led, as Ellen was in the ex-
ample we cited above, to a greater understanding of his role. When di-
recting Hamlet, Geoffrey relies largely on his own skills and resources as
he learns how to get his own way, to, like Hamlet, “set things right,” or
to his sense of right, and this makes him somewhat uncompromising,
as in his statement cited above that the last performance of the play was
Ellen’s last chance to get the speech “right” as opposed to performing it
in a better, more complex and nuanced way than she had previously
been doing. But when directing Macbeth in season 2, he gets stuck for
ideas and learns that he can’t do everything by himself, that his own
way may not in fact be the best way, that his readings are not necessar-
ily “right,” and that he needs to engage creatively with predecessors by
studying Oliver’s notes and collaborating with his spirit. He learns that
he must take account of and compromise with Oliver’s reading to some
extent while still producing one that is his own; as McKellen puts it,
“Even though we are aware of past traditions, we don’t want necessar-
ily to repeat them, but to make it very much our own.” In this Macbeth-
like struggle for control over the theatrical kingdom, for the ability to
assert one’s will as the “King,” Geoffrey at first did not even want to
look at Oliver’s eight boxes of notes for the play, and indeed mocked
and scorned him, but when he is at a dead end for ideas and does take
a look, he finds that many aspects of Oliver’s work were indeed sound
(e.g., that adding a thrust to the stage will “erase the comfort barrier
created by the proscenium arch” by creating the illusion that the audi-
ence is “complicit in the intrigue, and will move the action into the
audience” [“Fallow Time” 2.2]). But he does not buy into Oliver’s vehe-
ment insistence that Banquo’s ghost must be physically present on
stage and visible to the audience, and instead goes with an empty chair.
Geoffrey, very much attuned to the psychosexual elements in the
play, wants to have Lady Macbeth unclothe and wash the blood off
Macbeth as he returns from battle. Oliver and the cast members, espe-
cially Henry Breedlove, the ironically named actor cast to play the bar-
ren King Macbeth, see this as gratuitous nudity and resist this reading.
Breedlove had previously performed Macbeth to critical acclaim and
sees no need to change anything from his earlier performances, no need
to re-examine the play or his character. He embodies a form of self-love
that does not really breed, that is infertile, impotent, and non re-creative.
We get from him mechanically reproduced art, exactly the same perfor-
mance repeated over and over (until the last syllable of recorded time
as it were), regardless of changing contexts. Like Oliver, he wants to see
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Macbeth as only a monster, and regards the bathing scene, which is part
of Geoffrey’s idea of humanizing Macbeth, as too radical and, of course,
massively disruptive to how he, Breedlove, wants to present the play
and the character. Interestingly, an actor friend of Breedlove’s called
Brian, whom Geoffrey refused to employ for the current season after he
had ignored his notes for his role as Claudius in the preceding season’s
Hamlet, sees considerable merit in the idea and encourages Geoffrey to
stick to his guns, and the scene is eventually staged that way. A struggle
with the past has become a creative collaboration with it. In order to
deal with Henry Breedlove’s reluctance to take chances and embrace
change, Geoffrey learns that tackling him head on, as he had with ac-
tors in season 1, produces no useful results: Breedlove ignores him.
Geoffrey fires him, but is forced to rehire him because the understudy
is not really up to the task. In order to jolt Breedlove out of his self-
serving inertia, Geoffrey must trick him, working in collusion with the
other actors, by changing blocking and entrances, etc., without telling
Breedlove, thus making him find his own way to cope on stage – in ef-
fect turning a well-rehearsed play into a kind of improvisation of itself.
Throughout the first two seasons, Geoffrey (and the viewer) gets a
sense that he is the only one, at least among the living, who is truly
dedicated to Shakespeare, a sense that produces a kind of egotism in
Geoffrey, a sense of privilege in the Shakespeare business, the very kind
of thing which, if left unchecked, could ultimately turn him into a ver-
sion of Oliver Welles.
Geoffrey’s Serving Charles Kingman’s Lear
In the third season, Geoffrey as director of King Lear learns that he must
move to the side and, like Kent in the play, serve the real king. When he
encounters Charles Kingman, he finds himself working with an imperi-
ous and dying old man, whose theatrical career has had much more
acclaim and renown than that of Henry Breedlove, but who is, nonethe-
less, committed wholeheartedly to Shakespeare, and to serving human-
ity (a possible implication of his surname) not his own ego. He is
imperious in attitude because he is dying and it is important to him to
reach the “truth” of King Lear, even if the effort kills him. Geoffrey
learns humility: he has found someone whose knowledge of and dedi-
cation to Shakespeare is much greater than his own, is indeed all con-
suming. The other actors, although they find Kingman to be insufferable
on occasion, do, again like Kent in the play, find that within him which
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they would “fain call master” and serve. To serve Kingman is, in effect,
to serve Shakespeare. So, when Richard Smith-Jones threatens to fire
anyone involved with Geoffrey and this play, the cast willingly aban-
dons Richard and joins Geoffrey and Kingman to mount a techno-
logically simple but artistically powerful performance of the play in a
church basement. Geoffrey’s humble, loving, and faithful service to
Kingman and Shakespeare (purged of the risk of excessive ego that
could have been brought on by his successes to date) is rewarded –
Geoffrey is also now able to return to the stage after a nearly ten-year
absence, and does so as Kent, a choice of character that acknowledges
that, as Brian says in season 2, “The play’s the thing. It’s bigger than any
one actor. You know that. I know you do. You must stage the play the
way you see it” (“Steeped in Blood” 2.5). It is fitting that the series end
here, as Oliver’s work in educating Geoffrey is done.
Geoffrey and Smith-Jones
Geoffrey Tennant’s story arc over the three seasons of Slings & Arrows is
that of a bildungsroman, as Geoffrey learns from his experiences, as
well as from Oliver and Kingman. Richard Smith-Jones’s story arc is, in
contrast, quite different. Despite numerous opportunities, Richard fails
to learn from art, fails to learn about art, and fails to learn that, as a busi-
ness manager in a Shakespeare festival, he is in service to art. He sees
himself as only in service to commerce, and his approach to staging
Shakespeare is to do a strictly materialist cost-benefit analysis. As a
business manager he sees his function as limited to keeping New
Burbage viable as a business, “an arts-skewed commercial venture” as
a representative of a major corporate sponsor describes it (“Oliver’s
Dream” 1.1). Hence, if it means getting more corporate or government
money, he will ignore theatrical traditions like providing complimen-
tary tickets to long-serving actors. At first he seems to have cordial
enough relations with May Silverstone, an elderly board member who
represents the idealized form of corporate presence that supports, with-
out interfering with, the artistic goals of New Burbage. But she is
pushed aside by Richard’s sometime girlfriend, Holly Day, a corporate
mercenary who represents the sponsor Cosmopolitan Lenstrex, who
increases the narrowing of Richard’s gaze to the commercial, and who
has a scheme to turn New Burbage into a Shakespeare theme park. The
theme park idea is one that sees Shakespeare as, at best, a commodity
or a “brand” to be exploited for short-term gain rather than as a body of
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work that, if engaged with properly, has the power to humanize. When
Oliver’s artistically sound plan for a thrust stage for Macbeth in season
2 requires a huge expense, plus the removal of fifty or more seats,
Richard balks, but eventually gives in, only because the festival is com-
mitted to Oliver’s Macbeth (exploiting Oliver’s reputation for further
profit), and it requires the thrust. In season 2, the quest to bring in
younger audiences and more money, coupled with an offer of help for
his own advancement in the company if he gets a Conrad Black–like
corporate mogul on the board so that New Burbage can be run as a
proper business, leads Richard to the disastrous plan of engaging the
public relations firm Frog Hammer to rebrand New Burbage by erect-
ing billboards that cruelly and tastelessly mock its current subscribers
as sick old people on life support. For Richard and for his friends and
acquaintances in the corporate world, the profit motive severs all other
ties, obligations, and responsibilities. He has no interest in the real busi-
ness of New Burbage, staging Shakespeare – indeed he doesn’t even
like Shakespeare – and when it comes to things artistic, his real passion
is musical theatre. So, he unsuccessfully auditions for a part in a Gilbert
and Sullivan musical and ends up directing the vacuous musical East
Hastings in season 3.
Over the course of its own narrative arc, Slings & Arrows asks which
set of stories provides the best set of answers to the questions facing
the various individuals, including Richard Smith-Jones, who form the
communities that intersect within New Burbage. Not surprisingly, it
finds within the Shakespearean corpus a set of answers that it prefers to
the readily available alternatives. Thematized through a playing and
replaying of the “Tomorrow” speech from Macbeth, Slings & Arrows
finds within the Shakespearean corpus the narrative alternatives to the
meaningless world that Macbeth glimpses upon learning of his wife’s
death, and to the equally meaningless world of those not open to the
transformative powers of art. It rejects his conclusion that life is “a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” offering
in its stead the familiar, and often contested, notion of lives told by a
universal genius who wrote for all times and whose works contain one
of the greatest explorations of the human condition, whose words, if
properly listened to, can put us into contact with feelings, experiences,
and ideas that have been buried and overwritten by the routines of our
everyday life.
We first encounter the “Tomorrow” speech in season 1 when the
Vice-President for Customer Care of Cosmopolitan Lenstrex uses it in a
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thank you speech he delivers on the opening night of Oliver’s “tenth

Dream.” Reading awkwardly from prepared notes, he says, “I believe it
was the immortal Bard who said ‘life is a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Well, we at Cosmopolitan Lenstrex
disagree. Life, anyone’s life, regardless of their race …” (“Oliver’s
Dream” 1.1). The camera moves to Holly Day, who makes a dismissive
sound while rolling her eyes upwards and talks about matters like the
gift shop revenue with a smirking Richard, who is paying scant atten-
tion to the speech. We can vaguely hear the vice-president droning on
in the background. Sheer rhetorical ineptitude (his failure to grasp the
rhetorical requirements of a thank you speech) and intellectual obtuse-
ness (his failure to contextualize the speech and its concerns) confound
the speaker’s efforts to ingratiate himself to his audience by quoting
Shakespeare. He clearly does not realize that this is not the occasion to
be taking issue, especially in a superficial way, with Shakespeare – he is
after all receiving on his company’s behalf an award by an institution
whose function is to promote and celebrate Shakespeare, it’s a
Shakespeare festival. The underlying existential question raised by the
speech (“What is the meaning of life?”) and the reasons underlying the
inadequacy of Macbeth’s answer (“Life has no meaning”) are lost on

him. No one attends to his vacuous observation that life is full of mean-
ing, nor to the delusional idiocy that it is available to all, regardless of
one’s race. He is unintentionally implicated by Macbeth’s words: just
one of the “poor player[s]” that “strut and fret” and are then literally
“heard no more.” Few listen, and those that do, like his boss, Holly Day,
conclude it’s time to replace him.
Our second encounter with the speech occurs in 1.3 (“Madness in
Great Ones”). Upon his return to New Burbage, Geoffrey Tennant is
given the task of leading a corporate strategy workshop to a group of
marketers and an accountant. The overall comic arc of the series – in
which the personal needs and desires of the characters are generally
satisfied or fulfilled, and the enervation of theatre as art by the ascen-
dancy of commerce is countered, not by expelling commerce in a kind
of naive romanticism, but by enabling the enlarging of the perspective
and the self-definition of individuals – is very neatly encapsulated here.
Terry is an accountant, described by the others as “the numbers man.”
His sense of self, internalized and reflected back to him by his corporate
peers, has been circumscribed by his corporate role. The workshop that
Geoffrey conducts leads him not to finding a way to be a better accoun-
tant, but to finding a much more capacious sense of self and of life. With
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Geoffrey’s guidance, he finds through the text of the “Tomorrow”

speech a way of apprehending self and the world that had not occurred
to him before. By opening himself to the questions Macbeth opens up,
he gains the opportunity to engage the complex questions posed within
the speech and the complicated answers it provides to those questions.
In doing so, the “petty pace” of the routine moments, the unvarying
“tomorrows,” which when tallied constitute a life are punctuated by
moments of significance – moments like the one he has just experi-
enced. His sincere engagement with the text, not incidentally, makes
him a more interesting person, not only to himself, but also to others, as
one of marketers in the workshop starts to flirt with him. Here we can
see most clearly Slings & Arrows’ comfort with liberal humanist notions
of canonical art as a liberating force that creates the possibility of self-
transformation as opposed to seeing it as an instrument of oppression.
Our next encounter with the speech occurs in season 2, the season
dedicated to the main stage production of Macbeth. But we do not see
the speech performed by Henry Breedlove. In 2.2 (“Fallow Time”),
Geoffrey and Ellen go to an elementary school’s production of Macbeth,
in which, of course, the play is stripped to the bare essentials required
to tell the story and the language is modernized and scaled down. The
children’s version captures Lady Macbeth’s badgering her husband to
be a man by killing Duncan in his sleep; the play’s excessive amounts
of blood (which the actors at the Burbage talk about at some length); the
equivocal nature of the prophecies, etc. This little production gives us a
very truncated “Tomorrow” speech, in which Macbeth says: “Now
they tell me my wife is dead. I don’t understand life. It just keeps going
on and on with no purpose. I am so sad.” This contextualized version
of the speech exhibits a better grasp than the vice-president had.
Oliver’s ghost appears next to the child Macbeth and says to Geoffrey,
“Isn’t that poignant? This little boy captured the essence of Macbeth’s
despair with those few lines: ‘I don’t understand life. It just goes on and
on with no purpose.’” This scene also suggests that the drama teacher
for these small children is doing a more effective job of introducing her
students to the wonders and complexities of Shakespeare than did the
authoritarian teacher whose students threw pennies at the actors in 2.1
(“Season’s End”).
Our final encounter with the “Tomorrow” speech occurs at the end
the series, and returns us to Richard Smith-Jones. Here, in the closing
moment of the final episode (“The Promised End” 3.6), Anna, the
company’s associate administrative director, is forced to choreograph
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her own dismissal. Throughout the three seasons of Slings & Arrows,
Richard Smith-Jones’s character has been continually in play.
Awkwardly straddling the worlds of art and commerce, he is poten-
tially the villain of the piece, the one who will sacrifice art to commerce,
turning New Burbage into a Shakespearean theme park; or, alternative-
ly, he is a potential hero in a bildungsroman subplot, the one who will
put his financial skills in the service of theatre. At the outset of season 1,
he primarily focuses on the bottom line, prefers ABBA to Shakespeare,
and is susceptible to the charms of Holly Day, the corporate seductress.
Nonetheless, and despite the inevitable frustrations of managing tem-
peramental thespians, he appears genuinely committed to the New
Burbage Festival. In season 2, the tensions continue, but he is increas-
ingly drawn to the world of theatre, albeit musical theatre, which Slings
& Arrows, as evidence of its own high culture prejudices, regards as
artistically shallow, commercial, and populist entertainment. But it is
an art form nonetheless, and the easing of the constraints that a corpo-
rately contained selfhood has imposed on Richard echoes Terry the ac-
countant’s earlier encounter with the transformative power of art.
Richard’s participation in the production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS
Pinafore opens up the possibility of his rebranding himself, a theme that

is further developed in season 3 when he takes over the direction of the
teen musical East Hastings. While the musical is framed as a bloated
bathetic counterpoint to the sparse sublimity of the main company’s
production of King Lear, it is unclear until this final scene with Anna
where Richard Smith-Jones will finally land, and we learn in this scene
that he has squandered the regenerative opportunity that was offered
him: “You came so close, Richard, to becoming a human being. But you
lost your soul.” Echoing the “Tomorrow speech,” Anna tells him, “And
now you’re just a fool”; and he joins the ranks of those other fools
whose “yesterdays have lighted … the way to dusty death.”
The narrative of Richard Smith-Jones, unlike that of Geoffrey Tennant,
is a failed bildungsroman, a story of the man who fails to learn. As we
noted above, Slings & Arrows presents the narrative of Shakespeare as
an institution or icon as a form of romantic comedy. But Shakespearean
romantic comedy typically contains at least one character who remains
at odds with the values that prevail at the end of the play and who thus
is excluded from the concluding feasting and revelry. In Slings & Arrows,
Richard, a Malvolio-like figure, plays that role. As business manager for
the theatre company, Richard is, like Malvolio, in effect only a steward
and not part of the artistically privileged inner circle, regardless of his
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attempts to enter that charmed circle via the musical. Indeed, like
Malvolio’s yellow stockings and forced smile, the musical becomes a
measure of Richard’s distance from the centre that he simultaneously
envies, desires, and loathes. At the end of the series’ final episode,
Geoffrey and Ellen marry and plan to move to Montreal to continue art
in the tradition of the Theatre sans Argent, far away from the territory
(literal and metaphorical) of New Burbage; now that Geoffrey has re-
gained sexual as well as artistic potency, they may have the baby they
were planning ten years ago. The final scene before the credits is of cel-
ebration and feasting in the theatre bar, with Ellen in her wedding
gown performing the ritual tossing of the bridal bouquet, an ending
that is instinct with new beginnings, as in Shakespearean romantic
comedy. But in the very final image of Slings & Arrows, after the final
run of credits that many viewers may in fact not bother to watch, we see
the face of Richard Smith-Jones pressed up against the window of the
bar, looking in, but remaining outside, shut out and unassimilatable.
Geoffrey and Darren Nichols

The trajectories of Geoffrey’s and Richard’s narratives are diametrically

opposed. At the end of the series, the theatrical tradition that Geoffrey
represents has been expelled from New Burbage. The commercial bar-
barians have upstaged the artistic heirs to the throne. Yet, though
Richard Smith-Jones wins New Burbage, his victory is pyrrhic. His fail-
ure to learn from his experience leaves the kingdom with an animating
vision that reduces it to being simply another commodity in the enter-
tainment marketplace.
Significantly, the character of Darren Nichols, Geoffrey’s directorial
rival over the three seasons, is not implicated in either of these criss-
crossing bildungsromans. At the conclusion of the series, he is just as
he was at the outset – neither better nor worse in relation to the series’
implied standard of artistic value. Darren, while little more than a
comic foil for Geoffrey (the two have been competing throughout their
intersecting careers), provides the series with an opportunity to lam-
poon the contemporary theatrical avant-garde. In season 1, the com-
pany hires him to direct its Hamlet. In vivid contrast to the adoration of
the skull, Darren Nichols declares Shakespeare to be dead and irrele-
vant. In his first meeting with the cast, he disassociates himself from
the timorous bardolatry of “the common man”: “I don’t worship dead
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texts, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find interest in them. Let’s read this
corpse” (“Madness in Great Ones” 1.3). His subsequent direction un-
derscores the posturing, arrogant self-promotion of his apparent artis-
tic radicalism. If anything, it’s the same as the sold-out Oliver Welles’s
writ large and expensive. Where Oliver wanted some bleating anima-
tronic sheep for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Darren wants live horses
on stage and lavish pyrotechnics for his Hamlet. More interested in the-
atrical spectacle than the language of the playtext, Darren doesn’t even
register that the American movie star brought in to play the lead says
“angles and ministers of grace” rather than “angels.” In season 2, re-
cently returned from Germany, Darren takes on Romeo and Juliet. An
early adopter of whatever avant-garde and postmodern theatrical
practices hold sway in continental circles, he leads the cast through
various arid and strained exercises during rehearsal, ignoring the text
just as much as he had when directing Hamlet. In protest, the actors
playing Romeo and Juliet seek help from Geoffrey, and their engage-
ment with the text through him leads to their offstage passion as well
as to that on stage. In season 3, Darren abandons Shakespeare entirely
in favour of a banal pop musical, East Hastings, and he leads the vacu-
ous teenage cast through tortuous rehearsals until they mutiny and
replace him with the enthusiastic, but inept, Richard Smith-Jones.
Clearly something of straw man in the debate between traditional and
innovative theatre, there’s little that’s daring about Darren, and like
Richard, he is, despite his seeming radical ideas, attitudes, and appear-
ance, primarily concerned with money and status – nickels. The comic
treatment notwithstanding, Darren’s hypocrisy quietly points to the
curious alliance between postmodern cultural practices and capital-
ism. As Jameson and others have noted, critiques of logocentricism,
foundations, and the hierarchies of value dependent on them can have
a levelling effect, reducing all cultural objects to the status of commodi-
ties circulating, and competing for attention, within a global market-
place. There is little to suggest that Darren Nichols’s radical pretensions
are in any way aligned with a progressive politics that might have an
impact outside of the texts in which he takes interest. Thoroughly elit-
ist and self-promoting, Darren, we learn, values only that which serves
to advance Darren Nichols. In this respect, he and Smith-Jones are
fully aligned. It makes perfect sense that, as the series concludes,
Smith-Jones, now installed as the managing director, hires Darren
Nichols to be the new artistic director of New Burbage. Darren enters
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proclaiming, “Let’s talk box office” (“The Promised End” 3.6). Together,
they can now get down to the real “business” of theatre unfettered by
all this romantic claptrap about “truth” and the “ineffable tragedy of
the human spirit.”
Nahum
Oliver Welles is not the only the character that haunts New Burbage.
Nahum, a Nigerian refugee – once a director of political theatre in
Nigeria, now employed as a security guard/custodian in New Burbage
– also haunts the entire series. Almost always depicted on the periphery
of the action, whether watching the actions on stage and off from the
vantage of his security monitor, or from the wings and backstage corri-
dors, his very corporeal, as opposed to Oliver’s spectral, presence re-
minds the audience of the existence a larger reality beyond the little
world of the New Burbage festival. His presence puts the quarrels about
“art” and “truth” that inform Slings & Arrows’ mock-heroic pastoral into
geopolitical relief, not trivializing those concerns but cautioning us as
Swift famously does in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) that “nothing is great or
little otherwise than by comparison” (Swift 1978, 289). Oliver, watching

his listless opening night production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with Nahum in the security office, despairs, “There’s not a moment of
truth in this whole production” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). Nahum, recall-
ing his production of Ken Wiwa’s The Wheel that led to his imprison-
ment, reminds Oliver that “truth can be a very dangerous thing”
(“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). The brutalities of the postcolonial regime from
which he has been exiled and his experiences with racism and underem-
ployment in Canada have taught him hard truths, which the denizens of
New Burbage, preoccupied as they are with the petty jealousies and ri-
valries peculiar to the world of the theatre, will likely never have to
confront. Nahum is presented to us as a happy outsider, accommodated
to his new home, and benignly amused by the endless strutting and fret-
ting of its inhabitants. Though he never becomes much more than a
“mechanical” in this world, he does by the end of season 3 get margin-
ally closer to the action when he is pressed into service, shaking a piece
of sheet metal backstage to create the sound of the storm in Geoffrey’s
church-basement production of King Lear. Whether ensconced within
New Burbage or exiled without, the Other’s social mobility in this clos-
eted world of white privilege is on the whole rather limited.
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Nahum serves another purpose in the series and that is to remind

us of someone who shares his unfamiliar name: Nahum Tate, the
eighteenth-century poet laureate who gained renown during his time
for rewriting King Lear as a comedy. In Tate’s handling of the story,
Lear is restored to the throne and Edgar and Cordelia wed. Like the
Nahum of Slings & Arrows whose day job it is to keep the world of
New Burbage secure, Nahum Tate’s treatment of King Lear as comedy
keeps the horrors the play unleashes – arrogance, betrayal, violence,
war, madness, and death – safely at bay. More so than Shakespeare’s
audience, Tate’s can sleep securely knowing that the universe is still
a place where justice prevails and the good live happily ever after. In
a similar fashion, Slings & Arrows – by satirizing a culture in which
the only values that count are economic ones and by romantically re-
asserting the primacy of cultural value – turns tragedy into comedy.
Its revaluation of value turns what would otherwise be the tragedy of
Geoffrey Tennant’s excommunication from the church of high culture
into a comedic victory for art. Exile becomes homecoming. Similarly,
it turns Richard Smith-Jones’s and Darren Nichols’s ascendance to the
throne into a tragic indictment of its hollowness. Triumph becomes
defeat. Shut out of the pub, but looking longingly at the celebrations
within, it is Richard Smith-Jones who is banished.
When the final curtain closes on Slings & Arrows, Nahum’s “inef-
fable tragedy of the human spirit” has been transformed into come-
dy of an almost divine kind. As we move through the three seasons,
Death’s sting loses both the dread and angst of Hamlet’s “to be or
not to be” and the absurdity of Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot sig-
nifying nothing,” and instead, owing much to the same sensibility
that gave us Tate’s feel-good King Lear, is reconceived as only a step
in life’s journey as it moves into eternity. Oliver’s ghost, freed from
his purgatorial haunting, joins hands with a vindicated Charles
Kingman and the two ascend to their well-deserved place with the-
atre’s elect.
Slings & Arrows reanimates the Shakespearean corpus: it does not
regard the plays and the traditions as a dead body like Darren Nichols,
nor as the desiccated relic of Oliver’s/Yorick’s skull that Geoffrey car-
ries with him. True to the series’ conservative, avowedly bardolatrous,
conception of Shakespeare, there is no corpse in need of resurrection.
All that there is is an eternally vital and universally present body re-
quiring the service of the faithful.
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WORKS CITED
“Fallow Time.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 2. Created and
written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by
Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD.
Fortier, Mark. 2002. “Undead and Unsafe: Adapting Shakespeare (in
Canada).” In Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?, ed. Diana Brydon
and Irena Makaryk, 339–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
“Geoffrey Returns.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 2. Created and
Higgins, Dick. 1966. “Statement on Intermedia.” http://www.artpool.hu/
Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html. Accessed 15 December 2011.
“Madness in Great Ones.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 3. Created
and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by
McKellen, Ian. 1978a. “Introduction to Macbeth.” In On Macbeth, directed by
Trevor Nunn and Philip Casson. Thames Television, 1978. DVD.
– 1978b. “The Scottish Play: An Explanation.” In On Macbeth. Dir. Trevor
Nunn and Philip Casson. Thames Television, 1978. DVD.

– 1996. “Introduction.” In William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”: A Screenplay
Written by Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, Annotated and Introduced by
Ian McKellen, 7–37. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.
“Oliver’s Dream.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 1. Created and
“The Promised End.” 2006. Slings & Arrows. Season 3. Episode 6. Created and
Royster, Francesca T. 1998. “‘The End of Race’ and the Future of Early Modern
Cultural Studies.” Shakespeare Studies 26: 59–69.
“Season’s End.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 1. Created and
Slings & Arrows. 2003–6. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin,
and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008.
DVD.
Smith, Lynn. 2007. “Theater of the Absurd to Them Is Just Life.” Los Angeles
Times, 16 February 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/16/
entertainment/et-slings16. Accessed 21 March 2012.
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“Steeped in Blood.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 5. Created and
Swift, Jonathan. 1978. The Portable Swift. Ed. Carl Van Doren. New York:
Viking Press.
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Your Master’s Voice:

The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial
Authority on 1930s American Radio
An drew Bretz
Rags on Shakespeare
Radio in the early twentieth century represented a leap forward in

terms of the ability of communications technology to reach vast new
audiences, creating the first truly mass media enterprise that extended
beyond national, cultural, and ideological borders. The extensive pos-
sible scope of the medium was inhibited in the early, experimental days
of radio (pre-1920) by the lack of a commonly accepted set of aural and
narrative tropes. Radio’s success as a popular dramatic medium in the
United States from the 1930s to the 1950s is at least partially attributable
to the establishment of these tropes of storytelling, many of which were
drawn from other media forms. The authoritative voice of the narrator,
a characteristic feature of the aural texture of radio that was deployed
with increasing regularity through the Golden Age, was first perfected
through radio’s early adaptations of Shakespeare.1 Radio adaptations of
Shakespeare adopted narrative techniques and structures of authority
from different media – from the stage and from aural media like the
phonograph – and in doing so legitimated radio as a medium for the
transmission of “legitimate” drama. Indeed, radio drama was first ar-
ticulated as existing within the seam between the theatre and the new
medium – not quite the stage, yet not wholly aural either – and it was
with the advent of the authoritative voice of the Shakespearean narrator
that the intermedial space of radio drama became its own unique genre.
When radio adapted Shakespeare, it was not simply a case of reme-
diation from one mediatized form to another – stage to radio. The ges-
ture carried with it a social, political, and historical signification that
shaped the intermedial effects of adaptation. Indeed, ideology, as much
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Your Master’s Voice: 1930s American Radio 231
as technology, shaped the ways in which the radio structured its audi-
ence as related to Shakespeare. From the beginning of commercial radio
in the United States, Shakespeare played a role in legitimizing the new
medium and introducing audiences to the dramatic potential of radio,
though it was originally an attempt to aurally reproduce a spectacular
stage play. In September of 1922, portions of Romeo and Juliet were
broadcast by WJZ in Schenectady, New York through a remote hook-up
from Henry Miller’s Theatre on Broadway; this was only seven months
after the same radio station had produced the first radio drama heard
on American airwaves, “The Wolf.” Throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
the institutions behind radio increased their investment in the works of
Shakespeare, culminating in the so-called 1937 Summer of Shakespeare,
where the two major networks, NBC and CBS, broadcast adaptations of
Shakespeare’s plays in competing time slots. The growth and popular-
ity of radio as viewed through its relation to Shakespeare encapsulate
the growing complexity of the relationship between early twentieth-
century American audiences and the literary canon. Despite argu-
ments that Shakespeare was perfectly suited to the new medium, the
Shakespeare presented on radio was an ossification of theatrical repre-
sentation. The mediation of a narrator – a professor, a noted actor, or

other representative of authority – rendered Shakespeare comprehen-
sible in the new medium, but only just. The authority of the narrator
was usually established through some other medium, such as the the-
atre or literary studies, and then imported to radio.2 The presentation of
Shakespeare over these early radio networks directly collocated the
new medium with the cultural élite of other media and gave a greater
voice to American culture’s already enfranchised. In the following es-
say, I argue that radio’s audience in the period from 1920 to 1940 was
actively discouraged from engaging with the Shakespearean text by the
mediating figure of the expert, who was to guide them through the
exegetical process. Not merely an artefact of the translation to a new
medium, the narrator structured the possible mode(s) of audience en-
gagement, bridging between the raucousness of late nineteenth-century
theatre audiences and the domesticity of early twentieth-century radio
audiences.
Aural Art
Long before radio ascended to become the dominant entertainment

form in the early 1930s, far surpassing cinema and records in audience
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 232 Andrew Bretz
and impact, Shakespeare had already become culture.3 As Lawrence

Levine notes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, “By the turn of the century,
Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose
dramas were the property of those who flocked to see them, into a sa-
cred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and over-
bearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations” (1988, 72).
Audiences ceased to view Shakespeare as an engaging popular enter-
tainment, which they parodied, referenced, and deformed at will across
both genre and media, and instead received his plays with refined, po-
lite, theatrical attention, but little engagement. This sacralization of
Shakespeare privileged certain social groups insofar as the trend to-
wards spectacular presentation of the plays alienated those who could
not afford to go to the theatre while at the same time associating read-
ing Shakespeare with the leisured classes. “Aristocratizing the pit,”
which was enabled by the increasingly spectacular mise-en-scène of
Shakespearean productions of the late 1800s, had been riotously ob-
jected to by working-class theatre-goers in the mid-nineteenth century.
The movement to render the theatre a place of refined attention was
part of the widespread investment in self-improvement through expo-
sure to “culture.” Shakespeare was lifted out of the barroom and en-
sconced firmly in the urban theatre. At the same time, Shakespeare
ceased to be on the family bookshelf beside the Bible (Levine 1988, 18).
Indeed, some American editions of Shakespeare reinforced the class
divide by offering two sets of notes, one for the “average reader” and
one for the “critical reader” (Levine 1988, 72).
The rise of recorded sound was expected, in some ways, to remove
the boundaries between the two audiences, as the “average reader” (or
audience member) would finally be able to listen to the greatest
Shakespearean actors of the day perform their greatest roles through
the innovation of the phonograph. This early experiment in recording
sound for general distribution and sale was itself an exercise in a deep-
ly conservative and hegemonic intermediality as the aesthetic forms of
the aural world of the theatre were supposed to be exactly recreated
for the general public.4 As David Timson relates in the liner notes to
Great Historical Shakespeare Recordings (2000), “With the development
of Edison’s Phonograph in the 1880s, the ephemeral art of the actor
found a little more permanence. Never again would a famous actor af-
ter his death be ‘heard no more,’ and future generations would be able
to judge for themselves whether his reputation was justified.” Indeed,
Edison was evidently keenly aware of the potential of Shakespearean
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recordings as both an economically and a culturally valuable product:

only ten years after the initial invention of the phonograph, he sent a
personal representative to England to record some of the most famous
actors of the day. The phonograph and recorded sound had two effects,
however, neither of which was expected. On the one hand boundaries
between audiences became even more rigid, since the recordings were
only available to those who had the money to spend on an expensive
technological “drawing room entertainment,” and on the other hand
the technology undercut the histrionic acting style of the time, leaving
great actors such as Henry Irving literally “out of his voice” (Timson
2000). Rather than being in dialogue with an audience throughout a
performance, rather than being able to use their bodies to signify, actors
were asked to cast their voices down a “speaking tube.” Though actors
such as Irving, Ellen Terry, and Edwin Booth recognized the impor-
tance of the new medium, these early recordings did little to change the
location of Shakespeare as an example of high culture and, indeed, may
have exacerbated it. The Edison phonograph recordings were an early
example of remediation – transforming the cultural object from one
media form (theatre) to another (the phonograph). The early record-
ings were what Brecht described in “The Radio as an Apparatus of

Communication” (1927) as a “substitute” (2006, 2). In that remediation,
however, there was no attempt to reconceptualize how Shakespearean
texts might need to adapt to the constraints of the new medium. Indeed,
this refusal to engage with the ways in which different media (espe-
cially radio and aural media) dictate the forms of Shakespearean ex-
pression is a problem that is still endemic to discussion of Shakespeare
on the radio.
As the radio age began, Shakespeare’s unique cultural location pre-
vented his plays from gaining general popularity over the new medi-
um. Douglas Lanier, one of the few scholars to have written on
Shakespeare on American radio, notes that Shakespeare seemed re-
markably well suited to a purely audio format.5 Similarly, Susanne
Greenhalgh notes that “radio held out the promise of a new type of
drama, no longer tied to the history and conventions of the theatre, but
capable of evolving its own styles of dramaturgy and modes of perfor-
mance” (2011, 544). With such techniques as stage directions embedded
in the dialogue and rich visual language combined with generally
known and broadly accessible characters such as Falstaff, Hamlet, and
Richard III, an audio presentation of Shakespeare’s plays should have
advantages over a theatrical presentation, from both production and
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artistic standpoints. Also, in terms of artistic advantages, the intimacy

of the microphone allowed for a greater range of emotional expression
than was available on stage, where the broadly declamatory style had
dominated for over two hundred years. The advantages radio presents
as a medium for Lanier, however, situate radio and aural media in
terms of lack. As Lanier states, “the lack of the visual apparatus of
performance – involving the hands of scene designers, costumers,
and directors – placed emphasis back on the actors and the text, on
vocal characterization and the verbal music of Shakespeare’s poetic
language” (2002, 196). That is, in terms of the production, costumes
were unnecessary, as the entire “visual” world of the play was taking
place inside the listeners’ minds. Further, Lanier’s understanding of
Shakespeare seems largely based on the plays as written documents
rather than staged performances. This lack-as-fullness of the aural me-
dium of radio is described by Greenhalgh as inherent in the medium of
radio itself: “The ‘present-tenseness’ of the radio medium, the sense it
gives of an experience still moving towards the future, even when its
auditory codes remind us of its historicity, also paradoxically convinces
us that its utterances are living and dynamic even when we know the
speakers to be long dead” (2011, 544). Although very early performanc-

es of Shakespeare on the radio would have been live broadcasts, the
complicated relationship between liveness and citationality remains.
The aural medium that adapts Shakespeare orients itself to the past,
even as the medium itself demands engagement in the present. The ten-
sion between radio’s insistence on liveness through the heard voice and
the historical orientation of Shakespeare’s language opened up unique
dramaturgical avenues for the first time.
Pioneering radio producers echoed Lanier’s expression of hope for
the possibilities of Shakespeare on the radio. Early attempts to bring
Shakespeare to the radio, however, often did not consider the uniquely
aural nature of the medium, instead offering an audio capture of a stage
version. In doing so, these attempts at intermedia were taking as their
direct object the theatrical piece, while situating radio as a derivative
mode of representation. This representation of radio as subordinate to
other performance media was particularly dissatisfying to those who
worked in radio and recognized the possibilities of the new medium. In
1933, Hilda Matheson, the founder of the news division of the BBC,
wrote of the frustrations of broadcasters with this form of presentation
of Shakespeare in Broadcasting.
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Microphones have been slung in theatre wings to enable plays to be heard

from an actual theatre; professional companies have given theatre plays in
studios, or they have been given by specially selected players. With certain
notable exceptions, and without certain definite precautions, this proce-
dure is not usually a success; but the notable exceptions are important and
significant. They include great plays which are also great poetry, and con-
spicuously the plays of Shakespeare; and they include also (with skilful
adaptation and presentation) many plays of discussion, in which the dra-
matic interest is mainly centred in ideas rather than in incident. The plays
of Mr. Bernard Shaw are examples of this class. (1933, 110–11)
Here, radio is theorized as the opposite of the spectacular tradition of

late Victorian stagecraft, where only “great poetry,” Shakespeare, and
plays of ideas are successful candidates for radio adaptation. Matheson
recognizes that direct recordings of theatrical presentations generally
do not work on radio because the visual codes of early twentieth-
century naturalistic theatre are obscured by the medium. Shakespeare’s
work lends itself to the radio because of its “poetic” or euphonic quality,
and specifically not because of its dramatic quality, which is predicated
on incident. As Matheson goes on to explain, the intimacy of the rela-

tionship between radio and audience precludes a drama of incident.
The concentration upon one sense, the inevitable sharpening of the ear to
catch fine shades of voice and meaning, the impression that the speakers
are close beside one, may all help to emphasize the human element, to
bring one more intimately into touch with the thoughts and emotions
which the players are interpreting, and at the same time give a fuller
weight to the beauty of language and cadence. (1933, 112)
In Matheson’s vision of Shakespeare’s role in broadcasting, intimacy

does not act as an obstacle for the understanding of Shakespeare. Actual
practice, however, differed from Matheson’s idealistic expectations by
not offering an aural text available for audience interpretation. Indeed,
networks and producers assumed that audiences would need guidance
through the material being offered them insofar as the translation of a
theatrical text to the new medium of radio would confuse audiences
unprepared for the purely aural medium. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
when Lanier describes Shakespeare’s language on the radio, he echoes
the assumptions of the networks who introduced the controlling voice
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of the narrator to interpret and explain for audiences who could not
possibly otherwise understand the material being offered to them.
Lanier goes on to suggest that the “poetic density” of the Shake-
spearean canon was a stumbling block for radio listeners because the
complexity of language was at odds with the highly colloquial vernacu-
lar of American English spoken at the time on the radio. To assume,
however, that the audience would be unable to comprehend poetic lan-
guage spoken over the radio underestimates the literary acuity of the
listeners of the time. Further, such an assumption underestimates the
ability of radio to create a form of disembodied theatre, or theatre of
interiority, predicated on the melding of text, theatrical convention, and
the technical requirements of the new medium. Poetry readings were
common on the airwaves in the English-speaking world, albeit often
relegated to less popular time slots. Although the earliest Shakespear-
ean audio productions were merely recitations by great performers like
Irving and Booth or audio captures of theatrical performances, by the
mid-1930s directors created new mechanisms to situate these texts
within a uniquely aural world.6
“Voodoo” Shakespeare
While radio and Shakespeare were in the midst of an increasingly

difficult relationship owing to preconceptions about the transition
between media, Shakespeare on the stage was proving more viable
than ever. Orson Welles, the “monstrous boy” of classical theatre in
the United States, strongly argued for the commercial viability and
accessibility of Shakespeare, and his “Haitian” or “Voodoo” Macbeth
exemplified his philosophy of politically engaged and commercially
successful Shakespearean production in the mid- to late 1930s, while at
the same time articulating an intercultural and intermedial space for
Shakespearean performance. The spoken text of the play was still rec-
ognizably Shakespearean, though it engaged in much liberal manipula-
tion of the material at hand. The Witches were subject to the most
significant alterations, with their lines reduced, relocated, and – what
lines were left – repeated throughout the performance.
Although the spoken words were Shakespearean, nothing about the
rest of the production recalled or revivified the Elizabethan world. The
as-lavish-as-they-could-afford production design placed the location in
nineteenth-century Haiti, with all of the characters played by African
American actors for the first time. Shakespeare was lifted out of a
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nostalgic identification with a lost past of unquestioned white domi-

nance, and, through the presentation of black bodies using African
music and Haitian spellcraft, this production anticipated the racial de-
construction of Shakespearean texts on the stage of the late twentieth
century from Mumbai to London. Though the design evoked African
drums and tribal warfare, the actors used Scottish terms like “thane”
and “heath”; the only material change in the script other than transpo-
sition and cutting was the change from “pale Hecate” to “dark Hecate.”
The production was deliberately grandiose, spectacular, and provoca-
tive, exemplified in the notes of a production script described by
Michael Anderegg in Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture:
As Macbeth prepares to visit the witches, for example, “a low wind starts
building.” “Build tympani,” we read, “thunder drums and sheet and wind,
build up and up … Cellophane rain (Big), gong – 2 flashes of lightning –
Rain – all voodoo drums (very loud).” Whoever wrote these cues into the
manuscript got sufficiently carried away, at one point, to draw, in red block
capitals, “RAISE HELL WITH EVERYTHING.” (Anderegg 1999, 25)
Welles’s production explicitly tried to upset any association of

Shakespeare with élite, highbrow culture and encouraged the audience
to engage with the text in a way that had not been seen since the mid-
nineteenth century. His Macbeth eschewed the naturalist-spectacular
traditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century production
aesthetics for a symbolist-resistive aesthetic. In doing so, he relocated
Shakespeare within the cultural imaginary to become an author who
spoke through the racial other of 1930s America.
As iconoclastic as the “Voodoo” Macbeth was in terms of race politics
and the visual dramaturgy of American Shakespearean performance,
its focus on the aural qualities of the theatrical performance anticipat-
ed the sophisticated audio adaptations of Shakespeare that Welles
would offer on radio. “Voodoo” Macbeth ends not with Malcolm’s
speech, re-establishing order out of the tragic world of the play, but
with Hecate and the “Voices of Voodoo Women” drowning out the ac-
clamation of Malcolm as King of Scotland. As Daniel Fischlin notes
elsewhere in this book, the use of music (such as the African-inspired
drums of Welles’s Macbeth) can threaten to overwhelm or “displace”
the words, an intermedial effect that was a particular concern for
Welles. Rather than eschew music altogether, Welles built the audio
cues into the script, heightening the affective theatricality of the piece.
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Clara Fernández-Vara suggests that Welles’s use of sound effects in his

radio work seems to have been influenced by his early work with The
Shadow, yet in Macbeth, Welles showed a remarkable acuity to the ways
sound could be interwoven with dialogue both to develop the sense of
time and place and to create mood (2004, 70). The final scene exempli-
fies the close attention he paid to the aural texture of the play:
M AC DUF F. For so thou art. Behold where stands

The usurper’s curs’d head.
(The Witches gleefully hold the head aloft.)
The time is free.
Hail, King of Scotland!
VOIC E S OF VO OD OO WO ME N. All hail, Malcolm.
(They are interrupted by a thunderous chorus from the army.)
ARM Y. Hail, King of Scotland.
VOIC E S OF VO OD OO WO ME N. Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
HEC AT E. Peace!
(The drums, army, music, voices of the voodoo women –
all are instantly silent.)

The charm’s wound up. (Anderegg 1999, 87)
By returning aurally to the Witches’ charm and subjecting Macbeth,

Malcolm, and Macduff all to the power of Hecate, Welles re-enacts the
trauma of the tragedy and, at the moment of tragic reconciliation and
order, establishes a chaotic universe subject only to the whims of a ca-
pricious god. As Richard France describes it, “No sooner was Macbeth
dead, and his severed head tossed to the crowd, than it became clear
that Malcolm would serve as terror’s agent” (2001, 14). The generic
qualities of Macbeth that located it in the system of Elizabethan tragedy,
such as the putative return to order, were stripped away by Welles as he
subordinated the Shakespearean text in the name of theatrical effect. By
playing with the generic conventions of the re-establishment of order,
Welles was soliciting an audience response, evaluation, and engage-
ment with both his theatrical text and his text in relation to the
Shakespearean original.
It is perhaps ironic that while Welles was, on the one hand, offer-
ing a Shakespeare that demanded audience reaction, interpretation,
and engagement in the theatres of Harlem, he was at the same time
deeply engaged in radio, a medium whose corporate dramaturgy of
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Shakespeare was predicated on the intermediary role of the voice of

authority – a model Welles did not share. Welles’s model of engaging
the audience through the use of aural theatrics was a view of the au-
thority of the work of art where the artist, the interpreter, and the audi-
ence each had some value, though the interpreter was arguably the
most important of the three. Shakespeare’s text existed to be interpret-
ed; the audience was an audience insofar as they were engaged with
the interpretation.
When it came to radio, Welles’s views of the role of the audience and
that of the interpretive artist were predicated on a cordial familiarity
between the two. Any imposition of imaginative distance between the
narrative voice(s) of the play and the audience (e.g., an announcer say-
ing, “The curtain is now rising on a presentation of …”) imposed an
interpretation upon the text, guiding the audience to a particular exe-
getical model. Welles would decry the use of the narrator/announcer
– a technique to be described in detail below – as “hopelessly inade-
quate and clumsy” (quoted in Naremore 1989, 13). He understood that
the audience was to be understood not collectively, but individually;
that the relationship an audience had with the radio was a fundamen-
tally intimate one. Radio’s audience was never wholly private, nor
wholly public. For Welles, the dramaturgy of the theatre, which is pred-
icated on the public consumption of the theatrical text, may be cited,
yet the medium of radio privileges the interiority of the aesthetic expe-
rience. Thus, the medium requires a new set of dramaturgical practices
that may be drawn from theatrical practice, but must adapt to the new
relationship with the audience.
Throughout the later 1930s, Welles became at least as famous for his
radio work, such as The Shadow and The Mercury Theatre of the Air, as he
did for his theatrical ventures such as Macbeth. As the major radio net-
works were providing Welles with a regular and steady series of pay-
cheques, they were producing versions of the Shakespearean canon
that totally reshaped the material – in terms of both content and formal
presentation. That Shakespeare should be offered over the airwaves
never seemed to be a question, but exactly how the plays were to be
presented was a subject of some debate. In a blind (but intensely aural)
medium, could actors “perform” the text without the traditional visual
aids and histrionic styles that audiences had come to expect? Would it
not end up sounding just like a reading? Or was the auditory experi-
ence of radio something utterly different from the theatre or the cinema
or the act of reading? The answers to these questions point to the ways
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in which radio adaptations of Shakespeare were profoundly, challeng-

ingly intermedial – and played a key role in translating Shakespeare to
new audiences.
From Announcer to Narrator
The position of narrator and the analogous role occupied by the an-
nouncer stretch back to the very earliest days of experimental radio in
the United States, when companies such as AT&T, Westinghouse, and
General Electric broadcast radio programs aimed at an ill-defined
“public” for the first time. Though experimental and private radio
broadcasts were popular before the First World War, in July 1917 the US
government took over almost every radio broadcasting station in the
country, with the exception of a few high-powered transmitters owned
by large corporations. After the war was over, on 29 February 1920, the
airwaves were again made public, and in anticipation of this action,
the large corporations who had been allowed to retain their transmit-
ters formed a monopolistic cartel, the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), in 1919. It was at this time that the first regular radio broad-
casts were offered, with an announcer introducing phonograph re-

cordings, reporting on the weather and news, or interviewing local
and national figures.
The first announcers were often engineers and electricians shoe-
horned into the role of announcer for the purposes of the broadcast;
they were not trained in public speaking or elocution and their broad-
casts were decidedly colloquial in tone. Announcers would regularly
ask for anyone who was listening to write in to the station (care of the
large corporation that ran the station, such as Westinghouse) as a form
of audience polling. Audiences could ask for music to be played or for
news items to be read, or simply say hello to the radio personalities that
they heard regularly and came to appreciate like friends. Bertolt Brecht,
who suggested in 1927 that radio’s possibilities as a communication
medium were limited by its nature as a broadcasting technology, ap-
plauded this early engagement with the audience.
The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public

life … that is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to
transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him
into a relationship instead of isolating him. (2006, 2)
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Brecht’s desire for truly two-way communication, though not possible

with radio technology, recognized the conservative limitations of a me-
dium that was widely hailed as revolutionizing how people engaged
with culture. On the radio, rather than a chorus of voices jostling for
attention, there was the single voice of the announcer and that voice
was the representative of a corporation. The presence of the announcer
routinely reminded the audience of the source of their entertainment,
but also placed the announcer into the position of a corporate represen-
tative – the voice of a system of capitalist production.
In 1921, several things happened at once that would in the coming
years solidify the way radio positioned itself as an authoritative inter-
mediary between the individual and the Shakespearean adaptation.
First, Westinghouse set up and licensed a series of radio stations across
the eastern United States, which meant that, although none of them
were linked to the others through telephone lines, their mutual owner-
ship scheme laid the groundwork for the network system. Second, in
early 1921, the first Westinghouse station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, selected
its first regular program manager and announcer, Harold W. Arlin, pro-
fessionalizing the role of the radio announcer for the first time in the
US. Third, on 10 March 1921, KDKA broadcast short excerpts from a

play being produced at the local Davis Theatre, setting the precedent
for dramatic radio productions.
In 1922 and 1923, broadcasting started to take off as more consumers
bought radio sets from producers who would then turn around and
broadcast entertainment to the same sets that they had just sold. AT&T
began to experiment with commercial radio; custom-built studios were
designed for radio broadcast. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “The
commercial interests who think to render media universally accept-
able, invariably settle for ‘entertainment’ as a strategy of neutrality”
(1964, 305), so it is unsurprising that it is at this time that KDKA broad-
cast a full-length drama from the stage, “Friend Mary”; and WJZ in
Schenectady broadcast both the first written-for-radio drama, “The
Wolf,” and the first full Shakespearean performance heard on American
airwaves. In celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the pub-
lication of the First Folio, on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 1923, WJZ
broadcast the entirety of As You Like It from a remote hook-up on the
44th Street Theatre in New York, with the Broadway leading lady and
later Hollywood character actress Marjorie Rambeau as Rosalind.
Though the performance was not recorded and there is very little in the
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literature on radio discussing it, the broadcast serves as a seminal mo-

ment in the early days of radio for its attempt to broadcast the whole of
a Shakespearean play. Shakespearean performance at the time, espe-
cially on Broadway, was largely spectacular in appeal and directed to-
wards alienating a popular audience rather than incorporating that
audience.
By broadcasting the whole of As You Like It, WJZ was trying to par-
ticipate in that same cultural economy of Shakespeare as a signifier of
cultural value – to legitimate itself as a worthwhile medium for dra-
matic performance and entertainment – while the auditory nature of
the medium stripped away the spectacular mechanism by which the
alienation of certain audiences had been achieved. In order to re-
establish mechanisms of interpretive guidance for a medium that ren-
dered the spectacular impossible, those mechanisms would have to be
altered. One of the ways to do this would be to privilege the visual over
the auditory – situating radio as a deficient medium, unable to offer as
rich an experience as the legitimate theatre and therefore utterly un-
suited to Shakespearean performances – yet this strategy would have
run counter to the business model of RCA and other radio parts and set
suppliers who were trying to create a new market predicated on the

desirability of the auditory entertainment experience.7
As noted above, the discourse around radio drama so reviled by
Hilda Matheson was situated in terms of absence, yet, while the propo-
nents of radio’s potential as a medium could not articulate their vision
of radio in terms of presence, they did insist upon the difference of the
medium. That is, although radio was described in terms of lack, the
experiential difference rather than the superiority of any given perfor-
mance medium, such as silent film and radio, was almost immediately
recognized by writers at the time. In the following excerpt from a Radio
Digest article from 27 October 1923, for instance, though the journalist
describes radio in terms of lack and blindness, the medium itself tran-
scends this lack through the imagination of the audience.
The radio play, a new form of dramatic interest, is increasing rapidly in

popularity. Go to a movie and then come home and listen to a Radario and
you will have received two exactly opposite theatrical effects … Of course,
scenes and acts from current plays are often broadcast, but many eastern
stations now have their own theatrical groups and give plays especially
adapted for Radio use. Pretend you are blind and listen to these plays, the
better your imagination, the better the play. (Quoted in Maltin 2000, 13)
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Thus, the strategies by which Shakespeare had been appropriated and

alienated from the popular audience did not and could not apply to the
new medium.
Audiences developed personal, intimate relationships with the plays,
forming images in their own minds of what the characters looked like,
and coming to their own conclusions as to what the plays were actually
about. This much more intimate relationship between audience and
work of art, ironically, also echoed the relationship audiences of early
nineteenth-century America had with Shakespeare, when they literally
talked back to the play, called out to the actors, and engaged with
the material rather than let the play wash over them. This form of
Shakespearean presentation, which privileged the audience’s intimate
relationship with the text, ran counter to both the presentation tradition
of Shakespeare in the US, which was predicated on the alienation of
certain audiences, and the radio industry’s business identity, where a
single voice both mediated the aural world and represented the power
of the corporation behind the radio at the same time.
By 1927, the major networks were established, and the US govern-
ment created the forerunner to the FCC, the FRC. At this point, a suc-
cessful business model for radio advertising had largely been worked
out. In this model, advertising agencies produced shows for their cli-
ents, which they would then pay the networks to broadcast, while the
networks would guarantee certain blocks of time for sponsored shows
and certain blocks of time for “sustaining” shows, which were not
sponsored and generally served a cultural interest. The sustaining pro-
grams were a reaction on the part of the industry to encroaching gov-
ernment regulation. Rather than have the government take over the
entire industry, as would happen in Great Britain, or even a part of it,
as would happen in Canada, the American radio industry tried to
prove that it was doing legitimate cultural work and not merely sell-
ing dish soap to housewives. Throughout the early 1930s, sustaining
programs became an increasingly important part of the strategy for
industry independence, as the success of such public radio monopo-
lies in countries like Germany and Great Britain offered a credible al-
ternative to the American model of broadcasting. Network production
of Shakespeare’s plays was an easy rejoinder to the critics who argued
that the commercialization of the airwaves was undesirable. Indeed,
throughout the 1930s, almost a hundred different episodes were
produced by various programs that were direct adaptations of
Shakespeare’s plays. The late 1920s saw “An Hour with Shakespeare”
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and “Scenes from Shakespeare,” but beginning in 1929, NBC produced

the sustaining program “Radio Guild,” which broadcast versions of
popular and classical plays and other literary adaptations (Balk 2006,
195). As sustaining programs were without sponsorship, they framed
the narrative material in different ways from sponsored programs that
required occasional interruption for commercial breaks. Whereas a nar-
rator or announcer in a sponsored program would interrupt the narra-
tive in a more or less intrusive way in order to sell the sponsor’s product,
in a sustaining program the narrator or announcer could take on a dif-
ferent intercessory role. Unlike other programs such as “The First
Nighter,” which produced versions of popular Broadway plays, or the
sponsored “Lux Radio Theater,” which started producing radio ver-
sions of Broadway plays only to switch to Hollywood movies, the
“Radio Guild” adapted its material for radio from literary sources.
Enter the Expert
“Radio Guild” was broadcast on NBC in the United States and across
the CBC in Canada, so though the broadcasts themselves have not all
survived, many of the scripts can be found in the CBC archives at

McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. These records are
merely scripts rather than audio recordings; many of the earliest perfor-
mances of radio have been lost because they were never recorded. The
scripts represent another layer of intermedial representation and
Shakespearean adaptation, for they are textual traces of performance
pieces (sometimes even with the pencilled-in notes of actors and direc-
tors). They point towards the always absent radio play, yet themselves
can never fully supplement the performance. Further, the records at
McMaster are incomplete. For example, a script for Hamlet dated
3 August 1930 and described as “Part One” does not have a correspond-
ing “Part Two”; similarly, a program note at the end of the 9 September
1930 performance of King Lear indicates that Othello would have been
produced the following week, but that script does not exist in the ar-
chive. Many of these scripts predate the existence of the CBC, and often
have indications that they were originally in the possession of WJZ, the
pioneering broadcaster of Shakespeare in Schenectady. Despite their
incomplete nature and somewhat murky provenance, the scripts offer a
unique insight into the presentation of Shakespeare on the radio prior
to the 1937 “Summer of Shakespeare” when the two dominant net-
works put on competing Shakespearean adaptations.
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“Radio Guild” mediated between the audience and the Shakespearean

play through the voice of the announcer using one of two general strate-
gies. First, the announcer noted changes in time and space, and intro-
duced who was speaking. This form of mediation was more prevalent in
the late 1920s and very early 1930s, when radio directors, producers, and
audiences had not developed the sophisticated repertoire of auditory
cues that indicated changes in scene. It was also the easiest way to distin-
guish between various similar-sounding voices on early radio sets, ef-
fectively sidestepping reception and audio problems. These announced
changes in time and space, though carried over from certain theatrical
and editorial traditions, are often not called for in Shakespeare’s plays.
As noted above, owing to the spare visual nature of the Elizabethan
stage, as a play or a scene began, characters would often describe their
own location – spatially and temporally – and offer background, such as
in the opening speeches of The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure. In another solution to the problem of introducing an
Elizabethan audience to the scene, Shakespeare would offer a prologue-
character, such as the Chorus in Henry V, Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Gower
in Pericles, or Prologue in Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida. In both
cases, Shakespearean texts obviate the need for modern narratorial in-
trusion. When the narrator of “Radio Guild” intervened in this mode,
the intrusions mimicked the kind of stage directions that one would ex-
pect to find in an edition of Shakespeare, rather than a radio re-enactment
or adaptation of a theatrical performance. The second form of announc-
er mediation, and by far the more prevalent form, is exegetical in pur-
pose. In early 1930, “Radio Guild” secured the American drama critic,
playwright, and scholar Clayton Meeker Hamilton to introduce and nar-
rate the Shakespearean adaptations on the program. The introduction of
Hamilton at the beginning of the 7 November 1935 adaptation of King
John, for example, established his pedigree and the authority of his par-
ticular reading of the text in terms of his specialized knowledge.
The National Broadcasting Company has made arrangements with

Mr. Clayton Hamilton to act as commentator throughout this series.
Mr. Hamilton is the well-known playwright and dramatic critic, and is one
of the country’s outstanding authorities on plays, their writing, and their
writers. (“Radio Guild”)
By situating Hamilton in terms of his erudition, the “Radio Guild” au-

thorizes his speech in terms of his ability (and his ability only) to
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comprehend and make clear to the audience the plays in question. The
expectation therefore is that the plays must be only comprehensible to
those who have the training, knowledge, and expertise to make sense
of arcane language. Hamilton’s position as a critic does not guide the
audience through a reading; does not help the audience to understand
more obscure references; does not open possible readings and foster
engagement. Through establishing Hamilton’s position as a critic,
“Radio Guild” positions him as an intermedial intercessor, whose
privilege as a “playwright and drama critic” brings authority not only
to himself but to radio as a medium, while at the same time the
medium of radio lends structural authority to his single voice as
announcer-narrator.
Reading For, Reading With
Before each play began, Hamilton would offer a short reading of the
play, imposing a thesis on the individual play and situating it within a
larger conception of who Shakespeare was, and what Shakespeare
meant. In one of the earliest “Radio Guild” broadcasts, on 21 September
1930, Hamilton offered a reading of Richard III that clearly harked back
to the character-oriented readings of the late Victorian period. In this
opening announcement, he declares that self-transformation is a “trag-
edy of conscience.” In an exegesis that has disturbing resonances with
the fascist model of the self being promulgated at the time, Hamilton
equates Richard III’s evil with weakness.
Always in Shakespeare, like some precious pearl, may be found beneath

the progress of each play, some motivating human truth. The passage of
years, the change of customs, may never entirely dim its lustre. Tonight,
we encounter perhaps the most evil character in Shakespeare – and the
truth; to succeed in a given course in life one must devote oneself consis-
tently thereto. To attain success, a good man must not become evil, nor an
evil man, good. Tonight we present a man who weakened in his course. It
may be called a tragedy of conscience. (Hamilton 1930, 1)
This opening announcement is remarkable for many reasons, and I

want to focus on Hamilton’s equation of the stability of the self with
success. In order to succeed in the world, the individual must not allow
him/herself to be transformed, lest he or she become like “the most evil
character in Shakespeare.” Describing the tragedy of Richard III in terms
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of a single, universal “human truth” that is accessible through the voice

of the intercessory narrator forecloses on ambiguities of meaning. It is
these ambiguities, and how individual audiences and actors resolve
them through the engagement between character and audience, that
provide much of the performance pleasure of Richard III. In effect,
Hamilton asks the audience to let the play wash over them, to stay their
own courses, rather than engage the play and possibly let it weaken
their resolve. In this reading, there can be no act of self-sacrifice in the
listening of this play, because to do so would be to mimic Richard him-
self. Richard loses himself, both his life and his crown, at the Battle of
Bosworth Field, and Hamilton turns the play into an illustration of
moral constancy, pruning the text to support his argument. The inter-
cessory narrator structures the possible mode(s) of engagement for the
radio audience, but does so drawing on a tradition of theatrical adapta-
tion that stretches back into the late seventeenth century.
The play itself shows signs of heavy adaptation: new dialogue has
been written and speeches from 3 Henry VI have been wilfully inserted.
Indeed, the version of Richard III presented on “Radio Guild” was itself
a half-hour-long adaptation of Colley Cibber’s 1699 rewriting of Richard
III, thus presenting several layers of mediation even before the audi-
ence heard the piece. The reliance on Cibber’s text is unheralded, even
though by the early twentieth century his version had long since passed
out of fashion in the theatre. The use of Cibber’s heavily edited text is
apparently in keeping with the essential quality of radio adaptations, as
suggested by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation, which is “distil-
lation” (2013, 41). However, such distillation is inevitably presenting a
political as well as an aesthetic argument. Here, the expert announcer is
not merely presenting the text of Shakespeare and offering a possible
exegesis, but disingenuously presenting what had become an ideologi-
cally deeply conservative historical oddity as Shakespeare and also of-
fering a possible exegetical model for the play. Even in cases where the
mediation of the announcer is largely descriptive rather than exegeti-
cal, the script resituates certain characters’ lines to suggest interaction
between the characters and the narrator. These resituated lines modu-
late the relationship between Richard and the audience by naturalizing
the position of the narrator within the play. Richard’s soliloquies cease
to address the audience with these additions and turn to the interces-
sory narrator, further increasing the mediation of an already highly me-
diated experience and subverting the intimacy of radio that Hilda
Matheson theorized only three years following this production.
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ANNOUNCER: Richard’s ambition does not stop with the murder of

Henry – nor with the contemplated taking off of Clarence and Edward.
He immediately takes steps to ingratiate himself with Lady Anne, widow
of the young son of Henry. She has obtained permission to bury the mur-
dered King, her father-in-law, and we find Richard waiting to intercept the
burial procession. Anne has pleaded illness to avoid him.
GLOS: ’Twas her excuse to avoid me. Alas! She keeps no bed: – She has
health enough to progress far as Chertsey, though not to bear the sight of
me. I cannot blame her: – Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb
… (“Radio Guild”)
Instead of Richard’s soliloquy appealing to the unseen radio listeners,

“’Twas her excuse to avoid me” seems to directly respond to the words
of the announcer. This strategy of deformation differs significantly
from that employed in Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth insofar as Welles’s
stage version hailed audiences as an adaptation and in terms of its ad-
aptation. Welles’s version invited commentary and participation from
the audience, never claiming to be the single, true Macbeth. It was a
form of engagement with the tradition, which encouraged greater fa-
miliarity with the Shakespearean original.8 Here, the announced “truth”

of the play, which is foregrounded in the opening lines, and the autho-
rized voice of the intercessory narrator both serve to discourage indi-
vidual engagement with the play. General radio audiences were not to
presence the play, but to accept it as a distant, distinct representative of
a universal and true culture of which they were not a part.
Throughout the 1930s, radio adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays em-
ployed similar techniques of exegesis. These techniques remained in
place (with difference) through attempts to reinvent radio Shakespeare
later in the decade, though there were a few notable exceptions to the
general trend of narratorial guidance. CBS’s “Columbia Workshop,”
which began broadcasting on 18 July 1936, was explicitly “devoted to
experimental radio” (Welles 1936a) and in a month, on 19 August 1936,
the “Columbia Workshop” turned to Hamlet. The performance starred
Orson Welles and covered only the first two acts of the play. In this ver-
sion, the intercessory narrator position is occupied by Welles, who in-
troduces the play and offers an explanation for the two-act-only format.
This explanation does not foist an exegetical framework on the audi-
ence, but invites the audience to engage the play. The two-act-only
structure was designed to “Giv[e] you, we hope, a clear, dramatic state-
ment of the causes of Hamlet’s tragedy.” This invitation to engage the
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play was taken up by the audience and a letter campaign caused

the “Columbia Workshop” to finish Hamlet a few months later on
14 November 1936. As Fernández-Vara notes, “Welles integrated the
discursive framing into his radio drama, trying to efface it and make
the narrative content closer to the listener” (2004, 77). Though the sec-
ond half of Hamlet does not have the same overt appeal to the audience
as the first, the two parts stand as an attempt to moderate narratorial
exegesis.
The techniques of moderation came back – though with diminished
force – less than a year later in the “Summer of Shakespeare.” When
CBS announced in early 1937 that it was going to present “The
Shakespeare Cycle,” it claimed that it was the first major attempt to put
Shakespeare on the radio in United States history. In doing so, CBS
completely sidestepped “Radio Guild” and earlier experimental per-
formances by broadcasters like WJZ. CBS’s “Shakespeare Cycle” was to
involve a cast of Hollywood celebrities such as Walter Huston, Leslie
Howard, and Humphrey Bogart, trading on the authority of the celebri-
ties’ status to legitimize the CBS production. Shortly thereafter NBC
announced its own Shakespearean series, “Streamlined Shakespeare,”
featuring the falling star of the Shakespearean actor John Barrymore, as

an attempt to recapture the mantle of legitimate radio theatre.
Both “Shakespeare Cycle” and “Streamlined Shakespeare” en-
gaged in a kind of intermedial piracy of sorts, as the “Streamlined
Shakespeare” series turned back to the high art of the New York the-
atre for its primary star, while “Shakespeare Cycle” took its cast from
the populist world of Hollywood film. Neither the “Shakespeare
Cycle” nor “Streamlined Shakespeare” showed any interest in allow-
ing the audience to engage the works themselves. For example, the
actors, though drawn from Hollywood, speak “Shakespearean” rather
than using their native accents. The unique and instantly identifiable
voices of Edward G. Robinson, playing Petruchio, and Humphrey
Bogart, as Hotspur, were muddled behind a mid-Atlantic accent in the
CBS series, while John Barrymore, whose British accent locates his
characters firmly in a high culture not shared by the general popula-
tion, headed the NBC series. The narratorial intrusions by Barrymore
himself also served to undermine the intimacy of the audience’s rela-
tionship with the play, resisting audience engagement with the text. As
in the “Radio Guild” series, the narrators provide not only background
but also close interpretive avenues for the audience. For example, the
introduction to the CBS “Shakespeare Cycle” version of Julius Caesar
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offers a character reading of Caesar that harks back to Victorian criti-

cism, closing off possible counter readings of the character.
Rome. When Rome was the world, and Caesar was the mightiest Roman.
Caesar the conqueror, Caesar the lawgiver. Wise Caesar. Vain Caesar.
Brilliant Caesar. Superstitious Caesar. Tomorrow he will be dead, but to-
day he lives and the world is his for the taking. (Julius Caesar 1937)
Howsoever the narrator served to close doors, the encouragement of

the audience to presence Shakespeare in the “Columbia Workshop”
experiment must have affected the construction of the mediation of
the play by the “Shakespeare Cycle” narrator. Instead of claiming au-
thority from external sources such as the academy or the theatre, the
narrator of “Streamlined Shakespeare” situated himself in the role of
eyewitness.
He continues, placing all of the verbs in the present, shifting the story
from irretrievable past to the accessible future-present.
Today is the Roman festival of the Lupercal. In a few moments, the sons of
noblemen will run naked through the streets, striking all they may meet
with leather thongs. In this manner will they symbolize for the gods the
purification of the city. All Rome will line the course to witness the holy
race, and none more prominent than Caesar with his wife Calpurnia.
(Julius Caesar 1937)
Read in a manner not unlike the phrasing of journalists at the time,

though with classical music underscoring it, the narrator’s script here
emphasizes the presence of the Shakespearean story even as it explains
the cultural difference. By locating the ancient Roman world in the
present – i.e., “Today” – “Shakespeare Cycle” gives the narrator a posi-
tion of an eyewitness. As Edward Miller describes, eyewitnesses have
authority not because of access to the specialized knowledge of a
Clayton Meeker Hamilton or a John Barrymore, but by virtue of their
accidental position in the world.
The eyewitness has a particular and peculiar relationship with knowl-

edge; however, this knowledge is neither empirical nor learned. It is a
knowledge of proximity, a knowledge of history as it is happening, a pur-
ported liveness. The listener is in the audible presence of the eyewitness
whose voice surmounts distance. This voice transmits earth-shattering
events into language,
WESTERN RESERVE UNIV knowing that he is in the presence of history being
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made. This voice trusts that words and the medium can succeed and sur-
vive any event, even the most disastrous. (2003, 62)
The “Shakespeare Cycle” posited the relationship between audience

and narrator in a slightly different way from Barrymore’s “Streamlined
Shakespeare.” The difference is subtle, as the medium’s reliance on a
narrator to articulate authority remains the same, yet the epistemic
structure of authority has here shifted. It remains true that the interces-
sory voice of the narrator structures the ways in which the audience can
engage with the Shakespearean text. With the “Shakespeare Cycle,”
however, the remediation of the text to radio is predicated on an appeal
to direct knowing, whereas with “Streamlined Shakespeare” the reme-
diation is based on privileging the theatrical experience of John
Barrymore over the individual experiences of the listeners.
The year following the “Summer of Shakespeare,” Orson Welles con-
tinued the modulation of the relationship between the authoritative
intercessory narrator and the audience in his “Mercury Theatre of the
Air” production of Julius Caesar, where he brought in the radio news
anchor H.V. Kaltenborn to narrate the production. The choice of
Kaltenborn was unique. As a news anchor, he had the privilege of the

eyewitness, but also, as the most popular news anchor on CBS, his was
a representative voice for the network. Further, as Fernández-Vara dis-
cusses, Kaltenborn was the journalist charged at that moment with re-
porting the developments of the Munich Conference (2004, 95). In
choosing Kaltenborn, Welles situated the version of Julius Caesar by
“The Mercury Theatre” in both the present of the Munich Conference
and the past of Shakespeare’s vision of Rome.
The Intercessory Voice
The famous RCA logo of a small dog listening to a phonograph, amazed

at hearing “His Master’s Voice,” encapsulates the capitalist medium’s
ideal relationship between early radio pioneers of Shakespearean adap-
tation and the audience. Further, the image articulated the technologi-
cal deficiencies of a broadcast medium like radio, which systemically
discouraged audience engagement. Interestingly, however, that logo
was not created for radio, but for the sound recording industry, offer-
ing an originary and concluding site of intermedial adaptation for
this paper. The relationship between Shakespearean performance and
emerging media such as radio and audio recording from 1880 to 1950
hasEBSCO
been Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/12/2021 10:14 AM via CASE
largely overlooked by scholars, partially because, until the rise
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of the internet, the technological limitations of disseminating audio re-

cordings have precluded them as an object of study. Nevertheless, radio
was by far the single most popular medium of the 1930s–1940s, well
outstripping the infant television and the far more studied film.
Defining the relationship between this most popular of media and
Shakespeare can illuminate the cultural position of both. By the turn of
the century, Shakespeare had come to be associated with high culture
and, as the decades wore on, private radio interests such as NBC and
CBS appropriated Shakespeare to justify their positions on the air as
more than merely selling soap flakes and other domestic goods. The
position of the announcer developed into that of the narrator, whose
intermediation between the radio audience and the purported
Shakespearean text was predicated on his position as an authority in
the academy or on the stage.
Throughout the 1930s, this logic of authority broke down as radio
structured the intercessory narrator as less a kind of expert by training
and more an expert by virtue of his position as eyewitness. While still a
sign of a kind of expertise, the voice of the intercessory narrator re-
mained absolute, mediating between the text and the audience. In this
sense, the ways in which radio presented and performed authority in

the form of Shakespeare became increasingly complex as the Golden
Age wore on. Radio could never recover the immediacy and riotous-
ness of the theatrical experience of the nineteenth century (nor, in many
ways, would the radio networks have wanted to). Nevertheless, in re-
locating the authority of the intercessory narrator from specialized ex-
pertise to the engagement of the eyewitness, radio modulated the
relationship between audience and medium envisioned in the RCA
logo. No longer was it his master’s voice that the dog heard, but a voice
like his own, yet different. It was still not his own voice – such radical
interpretive freedom would be only possible with the internet and tech-
nologies like YouTube and mobile computing, explored elsewhere in
this book – but it was a voice that the radio industry developed to
sound like his. That is, his master’s voice had begun to give way not to
our master’s voice, but to your master’s voice.
NOTES
1 Though Rick Altman has suggested that Orson Welles may have invented
“the intrusive episodic narrator, the one who bridges each pair of scenes
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rather than appearing only at the beginning and the end of the program”
(1994, 12), this paper will show that the intercessory narrator existed long
before Welles’s rise to prominence in the late 1930s.
2 In other words, these interventions were intermedial, where the terms of
intermedial adaptation both structure and are structured within a unique
cultural context, as explored elsewhere in this book in the interview with
Tom Magill in reference to Northern Ireland.
3 1933 is usually considered a landmark year in terms of American radio in-
sofar as both the music publishing industry and the cinema were suffering
heavy losses from the Depression while the radio industry not only main-
tained its popularity but reached approximately 50% of the American pop-
ulation (McElvaine 1984, 141). For instance, 1932–3 saw the birth of many
of the most popular radio programs of the golden age: “The Jack Benny
Program,” “The Lone Ranger,” and the first of Roosevelt’s “Fireside
Chats.” By 1933, corporations saw the benefits of radio as an advertising
medium and hailed and constructed audiences as consumers of material
as well as cultural products (Lenthall 2007, 63).
4 Intermedia scholars have largely ignored early audio media, as they tend
to look at the emergence of media in the postmodern world rather than
the 1910s and 1920s. For example, though G.H. Hovagimyan’s essay “On
***** Media” recognizes the political uses of radio by totalitarian and dem-
ocratic states in the early twentieth century, it largely ignores the tropes
used by dramatic presentations on radio as a set of borrowed or interme-
dial forms (Hovagimyan 2005).
5 Lanier’s work in Shakespeare after Mass Media (edited by Richard Burt) has
not been alone in commenting upon radio and Shakespeare. Indeed, in
recent years a number of articles have looked into the phenomenon.
Susanne Greenhalgh’s article in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare
and the Arts (2011) looks into English-speaking radio history through
versions of Hamlet. The recent work in McKernan, Oesterlen, and Terris
(2009) shows the enduring relevance of the medium within a largely
digital world. Nevertheless, the field of research is still largely
understudied.
6 Also, to claim that the density of Shakespearean language was itself a
stumbling block to the general popularity of Shakespeare on the radio ig-
nores the growing commercial viability of Shakespeare throughout the pe-
riod, both on the radio and in other media such as film and the stage.
Shakespearean language was neither inherently inaccessible, nor was it a
guaranteed failure at the proverbial box office. If Shakespeare could still
be a success at the box office, then Shakespeare’s marginalized position on
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radio – as neither wholly theatrical performance nor wholly born on the

radio performance – needs further unpacking.
7 By the 1930s, radio broadcasters and producers had long since recognized
the attractiveness of a visual medium like television. Serious efforts had
begun to make the technology marketable, yet until the 1950s (when
broadcast television became feasible in the United States), the broadcast-
ing industry was bound to market the auditory medium as an equal but
different experience. It was only in the decades following the rise of televi-
sion that the spectacular regained ascendancy in home entertainment, and
radio has since been figured as somehow deficient.
8 The irony is twofold regarding Shakespeare’s original text. On the one
hand, the editorial history of Richard III is fiendishly complex, since schol-
ars consider two independent texts (the Folio and the Third Quarto) equal-
ly authoritative. That is, there is no single original text of Richard III that
can be reliably ascribed to Shakespeare, but two forms of the play with
equal claim to authority. Further, Shakespeare’s Richard III was itself an
adaptation and response to an earlier set of texts, both printed histories
(such as Edward Hall’s Union) and plays (Richardus Tertius; The True
Tragedy of Richard the Third). Richard III was an adaptation or remediation
of previous materials, later adapted by Cibber and then further remediat-

ed by Hamilton to the radio.
WORKS CITED
Altman, Rick. 1994. “Deep-Focus Sound: Citizen Kane and the Radio
Aesthetic.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 15.3: 1–33.
Anderegg, Michael. 1999. Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Barrymore, John. 1937. Streamlined Shakespeare. Performed and Directed by
John Barrymore. NBC Radio. June–July. Radio Broadcast. MP3 format.
Balk, Alfred. 2006. The Rise of Radio, from Marconi through the Golden Age.
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Brecht, Berthold. 2006 [1927]. “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communica-
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Readings, 2–3. South Orange, NJ: CSFC Consortium.
Fernández-Vara, Clara. 2004. “Orson Welles’ Intermedial Versions of
Shakespeare in Theatre Radio and Film.” MSc, MIT.
France, Richard. 2001. Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The WPA and Mercury
Theatre Playscripts. New York: Routledge.
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Greenhalgh, Susanne. 2011. “Shakespeare and Radio.” The Edinburgh Compan-

ion to Shakespeare and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hamilton, Clayton Meeker. 1930. Introduction to “King Richard III.” An Hour
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ed. Hans Breder and Klaus-Peter Busse, 117–20. Dortmund: Dortmunder
Schriften zur Kunst.
Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013 [2006]. A Theory of Adaptation.
2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Julius Caesar. 1937. Shakespeare Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Narrated by
Conway Turrell. Performed by Claude Rains, Thomas Mitchell, Walter
Abel, Reginald Denny. CBS Radio. 26 July. Radio Broadcast. MP3 format.
Lanier, Douglas. 2002. “WSHX: Shakespeare and American Radio.” In
Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt, 195–220. New York: Palgrave.
Lenthall, Bruce. 2007. Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of
Modern Mass Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Maltin, Leonard. 2000. The Great American Broadcast. New York: New
American Library.
Matheson, Hilda. 1933. Broadcasting. London: Thornton Butterworth.
McElvaine, Robert S. 1984. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New
York: Times Books.
McKernan, Luke, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, and Olwen Terris, eds. 2009.
Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide. London:
British Universities Film and Video Council.
McLuhan, Marhsall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Miller, Edward D. 2003. Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Naremore, James. 1989. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas: Southern
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“The Radio Guild.” N.d. CBC Archives Transcript. McMaster University
Library.
Shakespeare, William. 1988a. “Hamlet.” In Four Tragedies, ed. David Bevington.
New York: Bantam.
– 1988b. “Julius Caesar.” In Four Tragedies, ed. David Bevington. New York:
Bantam.
Smith, Judith E. 2002. “Radio’s ‘Cultural Front,’ 1938–1948.” In Radio Reader,
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NA 220012. Liner notes.
Welles, Orson. 1936a. “Hamlet, Part One.” Performed by Orson Welles,
Alexander Scorby, Rosamond Pinchot, Edgerton Paul, Sidney Smith.
Columbia Workshop. Internet Archive. 19 September. http://ia700200
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.mp3.
– 1936b. “Hamlet, Part Two.” Performed by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton,
Virginia Welles, Laura Strob, Whitford Cane, Sidney Smith, Edgerton Paul,
Edward Jerome. Columbia Workshop. Internet Archive. 14 November.
http://ia700200.us.archive.org/20/items/ColumbiaWorkshop/361114_
Hamlet_Part_2.mp3.
– 1990. Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts.
Ed. Richard France. New York: Greenwood Press.
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Sounding Shakespeare:
Intermedial Adaptation and Popular Music1
Dani el F i schli n
Preamble
If music be the food of love, play on

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,
or What You Will (1.1.1; emphasis mine)
See I’m a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare

Jesus Christ the King of these Latter Day Saints here
To shatter the picture in which of that as they paint me
as a monger of hate and Satan a scatter-brained atheist
But that ain’t the case, see it’s a matter of taste
We as a people decide if Shady’s as bad as they say he is
Or is he the latter – a gateway to escape?
(Eminem, “Renegade”)2
Count Orsino’s opening declamation in Twelfth Night encourages mu-

sical “play” and links that play, by paronomasia, to theatrical play and
to erotics – as if to suggest, in a single suppositious witticism, the inex-
tricable links among music, play, whether musical or theatrical, and
love. The highly quotable comment is precisely so because it gets at an
underlying relationship reiterated in Shakespearean theatre. In that re-
lationship, musical and theatrical play are empowered as forms of per-
formance that cannot help but be popular, if not “universal,” because
they are inextricably linked to erotic play.
Moreover, Orsino’s words anticipate what is a fundamentally inter-
medial relationship, suggesting that music stands in for something
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other than itself, crossing over into other forms of mediation that make
it at once ludic (“play on”) and erotic (“the food of love”). Music in this
context enables play, with a sly pun on both theatrical and erotic play
by way of a “food” trope that is sufficiently open-ended to imply both
necessary nourishment and pleasure. But Orsino’s line also indirectly
addresses a determining feature of adaptation in relation to intermedi-
ality: namely, that adaptations in which crossovers occur from one me-
dium into another tend towards proliferative play. They are resolutely
generative of meaning as a function of playing across media. The very
term “intermedial adaptation” implies that intermedial techniques are
also adaptive techniques. Intermediality always already suggests the
transformation, remediation, or hybridization that occurs when one
form of media enters into dialogue with another. Hence, intermedial
interventions adhere to adaptation’s primary function to proliferate
meaning using whatever techniques – intertextual or intermedial – are
readily available and, presumably, aesthetically compelling.
The insight is the opposite of what musico-literary critic Walter
Bernhart describes as “one particular aspect of the intermedial relation-
ship between words and music, namely the possible danger that the
music, when it is combined with words, may in some way ‘destroy’ the
words. This implies that music, in a multimedia situation, as far as its
effect on an audience is concerned, possibly overrules, displaces, ab-
sorbs the words and what they have to say” (2002, 247). Intermediality,
in the Shakespearean context cited above, implies combinatory, hybrid-
ized, multiple forms of meaning arising from the collision of signifiers
that makes Orsino’s words so memorable. The line reminds readers
that music is always already implicit in the language of theatre, the
iambic pulse of the first four feet of the line giving way to the emphatic
spondee of the last foot, “play on.” The intermedial music of the line (it
is at once aural and textual) literally enacts its substantive meaning and
its injunction to “play” across the rich possibility of meaning that a sin-
gle line such as this can make possible.
By contrast, Eminem’s rap duet with Jay-Z, “Renegade,” from Jay-
Z’s sixth album The Blueprint (2001) was released on September 11 coin-
ciding with the attacks by Al-Qaeda on the US. The duet explicitly
makes over-the-top connections between Eminem’s status in popular
culture as “a regular modern day Shakespeare/Jesus Christ the King of
these Latter Day Saints here.” It does so while also launching a scath-
ing attack on religious dogmatism, the lame-brained criticism of
Eminem’s music by people whose own hypocrisy he attacks, and those
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Sounding Shakespeare: Adaptation and Popular Music 259
who simply do not understand how his music expresses the rage and
frustration of stymied youth in America and how that music offers “a
gateway to escape” that is of the people.
The lyrics invoke Shakespeare as a double signifier: first, of the pa-
rodic rhetorical excess that produces both celebrity and the false per-
ceptions and criticisms that Eminem rails against; and second, as a
conduit for the poetic power invoked by Eminem as a means to achieve
artistic autonomy, a conduit whose performance provides a “gateway
to escape” from the constraints of people whose “taste” dictates other-
wise. The “gateway to escape” trope invokes anarchic creative powers
associated with rap: its ability to unleash the collective intermedial
aesthetics of textual and musical signifying. The phrase “We as a peo-
ple decide” invokes the Preamble to the United States Constitution3
and its opening proclamation, which suggests that state sovereignty
arises by will of the “people.” Eminem’s sly allusion locates the “peo-
ple” as the fount of decision making, the very place where the “popu-
lar” in “popular culture” originates. In a country increasingly governed
by political oligopolies and corporate self-interest, such a declamation
is not without a much wider political resonance than “Renegade” has,
with its extended defence of ghetto culture, as Jay-Z declaims at the

beginning of the piece:
Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?

See I’m influenced by the ghetto you ruined
That same dude you gave nothin, I made somethin doin
what I do through and through and
I give you the news – with a twist it’s just his ghetto point-of-view
The renegade; you been afraid
I penetrate pop culture, bring ’em a lot closer to the block where they
pop toasters and they live with their moms got drop roasters from botched
robberies niggas crouched over
mommies knocked up cause she wasn’t watched over … (“Renegade
Lyrics”)
The giving of the “news,” with its combination of New Testament and
media resonances, and the penetration of pop culture by the renegade
“ghetto point-of-view” combine to attack pop and media cultures that
have excluded this view while showing how any reductive notion of a
monolithic popular culture is riven by contradictions, here driven by
class and ethnicity. Rap’s intermediality is based on both its cultural
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difference and its use of musico-poetic tropes to access “pop culture.”

Jay-Z’s words imply that rap has adapted to the conditions of oppres-
sion that exclude the ghetto and used the very tools of the oppressor to
travel across cultural divides, here signified by the split between the
ghetto and the suburbs.
The US Nielsen SoundScan ranks Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers
III) as the best-selling artist of the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury, having sold more than 80 million albums worldwide, making him
one of an élite handful of best-selling popular music artists in the world.
Likewise, Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter) is one of the most successful hip
hop artists and pop music entrepreneurs in the US with a net worth of
some $450 million (as of 2010) and album sales of approximately 50 mil-
lion units worldwide. Both artists have had, in other words, remarkable
success in “penetrating” pop music markets – and have corresponding
financial and artistic clout as a result, even as they have built that clout
on the kinds of renegade, “outsider” comments that the above-cited
lyrics demonstrate.
Shakespeare’s name, then, sits comfortably in this context both as a
signifier of financial and artistic achievement and as an iconic presence.
Shakespeare’s literariness helps validate the renegade perspectives,

which simultaneously critique a pop culture that excludes ghetto cul-
ture and empower a pop culture of the people who “decide” on what is
to be successful. Moreover, Shakespeare’s canonic centrality (the power
of his global brand) has now travelled into the urban musical contexts
of “renegade” black culture, a clear indicator of intermediality as both
a crossing over of media and a crossing over of cultures interpellated
by media.
Both epigraphs outline a set of relations between popular culture, as
a monolithic entity riven by internal contradictions and dissonances,
and Shakespeare, as a touchstone reference for both artistic achieve-
ment and popular appeal, whose presence can be appropriated to pop-
ular culture as the need fits. Gianni Sibilla reminds us, “Pop music is an
intermedial and intertextual phenomenon defined by its position in the
contemporary mediascape” (2004, 124). Shakespeare, as an iconic glob-
al intermedial brand, is situated in a similar relation to the mediascape,
endlessly appropriated to whatever uses the mediascape dictates, end-
lessly interwoven into intertextual and ever-proliferating representa-
tive strategies that run the gamut of advertising through multiple
genres of media and intermediality. In short, Shakespeare’s adaptation
into intermedial contexts associated with the power of popular song
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produces new contexts and resonances that sound Shakespeare’s ca-

pacity to mutate, to remain endlessly protean, as the pressures of new
media and new intertexts are brought to bear on his presence as an ava-
tar of proliferative meaning.
“Being Popular”: Defining Popular Music?
Definitions of popular music are problematic because they often fail to

distinguish between the multiple genres of what “popular” can mean
and the remarkably diverse activities of musicians whose work is “pop-
ular” but flies under the radar of what gets presented as mass culture.
Popular in this sense is not to be equated with mass culture, though it
frequently is. And popular, in this sense, references a broad range of
musical practices that cross over multiple genres, activities, and media
– not all necessarily represented in mass culture (though not all neces-
sarily excluded from mass culture either). Intimate practices of music
making that are widely occurring but largely ignored or underrepre-
sented in mainstream media are as important an aspect of popular mu-
sic as are its more commodified outputs. Popular music, in this view,
may reference genres as diverse as punk, grunge, alternative, gospel,

blues, Broadway song, rock, turntabling, hip hop, and the like, while
simultaneously referencing the practices of a broad segment of non-
commercial musicking4 that occurs in homes, local community con-
texts, and specific cultural and ethnic contexts in which music making
is an integral part of the fabric of everyday life that unites, and even
defines, community and the individuals who make it up. If one in-
cludes in this context multiple forms of dissemination across diverse
forms of media – think cassettes, vinyl, CDs, digital filesharing, radio,
TV, internet outlets of various kinds including social networking sites,
archival sites, and so forth – it becomes clear that intermediality is al-
ways already in practice as a precondition for understanding popular
music’s intersections with media culture writ large.
“Popular,” then, references not only the contexts that produce the
music and allow for its dissemination but also audience reception, the
access of the musicians to cultural bandwidths that are more or less
travelled (think Clear Channel5 dissemination as opposed to Indie
[Independent], DIY [Do-It-Yourself], or local community practices
and aesthetics), and the activities of the musicians themselves as self-
defining, autonomous makers of popular culture, regardless of the at-
tention paid to it by mass culture. Moreover, because subjective notions
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of value and status are so often a key aspect of self-fashioning in popu-

lar culture generally, one person’s notion of popular may be another
person’s notion of marginal or irrelevant. The jazz purist may eschew
notions of jazz as a popular form of music as much as the punk fan
finds the so-called popularity of jazz incomprehensible or risible – and
some listeners may find both forms to be wholly unthinkable as popu-
lar music while others have no problem reconciling the two forms as
different aspects of what popular music can mean. Intersubjective no-
tions of value, then, are a crucial aspect of the definitional problems
associated with precisely defining what popular music may mean in
different contexts. Intermediality in its proliferative, adaptive, protean
incarnations is as much an expression of those intersubjective values
associated with pop music as it is of anything else.
“Being” popular in a mass cultural context means something en-
tirely different from “being” popular in a lived everyday sense shared
across communities for whom popularity derives from practices that
are quotidian, continuously evolving, yet deeply rooted in identity
structures to which mass culture pays little heed. The ways in which
these multiple communities of practice engage with either pop music
or Shakespeare across multiple forms of culture, media, and meaning

assure that the intermedial effects, which one must also recognize as
adaptive effects, are consistently associated with the attempt to gener-
ate new meaning through novel cultural practices.
Pop music implies an aesthetics that eludes easy definitions and is
grounded on the paradox that assumes both centrality and marginality
as its key attributes. So hip hop sells as ghetto music to suburban white
males as part of a phantasy of rebellion. The music industry capitalizes
on “insider” cultural capital associated with alternative music scenes
that are trans-mediated into new markets. But the marketing hypocrisy
of selling the ghetto to bourgeois consumers can in itself cause a plum-
meting of cultural capital’s stock when the putative authenticity of the
scene is compromised by the realization it has been co-opted and is no
longer in antagonistic opposition to the corporate values by which it
has been overtaken. Torn between public commons notions of music
as outside commercial economies of exchange and the creation of mu-
sic for profit, popular music entails contradictory notions of the func-
tion of music generally. It is also thoroughly implicated in discourses
of class that distinguish low- and highbrow music by canonical choic-
es associated with repertoire, style, education, institutionalization.
Moreover, British pop music scholar Timothy Warner argues, “pop mu-
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sic is inextricably bound to developments in audio technology and the

working practices [that] ensue” (2003, xi). Manipulation of technology
in ways that generate new forms is a key aspect of popular music. This
rule of thumb applies as much to the introduction of radio as to the
invention of the electric guitar in the first half of the twentieth century
(and subsequent practices like Frippertronics6 that explore the poten-
tial of that medium of expression via layering on newer technologies
like tape looping) – and to the more recent use of turntable technology
in the latter half of the twentieth century as a retro way of making new
music via scratching, beat juggling, and beat mixing and matching.
The persistent engagement with new technologies for generating
meaning is one reason why pop music remains so remarkably interme-
dial. British sociologist and rock critic Simon Frith elaborates five crite-
ria for defining popular music: commercial music that participates in
an economic system; music that is attuned to changes in technology
especially with regard to both storage and recording; music that is “ex-
perienced as mediated” and bound up with the mass media of radio,
TV, cinema, and, more recently, the internet and the digital revolution;
music made for pleasure and entertainment; and music that is formally
hybridized, crossing “social, cultural, and geographical boundaries”

(2004, 3–4).
Frith’s paradigms work well generally, though they largely focus on
the commercial and commodity status of popular music while ne-
glecting music that is “popular” in the etymological sense of the Latin
adjective and noun popularis (meaning by, of, or for the people or com-
patriot, comrade) and populus (people or nation). In this latter more
generalized sense of “popular,” music may be more closely tied to so-
cial and community functions that strengthen structures of identity,
history, memory, storytelling, and community affiliation. In such a
sense, the commodity- and economic-centred definitions of popular
music evade the larger question of popular music as a key site for ar-
ticulating public commons notions of community and individual self-
fashioning. Moreover, as British sociologist Georgina Born argues,
“within commercial popular music there is a proliferation of markets
and of production processes [that] is remarkable compared with other
mass media. Television, cinema, the press and radio are by comparison
large-scale, centralized and oligopolistic forms of cultural production,
with little entry or influence by small-scale producers and distributors”
(1987, 1). So a key aspect of any understanding of intermediality in rela-
tion to pop culture and its interpretation of an iconic presence like
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Shakespeare is that pop culture cannot be dissociated from the full

spectrum of cultural productions that produce ongoing intermediation.
In short, intermediation is a defining aspect of new adaptive forms of
intertext that recycle, mutate, and shapeshift as a defining element of
their creative process.
For our purposes, then, popular music may be understood as intrin-
sically tied to notions of class (in the sense of “who” and “how” the
populus or people may be defined); access to and use of technology
(from choice of instrument through to performance, recording, and
dissemination techniques); hybridization, permeability, and interme-
diality in both commercial and non-commercial structures of creation
and dissemination; and public commons notions of identity and self-
fashioning that arise as an expression of both community and indi-
vidual identities. The function of popular music is to be dissociated
from any one singular telos (like simply pleasure or entertainment), as
there are too many ways in which music creates meaning as an art
form that relies on sounds whose representations cannot always be
determined or reduced to singular meanings. This ambiguity, along
with the fact that so much popular music is tied to either words or to
dance forms, makes for interesting parallels with the performative

practices associated with Shakespearean theatre, which in their own
contexts were already tending towards the proliferative meanings as-
sociated with intermediation.
Shakespearean Contexts and Connections
The aesthetics of Shakespearean theatre have, from their inception,

been profoundly tied to popular music, whether in Shakespeare’s
own historical moment or in subsequent historical moments that
fuse Shakespearean tropes with popular musicking of various sorts.
Shakespeare’s plays make use of multiple musical moments in which
popular musics are deployed as performative and affective structures
that often play a meta-diegetic, intermedial role in the plays: the musi-
cal moments that are part of the play structures, in other words, com-
ment upon the larger narrative structures in the plays in ways that
unite verbal and musical affect.
Shakespeare’s plays were written during a time that overlaps with
the height of the Elizabethan lute song phenomenon (approximately
1596–1622 and comprising a corpus of about 650 songs [Fischlin 1998,
42]), in which this remarkable form of cultural production anticipated
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the waves of popular song styles that have become an inescapable fea-
ture of Western culture generally. As both a courtly and a private do-
mestic entertainment governed by a poetics of intimacy that appears to
have been widely shared and remarkably popular, the lute song is but
one of many historical factors that make Shakespeare’s association with
popular music unavoidable. As I have argued elsewhere, “The public
representation of interiority is rife with tensions between the conven-
tions of external display and the hermetic display of private contem-
plation” (Fischlin 1998, 267). The staged representations of song in
Shakespearean theatre partake in this tension as much as do current-
day popular musical performances in which staging the interiority of
the artist plays a crucial role in producing affect. The very insertion of
song into a theatrical text suggests, in this context, an intermedial af-
fect only possible as a function of the intermediation. A culture in
which the staged representation of affective intimacy was a key trope
was capable of producing such a trope through nascent forms of inter-
medial making.
Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore’s Music in Shakespeare: A
Dictionary notes how “Music pervades Shakespeare’s plays and poems.
In addition to numerous stage directions for music and sound effects

and the many vocal songs in the plays, Shakespeare’s dramatic and
poetic work is permeated by references to music, involving over
300 terms” (2005, 1). And as the English organist and composer Edward
Naylor reminds us, “Out of thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare, there
are no less than thirty-two which contain interesting references to
music and musical matters in the text itself” (1896, 17). In addition,
Wes Folkerth has argued in The Sound of Shakespeare that writing was
the “most sophisticated technology for recording sound events in
Shakespeare’s England” and Shakespeare “learned to push that repre-
sentational technology to its mimetic limits … Shakespeare’s playtexts
record past acoustic events, vivifying the past presences of different
voices, tones, and intonations in the early modern theatre. The sounds
embedded in these playtexts ask us to assent to the fullness and reality
of their temporal and cultural otherness. At the same time, they also
express, at various registers of theatrical and linguistic representation,
their author’s understanding of sound” (2002, 7). As a register of acous-
tic memory beyond the mere referencing of musical events and con-
cepts, then, Shakespeare’s playtexts are always already reminding us of
their intermediality, with script and typography pointing us back to
sonic events, acoustic presences.
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Moreover, understanding the fullness of the plays’ indebtedness to

musical and sonic contexts requires that we attend to how they were
preceded by musical performances and occasionally by inter-act per-
formances. Bruce R. Smith cites Andrew Gurr’s view that “the musical
consort ‘brought the largest single alteration to the King’s Men’s prac-
tices when they took over the Blackfriars playhouse,’” a change that
“proved so popular that the company retrofitted the Globe to include
a curtained music room in the balcony above the stage” (1999, 221).
Consort music’s popularity during Shakespeare’s time imitates the
complex relations of Shakespearean theatre’s popularity to different
classes and audiences, both as a popular and a courtly entertainment.
Consort music was as likely to be heard at a play or a masque as at a
banquet or outdoor entertainment, and was an important aspect of do-
mestic music making: “By the late 16th century, viol consort playing
was a major form of domestic musical recreation and education, as
many households possessed a chest of viols” (Randel 2003, 211).
The proximity of street ballad culture to the sites of Shakespearean
theatrical production also indicates an inevitable connection between
Shakespearean theatre and the popular music of its day. American early
modern scholar Bruce R. Smith notes, in a discussion of popular bal-

lads, how from the
street to the stage was only a matter of steps, in fact, if the Globe was 99
feet in diameter. On the stage, ballads might be not only commented upon
and quoted, but performed and metaperformed. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra
is only the most famous of the characters who voice contempt for “scald
Rimers” who will “Ballad vs out a Tune” – in the same breath that she
scorns the “quicke Comedians” who “extemporally will stage vs” … Such
ritual snubs to a commercially rival medium do not, however, prevent
[Shakespearean] characters from seizing on popular ballads in moments
that require lyric intensity, as Desdemona does with “Willow, willow” just
before her death or Benedick with “The god of loue that sits aboue” in the
throes of his love for Beatrice … Performance of ballads onstage did not
stop with quotation, however … Metaperformances of ballads onstage –
that is to say, performances of performances of ballads – occur most fa-
mously in The Winter’s Tale and Bartholomew Fair, where Autolycus and
Nightingale ply their wares to rural and to urban customers who are alike
in their eager gullibility. (1999, 168–9)
It is important to remember that ballads were both folk and street

forms, circulated
WESTERN RESERVE UNIV as printed broadsheets that were read aloud or, in the
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case of folk ballads, sung or recited from memory. Ballads themselves

emerged from a variety of sources, spanning folk songs, popular songs,
working songs, and courtly or art songs (Wilson and Calore 2005, 34) –
and an important aspect of their popularity was the very hybridity of
origin to which they gave voice. Ballads, in short, were profoundly in-
termedial musico-textual forms not only because they blended multi-
ple cultural sources but also because they circulated as both text and
song in multiple formats.
Just as ballads were a form of Elizabethan popular music integrated
into Shakespearean theatre so too was dance music. F.W. Sternfeld
notes in Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (1963) that the “great bulk of
extant Elizabethan and Jacobean music for solo instruments, such as
virginals or lute, and for consorts, whole or broken, consists of dance
music, largely in the form of pavans and galliards” (2005, 251). And
Shakespeare’s plays are replete with references to dance, “contain[ing]
numerous allusions to dance, using terms that would have been as im-
mediate and striking in their imagery to audiences as they are obscure
today” (Dobson and Wells 2004, 105). Dancing in Shakespeare’s his-
torical context “formed a part of people’s lives at all levels of society
in a way that we can scarcely conceive now, and the ability to dance
proficiently was an expected social accomplishment for the gentry and
nobility” (Dobson and Wells 2004, 105). The fusion of song, ballad,
instrumental musicking, dance – all part of Shakespearean theatrical
representations – marks the degree to which Shakespearean theatre in
its own historical moment was intensely linked to, and reflective of,
popular trends in intermedial musicking at that time.
Popular music’s relationship to Shakespeare is complex, not the
least because it oscillates between piggybacking upon Shakespeare’s
iconic status and deploying popular music’s own current-day iconic
status to resituate him in relation to new (potentially global) audienc-
es for whom his cultural currency is only distantly present. This curi-
ous relationship in which celebrity status and popularity (both of
Shakespeare and of major figures in popular music) are intermixed
and mutually reinforcing is a highly problematic aspect in any discus-
sion of Shakespeare and popular music. As British literary scholar Julie
Sanders points out: “while the influence of Shakespeare on music has
been considerable, the domain of musical interpretation, not least
opera, has had its impact in turn on the performance and under-
standing of many Shakespearean plays” (2007, 108). This aspect of the
Shakespeare effect’s impact on popular culture generally is profoundly
tiedWESTERN
to theories
RESERVE UNIV of adaptation, reinscription, deformation, sampling,
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allusion, translation, bastardization, and citation as Shakespearean

sources are transmuted and shapeshifted into vastly different interme-
dial contexts driven by the imperatives of contemporary aesthetics, his-
torical contexts, and economies of self-fashioning. Sanders argues:
The most fractured and fragmented Shakespearean presence of all is per-

haps to be found in contemporary popular music, especially the com-
pressed form of the popular song lyric, to the extent that terms like “adap-
tation” seem inaccurate, even irrelevant, when applied to the glancing
references or invocations that these frequently involve. It is difficult in the
same context to be confident, therefore, about the extent to which these
fleeting references or allusions require recognition – “deep,” fully contex-
tualized, or otherwise – on the part of their receiving audiences of their
Shakespearean origin or inspiration for the production of their meanings
and effects. (2007, 182)
The sheer fragmentary pervasiveness of Shakespearean referents in

popular music defies easy understanding. That said, it is worth noting
that this pervasiveness does indeed signify as an aspect of the Shakespeare
effect, defined as the capacity to do things to (and with) Shakespearean

source materials in ways that are anarchic, unpredictable, and not nec-
essarily coherent or reducible to singular meanings. Doing things to
Shakespeare via popular music, as with other aspects of popular cul-
ture generally, can produce an inverted relationship to Shakespeare’s
historical position as an iconic, universal cultural presence. Access to
Shakespeare is frequently mediated by popular culture with cinematic
and musical representations of Shakespearean citation and adaptation
preceding the original source material in terms of how audiences first
access Shakespeare. In these contexts it is impossible to address the
range of presence the Shakespeare effect has in and across cultures
without addressing how Shakespeare has been intermediated.
Case Study: Popular Song and Shakespeare in Canada
The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) website de-

votes a significant portion of its multimedia pages to Shakespeare and
popular music in Canada (Fischlin 2004).7 The online resource provides
a useful point of departure for understanding the contemporary array
of ways in which Shakespeare intersects with popular music. The fact
that the CASP site heavily relies on multiple forms of media to show
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how Shakespeare has been adapted into diverse popular music contexts
is in itself an indicator of Shakespearean intermediality. The internet as
a portal that collides content with multiple forms of intermediation is
perhaps the ultimate expression of intermediality: it allows for virtually
any form of media presencing via convergences that the internet’s tech-
nologies and infrastructure have steadily been evolving.8 Mark Williams
notes how
The attention to intermedial issues is also in part a historiographic re-

sponse to the contemporary media environment of convergence. If we are
to understand the many and continuous changes in our media environ-
ment and ecology, studies that afford a better reckoning of the scale and
complexity of prior relations between and across “media” (understood in
as complex and multiple a sense as required) will be important in media
history. (2009, 46–7)
Convergence is a key trope for understanding intermedial adaptations

and permutations. This is so because in the new “configurable world,”
as Aram Sinnreich calls it, “Creative transformation and aesthetic in-
novation … [are] markers of artistry among configurable musicians”

(2010, 100). Intermedial transformations and innovations are tropes for
“doing things to” received modes of configuring aesthetic realities,
tropes that ineluctably align with adaptation tropes. Shakespeare, for
better or worse, and because of his iconic presence in global media
culture as an avatar of literary and creative excellence, is one focal
point for intermedial experimentations with the transition from em-
bodied (theatrical) to virtual (and hybridized) digital, configurable
representations.
The audio portion of the CASP site, for instance, is divided into sec-
tions that include audio installation/experimental; music perfor-
mance; songs for stage; and theatre/archive recordings – a breakdown
that encompasses a remarkable range of musical performance prac-
tices and media associated with Shakespeare in Canada. Though not
all fall under the rubric of popular music, there are, nonetheless, a
significant number of examples from the site in which popular music
is a defining factor. Western Canadian playwright and author Ken
Mitchell’s 1976 Cruel Tears, for instance, is a country and western ad-
aptation of Othello, in which six country songs are performed by the
country-folk group Humphrey and the Dumptrucks, a group active
from 1967 to 1981 largely in Western Canada, where their mix of
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aspects of folk, country, and rock music spoke to issues faced by rural
Canadian communities.
Canadian director Antoni Cimolino commissioned songs composed
by the Canadian supergroup The Barenaked Ladies for his 2005
Stratford (Ontario) production of As You Like It. In both Mitchell’s adap-
tation and Cimolino’s staging, the plays become a means for deploying
the representational affects associated with popular music. In the case
of Cimolino’s production, the play was imagined in a “summer of love”
setting during the late 1960s, with Cimolino paralleling the themes in
the play with the social and political issues of the decade. But at the
same time, by importing the popular cultural prestige of the wildly suc-
cessful Barenaked Ladies, Cimolino (as general director of the Stratford
Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, which was founded in 1952) was clear-
ly seeking to revitalize stagnant and aging audiences at the largely con-
servative, but institutionally important, festival. Both examples speak
to the wide spectrum of audience that the mix of Shakespeare and pop-
ular music can address: from rural communities in Western Canada
through to elite audiences associated with one of Canada’s premier cul-
tural institutions.
By contrast, Canadian performance and multimedia artist Dawn

Matheson’s 2007 Tongues in Trees was an outdoor audio installation cre-
ated specifically for the Shakespeare Made in Canada Festival at the
University of Guelph. For the piece, seven adult learners from Action
Read Guelph (an adult literacy centre) each selected a Shakespearean
monologue that best described their lives, and then performed the
monologues with their own unique voicings. The installation pared
down the Shakespearean text to a level of open expression understand-
able by all, regardless of class, educational standing, or ability – and is
at once recognizable in its sonic, acoustic properties as both popular
and populist: a choice of popular (read: instantly knowable) mono-
logues and of performances that are populist in the sense that the un-
trained voices of the adult literacy learners speak in the everyday
inflections of a cross-section of people from a localized community.
Matheson’s intermedial experiment literally ended up in the trees out-
side the art gallery with the performers’ taped, then digitized, perfor-
mances of Shakespearean monologues broadcast through loudspeakers
hidden in the gardens around the gallery and activated by photoelec-
tric sensors triggered by gallery-goers.
This audio performance, while never marketed to a mass audience,
marks a breakdown of what “popular” means in relation to Shakespeare,
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with the music of the language transmuted and shaped by the very
personal conditions of the performers dealing with literacy issues in a
remarkably creative way. The piece reminds us that even a recitation of
a Shakespeare text has remarkable musical qualities that reflect upon
the nature of the performer and his or her context. Here, “popular”
references class, education, widespread learning disabilities, and the
biases that must be overcome to be capable of giving oneself voice,
while evoking the groundlings who stood in front of the Elizabethan
stage because they were too poor to sit on one of the three levels of the
Globe. Matheson’s work poses useful questions about who gets to voice
Shakespeare and how the kinds of voicings her work articulates, though
arising from how popular culture intersects with Shakespeare at a
“ground” level, are also excluded from the strategies of celebrity and
mass cultural power so frequently thought of as the defining frame-
work for all popular culture.
Other examples from the CASP site include Canadian composer,
singer, and harpist Loreena McKennitt, who has sold some thirteen mil-
lion “world music” records worldwide. The popular Canadian Celtic
singer’s version of Prospero’s epilogue speech (“Prospero’s Song”) is
part of a long musical association with Shakespeare. In 1981, she moved

to Stratford (Ontario) to perform in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
HMS Pinafore. And in 1982 McKennitt sang the part of Ceres in The
Tempest and understudied Portia in Julius Caesar, while in 1984 she
composed for and performed in Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 2001, she
returned to Stratford to write the music for The Merchant of Venice pro-
duction of that year. The version of Prospero’s speech sung by McKennitt
represents the way in which culture travels across and through colonial
and postcolonial spaces, popular music being an effective conduit for
marking relations of influence and affect as they hybridize into new
historical and cultural contexts and then represent those contexts in
new formations to a global audience. Here, it is important to underline
how intermediality is as much a function of travelling across media as
it is of travelling across cultures that are literally intermediated by new
aesthetic forms.
Canadian singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright is also represented
on the CASP site with a remarkable interpretation of Sonnet 29, “When
in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/I all alone beweep my out-
cast state.” Wainwright was invited in 2002 to participate in a fund-
raising project for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
The EMI compilation When Love Speaks is a recorded collection of
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Shakespeare’s sonnets performed by a prominent group of British

stage and screen actors including Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh,
Richard Attenborough, and Juliet Stevenson. The appearance of Rufus
Wainwright in this élite club of performers is an example of the Shake-
speare “effect” being appropriated to popular culture that, in the case
of Wainwright’s interpretation, becomes a highly politicized explora-
tion of gendered identity based on difference. CASP researcher Ben
Walsh argues that
The speaking “I” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 addresses the “fair-complex-

ioned man” as his beloved: such desire possibly being the source of his
disgrace … Raising this experience from the page and a context now 400
years past, Wainwright’s persona as a queer pop star emphasizes a queer
reading while de-emphasizing other readings that have thus far been priv-
ileged. The intensity of Wainwright’s voice increases as the text shifts from
despair to the hope he finds in his beloved. Wainwright’s performance
and thus Shakespeare’s text can be understood as an affirmation of a queer
identity, which is why the speaking “I” is able to resolve this self-reflection
with the couplet:
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
While some would note a certain irony in the final signifier “kings,”
“queen” being a term both of derision and pride in a modern queer com-
munity, what is most significant in this final couplet is the way in which
the descending scale and very articulated diction bring the words to the
fore heightening this conscious decision to continue identifying and being
identified with the term “disgrace.” This choice to remain in disgrace or
to remain apart from dominant structures of power rather than accept the
demands of a dominant social order is a choice the speaking “I” has made.
Wainwright is clearly making the same choice through his singing of Son-
net 29 as emblematic of liberatory queer discourse. (2004)
The pop icon, in other words, brings his own and Shakespeare’s celeb-
rity to the performance, which then unpacks a critique of previous
readings of the sonnet that fail to recognize its queerness and that nor-
malize or generalize its content in ways that elide its homoerotic affect.
The centre thus speaks to the margin, if such terms mean anything at all
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in as complex a representation spanning centuries of artistic relations

involving Shakespeare and gender.
Wainwright’s interpretation of the sonnet exemplifies popular mu-
sic’s capacity to animate from a position of relative cultural importance
a more marginalized aspect of its being. The politics of such a represen-
tation are significant not only for how they illuminate and reread
Shakespeare but also for how they reflect on pressing contemporary
issues of intermedial representation, in this case related to centuries
of oppression and marginalization associated with queer gendering.
Wainwright’s association with Shakespeare does not end with this per-
formance. His CD All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (2010) features
interpretations of three Shakespeare sonnets, and ongoing work on a
song cycle will focus on five orchestrated sonnets to be performed with
the San Francisco Symphony. Wainwright avers that “I knew a little bit
about the sonnets, but I’d never immersed myself in them before, and I
really did for this project … Once you dip into that stream you’re pretty
much rushed down the river by the beauty of it all. There is an innate
musicality within the vowels and the consonants and the spaces and so
forth. My life changed after the sonnet, so I thought it was necessary to
present that new addition to my lexicon” (Graff 2010).

Other examples from the CASP site show the remarkable range of
genre and style that emerges when Shakespeare collides with popular
music. American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington’s
(1899–1974) Such Sweet Thunder was commissioned in 1956 by the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Ontario), where in July of that year
the Ellington Orchestra performed it. Such Sweet Thunder is consid-
ered among the most accomplished of the many suites composed by
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (1915–67), his most frequent and sig-
nificant collaborator. In paying tribute to Shakespeare, Ellington and
Strayhorn painted a series of finely drawn portraits of some of the
Bard’s most memorable tragic, comic, and heroic figures, including
“Sonnet for Caesar,” “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” “Lady Mac,” and
“Madness in Great Ones.” John Edward Haase notes, in his essential
study of Ellington, Beyond Category – The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington:
“As did Shakespeare, Ellington deployed his players like great actors
on a stage. For nineteen years, Shakespeare was part owner of a reper-
tory company, and wrote ONLY for that company. Likewise, Ellington
had HIS own repertory company – for fifty years – and wrote almost
exclusively for its players. Shakespeare’s plays have outlived the actors
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for whom they were conceived. Ellington’s music may, as the centuries
pass, attain the same achievement” (cited in Duke Ellington and His
Orchestra 1957, liner notes).
Ellington’s influence on American music across multiple genres is
singular and he is widely considered to be one of the most important
and influential American composers in any genre. Ellington also
composed incidental music for a Timon of Athens production at the
Stratford Festival in 1963, thus bringing yet another form of inter-
medial presencing (jazz) to the Shakespearean theatrical context.
Remarkably, Ellington’s sketches and partial score remained in the
Stratford archives since then and have only recently been recuperated,
reconstructed, and recorded by Stanley Silverman and an ensemble of
musicians associated with the Stratford Festival. Consisting of twenty
pieces – including numbers like the “Overture: Black and Tan Fantasy”;
“Market Crash”; “False Friends: Banquet Theme”; “Revolutionary
March”; and “soured for the Second Banquet: Creole Love Call” – the
music blends Afro-American jazz stylistics and social consciousness
with the themes of Shakespeare’s play: greed, generosity, betrayal, rev-
olution, reconciliation, and resurrection.
At the time of Ellington’s association with the Stratford Festival, it

had already established an international reputation for its music festi-
val over and above its theatrical one. As Silverman notes in his com-
mentary for the full recording of the incidental music from Timon of
Athens: “A typical day might include a concert of Beethoven played by
resident musician Glenn Gould followed by a performance of Antony
and Cleopatra starring Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell.
Through those years Ellington frequently visited Stratford with his
band and became infatuated with Shakespeare. In sold-out perfor-
mances, confronted with no place to sit, he could be seen sitting on the
stairs in the theatre’s aisles” (Duke Ellington’s Incidental Music for
Shakespeare’s Play Timon of Athens 1993). Coincident with his scoring of
the music for Timon, Ellington was also working on My People, written
for the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago and inspired
by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. My People was both an exploration of reli-
gious and historical themes related to the African diaspora and an ap-
peal for racial harmony, and it is interesting to speculate on the degree
to which these influences also found their way into the score he com-
posed for Timon of Athens.
Examples like these from the CASP site show an astonishing breadth
of the creative, intermedial practices that interlink Shakespeare and
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popular music in a specifically Canadian context. Moreover, they dem-

onstrate the characteristic interpenetration and hybridity of popular
musical culture as it finds renewed expression in unexpected global
venues and relations, whether in McKennitt’s Celtic and Middle Eastern
world music or in Ellington’s Made-in-America vision of Shakespeare
for a Canadian stage. These examples are far from comprehensive.
Study of other national sites, especially in the English-speaking world,
will produce similar outcomes in terms of the degree to which popular
music is a conduit for refashioning Shakespeare across a wide range of
media techniques and aesthetic strategies that sample, adapt, reference,
slyly undercut, translate, and fearlessly refashion Shakespeare. It is to
further examples of these that this essay now turns.
Globalizing Shakespeare through Popular Music
Shakespeare’s historical moment is associated with the early modern

European age of “discovery,” an emergent stage in the ways in which
global relations were being reconfigured by trade, economy, and tech-
nology associated with the “New” world and the shift of capital to
Europe. In that sense, Shakespeare always already partakes of what

might be called globalized culture, as surely as his historical moment
coincides with imperial, state, or diasporic culture. Anston Bosman
notes that the term globalization “names a condition as ancient as the
experience of empire and diaspora, of nations and the states they cre-
ate” and that Shakespeare himself “lived in the age when all the
world’s populated continents were first permanently linked by trade
… During his lifetime, cultural exchanges multiplied not only among
European nations, but between Europe and the Atlantic and, more
slowly, Pacific worlds. Many of these growing interdependencies left
their mark on Shakespeare’s writing and theatre, from advances in
stage design to an explosion of literary sources in print” (2010, 285).
Globalization and imperial culture are inextricably linked with the ex-
plosion of technologies and media without which intermedial adapta-
tion would be unthinkable.
As I argue elsewhere, Shakespeare’s roots in Elizabethan popular
culture and his skill at making money were not unrelated to the ways
in which his work has, from the start, intersected with notions of glo-
balization, cultural border-crossing, and the confrontation with differ-
ence. The Globe Theatre, in which Shakespeare had a share, was one of
the first joint stock companies – now referred to as corporations, mutatis
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mutandis – alongside the British East India Company, whose history of

imperial trade extended over the centuries following its establishment
by Royal Charter on 31 December 1600. The British East India Company
played a key role in establishing the British Raj in India, a colonial en-
terprise only undone by Mahatma Gandhi, after years of struggle, in
1947. The Globe Theatre was founded as a joint stock venture in 1599,
and played its own role as a conduit for popular culture, which staged
forms of theatrical nationalism that commented (not always positively)
on historical genealogies related to British self-interest. Henry V’s cul-
minating moments at Agincourt (1415), as depicted by Shakespeare,
resound with the triumphal rhetoric of enacted power – remember that
the English were fighting in France, a country they had invaded long
before they got to India (Fischlin 2006, 1).
The point to be remembered here is that popular culture, both gen-
erally and in its specific, localized manifestations, is thoroughly im-
bricated in both business and imperial structures of power. These
structures, in turn, cannot be separated from globalization as an expres-
sion of both imperial power and its cultural offshoots. In pop music this
point often gets lost as a function of its practitioners frequently posi-
tioning themselves outside of such power structures – subversive, dis-

missive, or critical of them – even as such a seemingly radical positioning
becomes one of the ways in which their music becomes marketable.
This paradox is closely connected to Theodor W. Adorno’s insight that
“The production of popular music [which he thought of largely in mass
cultural terms] is highly centralized in its economic organization, but
still ‘individualistic’ in its social mode of production” (2002, 443).
The concept of individualist production that manifests exceptional
qualities is crucial to popular music generally (think Ellington, Dylan,
Johnny Rotten, or the previously cited Eminem, all of whom have had
impressive impact on popular musical culture in their respective ways
and historical contexts) and is closely tied to ways in which popular
music appropriates, or does things to, Shakespeare. Shakespeare is per-
haps the ultimate touchstone, however problematically, for the power
of the individual to self-fashion and in turn to influence popular culture
as a “universal” expression of genius. Adorno gets at precisely this
point by noting how at the “end of the bourgeois era, the capacity to
bring forth the entire world aesthetically from within oneself, from the
subject, was embodied, once again, in a few individuals; as it had been
vouchsafed to the greatest artists at the beginning of the epoch, to
Michelangelo, or Shakespeare perhaps” (2002, 627). This “capacity to
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bring forth the entire world” is an allegory for intermedial adaptations,

the fluidity with which media shapeshift across boundaries to become
hybridized and ceaselessly protean. Self-fashioning in an age where
multiple media are available to individuals for aesthetic play cannot
help but be intermedial.
What Adorno had not quite understood (or seen as a function of his
own historical moment) was the degree to which this “capacity to bring
forth the entire world aesthetically from within oneself” had been ap-
propriated by popular culture away from so-called serious culture with
a vengeance – especially so in the mass media culture that developed
exponentially in the latter part of the twentieth century. The aesthetics
of representation that popular culture, understood in this perspective
as a primary aspect of mass culture, embodies is a triumphal union of
personality, content, and technology widely disseminated as a singular
expression of the economy of “greatness.” In such a context, it is not
surprising that Shakespeare’s iconic status as perhaps the “greatest”
literary artist ever happily coincided with popular music’s own aes-
thetics of celebrity self-fashioning within economies of scale never
achieved before. These economies of scale are tied to intermedial aes-
thetics that allow for remarkably efficient dissemination practices em-

bodied in, for instance, pop songs. These fuse words and music with
dance, videos, film, YouTube and social networking presencing (think
Facebook and its ability to make aesthetic objects go “viral”), and a host
of other mediatized representations that incrementally intermediate as
a function of the diversity of media through which an aesthetic object
can be interpellated, refashioned, adapted, and disseminated.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw a remarkable prolifera-
tion of the ways in which popular culture in all its manifestations en-
gaged with Shakespeare via a number of techniques already mentioned
in this essay. Scholarship on the particulars of this engagement is in-
creasing, yet, interestingly, the scholarship on popular music’s engage-
ment with Shakespeare, aside from the work of Julie Sanders and more
recently Adam Hansen, is spotty. Hansen’s Shakespeare and Popular
Music is a welcome and informed intervention into the field that begins
by warning against overestimating “the frequency of pre-existing pop-
ular songs in Shakespeare’s plays” (2010, 16) while nonetheless ac-
knowledging the “shared bond between Shakespeare and early modern
popular music, and the popular cultures they both give voice to” (20).
Hansen’s work argues that “Shakespeare helps popular music assume
different forms” and that “popular music makes Shakespeare mean
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different things too, putting a new spin on his words in new contexts.
Sampling and remixing Shakespeare changes [sic] him, but also devel-
ops existing potentials in his work. Popular music amplifies ambigui-
ties and contradictions in this work, and between it and the dominant
discourses of Shakespeare’s period and our own. At the same time,
popular music’s use of Shakespeare realizes contradictions within
such music, and within its relations to the contexts in which it is made
and consumed” (158). The assumption of different forms that Hansen
mentions is a key aspect of pop music’s intermediality. Moreover, that
intermedial capacity to shapeshift is productive of new forms of repre-
sentation that proliferate the Shakespeare effect as an unstable adaptive
form restlessly seeking out new ways to cross over into other forms and
generate new meaning.
It is important to recognize the degree to which various genres of
entertainment with varying degrees of relation to popular markets and
cultures all make use of Shakespeare, whether glancingly or in more
profound, deeply rooted ways. Cinema, dance, theatre, and their many
subgenres and styles reference and sample Shakespeare with surpris-
ing regularity if they are not performing all-out adaptations of his work.
Music figures in many of these forms of representation as a key ele-

ment: in Broadway musicals (both on and off) alone, Shakespeare is
widely represented in such productions as Rogers and Hart’s 1939 The
Boys from Syracuse, based on The Comedy of Errors, Kiss Me Kate, West
Side Story, Rockabye Hamlet, and The Lion King.9 All these examples as-
sociate Shakespeare with popular music in multiple ways. Consider,
for instance, the memorable tunes and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and
Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 Romeo and Juliet Broadway musical adapta-
tion, West Side Story. West Side Story went on to be reconfigured as a
highly successful 1961 movie, winner of ten Academy Awards (in addi-
tion to being the second highest grossing film of that year), and is a
classic example of the staying power and cultural presence of this form
of popular musical entertainment’s association with Shakespeare.
The incremental effect of these sorts of creative outputs as they travel
across media, national sites, and audience reception, though difficult to
calculate with precision, is an important aspect of the ways in which
popular music’s investment in Shakespearean presence can be under-
stood. The thousands of hits that occur when one punches the terms
“Shakespeare” and “music” into a YouTube or Google search function
attest to the ways in which Shakespeare and music circulate as one as-
pect of a much broader popular culture scenario in which sampling,
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remixing, citation, and marketing of brands are determining features of

online culture as it morphs and intermediates source materials for a
(potentially) global audience. In this scenario it is possible to speak of
the Shakespeare effect in terms that recognize his widespread cultural
currency and iconicity, his presence and influence, even as the global
and universal elements of that popular presence remain not wholly
knowable as a function of networks of dissemination and mediation
that are too complex, too marginal, or too marked by cultural differ-
ences that no single critic can encompass.
That said, in cinema and film culture, and especially in those films
where the score is a crucial aspect of how the film creates meaning,
popular music is a key element in globalizing Shakespeare’s cultural
presence. In the case of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare this is evi-
dent in such films as Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s William
Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), with a soundtrack by artists that
range from Radiohead to Garbage and the Butthole Surfers, and Indian
director and composer Vishal Bhardwaj’s Macbeth adaptation Maqbool
(2004), which takes place in the Mumbai underworld and has a score
(composed by the director) that features elements of Indian classic,
popular, and Bollywood musicking. Both films make explicit use of a

meta-diegetic effect, in which the music of the film is a necessary ac-
companiment to the interpretation of the film and is not just back-
ground sound (see Sanders 2007, 159). Luhrmann states, “[Shakespeare]
would just stick the popular song of the day in the middle of the show.
You know, to advance the story, but also to engage people through
song” (York 2006, 61). Both examples point to the range of national sites
and musical styles that meta-diegetically associate popular music with
Shakespeare as a crucial feature of film adaptations. Moreover, these
films exemplify how theatre transmutes into film, which is then further
mediated by the music that accompanies the film, encapsulating inter-
medial adaptive strategies that link Shakespeare to multiple forms of
popular music.
Beyond these, in a far wider field of potential examples from which
to choose, is any number of pop music artists who cite, re-cite, sample,
reference (consciously or unconsciously), and generally “play” with
Shakespearean referents within their artistic ambits. Though it is not
within the scope of this essay to exhaustively cite examples of how pop-
ular music and Shakespeare intersect, a few instances are worth noting
for how they show the range of ways in which Shakespeare and popu-
lar music collide to make meaning.
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British rock musician Elvis Costello, for instance, in his Il Sogno [The
Dream], a 2004 score commissioned by an Italian ballet company, creat-
ed a dance adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with music that
derives from not only the French impressionists but also Duke Ellington,
George Gershwin, and Igor Stravinsky, among others. In 2006 Costello
collaborated with the Brodsky Quartet to write a suite of songs called
The Juliet Letters inspired by a literature professor who answers letters
written to Shakespeare’s Juliet. Though not specifically popular music
with their aspirations of classical formalism, both projects are insepa-
rable from Costello’s place in the pop music pantheon. And elsewhere
in Costello’s oeuvre are multiple references to Shakespeare, including
the twelfth track on his 1989 album Spike entitled “Miss Macbeth,”
“Crimes of Paris” (on Blood & Chocolate, 1986), and “Mystery Dance”
(on My Aim Is True, 1977), all songs that reference Romeo and Juliet.10
Adam Hansen notes how Costello invokes “Shakespeare again and
again to bring about the comparable kind of distinction in or from pop-
ular music that ‘Mystery Dance’ heralded so ambiguously” (2010, 115),
and Hansen further underlines that, with The Juliet Letters, “Costello
‘distanced himself from youth-centered pop culture and from mass-
market appeal’” (115).11 The very fact that Costello was experimenting
with genre crossovers like Il Sogno and The Juliet Letters, and doing so
using Shakespeare, suggests how Shakespeare functions in ambiguous
relation to both popular and high culture simultaneously, thus becom-
ing an effective vehicle for such experimentations from an artist per-
haps more comfortable with the former.
In 2011 Wadada Leo Smith, the American creative improvising musi-
cian and member of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians (AACM), released the Dark Lady of the Sonnets CD
with TUM Records and his Mbira trio, featuring Pheeroan akLaff on
drums and percussion and Min Xiao-Fen on the Chinese stringed in-
strument known as the pipa. The liner notes and the TUM Records site
make no explicit mention of Shakespeare or Shakespearean sonnets
other than in the title, which obliquely references the so-called Dark
Lady sequence (sonnets 127–52) in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Listeners to
the recording soon discover, however, that the “dark lady” in Smith’s
context is a reference to Billie Holiday, the character in an elegiac text
from 1962 by African American poet Amiri Baraka entitled “The Dark
Lady of the Sonnets” found in his book Black Music: “Nothing was more
perfect than what she was. Nor more willing to fail. (If we call failure
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Account: s8481523
something light can realize … ). Sometimes you are afraid to listen to

this lady” (2010, 31–2). Smith (2011), in a poem included in the liner
notes to the recording, states of Holiday that she had “A voice larger
than our world … A pure music/flowing through the air/Connecting/
the hearts of Lovers.” The spectral presence of Shakespeare is here in
ways that make Smith’s transformation of the dark lady trope a com-
pelling reclamation of African American contexts. Intercultural adapta-
tion of a familiar trope associated with the Shakespearean canon occurs
in a radical improvisatory context. That context brings together very
different forms of musical expression in the name of this adaptation,
haunted by a Shakespearean presence that has all but been effaced from
the new work. Intermedial adaptation here works across cultures,
across musical styles and textual forms, and across expectations about
how cultural references (like Shakespeare or Billie Holiday) resonate in
very different ways when this form of adaptation is deployed.
A far different relation to Shakespeare is at work in British rap and
hip hop artist Akala (Kingslee James Daley, also known as Black
Shakespeare). Akala released a 2006 single entitled “Shakespeare” that
features the following lyrics explicitly linking Akala (a Sanskrit term
that means “immovable” but also “unskilled in the arts” and “out of
joint” with time) with the Bard:
Nigger listen, when i spit on the riddem, I kill em,

raw like the Ball of Brazilians,
you don’t war, cor the kids brilliant,
blood, im the heir to the throne,
not William, Akala, smart as King Arthur,
darker, harder, faster,
rasclaat, I kick the illa shit,
it’s like Shakespeare, with a nigger twist,
lyricist, im the best on the road,
nitro flow, oh-so-cold, I’ma blow yo …
I’m similar to William, but a little different,

I do it for kids that’s illiterate, not Elizabeth,
stuck on the road, faces screwed up,
feel like the world spat em out, and they
chewed up,
its a matrix, I try and explain it … (“Akala: Shakespeare Lyrics” n.d.)
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The lyrics, with their typical hip hop strategy of the speaker’s enhanced
and often parodic self-esteem as a front-and-centre rhetorical perfor-
mance strategy, are also densely political with their explicit linkage of
Akala’s “riddem” to Shakespearean lyrics – but with a “nigger twist.”
Akala himself describes the song as a “comedic parody that I was the
rapping reincarnation of Shakespeare,” while noting that “Rap gets a
hard time based on this new school of MCs from America who only rap
about tits and arse and jewellery. But if you look at real hip-hop, your
KRS-Ones, your Chuck Ds, it’s poetry, it’s social commentary, it’s docu-
menting history. And in three or 400 years, people will probably look
upon it as such. There were those who frowned upon Shakespeare’s
work in his time, but it was a reflection of reality” (Emery 2009). The
compression of meaning that Akala sees rap performing – its capacity
to span multiple contexts literary, musical, and otherwise – exemplifies
how sounding Shakespeare inevitably links to intermedial adaptation.
This sort of politicized lyricism, mediated by a Shakespearean pres-
ence, is also evident in American rapper, actor, and poet Saul Williams’s
“Act III scene 2 (Shakespeare),” co-vocalized with rap metal band Rage
Against the Machine’s lead singer Zack de la Rocha (ranked thirty-
third on VH1’s 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock list) and the fourth
track on his eponymously titled second album Saul Williams (2004):
This is a call out to all the youth in the ghettos, suburbs, villages, town-
ships. To all the kids who download this song for free. By any means. To
all the kids short on loot but high on dreams. To all the kids watching T.V.,
like, “Yo, I wish that was me.” And all the kids pressing rewind on Let’s
Get Free. I hear you. To all the people within the sound of my voice.
…
Spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined, the no ones, the nobodies,
the last in line …
…
I didn’t vote for this state of affairs. My emotional state’s got me pros-
trate, fearing my fears. In all reality I’m under prepared. ’Cause I’m ready
for war but not sure if I’m ready to care. And that’s why I’m under pre-
pared. ’Cause I’m ready to fight, but most fights have me fighting back
tears. ’Cause the truth is really I’m scared. Not scared of the truth, but just
scared of the length you’ll go to fight it. I tried to hold my tongue, son. I
tried to bite it. I’m not trying to start a riot or incite it. ’Cause Brutus is an
honorable man. It’s just coincidence that oil men would wage war on an
oil rich land. And this one goes out to my man, taking cover in the trenches
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with a gun in his hand, then gets home and no one flinches when he can’t
feed his fam. But Brutus is an honorable man …
…
If you have tears prepare to shed them now. For you share the guilt of
blood spilt in accordance with the Dow Jones. Dow drops fresh crop skull
and bones. A machete in the heady: Hutu, Tutsi, Leone. An Afghani in a
shanty. Doodle dandy yank on! An Iraqi in Gap khaki. Coca Coma come
on! Be ye bishop or pawn, in the streets or the lawn, you should know that
these example could go on and on and what since does it make to keep
your ears to the street? As long as oils in the soil, truth is never concrete. So
we dare to represent those with the barest of feet. ’Cause the laws to which
we’re loyal keep the soil deplete. It’s our job to not let history repeat.
As with Jay-Z and Eminem, popular and populist coexist on the same
plane of artistic expression, with Akala’s lyrics addressing youth illit-
eracy, alienation, and a complex matrix of circumstances in which
they’re caught that needs to be explained and refashioned. Williams’s
lyrics invoke a global vision of disintegration (Rwanda, Afghanistan,
Iraq) as they situate this vision within a reading of Julius Caesar’s Brutus
as an honourable man for having slain a tyrant and hegemon. The rap
specifically references Julius Caesar 3.2, the locus of both Brutus’s “Be
patient to the last” and Antony’s infamous “Friends, Romans, country-
men.” These Shakespearean speeches are explicitly refashioned and
contemporized by Williams and de la Rocha’s rap. The political con-
tent, the address to disaffected youth, the lyrics with their explicitly
global historical contexts, the populist appeal to all (whether “bishop or
pawn”), and the Shakespearean referents are a potent mix that stages
popular music’s anarchic, critical energies as much as it enacts its liter-
ariness in relation to Shakespearean intermedial contexts.
Akala had posed the provocative question in a 2009 interview with
the Guardian magazine: “If Shakespeare was alive today, would he
have been a rapper?” (Emery 2009), an association echoed in African
American music critic and New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh’s de-
scription of Eminem in the New York Times as the “Hamlet of hip hop”
(2005). These sorts of associations link Shakespearean tropes with pop-
ular musical self-fashioning that always already has a potential global
reach. They point to the remarkable ways in which both Shakespeare
and popular music coexist as collided entities mutually generating
meaning for each other in the crucible of contemporary popular cul-
tures as they take shape within a global context.
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NOTES
1 I am indebted to graduate student Christie Menzo – whose superb work

on Akala and Shakespeare provided me with much food for thought – and
to fellow co-organizers and participants in the September 2010
Shakespeare and Popular Music Conference held at the University of
Guelph and sponsored by the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare
Project (CASP), the School of English and Theatre Studies, and the College
of Arts Dean’s Office. Portions of this essay, mutatis mutandis, will be pub-
lished in The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Volume II: The World’s
Shakespeare, edited by Bruce R. Smith (forthcoming).
2 Note that Slim Shady is Eminem’s alter ego, who often gets blamed in lyr-
ics for what goes wrong in Eminem’s life.
3 “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the com-
mon defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America.”
4 Musicking is defined by music educator Christopher Small as taking part,
“in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by lis-

tening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance
(what is called composing), or by dancing” (1998, 9). For Small, the term
references activities “in which all those present are involved and for
whose nature and quality, success or failure, everyone present bears some
responsibility” (10). The concept is important for how it addresses the full
contexts that bear on any musical representation and has important impli-
cations for thinking through the range of meanings associated with the
term “popular music.”
5 Clear Channel Communications, Inc. is an American media conglomerate
company that is the largest owner of full-power AM and FM and short-
wave radio stations (including twelve radio channels on XM Satellite
Radio) and is also the largest pure-play radio station owner and operator
with some 18,000 employees and revenue (in 2007) of some $7 billion. As a
result of what is largely a monopoly control of market access, it has signifi-
cant control over who and what kind of music gets disseminated as “pop-
ular”: Clear Channel was responsible for, among others, the banning of the
Dixie Chicks for anti-war comments made in 2003 just prior to the inva-
sion of Iraq by the Bush regime, and the banning of numerous peace-
related popular songs, including John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Jimi
Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 (see Deitz n.d.).
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6 Developed by the English guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame

(and named as such by the poet Joanna Walton), Frippertronics “is an ana-
log delay system consisting of two reel-to-reel tape recorders situated side-
by-side … Fripp used this technique to dynamically create recordings
containing layer upon layer of electric guitar sounds in a real time fashion.
An added advantage was that, by nature of the technique, the complete
performances were recorded in their entirety on the original looped tape”
(“Frippertronics” 2011). Frippertronics is associated with both experimen-
talist, avant-garde composers like Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, whose
experiments with tape looping in the 1960s laid the groundwork for this
form of electronica, and ambient music composer Brian Eno, who collabo-
rated with Fripp on two Frippertronics albums, No Pussyfooting (1973) and
Evening Star (1975).
7 For more complete listings and discussions of these and other examples,
see the Streaming Audio section of the CASP site located at http://www
.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/m_audio.cfm.
8 The 2011 release of Icelandic pop star and singer songwriter Björk’s app
album Biophilia, the first app album ever produced, heralded yet another
step in the evolution of intermedial online, digital forms predicated on
multiple forms of (inter-)mediation. Recorded in part on an iPad, Biophilia

was described by Björk as a “multimedia collection ‘encompassing music,
apps, Internet, installations, and live shows’” (“Biophilia, album” 2011).
9 For a more complete listing of on and off Broadway plays please consult
the Shakespeare and Popular Music website at http://sites.google.com/site/
shakespeareandpopularmusic/shakespeare-on-broadway#
TOC-Off-Broadway.
10 A full list of songs by pop artists who reference Shakespeare would be ex-
tremely long and is a near impossible task to fulfil, especially if one takes
into account global, alternative, and independent forms of pop that have
little presence in mainstream media. A useful catalogue, nonetheless, is to
be found in Folkerth 2006. A shortlist that is non-comprehensive but that
nonetheless shows the range of artists who have adapted Shakespeare to a
popular music context might include, in no particular order, Udo
Lindenberg and Nina Hagen, “Romeo und Julia”; the Smiths’ references to
Antony and Cleopatra in “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”; Elton John,
“The King Must Die”; Metallica, “Damage, Inc.”; Rush, “Limelight”; Cleo
Laine’s “Wordsongs” album; Morrissey, “King Leer”; Sammy Hagar,
“Rock ’n’ Roll Romeo”; Tom Waits, “Romeo Is Bleeding”; October Project,
“Ariel”; the Tragically Hip, “Cordelia”; Barclay James Harvest, “Lady
Macbeth”; John Cale, “Macbeth”; the Eagles, “Get Over It”; Sting,
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“Nothing Like the Sun” and “Consider Me Gone”; “What a Piece of Work
Is Man” from the musical Hair; Loreena McKennitt’s previously men-
tioned “Prospero’s Song”; Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”; Dire
Straits, “Romeo and Juliet”; Tonio K, “Romeo and Jane”; Lennon and
McCartney, “I Am the Walrus” (where loops of dialogue from Henry IV are
introduced at the end of the song); Melissa Etheridge, “Juliet, Where’s
Your Romeo?”; the Indigo Girls’ CD/concert tour, “Swamp Ophelia”;
Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind”; Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael), “Here in
Heaven”; Madonna, “Cherish”; Bruce Springsteen, “The Rising” with its
evocation of the “garden of a thousand sighs” from Shakespeare’s Twelfth
Night; Lou Reed, “Romeo Had Juliette”; and Laurie Anderson, “Blue
Lagoon.”
11 For the complete discussion of Costello in Hansen 2010, see 115–18.
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“Playing the Race Bard”:

How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold
(at) the 2006 Stratford Shakespeare Festival
James M cKi nnon
In Reading the Material Theatre, Canadian theatre critic Ric Knowles ex-
amines the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and asks, “what, and more
importantly how Shakespeare means at the Stratford Festival” (2004b,
106). Applying a method which will be elaborated in more detail below,
Knowles concludes that the both the productions and “the discursive
and material contexts from which those productions emerged” worked
together to construct “Shakespeare” as a “multinational, historically

transcendent product presented for the pleasure of a privileged and
culturally dominant group of consumers” – particularly those consum-
ers represented by the “exclusively white, male, and middle-aged” cor-
porate sponsors depicted in the Festival program (111). In light of
Knowles’s rather depressing assessment of what and how Shakespeare
meant at the 1993 Stratford Festival season, I want to examine a more
recent performance – and, following in Knowles’s footsteps, the discur-
sive and material contexts surrounding it – in order to ask whether
things have changed. This essay examines how Shakespeare means in
the production and reception of Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet at the 2006
Stratford Festival, focusing on the ways in which “Shakespeare” was
adapted, appropriated, and read in the play’s public discourse – includ-
ing Stratford’s publicity material, which seemed to be encouraging
readers and spectators to actively consider the question. My essay im-
plies a connection between reception contexts and marketing contexts
that mediate Harlem Duet as an adaptation, and that make use of that
intermedial relationship for specific ends. In that context, I examine the
ways in which the Festival used Shakespeare to construct Harlem Duet
as a symbol of its new commitment to cultural diversity. I will also
show how critics and commentators responded to the play, and how
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from “Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 291
the material conditions of producing theatre at Stratford may have

thwarted the “best” intentions of the Festival and the artists – just as
Knowles suggests in his book.
My objective is not to determine what Harlem Duet means, but how;
and more specifically, how Shakespeare figures in its reception. This
essay does not analyse Harlem Duet as Sears’s response to Shakespeare.1
Rather than viewing the play as the product of the adaptive work of a
particular author or auteur, I want to consider the continuing and dif-
fuse process of adaptation, which neither begins nor ends with a partic-
ular author, but permeates the play’s reception.2
Diffusion in and across various reception contexts lies at the heart of
intermedial adaptation, the very diversity of reception contexts and, in
this case, marketing tools contributing to the intermedial diffusion of
the play. My primary sources, then, are neither plays nor examples of
dramatic/theatrical media, but advertisements, publicity materials,
and reviews. Scholarship on intermediality tends to focus on rela-
tionships and negotiations between film, screen, stage, and/or page,
privileging texts that conform to conventional notions about art. For
example, none of the various schema and taxonomies surveyed by
Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt in their thorough “mapping” of

intermedial discourse accounts explicitly for the ways in which theatre
and publicity discourse (in various media) shape each other (2006, 11–
25). I would argue, however, that this tendency reflects cultural biases
that confer higher esteem upon “pure” or fine art than upon overtly
commercial or critical media. If one looks past these biases, it becomes
clear that artworks (in any media) rely just as much upon marketing
and publicity discourse as the reverse, and that the reception of the
former is significantly influenced, if not determined, by the latter.
Moreover, with the rise of blogging and social networking, publicity
discourse is becoming increasingly intermedial: is a theatre produc-
tion’s Facebook page based on its print advertising campaign, or is it
the other way around?
Hence I do not focus on Harlem Duet itself, nor on its intertextual re-
lationship with Othello, so much as on its intermedial paratextuality.
Paratexts is the name Gérard Genette gives to all the “titles, prefaces,
postfaces, epigraphs, dedications,” etc. that “come to surround the text
and [may] become virtually indistinguishable from it” (1982, 28).
Paratextuality is an important category of intermedial adaptation, be-
cause adaptations often rely on paratexts in various media (publicity
blurbs, reviews, video trailers, etc.) both to signal the presence of an
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 292 James McKinnon
adapted text and to tell us how to interpret it. While literary critics have
often warned against relying on external evidence to make interpreta-
tions of texts, in practice readers and spectators do this all the time, and
as Linda Hutcheon points out, once we know things about a text or its
author – whether by way of a poster, a trailer, an interview, or a review
– they are bound to influence our reception (2006, 110). In this essay, I
focus on the ways in which Sears, Stratford, and media pundits used
Shakespeare and Shakespearean signifiers, in various media and types
of public discourse, to construct a frame of reference through which
spectators would interpret the significance of Sears’s adaptation of
Shakespeare. In particular, I will show how the production’s publicity
paratexts used Shakespeare to encourage spectators to read the produc-
tion as an emblem of African Canadian culture, to encourage intercul-
tural engagement, and especially to promote a vision of the Stratford
Festival as a (newly) inclusive, multicultural institution.
Knowles’s analysis of how “Shakespeare” means at the 1993 Stratford
season offers a useful point of departure. Resisting the conventional
assumption of many spectators (and critics) that plays simply “con-
tain” meaning, which their performances transmit directly to the pas-
sive spectators who watch them, Knowles looks carefully at the material
and ideological conditions which the performance both shapes and is
shaped by, including theatre architecture, ticket prices, working prac-
tices, and public discourse – all of which will figure prominently in my
account of how Stratford marketed Harlem Duet (and vice versa).
Knowles concludes that given Stratford’s
“brass, glass, and class” aesthetic, its universalist public discourses and
publicity material, its patriarchal and corporate management structures,
and its traditions and training function … with remarkable directness as
an Ideological State Apparatus, funded by government and corporate
grants and catering to an audience it construct[s] as monolithic, the pro-
duction of Shakespeare is necessarily the reproduction of a complex … but
nevertheless conservative, affirmative culture, endorsed by the appropri-
ated, high-cultural image of a universalist “bard of Avon.” (2004b, 128)
Here, and throughout Reading the Material Theatre, Knowles argues that
the material and ideological conditions of production and reception of-
ten blunt or undermine the “transformative potential of a particular
script or production” (10). His pessimism makes the 2006 production of
Harlem Duet particularly fascinating, because, as Harlem Duet’s critics
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– including Knowles himself – have consistently acknowledged, Sears

and her play are explicitly and vocally “transformative.” The conver-
gence of Sears and Stratford in 2006 thus offers a unique opportunity to
ask whether it might be possible to change how Shakespeare means at
the Stratford Festival – and, simultaneously, the extent to which that
meaning is fundamentally intermedial, insofar as it is always dispersed
through numerous (print, web, dramatic, theatrical, etc.) media and not
lodged in any of them.
Horizon of Expectations: Harlem Duet’s Initial Reception
Although Harlem Duet’s relationship with Shakespeare was undoubt-

edly a major factor in Stratford’s decision to produce it, Sears’s play is
not a retelling or version of Othello. Sears’s characters are linked to
Shakespeare’s by their names, but her plot, dialogue, and settings are
her own.3 The plot focuses on Othello’s first wife, Billie, and on what
happens to her after Othello leaves her for a white woman, a trauma
which Harlem Duet repeats in three distinct and distinctively African
American chronotopes, each haunted “by the spectre of inter-racial
desire” (Kidnie 2001, 30). In the 1860s, Othello and Billie are slaves or
servants4 to the father of Desdemona (a.k.a. “Miss Dessy”); in the 1920s,
Othello is a stage actor in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, and
“Mona” is a director who offers him the role of Pericles; and in contem-
porary Harlem, Billie is a graduate student, and Othello and Mona are
English professors at Columbia University. The contemporary story-
line is fleshed out, as it were, with other on-stage characters, including
Billie’s friend Magi; her father, Canada; and her sister-in-law, Amah.
Othello’s new wife is pointedly absent from all three storylines (as are
all white characters), which Sears weaves together with a soundscape
of live music and recorded excerpts of famous speeches from African
American history, such as Martin Luther King Jr’s “Dream” speech.
Intermedial paratextuality has been a significant factor in the play’s
cultural work since its 1997 premiere. Critics almost instantly canon-
ized Harlem Duet when it appeared in 1997, and the terms with which
they described and defined it would create the aura of prestige that
helped it earn further productions and numerous awards and that
would later form an important context for the 2006 production. Harlem
Duet’s first critics were nearly unanimous on two points in particular:
they all associated it with Shakespeare, and they almost all declared it
to be a play of great significance. The play was produced by Nightwood
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Theatre, an independent feminist company already well known for

launching Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning
Juliet), another Shakespeare adaptation, and widespread critical ac-
claim for the premiere attracted the attention of the much larger
Canadian Stage Company, which remounted Harlem Duet at its larger,
more opulent theatre in downtown Toronto. Within a year of its pre-
miere, Harlem Duet was transformed – largely in and through public
discourse – from a subversive indie show to a landmark cultural event:
the CanStage production won several local awards, and the play won
the 1998 Governor-General’s Award for English Drama. Over the next
few years, it was produced in Halifax and New York, and anthologized
multiple times, and thus had acquired a considerable reputation by the
time Stratford began negotiating with Sears in 2005.5
Shakespeare figures prominently in paratextual promotions and as-
sessments of Harlem Duet, even though it contains few explicit refer-
ences to Shakespeare. Every written response to Harlem Duet since 1997,
including reviews, previews, interviews, and scholarly essays, calls at-
tention to Sears’s relationship with Shakespeare, often signalling this
connection with titles such as “There’s Magic in the Web of It” (Kidnie
2001), “Othello in Three Times” (Knowles 2004a), “Playing the Race

Bard” (Cushman 2006), and so on. In addition, two of the anthologies
Harlem Duet appears in are primarily Shakespeare anthologies. So the
reputation of Sears’s play is inextricably tied to Shakespeare through
print media – even though the play itself contains only faint allusions
to Shakespeare.
Moreover, these responses – which frame the reception of the play for
spectators who read them – never use the conventionally negative lan-
guage that critics often reserve for adaptations, which Hutcheon and
others call “fidelity criticism”; that is, no critic has ever accused Sears of
copying, betraying, or riding on the coattails of Shakespeare. In fact,
even though the word “Shakespeare” appears in almost every docu-
mented response to Harlem Duet, the word “adaptation” never appears,
which is rather surprising for a play which includes characters named
after Othello and Desdemona.6
On the contrary, as the aforementioned titles imply, rather than ac-
cusing Sears of tampering with Shakespeare’s masterpiece, critics ap-
provingly portray her as cheekily or boldly challenging him. Reviews
of the Nightwood/CanStage productions bristle with synonyms for
“important,” describing Harlem Duet not merely as a good play but as a
major “achievement.”7 Geoff Chapman’s review in the Toronto Star is
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exemplary, not extraordinary, in proclaiming Harlem Duet as a “major

achievement … a powerful, fresh statement of familiar themes … that
has special significance for black culture” (1997). Throughout Harlem
Duet’s reception history, newspapers, anthologies, and essays have em-
phasized this sense of “special significance,” occasionally more than
the play’s dramatic value; and as we will see below, the tendency of
critics to focus on the play’s symbolic importance more than the play
(or performance) itself was, if anything, even more pronounced in 2006.
Why, given that Harlem Duet is neither a Shakespeare play nor what
most would call an adaptation of one, do critical paratexts focus on this
aspect of the play (and consequently neglect its other fascinating inter-
textual conversations, as Peter Dickinson argues)? Most likely because
Sears herself directly encourages readers and spectators to do so. While
Sears’s inventive appropriation of Shakespeare undoubtedly influ-
enced Harlem Duet’s instant recognition as an “important” play and
thus Stratford’s decision to produce it eight years later, the appropria-
tion in question is not restricted to intertextual references in the play,
but also occurs in other media.8 In particular, the play’s reception has
been powerfully influenced by a poem/essay, “nOTES oF a cOLOURED
gIRL: 32 rEASONS wHY i wRITE fOR tHE tHEATRE,” which has ac-
companied both the print and performed versions of Harlem Duet since
its premiere, and which plainly states the play’s connection to
Shakespeare and Othello with a moving personal anecdote:9
As a veteran theatre practitioner of African Descent, Shakespeare’s Othello

had haunted me since I first was introduced to him. Sir Laurence Olivier
in black-face. Othello is the first African portrayed in the annals of western
dramatic literature. In order to exorcise this ghost, I have written Harlem
Duet. (Sears 1997, 14)
Sears connects this experience to her desire to challenge and rectify the
absence of black faces and voices in mainstream Canadian culture, and
to ensure that her “nieces’ experience of the world will … be different
from [her] own”:
5 I was already eighteen when I saw Ntozake Shange’s For Coloured Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf in New York City.
This was the first live production by a writer of African descent I had ever
seen. 6 This will not be Qwyn’s fate. 7 She must have access to a choir of
African voices, chanting a multiplicity of African experiences. (1997, 14, 12)
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There is an implicit irony in Sears’s alleged desire to “exorcise”

Shakesepeare’s ghost, because the effect of uttering this desire is to con-
jure Shakespeare, not to dispel him: although it is the only part of her
“nOTES” to mention Shakespeare, this passage is widely cited in the
play’s critical and publicity discourse,10 which invariably links it to
Shakespeare. Spectators and critics who read that Sears wrote the play
as a response to Othello can’t help but respond to it as such. Like Sears
herself, both newspaper reviews and scholarly articles (including this
one) use Shakespeare references to portray Harlem Duet as a challenge
to the dominant whiteness of Canadian theatre. They often cite Sears’s
essay, and tend to focus on issues that it draws attention to, while per-
haps neglecting other aspects of the play (e.g., critics rarely discuss
Sears’s choice to set the play in Harlem yet pepper the dialogue with
explicit references to Canada). So even though Harlem Duet contains
few direct references to Othello or Shakespeare, Shakespeare has always
been an important factor in how Harlem Duet means – and so has inter-
mediality, because the “Shakespeare” that spectators respond to, or
imagine Sears responding to, is the one invoked by the play’s publicity
discourse.
Stratford 2006: Pre-Show Publicity and Marketing
In retrospect, Harlem Duet was an obvious choice for a Stratford Festival

eager to reach out to new audiences in the twenty-first century. In fact,
as early as 1998, Ric Knowles suggested that a Stratford production
would provide a fitting climax for Harlem Duet’s cultural rags-to-riches
narrative. In an interview with Sears and Alison Sealy-Smith (the origi-
nal Billie), which focused largely on their attempt to develop an African
Canadian theatre aesthetic, Sears and Sealy-Smith acknowledge the
symbolic significance of the CanStage production, which broke a per-
ceived colour barrier: “Before Harlem Duet, Canadian Stage had never
produced a work by an author of [black] African descent. And the
problem with Canadian Stage is that it’s called Canadian Stage, and it
represents Canada, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m Canadian, so it must repre-
sent me’” (Sears and Sealy-Smith 1998, 30). In response, Knowles in-
vites Sears to speculate on her next symbolic triumph, asking, “at what
point does Harlem Duet change Stratford?” (30). Knowles’s question
turned out to be prescient – but in hindsight, also ironic, because by the
time Sears was invited to break the same perceived colour barrier at
Stratford, Knowles had already answered his own question in Reading
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the Material Theatre, where he suggests that it would be difficult, if not

impossible, to challenge the conservative ideological and material con-
ditions of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
Shakespeare – or conflicting notions of “Shakespeare” – figured
prominently in the production and reception of Harlem Duet at Stratford.
Sears designates “Shakespeare” as a symbol of the cultural and histori-
cal forces that privilege white experience and marginalize other voices.
For the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, on the other hand, “Shakespeare”
symbolizes the allegedly universal values and creative achievements of
humanity, and functions as the primary channel through which the fes-
tival receives and transmits cultural capital. And yet, notwithstanding
the universalist discourse permeating Stratford’s public discourses and
marketing,11 its repertory is predominantly white,12 and its ticket prices
($50–$85 per ticket in 2012) and rural location limit attendance to spec-
tators with access to transportation, accommodation, money, and lei-
sure time.
As soon as the production was announced – and well before it actu-
ally opened – journalists covering the Festival’s 2006 season used refer-
ences to Shakespeare to point out the implicit conflict between Sears’s
transformative politics and the Festival’s conservative image, high-

lighting the contrast between the play’s all-black cast and the Festival’s
all-white image. The CBC’s Martin Morrow boldly predicted that
Harlem Duet would shake things up:
Stratford’s Shakespearean festival is one of Canada’s oldest and most dis-

tinguished theatrical institutions. It’s also about as multicoloured as a loaf
of Wonder Bread. That’s [why], amid the usual classics by the Bard and a
bunch of other dead, white European and American males, Djanet Sears’s
Harlem Duet sticks out like an African violet in a patch of daisies.
…
It’s a Stratford milestone – three, in fact. The show … is the first black
work to be produced in the festival’s 54-year history; the first to be direct-
ed by a black woman (Sears); and the first with an all-black cast. (Morrow
2006)
Morrow goes out of his way to insert “Shakespeare” into his phrasing
– at this point in time, “Shakespeare” had not been a part of the Festival’s
official name for three decades.13 Globe and Mail critic Kamal Al-Solaylee
opens with the same catalogue of milestones, and expresses the same
confidence that Harlem Duet will signify positive change:
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At Stratford, there’s a feeling that the end of Richard Monette’s reign and
changes in the festival’s artistic directorship structure will bring about
more culturally diverse programming.
“Things are changing, people are looking around and saying ‘The world
doesn’t look like us here,’” Sears acknowledges. (2006b)
These previews, and many subsequent responses to the play, invite the
reader to think of Harlem Duet as challenging what Morrow calls
“Stratford’s status quo.”
Although the media dramatized the implied conflict between Sears’s
vision and Stratford’s reality, it seems likely that the Festival actually
encouraged them to do so. For one thing, the Festival went out of its way
to accommodate Sears, negotiating for months before announcing the
play as a late addition to the 2006 season.14 Moreover, similarities in
the wording and content of the media reports strongly suggest that
Stratford’s publicity team played up the implied conflict because they
wanted to stir up a sense of tension and excitement – while still empha-
sizing some important milestones. Numerous critics described Stratford
as “whitebread,” and cited the same symbolic achievements (Stratford’s
first black play, playwright, and director). At least three reports (Al-
Solaylee, Morrow, and Evelyn Myrie) raise the spectre of “tokenism,”
only to follow it up with Stratford’s general director Antoni Cimolino’s
reassurance that
the goal ultimately is not to have a diverse show here or there. The goal is
to make it so that someone comes here and they look around the audience
and they see a wide spectrum of humanity seated [and] they look on the
stage and they see a wide spectrum of humanity in all the parts. (Quoted
in Myrie 2006)
Both Morrow and Myrie also quote Stratford’s head of new play
development, Andrey Tarasiuk, who reveals that Stratford had al-
ready commissioned new plays by other prominent non-white
Canadian playwrights, Andrew Moodie and Daniel David Moses.
The similarities between these reports imply that the Stratford
Festival deliberately projected a “whitebread” image of itself in or-
der to encourage the public to view Harlem Duet as “part of [its]
movement to better reflect the face of Canada” (Myrie 2006). By
encouraging critics to depict Harlem Duet as somehow challenging
its own producer, the Festival presumably hoped to arouse curiosity
andEBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/12/2021 10:15 AM via CASE
excitement
among prospective spectators – particularly those
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who might consider Stratford too staid and conservative (or white)
for their tastes.
At the same time, however, both the Festival and the media used
“Shakespeare” – in print and online advertising, images, and public
discourse – to reassure readers and spectators that Harlem Duet would
not threaten Stratford’s identity as a Shakespeare festival. Stratford’s
print ads deployed Shakespeare as a quality assurance representative,
reassuring more traditional Stratford spectators that the racy image in
the ads, posters, and programs was not some sort of mistake. The image
in question reveals Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel Shawn Williams
(Othello) in an implicitly naked embrace, with Williams standing be-
hind Robinson, his arms intertwined with hers around her torso, and
both gazing off to the right (reader’s left), cheek to cheek.15 The sexiness
of the pose is tempered somewhat by the actors’ rather solemn shared
gaze off towards the source of the light (which contrasts the actors
against a velvety black background). Overlaid on the upper right cor-
ner of the image are the words “Love, revenge,/loyalty, madness,” and
at the bottom right corner, graphically positioned to serve as a punctua-
tion mark, Shakespeare’s head appears, beside the words “{Othello, the
prequel},” bracketed to suggest that Shakespeare himself is whispering

them.
The image of Shakespeare is a reproduction of the iconic Folio title
page, and thus evokes traditional notions of Shakespeare as a universal
paragon of creative achievement and dramatic authorship. Its effect
is that of a seal of approval or official endorsement (“I’m William
Shakespeare, and I approve this message”). Taken as a whole, the ad
blends erotic suggestion (of the muted, tastefully lit sort) and diversity
(black actors plus white Shakespeare and the Stratford logo) with the
universal themes (“Love, revenge, loyalty, madness”) typical of
Stratford’s public discourse (see, e.g., Knowles 2004a, 107–8). The ad
uses Shakespeare to guarantee Harlem Duet’s high-cultural pedigree
without explaining too much: if you want to see what naked black peo-
ple have to do with Shakespeare, you’ll have to see the play.
The previews and reviews discuss the play in similar terms, which
suggests that Stratford succeeded in marketing Harlem Duet as a tanta-
lizing combination of timeless themes, sex, Shakespeare, and cultural
diversity. Significantly, Harlem Duet had never been described as a sexy
play before. Previous critics had focused on the play’s treatment of
“sexual politics” (Nemetz 2000) – a decidedly unsexy topic – but at
Stratford, it was as if the critics noticed for the first time that there
is a WESTERN
“steamy
RESERVE sex
UNIV scene smack in the middle of it” (Elliott).
16
Morrow
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8.1 Harlem Duet poster, Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel Shawn Williams
(Othello). Photographer: David Hou. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival
exploits the implicit tension between sex and serious subject matter in
a pre-production interview with Sears, Robinson, and Williams, which
establishes both the cultural significance of the play and its titillating
aspects:
[R]ace is only one part of the play, notes Sears … “The [racial] stuff is good,
it engages the intellect, but it’s also a good love story, sexy and racy. And,”
she goes on to confide in a half-whisper, “this is the sexiest version I’ve
ever done. It’s hot. It’s contentious.”
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Just how torrid does it get?

“There’s a reason I’m eating salad,” says Robinson coyly.
“And I’ve stopped drinking beer,” adds Williams.
The three burst into laughter. Contrary to what the promotional photo
suggests, Robinson and Williams won’t be nude, but they will appear in
a state of semi-undress. “Yeah, sexy and racy,” says Sears. “That’s what I
like … Yeah, this play is really just Coronation Street with black people in
Harlem,” she sums up. “Well, OK, maybe not. But if you like Coronation
Street, you’ll love Harlem Duet.” (Morrow 2006)
Stratford and sex; universal themes and contemporary issues; the erotic
and politic; black (actors) meeting white (Stratford’s traditional audi-
ence); Coronation Street with black people in Harlem: like the aforemen-
tioned ad, Morrow and Sears attempt to pique curiosity by juxtaposing
conceptual opposites – all linked with and through Shakespeare.
It is worth pausing to consider the intermedial juxtaposition implied
in and between the aforementioned examples. The ad, with its juxtapo-
sition of various layers of reality and fiction, exemplifies how and why
intermediality discourse applies to marketing and publicity discourse.
What does one perceive when confronted with such an ad: a photo-
graph of the “real” actors or the fictional characters? To borrow from
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s taxonomy of “remediation,” this
ad exemplifies “hypermediacy”: the convergence of the “real” actors,
the fictional characters they play, and the cartoonish, cross-hatched,
disembodied head of Shakespeare seems to deliberately draw our at-
tention to the medium (see Bolter and Grusin 1999, 45–9). But then an-
other level of intermedial confusion is added when in the interview,
Williams and Robinson discuss the ways in which they, the real actors,
are mediated or mediatized by the “fake” ad – all in the service of offer-
ing Morrow’s readers an “authentic,” intimate moment with two indi-
viduals who are – simultaneously – ordinary people, the stars of a play,
and the key participants in a historical cultural milestone. All of which
is rendered “newsworthy” by its relationship(s) to Shakespeare.
Reception: How Shakespeare Means in Stratford’s Harlem Duet

(and Vice Versa)
Responses to the Stratford Harlem Duet suggest that the conditions of

production and reception did (as Knowles might have predicted) cur-
tail the play’s attempt to transform how Shakespeare means at Stratford.
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However, it would be overstating the case to suggest that the Festival’s

material and ideological conditions utterly neutralized the play. In fact,
documents of reception suggest that in some ways it was unusually ef-
fective. First, many of the reviews suggest that the play did change
“how Shakespeare means” at the Stratford Festival. Second, responses
suggest that those who attended the production perceived it as a sig-
nificant social and cultural event. At the same time, responses to the
production hint at the ways that the conventional practices of both the
Festival and its spectators – particularly the critics – worked against its
attempt to recruit Shakespeare as an agent of cultural diversity or inter-
cultural exchange.
Harlem Duet’s generally positive reception at Stratford reiterated the
familiar themes of the play’s initial reception in 1997–8. That is, the crit-
ics typically acknowledge the importance of the production, and use
“Shakespeare” to draw interest and to lend significance and credibility.
The reviews depict Sears’s treatment of Shakespeare as especially
meaningful in the context of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and
unanimously approve of Sears’s treatment of Shakespeare.
However, the generally positive assessments are tempered by disap-
pointment that the show did not live up to the fanfare that preceded it.
Several of the critics claimed to be big fans (and readers) of the play, but
not of the production, which they found mildly disappointing and lack-
ing in “sexual tension” (Al-Solaylee 2006a). Al-Solaylee, who had
helped create the pre-show hype (see above), found the real thing a bit
anti-climactic:
With all the excitement greeting the current revival of Djanet Sears’s
Harlem Duet at the Stratford Festival … it would be wonderful to report
that Thursday’s opening-night performance was equally as exciting and
groundbreaking. (2006a)
But, sadly, it wasn’t; Al-Solaylee claims the “great story told by Sears
the writer [is] nearly botched by Sears the director,” a judgment echoed
by John Coulbourn:
It would be nice to report that Sears’ script – which won both Governor
General and Chalmers Awards – opened in triumph. But let us be content
with celebrating the fact that it opened at all, marking a series of firsts for
a festival that has clung too tenaciously to its lily-white roots. (2006)
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Al-Solaylee, Coulbourn, and others explicitly acknowledge how des-

perately they had wanted the play to live up to the hype, because of
what it would signify in the world beyond the theatre. The reviews not
only consider the quality of the play; they imagine “the public” watch-
ing the entire event, viewing the play within an intermedial frame they
themselves helped create. In the terms of print media, responses to
Harlem Duet at Stratford implicitly address not only the “Entertainment”
section of the newspaper, but also the “News.”
The critics (some of whom acknowledge having seen the play before)
were careful to focus their misgivings on the mise en scène and design,
while emphasizing their admiration of the play itself. Some noted that
the stage did not easily accommodate the play’s several distinct spa-
tial/temporal areas (i.e., the 1860s smithy, the 1920s theatre dressing
room, and the 1990s apartment). Robert Cushman claims that the play,
which was written for a proscenium theatre, “does not … sit very hap-
pily” on the Studio Theatre’s thrust stage, which he describes as
inhospitable to domestic drama, which this essentially is, and to the kind
of buttoned-down acting it naturally summons forth … one of the crucial
images – the stripping-down of a home – doesn’t count for much in a set-

ting that never looked lived-in in the first place. (2006).
Al-Solaylee, too, felt that the production was “[c]learly … set for a stage
with a proscenium arch,” and that the necessary “re-tool[ing]” failed to
exploit “the wonderful immediacy that a small, open space like the
Studio can create” (2006a). Such criticisms suggest that Sears, taking
her fourth turn as director, struggled to adjust to a thrust. In this, she
was not alone: John Coulbourn sensed that the play also suffered from
“inexperience … with the demands of” the thrust, and observed that set
designer Astrid Janson (also in her third tour of duty on the show)
didn’t help matters by trying to “stage a kitchen-sink drama without a
kitchen sink” (2006).
These reviews bear out Knowles’s prediction that material and ideo-
logical factors, including Stratford’s mammoth scale and operating
practices and its universalist public discourse, would contain and neu-
tralize the transformative potential of a play like Harlem Duet. First, as
the reviews note, Harlem Duet played at Stratford’s smallest venue, the
Studio Theatre, a space designated for the Festival’s more challenging
plays, “including new and experimental works [and] rarely produced
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classics” (“Studio Theatre”).17 Although this decision did allow Stratford

to minimize financial risk while exploiting the media hype around the
production, the venue also was supposed to benefit the play by creating
an exciting environment of relatively small but packed houses of inter-
ested spectators. (While welcoming the cast on the first day of rehears-
als, then–artistic director Richard Monette said, “You’ll like the audience
here. It’s different from our other audiences. They’re open-minded.”)18
However, as the reviews suggest, the shape of the venue was more prob-
lematic than its size. Harlem Duet had never appeared on a thrust stage
before, and the presence of many veterans in the cast, including the
original director, designer, and Othello, which should have been an as-
set, may have become a liability, as habits formed on the proscenium
arch transferred awkwardly to the thrust.
The perceived inappropriateness of the venue may also be symptom-
atic of Stratford’s corporate structures and institutional hierarchies,
which, as Knowles says, create “a certain institutional, structural, and
procedural inertia … that can defeat even the best-intended creative
efforts at change, resistance, or subversion” (2004b, 112).19 The creative
environment at Stratford contrasted visibly with that of previous
Harlem Duet productions. Sears claims that the first productions were
special for all the participants because they provided the rare experi-
ence of a creative atmosphere with “all Black people in a room” (Sears
and Sealy-Smith 1998, 28). The conditions at Stratford were very differ-
ent. From day one (when Monette showed up with an enormous con-
tingent of Stratford Festival staff to welcome the cast) there was an
acute awareness of racial difference in the creative environment. In ad-
dition, the cast and director were only rarely all in the room together,
for reasons described below; and when they were, they were super-
vised by a triad of (white) stage managers and frequently visited by the
design team and the various production and administrative personnel.
It was also immediately evident that the creative process would not be
ruled by the artists themselves – who were now a small subcolony of
Stratford’s hive of worker bees – but by a code of externally imposed
institutional policies and labour practices, union regulations, and a rig-
orous schedule of meetings, design presentations, costume fittings, and
so forth. None of the designers, technicians, or stage management team
who introduced themselves at the first rehearsal of Harlem Duet ex-
pressed any passion about or interest in creating “change, resistance,
or subversion.” The tone cultivated in the rehearsal hall by the stage
managers was rather one of following rules and procedures, obeying
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administrative hierarchies, maintaining stability and continuity, and

ensuring not the production of art so much as the constant reproduc-
tion of the conditions of production. Moreover, although Harlem Duet
enjoyed a relatively high profile in the media, it had much lower status
in Stratford’s production hierarchy, which prioritizes the big shows, in-
cluding 2006 headliners Oliver!, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night,
The Glass Menagerie, 1 Henry IV, and The Duchess of Malfi.20
Speaking in general of the conventional labour practices of North
American professional theatre, Knowles writes, “it is too often the case
that productive rehearsals are interrupted mid-flight by the need for a
required Equity break, or that theatre workers are strait-jacketed by the
requirement that they contribute only according to their job descrip-
tions” (2004b, 60).21 This is exactly what happened to Harlem Duet at
Stratford: the designs were pre-approved before the rehearsals began,
leaving little margin for error or flexibility, and the play’s low priority
meant continuous disruption to the rehearsal schedule, because Harlem
Duet’s actors were frequently pulled from rehearsal to accommodate
The Duchess of Malfi, in which most of them had minor supporting roles.
These disruptions were severe; after the first rehearsal, the whole cast
was not together in the same room again until tech week.22 It is possible
that the company was aware of the problems cited by the reviewers but
had no opportunity to fix them, having neither the power to alter the
set design (to better suit the thrust) nor the rehearsal time to rethink the
mise en scène.
Staging problems aside, most reviewers praised the play and ac-
knowledged the significance of its staging at Stratford. But many of
these responses exemplify the tendency of even positive reviews to
contain potentially disruptive or provocative performances. For one
thing, the reviewers who praise the play but critique its execution in-
voke a conceptual model of theatre which privileges print media over
live performance, whereby the performance transmits (imperfectly,
in this case) the transcendent “meaning” of the text to the audience
(Knowles 2004b, 49). The responses also tend to draw on the essential-
ist, universalist discourse which, Knowles claims, is typical of theatre
criticism in general and Stratford’s public discourse in particular. Al-
Solaylee, for example, hails Harlem Duet as “a rich, significant modern
Canadian play,” emphasizing that “[t]he intellectual reach of the text is
breathtaking.” Like many critics (especially of Shakespeare perfor-
mances), Al-Solaylee directs those disappointed by the performance to
take reassurance from the transcendent text. Others echo Jon Kaplan’s
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position that the production is important because it is a good play, not

because it is a black play; this approach seeks to pre-empt any sugges-
tion that Stratford might be bowing to political correctness by putting
“cultural diversity before excellence” – as Kate Taylor claimed when
the play won the Governor-General’s Award.23 But such assurances of
the play’s excellence resort to familiar essentialist clichés about “the
timeless cancer of racism” (Kaplan 2006). John Coulbourn, similarly,
praises Sears for creating “a back-story to Shakespeare’s classic that is
perhaps as timeless as the play that inspired it.” And Chris Hoile claims
(in an otherwise exceptionally sensitive review) that “Sears sets the
play in three distinct” times “in order to show the timelessness of the
situation” (n.d.). In fact, as the history of Othello’s production and re-
ception proves, racism is hardly timeless. Another critic opens with a
provocation, but falls back to the same comfortable reassurance that
good plays are timeless and universal:
It’s pretty iconoclastic. A play by a black female is taking centre stage at

Stratford. Canada’s major whitebread playhouse is finally making the ef-
fort to be more inclusive and to reflect … a country that is no longer a
replica of white Europe …

In the end, Harlem Duet isn’t good because it’s a play about blacks pro-
duced for the first time on the Stratford stage. No, it’s good because it’s
good. Theatre shouldn’t really be pigeonholed as black and white, gay
and straight, European or American. A good play is a good play. And that
ought to be the end of it. (Smith 2006)
Critics repeatedly applaud Harlem Duet for challenging monolithic,

Eurocentric, dead-white-male values; and yet, having done so, they
must hasten to defend the play as universally good, as if to reassure
readers that the play is for white audiences too. Such responses hint at
the subtle influence of publicity discourse, such as an anecdote in the
program describing Sears’s encounter with a woman who praised
Harlem Duet by saying, “This is not a Black play. This is an extraordi-
nary human play!” Sears responds,
While I undoubtedly accepted the praise, I was struck by the idea that
Black plays and human plays were completely different entities … I mean,
all Black plays are human plays! What part of the Black experience is not
part of the human experience? (Harlem Duet Program 2006, 10).
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Sears’s anecdote inoculates its readers against unwittingly excluding

black people from humanity.24
Although the assessments of the performance were mixed, most
critics devoted significant effort to praising the play, and they did so in
terms that encouraged their readers – whether or not they would see
the play – to rethink the significance of Shakespeare. Even the critics
who, in their anxiety to defend Harlem Duet as a great play and not just
a black one, described the play in universalist terms often did so in
ways that asked their readers to reconsider what “universal” means
and to whom it applies. Both Morrow and Gary Smith, for example,
cite Sears’s Laurence Olivier anecdote (which was also included in the
program) to remind their readers that seeing familiar faces on stage is
a privilege that white audiences have taken for granted, particularly
at Stratford.
Such reviews and other documents of reception indicate that the play
achieved some of its transformative objectives, particularly in regard to
changing “how Shakespeare means” – however subtly. Moreover, such
responses actually perform some of that work themselves: the process
of adapting what and how Shakespeare means continues in the writing
of theatre critics and others who were affected by the play. While the-
atre criticism may influence spectators, it also influences readers who
do not actually see the play, and whereas performance is ephemeral
and local, criticism is somewhat more durable and more far-reaching.
For example, Robert Cushman’s review in the National Post, which
circulated across Canada (and continues to circulate online), both per-
ceives and communicates with admirable economy how Harlem Duet
attempts to change “how Shakespeare means”:
Shakespeare’s black Othello married a white woman, and his play has
much to say on how her white friends felt about it. It tells us nothing
about the reactions of his black friends; it doesn’t even tell us if he had
any. (2006)
Cushman’s review exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between

Sears, Shakespeare, and critics: it uses Shakespeare references to attract
attention (the review is titled “Playing the Race Bard”) but gives Sears
the spotlight, explaining Harlem Duet’s significance as a production
which continues, but also intervenes in, Stratford’s tradition of
Shakespearean performance:
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Sears’ play, much feted in Toronto in 1997, earns its Stratford revival, di-
rected by the author, on grounds both textual (it’s superbly written) and
contextual (Shakespeare and all that jazz, the jazz being nearly as impor-
tant as the Shakespeare) …
Harlem Duet does more than supply a new context for the Othello story.
It also spins out variations on the play’s existing elements. Some of these
are just facile nudges … Others cut deep; if Shakespeare’s Othello might
be seen as an outsize representation of a black man “trying to pass,” then
that is certainly how Billie comes to regard her Othello; the more he seems
to reject his heritage, the more she embraces hers. (2006)
Cushman focuses on Sears’s originality and cleverness – what she adds

to the story. There is no suggestion that Sears has betrayed or abused a
masterpiece. Although he reads Harlem Duet through Othello, he also
encourages us to see Othello through Sears’s (or Billie’s) eyes. Encour-
aging spectators and readers to revise their impressions of canonical
masterpieces is perhaps the most important work that adaptations do,
and Cushman’s review shows both how Harlem Duet performs this
work and how public discourse can extend it.
Some responses indicate that Harlem Duet also performed significant

cultural work by transforming its spectators into performers, both in-
side the theatre and in the public space of Stratford. Watching a play
at Stratford, after all, is only part of an encompassing experience that
might include shopping, dining, and strolling around the town, and
seeing other spectators watch and respond to the play. Evelyn Myrie’s
account of her trip to see Harlem Duet – even though it says very little
about the play itself – establishes the significance of the event.
For the past few summers, I have made numerous unkept promises to
myself to go to the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. It was Djanet Sears’
new and exciting play Harlem Duet that finally got me there.
…
As we walked through downtown Stratford … we came across three lo-
cal young black women who observed us with curiosity … “Hello, Hello,”
they said. “It’s good to see you all … we don’t see many of us around
here.” We chuckled as we walked along to be a part of Stratford history.
…
This encounter reminded me of a story my mom recounted many times
to us … One day she ran into a black woman in a local store and was over-
come with joy. Without knowing the woman, my mom rushed up to her
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and gave her a big hug. “I was just so happy to see another black person
in town.”
…
I guess that’s how those young women felt as they met us heading to-
ward the theatre.
…
As we entered the theatre where Harlem Duet was being staged, we ac-
knowledged the significance of our journey … to Stratford. We knew we
were participating in breaking new ground. We were making history – we
were on our way to see the first black work to be produced in the festival’s
54-year history and the first to be directed by a black woman and the first
with an all-black cast. (Myrie 2006)
To Myrie’s relief, the performance doesn’t disappoint, but as her nar-

rative indicates, much of its cultural work had already been done be-
fore the house lights dimmed. Simply visiting Stratford made her and
her companions feel like performers in an important cultural event,
and seeing and being seen by others reinforced the feeling that they
were “making history.” The power of intermedial paratextuality is
significant here: the print and online paratexts, through their ease
and speed of dissemination, allowed the play to do its cultural work
outside the immediate time and place of the theatre in which it was
performed. Thousands of people, even if they did not experience the
play, thereby became aware of its significance. The print and online
media effectively help compensate for the inherent weaknesses (in
terms of dissemination) of theatre, ensuring that its impact can be
perceived (and remembered) both far away from and long after the
performance.
Black spectators were not alone in seeing the play as just one compo-
nent of a larger performance. Gary Smith, too, responds to both the
play and the equally significant “performance” of the audience:
There is little doubt the play is attracting black people to Stratford. The
day I saw it the theatre was almost full and there were far more people of
colour than us pale-faced whites.
…
It reminded me of the days in New York when I’d go to see the early
plays of James Baldwin and sit in a theatre full of blacks who cheered that
anti-white sentiments in Baldwin’s dramas, making me feel decidedly un-
comfortable. So this is what it feels like to be in a minority I thought. (2006)
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Although Smith defeats his purpose by constructing his readership as

exclusively white, his anecdote forces potential spectators (at least “us”
pale-faced ones) to confront, perhaps for the first time, both the feeling
of being excluded from the “universal” and the uncomfortable realiza-
tion that many people experience that feeling on a regular basis. Smith
recognizes that, by making him feel uncomfortable about his skin co-
lour, and thus forcing him to confront the experience of exclusion, the
play is not failing but succeeding – an insight that may resonate with
readers whether or not they attend the play.
Responses such as Smith’s and Myrie’s indicate that Harlem Duet had
positive effects in spite of the aforementioned barriers obtaining from
the material and ideological conditions of working and spectating at
Stratford. The character of these effects depends to an unusual degree
on the identity of the spectator, because Harlem Duet targets two dis-
tinct audiences who experience the same play in different ways. The
production offered black spectators the opportunity to “make history,”
as Myrie puts it, just by showing up at the theatre. Moreover, those
spectators not only saw, but were seen, and in this regard the thrust
stage did serve the play well, by making the spectators as visible as the
play. This visibility enhanced one of the play’s more potent effects,
which, as several scholarly appraisals of the play have noted, is to
“[force] the audience, regardless of who they are, into viewing the play
from the perspective of Black audiences” (Leslie Sanders 2000, 558),
and to consider, simultaneously, how rarely this perspective is ac-
knowledged in the theatre. White spectators, put in the position of
eavesdroppers, may be jolted into the uncomfortable realization that
other spectators see things differently; black spectators may suddenly
realize how unusual it is to confront a space dominated by people who
“look just like them” – an experience one of Sears’s character describes
in the play (1997, 79). By allowing its spectators to observe each other
confronting this experience, Harlem Duet disturbs the notion of a uni-
versal “Canadian spectator” whose perspective is uncomplicated by
either race or gender, and exposes the assumed whiteness of both the
Canadian spectator and Canadian theatre (Fischlin and Fortier 2000,
285). In this regard, then – contrary to the critics’ suggestions that the
play’s essential value resides in its text – the theatrical medium was
critical to Harlem Duet’s intervention in “how Shakespeare means” at
Stratford.
Simultaneously, black spectators, as confirmed by the observations
of Smith, Myrie, and others, were able to see others like them, creating
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a meaningful sense of inclusion, and a cause for celebration. At the

same time, they were visible to the non-black spectators, who were in
turn visible to them; and the consciousness of every spectator of the
play’s subject matter and the production’s cultural significance (a con-
sciousness heightened by all the paratexts mentioned above) made all
spectators aware, in some cases for the first time, of “performing” their
own skin colour, whether proudly, like Myrie, or sheepishly, like Gary
Smith. This unusual temporary community was at once divided by vis-
ible differences, but also united, since they all shared the roles of spec-
tators at a play and, more importantly, participants in an event that had
been publicized to all those present as “historic.” All those present at a
performance of Harlem Duet – or even those simply strolling around
Stratford on the day of a performance25 – were witnesses to a public
performance, whereby Stratford (and through it, Shakespeare) was
publicly claimed by a community that had previously avoided or been
excluded from it.
Conclusions
Harlem Duet’s reception at Stratford complicates both Knowles’s theory

of “how Shakespeare means at Stratford” and conventional accounts of
how plays work, in general. Stratford’s institutional policies, corporate
hierarchies, and working conditions did evidently hinder the creative
process, and may have contributed to negative assessments of play’s
directing and design; and the universalist discourse promulgated in
Stratford’s publicity and marketing material, and habitually adopted
by theatre critics, did at times threaten to claim the play for an alleg-
edly “universal” perspective that actually represented the decidedly
not universal perspective of (mostly) “pale-faced” male theatre critics.
Nevertheless, the reception of Harlem Duet also testifies to its capacity
to transform “how Shakespeare means,” partly because of its capacity
for transforming its audience into a performance of its own – a capac-
ity exploited and amplified by both Sears and the Festival, in public
discourse. This discourse successfully focused the attention of the pub-
lic (including both playgoers and the much larger group who only read
or heard about the play) on Stratford’s poor record of representing
Canada’s (and North America’s)26 ethnic diversity, both on its stages
and in its audience. It also drew significant numbers of black spectators
to Stratford, some for the first time; and even if those spectators didn’t
stay to see Sophia Walker play the Madwoman in Duchess of Malfi, as
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Stratford might have hoped, their mere presence in the audience of

Harlem Duet contributed to its performance efficacy. Thus, although the
factors Knowles identifies are clearly at work, they are not as depress-
ingly all-powerful as they sometimes appear to be in his analysis.
Harlem Duet’s reception also exemplifies both the extent to which
Shakespeare adaptation is a continuous, reciprocal, and intermedial
process. Sears’s dramatic adaptation (which itself responds to and con-
tinues the work of previous adaptors) means differently to solitary read-
ers than it did to the critics who framed it as a cultural event, or to the
different groups of spectators who watched the play, or watched each
other watching the play through the frame of the play’s marketing and
publicity discourse; and the critics’ accounts of all these forms of recep-
tion, in turn, influenced – and continue to influence – a much broader
audience, even in paratexts like this one. In addition, even though pub-
lic discourse surrounding Harlem Duet often focuses on Shakespeare,
it does not subordinate the adaptation to the source. As Julie Sanders
argues, even if adaptations “cannot help but reinscribe the canon …
they do so in new, and newly critical ways” (2005, 105), and the
Stratford production of Harlem Duet – including these public discours-
es – encouraged readers and spectators to reassess what and how

Shakespeare means, and how the Festival serves its communities.
Thus even if Harlem Duet reconstitutes the authority of the canon, the
canon thereby becomes “something different from what it was”
(Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 6). Thanks in part to the marketing and jour-
nalistic media that framed it as a major cultural event, Stratford’s Harlem
Duet worked productively towards Sears’s vision of a world in which
black spectators can always find a play that appeals to them, and white
spectators realize that not everyone can take this privilege for granted.
NOTES
1 Other writers have already offered perceptive analyses of Sears’s text and
its fascinating intertextualities, Shakespearean and otherwise. See, for ex-
ample, Dickinson 2002, Kidnie 2001, Knowles 2004a, and Leslie Sanders
2000.
2 As Linda Hutcheon demonstrates, “adaptation” is both a product and a
process, and moreover as a process of both production and reception
(2006, 7–9, 15–21).
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3 Othello, (Desde)Mona, and Billie are all linked to Shakespearean anteced-

ents: “Billie” comes from Sybil (a name Billie herself hates), from Othello’s
description of the infamous handkerchief: “A sibyl … In her prophetic
fury sewed the work” (3.4.72–4).
4 Although the dialogue implies that He and She live in a condition of slav-
ery in Harlem in the 1860s, New York gradually abolished slavery be-
tween 1785 and 1841.
5 As of 2012, Harlem Duet is available as a stand-alone play-text and in at
least three anthologies: Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama
(Sears 2000), Adaptations of Shakespeare (Fischlin and Fortier 2000), and The
Shakespeare’s Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada (Knowles
2009), which takes its title from a line in Harlem Duet. On the initial recep-
tion of Harlem Duet, and its connections to Goodnight Desdemona, see
McKinnon 2010, 138–41.
6 I searched 30,000 words of responses to Harlem Duet, and “adaptation”
was not one of them. In response to my query at a conference in 2006, even
Linda Hutcheon, whose definition of adaptation is notably broad, claimed
that Harlem Duet was really a new play, not an adaptation. For an exten-
sive account of the language and cultural bases of fidelity discourse, see
Stam 2005, 3–7.

7 Christopher Winsor calls Harlem Duet a “substantial achievement” (1997);
Jim Lingerfelt and Roger Kershaw described it (redundantly) as “bold and
daring … the essence of courageous theatre” (1997); and the Star’s Vit
Wagner referred to the play as “an impressive achievement, an ambitious
and accomplished work with scope and the vision to realize it,” in a re-
view titled “Theatre As It Should Be” (1997b).
8 References to Shakespeare in the play itself use “Shakespeare” to signify
the white culture whose validation Othello craves, at Billie’s expense. In a
scene where Othello comes to Billie’s apartment to clean out his posses-
sions, there is a brief reference to a contested Shakespeare anthology. Billie
tells Othello, “The Shakespeare is mine. But you can have it” (Sears 1997,
52). The 1920s incarnations of Billie and Othello also discuss Shakespeare,
because their break-up is precipitated by Othello’s fascination with a
white director (Desdemona) who offers him a chance to break out of the
minstrel circuit and perform Shakespearean roles, specifically Pericles (99–
100). As Kidnie points out, Harlem Duet, with its second-act story about the
reconciliation between Billie and her estranged father and its broad con-
cern with the lingering effects of African diaspora, is perhaps more direct-
ly engaged with Pericles than with Othello – but few contemporary
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spectators are familiar with Pericles and responses focus almost exclusively
on the Othello connection (Kidnie 2001, 41).
9 “nOTES” was included in the program of the 1997 and 2006 productions,
and prefaces the print edition.
10 For examples, see Smulders 2000, Wagner 1997a, Smith 2006, and Morrow
2006.
11 See Knowles 2004b, 108, for example.
12 The playwrights represented in the 2012 season, for example, are all of
European descent. See http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/.
13 Stratford officially reclaimed the word “Shakespeare” in 2007, but as
Morrow’s use of the adjective “Shakespearean” suggests, its deletion in
the 1970s was never really absorbed by the collective consciousness of its
audience.
14 As Sears told me shortly before she began rehearsals, the conditions had to
be right before she would agree to do the show at Stratford: almost a de-
cade after Harlem Duet’s first production, now an established artist fresh
from the success of Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, Sears no lon-
ger felt the need to work under less than ideal conditions, and perhaps she
recognized that Stratford’s programmers needed her more than she need-
ed them.
15 At the time of writing, the image is still circulating on the internet, where
it constitutes part of the production’s intermedial afterlife. See http://
www.blackcanada.com/gallery.htm.
16 Surprisingly, neither Elliott nor any of the play’s respondents have ever
commented on how Sears ironizes Othello’s infamous paranoia about
Desdemona’s suspected infidelity by showing Othello cheating on his
wife.
17 The Studio shows in the 2006 season included The Blond, the Brunette, and
the Vengeful Redhead, Fanny Kemble, and The Liar. Obviously, designating
the smallest theatre as a space for risky or challenging fare can be seen as a
strategy for containing or mitigating the so-called risk.
18 I was present at the first day of rehearsal, and thus privy to this comment
of Monette’s, because Sears had invited me to participate in the produc-
tion by offering a “scholar’s perspective” on the play to the company.
19 As an example of the difficulties Sears faced in dealing with Stratford’s
bureaucracy – albeit one of little consequence to the production – it took
her several phone calls and emails and over two weeks of negotiation to
persuade the Festival (at her insistence, not mine) to give me a program
credit. Ultimately, they refused to use the word “dramaturge” in the pro-
gram for institutional reasons. At one point, Sears asked me to provide a
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list of three possible titles to help her win this battle; in the end, I ended
up being credited as “Academic Research by …”
20 At the 2006 Stratford Festival, black actors could star in black plays, but
were otherwise relegated to minor roles. In The Duchess of Malfi, the Harlem
Duet cast played such juicy roles as “understudy,” “Malateste,” “Doctor,”
and “Madwoman,” which arguably undermines Stratford’s project of im-
proving record of ethnic and racial representation. In 2012, there were no
black playwrights, but black actors played leading roles in Electra and
Cymbeline.
21 For Knowles’s assessment of the influence of theatrical training, tradition,
and labour practices on the creation of meaning in the theatre, see 2004b,
24–36 and 53–62.
22 I was scheduled to attend the next full company day the week after the
first rehearsal, but this was postponed and ultimately never happened.
23 “There has been some grumbling,” Taylor grumbles, “that the Governor-
General’s literary awards are increasingly recognizing cultural diversity
before excellence, and recent drama winners give credence to the com-
plaint. Last year, the jurors … picked Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, an ambi-
tious but severely flawed reinvention of the Othello story. In 1997,
Winnipeg Metis Ian Ross won the prize for fareWel, a work which, to judge
from its current Toronto premiere, is a very minor comic drama” (1999).
Taylor (who had been the only critic to snub Harlem Duet when it pre-
miered in 1997) writes as though excellence was a criterion in and of itself,
without explaining what the criteria for “excellence” are (or whether, if
“cultural diversity” isn’t one of them, homogeneity is).
24 In a different version of this anecdote, appearing in the preface to The
Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, Sears sets the encounter at a pub-
lic post-performance talkback: “My response was kind, but immediate. All
Black plays are human plays! What part of the Black experience is not part
of the human experience? Most likely to the discomfort of the woman who
spoke, I elaborated further.” The version recounted in the Stratford pro-
gram is comparatively neutral, and does not suggest that asking questions
at a talkback will put spectators at risk of a public browbeating from the
playwright.
25 Stratford made some effort to ensure that Harlem Duet would be seen by
the black community, by arranging a number of outreach events and sub-
sidized bus trips from Toronto. As a result, the constitution (and liveliness)
of the audience varied considerably from one performance to another.
26 Roughly a third of Stratford’s revenue comes from direct sales to the
United States (see Knowles 2004b, 107).
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Theatre/2006/Entries/2006/9/11_Harlem_Duet.html. Accessed 1 April
2014.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge.
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Kaplan, Jon. 1997. “Rivetting [sic] Alison Sealy-Smith Bursts Bard’s Bubble.”
Now Magazine, 24 April. http://www.nowtoronto.com/archive/view_
issue.cfm?vol=16&num=34&year=1997. Accessed 1 April 2014.
– 2006. “A Riveting Duet.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. 31 August. http://www
.nowtoronto.com/stage/story.cfm?content=155192. Accessed 1 April 2014.
Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2001. “‘There’s Magic in the Web of It’: Seeing beyond
Tragedy in Harlem Duet.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.2: 29–44.
Knowles, Richard. 2004a. “Othello in Three Times.” In Shakespeare and Canada:
Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation. Brussels and New York:
P.I.E.-Peter Lang.
– 2004b. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Anglophone Canada. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.
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Harlem Duet. Stage Door (April). http://www.stage-door.org/reviews/
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Toronto: Coach House Press.
McKinnon, James. 2010. “The Dramaturgy of Appropriation: How Canadian
Playwrights Use and Abuse Shakespeare and Chekhov.” PhD diss.

University of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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Sears, Djanet. 1997. Harlem Duet. Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama.
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Accessed 7 December 2009.
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– 2004. The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. Toronto: Playwrights
Canada Press.
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Sears, Djanet, and Alison Sealy-Smith. 1998. “The Nike Method.” Interview
with Ric Knowles. Canadian Theatre Review 97 (Winter): 24–30.
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Thames: Thomas Nelson.
Smith, Gary. 2006. “Stratford’s Harlem Duet Deserves to Be Seen.” Rev. of
Harlem Duet. Hamilton Spectator, 26 August: D18.
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Had Been Married Before?” Daily News [Halifax], 7 April: 35.
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C11.
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PART FOUR
“Give No Limits to My Tongue …

I Am Privileged to Speak”:
The Limits of Adaptation?
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Patchwork Shakespeare:
Community Events at the American
Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916)
Mo ni k a S m ial kowsk a
This chapter explores the ways in which the American celebrations of

the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 drew
on and creatively combined a range of cultural practices across differ-
ent genres and media.1 The Tercentenary was marked by traditional
theatrical productions, such as Henry VIII with Herbert Beerbohm Tree
as Cardinal Wolsey, an African American amateur rendition of Othello
with Edward Wilbur Wright in the lead role, and the touring perfor-
mances of several of Shakespeare’s plays by the Ben Greet Woodland
Players. There were also forays into the fledgling medium of film: two
versions of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth with Beerbohm Tree, and J.M.
Barrie’s Macbeth pastiche, The Real Thing at Last (see Buchanan 2009,
190–216). The majority of commemorative activities in the US, however,
were of a more heterogeneous nature: less highbrow than traditional
theatre, more communal and participatory than film, and in many cases
intermedial and intercultural.
This may come as a surprise, considering that the key instigator
of the Tercentenary celebrations was the Drama League of America, a
voluntary organization whose self-proclaimed aims were “to raise the
public taste as regards the drama,” “to educate its members to a degree
of appreciation which will discriminate among plays,” and “to create
and organize a public which should support sound literary and artistic
effort on the stage” (Drama League of America 1911, n.p.). Generally,
the League promoted fairly traditional, text-based drama, as opposed
to popular, mixed genres such as the vaudeville. Its aspiration to edu-
cate the public to “discriminate among plays” implies an interest in
policing and maintaining boundaries between artistic and popular
forms, rather than a wish to promote intercultural or intermedial hy-
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 322 Monika Smialkowska
bridization. Nevertheless, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary the League

recommended a staggering range of heterogeneous activities: “plays,
masques, festivals, pageants, music, dancing, chorus, lectures, sermons,
art and craft exhibitions, club programs, library exhibits, study courses,
story telling, tableaux, planting of trees, and developing of Shakespeare
gardens” (Roberts 1916, 354). The American public received these sug-
gestions with enthusiasm, organizing a plethora of miscellaneous
events, spanning and often blending such disparate cultural domains
as literary criticism and history (study courses, lectures); drama (plays,
pageants, masques); religion (sermons); music (vocal and instrumental,
traditional and modern); dance (both professional and social); couture
(dressing up); visual arts and antiquarianism (exhibitions); folklorism
(reconstructions of popular festivals, games, and customs); horticulture
(Shakespeare gardens and tree plantings); and even gastronomy
(Shakespeare parties). These activities indicate that the practice – if not
the theorization – of intermedial Shakespearean adaptation has a rich
history, originating long before the advent of the digital era. Examining
this history can enrich our understanding of newer media and more
recent adaptations by mapping out the ideologically loaded debates
which accompanied earlier intercultural exchanges. Consequently, the

discussion that follows investigates possible reasons for the explosion
of multimedia adaptations of Shakespeare in 1916, as well as the overall
effects and meanings they generated, focusing in particular on the cru-
cial issues concerning the demarcation of the boundaries between pop-
ular and high culture.
To illustrate how far Tercentenary contributors were prepared to
go in their intermedial experiments, it is worth having a look at one
of the most bizarre cultural hybrids produced for the occasion – the
“Shakespearian circus” organized in New York by the young wom-
en of the Vacation Association (Program of the Community Masque
Caliban by the Yellow Sands 1916, 10). On 31 March 1916, the New York
Times reported:
Shakespeare is going to make his début in the sawdust arena. The girls of
the Vacation Association, who do their planning and plotting all the year
around at 38 West Thirty-ninth Street for their Summer vacations, are go-
ing to cast precedent out of the window and astonish future historians by
putting Shakespeare where, with all his versatility, he has never been be-
fore – in the circus. (“Shakespeare in a Circus” 1916, 9)
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Patchwork Shakespeare: The American Tercentenary 323
While the article emphasizes the organizers’ daring innovation in tak-

ing Shakespeare “where … he has never been before,” it also points to
the serious, scholarly dimension of the enterprise: “All of the volumes
of Shakespeare are off the shelves and most of the girls are ears deep
in classics in every room of the house. Popular novels, which used to
be at a premium, are now piled high on the shelves” (“Shakespeare in
a Circus” 1916, 9). It appears that, via a most unlikely route, the young
women participating in the project have achieved cultural elevation. By
getting involved in an undeniably lowbrow activity, a circus, they pro-
gressed from consuming popular culture – novels – to contemplating
respectable “classics” – Shakespeare’s work.
A report of the actual event, however, reveals that the affair was not
a straightforward progress from the lowbrow to the highbrow, but rath-
er an eclectic mixture of cultural forms and media, closer to a popular
variety show than to a classic literary or dramatic event. The New York
Times article of 6 May 1916 entitled “Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls”
made much of the participants dressed up as fairies having “the fright
of their lives” over the possibility that Chin-Chin, a baby elephant bor-
rowed for the occasion from the Hippodrome, might bite their bare toes
(fortunately, he turned out to be more interested in cookies). Having

covered this incident in detail, the report went on to describe the rest of
the program:
After the circus proper, in which there were many professional turns with
the dances of the vacation girls, the audience wandered out into the vil-
lage street of Stratford-on-Avon, at the rear of the hall, where Shakespeare
himself – Jack Hazard [sic] from “Very Good Eddie,” sold his own works.
Al Jolson had a music shop and pretty girls sold good things to eat and
drink at other shops in the village street. Later the hall was cleared and the
circus became a ball. (“Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls” 1916, 11)
This description reveals a fantastic mixture of historical periods, media,

genres, and cultural practices. In Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare him-
self (impersonated by John E. Hazzard, who a few months earlier was
involved, as actor and lyricist, in the production of the Broadway musi-
cal Very Good Eddie) rubs shoulders with the popular musician and en-
tertainer Al Jolson. Both Shakespeare and Jolson are involved not in
their respective arts, but in retail, selling their works, and are surround-
ed by busy catering operations. All this, combined with the facts that
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the fairies who got so terrified by the elephant in the “circus proper”
had been positioned “at the feet of ‘good Queen Bess,’” and that the
famous movie actress Mary Pickford was only prevented by illness
from being “one of the professional stars of the evening,” completes the
picture of indiscriminate cultural eclecticism and hybridity, in which
disparate forms merge and morph into one another (“Elephant Scares
Shakespeare Girls” 1916, 11). Fittingly, the evening ends with another
transformation: the circus (which by then has become a fair) now be-
comes a ball.
Shakespeare Tercentenary and the Community Theatre
It would be easy to dismiss the “Shakespearian circus” as a unique

product of one group’s quirky imagination. However, despite this pe-
culiar episode being perhaps an extreme case, countless Tercentenary
tributes across the US displayed similar characteristics of generic, me-
dia, and cultural fusion. In fact, the Tercentenary’s most widely publi-
cized and popular live event, the centrepiece of New York’s and the
nation’s celebrations, shared a number of features with the Vacation
Association’s contribution. That event was Percy MacKaye’s Caliban by

the Yellow Sands, repeatedly performed at the New York City College
Stadium (also known as Lewisohn Stadium) in front of thousands of
spectators between 24 May and 5 June 1916. Dubbed a “Community
Masque” by its author (MacKaye 1916, xix), Caliban was a colossal
production, enlisting the participation of about thirty professional
actors and over fifteen hundred amateurs drawn from a cross-section
of New York’s populace. The masque’s plot consisted of the brutish
Caliban undergoing a civilizing process at the hands of Prospero,
Ariel, and Miranda. Their educational methods were the arts of the
theatre: they produced for him three long Interludes and an Epilogue,
representing the development of dramatic art from its ancient ori-
gins in ritual and folk play to modern times. Interspersed with those
were ten “Inner Scenes,” enacting short excerpts from several of
Shakespeare’s plays (MacKaye 1916, xxxi–xxxii). The exchanges
between Prospero, Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban, as well as the Inner
Scenes, were fairly straightforwardly dramatic, as they consisted of
dialogue, speeches, and action. By contrast, the Interludes and Epilogue
resembled the Shakespearean circus in their multimedia character.
They involved carefully choreographed dances, group movements,
processions, choral singing accompanied by orchestral music, elements
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of tableau and pantomime, and displays of athleticism (see figures 9.1

and 9.2), as well as representations of Germanic Shrovetide customs, a
chivalric tournament, an Italian festa, and an Elizabethan May Day fes-
tival. Even animal participation was envisaged, as the New York Times
reported on 9 April 1916:
The committee in charge of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Festival must

find a tame elephant and bear within the next few weeks or change Percy
MacKaye’s Community Masque, to be presented in the City College
Stadium as the crowning event of the festival next month. The masque
calls for these animals, and it was thought they could be obtained at the
Bronx Zoo, but Director Hornaday dashed these hopes the other day when
he wrote saying there were no such animals, at least at his park (“Wanted
– An Elephant” 1916, X7).
This mixture of cultural practices situates Caliban closer to Shakespeare’s

theatre, which was not far removed from bear-baiting, fencing, and jig-
making, than to later, more decorous theatrical developments. Overall,
“the crowning event” of the Shakespeare Tercentenary was a heteroge-
neous affair, combining an astounding range of disparate media and

genres, rather than a formally uniform, highbrow artistic product. The
same can be said of numerous Tercentenary tributes across the US,
such as the pageant and masque staged in Atlanta (Carroll 1916); a
five-day program of events prepared by University of Texas, which
included “pageants, esthetic dancing, revels, fairs, lectures, plays and
pageants again” (“To Commemorate Shakespeare” 1916, 5); an “al fres-
co Shakespearean festival” organized by the Dallas Shakespeare Club
(Periwinkle 1916, 13); “Tableaux and scenes” staged by the Professional
Women’s League in New York (Program of the Community Masque
Caliban by the Yellow Sands 1916, 11); and “Elizabethan Fair and Pageant”
offered by Barnard College (Program of the Community Masque Caliban
by the Yellow Sands 1916, 11), to mention just a few examples (see also
Smialkowska 2010a, par. 7–8).
One reason for the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations having
been so eclectic may be found in the fact that they coincided with an
unprecedented increase of interest in the role of leisure, and drama in
particular, in American society. This interest manifested itself both in
practical ways, through the activities of such organizations as the
Drama League of America and the American Pageant Association, and
in more theoretical debates, conducted via public talks, articles, and
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9.1 (above) and 9.2 (opposite). Caliban’s community participants display their
gymnastic prowess in rehearsal. The masque’s text does not mention these
feats of acrobatics, but it does stipulate that the members of the Chorus in
the Greek interlude dance “with vigorous, rhythmic cadence of their athletic
bodies” (MacKaye 1916, 169). Photos courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
full-length books devoted to the topic. The Drama League of America,

a voluntary organization established in 1910, brought together in a
loose federation many existing dramatic clubs and societies across the
US and spurred the development of new ones (Blair 1994, 148–60).
While rejecting the role of censor, the League took on the responsibili-
ties of educator and arbiter of taste: “realizing that censoring will only
help advertise a bad play, not check it, the league acted upon the op-
posite principle, constructively to create a worthy stage – to support all
that is sound and valuable in dramatic art, merely shunning and avoid-
ing the meretricious and unworthy plays” (Drama League of America
1911, n.p.). Thus, the League sought to shape American drama by fos-
tering discerning audiences through such activities as promoting study
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courses and cheap editions of plays, as well as publishing bulletins that

advertised forthcoming productions of what was deemed to be “wor-
thy” drama.
Simultaneously, more theoretical discussions on the role of the the-
atre were being conducted in the press, educational institutions, and
other public forums. In the US the most active theoretician of the sub-
ject was none other than the author of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, Percy
MacKaye.2 Throughout the early years of the twentieth century,
MacKaye tirelessly produced public addresses, articles, and books aim-
ing at improving the American theatre.3 At the heart of the debates that
he participated in lay the question of what constitutes the theatre’s so-
cial role and function. Together with other progressivist drama activ-
ists, MacKaye accorded the theatre the role of a civic institution, vital to
society’s education and well-being: “As a national force, it has never
been correlated with the other great forces of citizenship, of law, of
industry, of statecraft, of patriotism. Nevertheless the theatre, in its
proper function, is peculiarly fitted for such association” (MacKaye
1909, 11). Thus, MacKaye viewed the theatre as a perfect instrument for
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promoting social improvement and national cohesion. In this respect,

his ideas matched those of other reformers of the Progressive era, who
aimed to address problems of social deprivation, alienation, poverty,
and lack of education, which were rife among disenfranchised groups
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly among
new immigrants arriving in ever-increasing numbers into the US. The
theatre, in MacKaye’s opinion, had the potential to raise social aware-
ness, educate, and integrate disparate groups within American society.
In order to do so, however, the theatre would have to be reformed
until it reached its “highest” form – one that would perfectly combine
supreme artistic standards and sound democratic principles: “art is
self-government in the highest; and dramatic art in the highest is the
formulation of harmonious democracy” (MacKaye 1912, 83). MacKaye
juxtaposed this lofty ideal to what he saw as the “depraved” actual
conditions of the theatre and other leisure activities in the early
twentieth-century US, consisting of such “debased forms of art” as
those offered in “[d]ance halls, penny arcades, moving-picture shows,
vaudeville houses, and other commercial theatres” (MacKaye 1912, 66).
It was the commercial underpinnings of the existing theatrical system
that MacKaye blamed for the contemporary American theatre not

fulfilling its momentous social duties or its artistic potential. He de-
nounced the profit-driven “theatre as a private business,” which, disre-
garding moral and aesthetic standards, offered productions “corruptive
of good taste, good morals, good art,” and he campaigned to transform
this system into “the theatre as it ought to be: a properly qualified pub-
lic institution” (MacKaye 1912, 125 and 128). He proposed to replace
the commercial theatre with what he called “a new expression of de-
mocracy, the civic theatre” (MacKaye 1912, 15). A few years after the
publication of his volume The Civic Theatre, Louise Burleigh used a
slightly different term, “the community theatre” (Burleigh 1917), which
MacKaye acknowledged to be “the better name for the idea” (MacKaye
1917, xi). Burleigh defined the community theatre as “a house of play in
which events offer to every member of a body politic active participation in a
common interest,” and – similarly to MacKaye – associated it with “dem-
ocratic institutions” (Burleigh 1917, xxxii).4 To grasp the concept more
fully, it is worth quoting MacKaye’s elaboration on the key principles of
this kind of theatre:
The Civic Theatre idea … implies the conscious awakening of a people to

self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of
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the arts of the theatre, participation by the people in these arts (not mere
spectatorship), a new resulting technique, leadership by means of a per-
manent staff of artists (not of merchants in art), elimination of private
profit by endowment and public support, dedication in service to the
whole community: these are chief among its essentials, and these imply a
new and nobler scope for the art of the theatre itself. (MacKaye 1912, 15)
The most important factor here is the non-profit and participatory char-
acter of the civic theatre. Crucially, both MacKaye and Burleigh empha-
sized the active role of the people in the production, not simply the
consumption, of what MacKaye later called “a drama of and by the
people, not merely for the people” (MacKaye 1916, xviii).
The degree of autonomy and control that the community theatre ac-
tivists were in reality prepared to accord to the general public, however,
is open to debate. Burleigh seemed to privilege the people wholeheart-
edly: “A state theatre must not be a theatre which is applied to the com-
munity from without or from above; it cannot be the perfected dream of
artists; it must spring from the dreams and needs of the everyday per-
son, the need for expression of the whole community” (Burleigh 1917,
xxxi). Conversely, MacKaye’s model, for all its emphasis on democra-

cy, ultimately placed the theatre’s leadership in the hands of “a perma-
nent staff of artists.” Similarly, at the First Annual Convention of the
Drama League of America, Dr William Norman Guthrie of the
University of the South expressed at best a conditional endorsement of
the people as the owners of the theatre:
The drama must come out of the people. That does not mean that play-
wrights must pander to the people. People can be led upward as well as
downward. We must have some authority, some standard of taste. This is
especially necessary in a democracy. Constantly we are getting to the point
when we demand that the people who speak to us shall really know some-
thing; we want experts. We are getting away from the thought that a child
of 6 months should rule the house and that one a year old should domi-
nate the town. (Drama League of America 1911, n.p.)
Guthrie’s and MacKaye’s insistence on the leadership of experts in

the ostensibly democratic theatre points to ambiguities within pro-
gressivist ideas concerning American drama at the beginning of the
twentieth century. The advocates of these ideas declared “the people”
to be the origin, producers, and owners of drama, while at the same
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time treating them as underdeveloped children in need of guidance

and control. Moreover, the institutional structure MacKaye proposed
for civic theatre – a central “Bureau at Washington, in connection with
the American Federation of Arts, provided with one well-paid direc-
tor” (MacKaye 1912, 38), as well as salaried expert artists at local the-
atres – resembles more closely a state-sponsored professional theatre
than a spontaneous “drama of and by the people.” Thus, MacKaye’s
“Drama of Democracy” (MacKaye 1912, 97) can be seen as coming un-
comfortably close to what Burleigh criticized as “the gift of a paternal
despotism” (Burleigh 1917, xxxi).
The issue of the control and ownership of the theatre, therefore, cre-
ated some contradictions and blind spots in the early twentieth-century
debates about the future of American drama. Another related problem
was that of reconciling the two highest priorities of the community the-
atre: its participatory nature and its high artistic standards. Could dra-
ma produced and managed by the people – largely amateurs – attain
the status of highbrow art? Conversely, could highbrow drama appeal
to the masses and be truly inclusive? The reports of the Drama League
of America indicate that this was an important and unresolved issue.
Miss Elizabeth Hunt, speaking at its Second Annual Convention,

opened her address with a blunt statement: “The League is spoken of
as a ‘high-brow,’ or a ‘kill-joy’” (Drama League of America 1912, 53).
Clearly, its activities were associated with the serious, artistic end of
the dramatic spectrum, not necessarily appreciated by everybody.
Moreover, at the same Convention, Mr J.E. Williams, an experienced
theatrical manager, pointed to the general public’s lack of interest in
this type of drama:
We have tried them with Shakespeare and Moliere, with Ibsen and Gogol,
Goldoni and Shaw, and they would have none of them … In fact the great-
est obstacle we had to overcome in getting an audience for “Kindling” [a
1911 play by Charles A. Kenyon] was the impression that it belonged to
the “high-brow” class; and we traced this impression to the fact that it was
endorsed by the Drama League. (Drama League of America 1912, 21)
Evidently, the League had its work cut out trying to improve the tastes
and habits of the contemporary theatre-goers. Public interest and high
artistic standards did not seem to go naturally hand in hand.
These early twentieth-century debates concerning the nature and
function of theatre may be seen as one of the key factors contributing to
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the astonishingly intermedial character of the Shakespeare Tercente-

nary activities across the US. The organizers of these activities may
have been trying to combine high art, of which Shakespeare is often
considered to be the epitome, with wide popular appeal and active in-
volvement of large sections of society, many of whose members were,
of course, not yet inculcated with the values of the community theatre.
It seems that, for the Tercentenary activists, public participation took
precedence over adhering to established dramatic conventions. Conse-
quently, pageantry, with its eclectic fusion of drama, music, spectacle,
dance, and processional movement, as well as its community-building
function, suited the purposes of the progressivist organizers of the Ter-
centenary better than more traditional theatrical productions. The rest
of this chapter will examine the effects of trying to put the tenets of the
community theatre into practice, focusing in particular on the extent
to which the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations embodied the de-
bates concerning theatre’s ownership, aesthetic standards, and social
functions. To this end, it is worth having a closer look at the most exten-
sively documented Tercentenary event, Caliban by the Yellow Sands.
“A Drama for and by the People”? The Shakespeare

Tercentenary and Intercultural Integration
In keeping with the tenets of the civic theatre, Caliban and the
Shakespeare Tercentenary as a whole were promoted as the instruments
of cultural integration, social cohesion, and community building. Many
campaigners explicitly commented on the occasion’s potential to help
assimilate America’s disparate social and ethnic groups. MacKaye ex-
plained that the “function of the Celebration” was “to help unite all
classes and all beliefs in a great coöperative movement for civic expres-
sion through dramatic art” (MacKaye 1916, xx), while on 4 March 1916
the New York Post announced the Tercentenary plans with the following
heading: “Rallying about Shakespeare. Plans to Unite All New York in
Tercentenary Celebration.” Similarly, in his address at the Shakespeare
Tercentenary Celebration Dinner held on 4 May 1916, the chairman
of the Mayor’s Honorary Committee for the New York Shakespeare
Celebration, Otto Kahn, encouraged New Yorkers to “seek and em-
phasize … that which unites us instead of searching out and accentu-
ating and indeed exaggerating that which separates us” (Kahn 1916, 6)
and optimistically declared that the city’s Tercentenary drive “stands
upon a broad and deep popular base; it enlists and has significance for
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Avenue A no less than for Fifth Avenue” (27). Beyond New York, in a
Dallas Morning News article of 3 April 1916, Pauline Periwinkle pointed
to the Tercentenary’s “nationalizing significance” for America, a coun-
try that, because of its immigrant population, “stands in need of a com-
mon impulse that will operate as a blending medium” (Periwinkle
1916, 13).
In some respects, Caliban fulfilled this promise of intercultural inte-
gration by combining disparate, “highbrow” and “lowbrow” media
and genres, performers from diverse walks of life, and elements of the-
atrical traditions of different cultures: Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
Germanic, French, Italian, and English (though not Native or African
American, Chinese, or Japanese). In practice, however, not all of these
forms were treated equally. The Interludes, in which most of the com-
munity performers appeared, took place on the stadium floor and con-
sisted chiefly of dances, choruses, pantomime, tableaux, processions,
and other spectacular and aural, rather than purely verbal, media (see
figure 9.3). Meanwhile, the Inner Scenes, played by professional actors
and containing dialogue from Shakespeare’s plays, were situated on
the “Inner Stage,” which was raised above the ground level, and only
revealed from behind “the Cloudy Curtains” when the Inner Scenes
were being acted (MacKaye 1916, xxix–xxx). Thus, the very structure of
the masque embodied some of the ambiguities at the heart of the con-
cept of the community theatre and the Shakespeare Tercentenary.
“High” drama, epitomized by Shakespeare’s plays, was literally and
symbolically elevated above popular customs and rituals enacted on
the lower level. Moreover, even though the community theatre was
supposed to originate from and be created by the people, Caliban’s key
components – text, music, directing, lighting, stage and costume design
– were produced by experts: Percy MacKaye, Arthur Farwell, Joseph
Urban, Robert Edmond Jones, and Richard Ordynski. Similarly, the as-
signment of the key speaking parts to professional actors privileged the
established, traditional theatre, rather than its populist counterpart.
The community performers, while undoubtedly crucial to the action
and effect of the masque, were not allowed much voice or original cre-
ative input. Interestingly, this mistrust of the amateur was mirrored
within the fiction of the entertainment. According to Prospero, Caliban
was to be civilized and liberated through mastering the arts of the the-
atre: “Master it [mine art] and go free” (MacKaye 1916, 83). Yet when-
ever Caliban attempted to take active control over dramatic creation by
seizing Prospero’s staff, scroll, and cloak, he ended up wreaking havoc,
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9.3. Pantomime scene of Hercules and the Sphinx from Caliban. Note the use
of masks and stylized, dancelike movements. Photo courtesy of Dartmouth
College Library.
debasing art, or relapsing into his brutish ways. At the end of the
masque, he was presented crouching at Shakespeare’s feet and calling
him “Master” (MacKaye 1916, 145) in a humble acknowledgment of the
superiority of the expert artist and established art forms.
While Caliban’s action and form thus reveal ambiguous attitudes to-
wards integrating “high” and “popular” media and genres, the circum-
stances of the masque’s production complicate the picture even further.
In January 1916, the event’s organizers revealed their plans to hold it in
New York’s Central Park. Little did they expect the furore that would
erupt over this choice of location. The press responded with vehement
protests against the plan, representing it as an “invasion” of the public
park (“Park Invasion Not Agreed to Yet” 1916, 1) and issuing an emo-
tive call to arms: “RISE TO REPEL INVADERS” (“Park Law Prohibits
MacKaye Pay Show” 1916, 1). The latter article quoted Assemblyman
Mark Goldberg, who objected to “grant[ing] permission to the
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favored few to invade a playground established so long ago for the

people” and “steal[ing] from the people their vested rights in their
parks and playgrounds” (“Park Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show”
1916, 1). Contradicting the populist tenets preached by the community
theatre activists, Goldberg juxtaposed “the people,” who owned the
park, to the Shakespeare Tercentenary organizers, whom he represent-
ed as the elite, “favored few.” Otto Kahn tried to reassure the protes-
tors: “The celebration is to be done entirely in the interest of the
community and to foster the community spirit. It is entirely for the
purpose of giving the people an opportunity to manifest the commu-
nity spirit” (quoted in “Park Invasion Not Agreed to Yet” 1916, 1). The
opponents, however, would not be persuaded, and within a few days
the Committee backed down and withdrew the application to use
Central Park, eventually settling instead for the City College Stadium,
the use of which was offered to them by the wealthy businessman
Adolph Lewisohn.
What this heated debate demonstrates is the competing ideas of
who “the people” actually are, and who is entitled to represent their
interests. While the Tercentenary organizers were no doubt sincere in
their belief that they were acting for the people’s good, others were
suspicious of their class affiliations and intentions. Part of the prob-
lem lay in the association of Shakespeare with “highbrow” art and
correspondingly high circles of society, prevalent by the early twenti-
eth century (Levine 1988, 72–81; Murphy 2008, 162–97). Another issue
was more immediately practical: the protectors of Central Park ob-
jected most strenuously to its hosting a fee-paying event. As the New
York Times reported on 14 January 1916, they argued that “[t]o charge
admission to any part of Central Park would arouse violent public
hostility,” and that “The use of the park for an individual private
enterprise cannot be permitted under any consideration” (“No
Masque in the Park” 1916, 8). Of course, this accusation of advancing
private business ends went directly against the aims of the commu-
nity theatre, as formulated by MacKaye. The Tercentenary activists
tried to counter it by stating: “The Shakespeare Celebration is not a
small body of individuals organized as a private enterprise; it is an
organization which already represents some hundreds of civic and
educational groups, societies, clubs, and leagues, embracing hun-
dreds of thousands of citizens in their membership” ( “Heed Cry
against Masque in the Park” 1916, 1). Nevertheless, the fact remains
that the Tercentenary Committee did plan to charge for at least some
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of the Caliban tickets to defray the costs of production, making itself

vulnerable to those who questioned its civic commitment and altruis-
tic intentions.5 This doubt as to the Tercentenary’s social affiliations,
together with the ambivalent position Caliban accorded to popular
media and genres, points to the ambiguous and dynamic character of
the occasion as an intercultural affair, as it was caught up in negotiat-
ing the relative status of different art forms and social groups.
“No End of Mediums Hopelessly Confused”: The Shakespeare

Tercentenary, Intermedia, and Artistic Standards
While some sceptics expressed doubts regarding the Tercentenary’s

populism, others criticized it for not attaining the other self-professed
goal of the Drama League of America: high artistic standards. One of
the most uncomplimentary commentators, quoted in the Philadelphia
Inquirer of 13 February 1916, went so far as to declare: “If Shakespeare
could rise in his grave and witness some of the events scheduled in his
honor this year … it is reasonably certain that he would go back to his
shroud and consider himself fortunate to be among the departed”
(“Sisters Shine on Two Stages” 1916, 11). Another critic pointed to the
genre of pageantry, which was widely adopted for the Tercentenary cel-
ebrations, as the chief culprit: “With the passing of June we have the
practical end of the epidemic of ‘Shakespearean Pageants’ which have
devastated the country this year. They have not been very successful.”
The author proceeded to outline the reasons for this lack of success:
… the affairs have, as a rule, been incongruous; their purpose principally

being to exploit some ambitious minor poet, some social ambition, rather
than to honor the inspired poet. The idea has been to ride Shakespeare on
the way to the social limelight.
…
This has prevented the requisite atmosphere; violated any artistic beau-
ty; killed, rather than heightened, theatrical illusion, and lost the spirit so
requisite to excite imagination by giving evidence of a genuine craving for
something fine and sincere.
…
Most of the “pageants” have been rather weird, half-baked affairs and
have sadly fallen by the wayside. Some of them, too, have been highly
creditable. But I cannot recall one that has been wholly successful, or cre-
ated any satisfying or artistic emotional stimulus.
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Similarly to the objectors to the use of Central Park, this criticism ques-
tions the Tercentenary organizers’ motives. While the author directly
accuses the individuals involved of hubris and self-advancement,
one can also interpret “some social ambition” in a wider sense, as the
overall social purpose of the community theatre – the improvement
of the American public through active participation in drama. The
article seems to suggest that such an overtly social purpose is at odds
with “artistic beauty.” Interestingly, the author also claims that the
Tercentenary pageants “failed to attract wide attention” outside of edu-
cational institutions, “did not awaken any general or community inter-
est,” and were not a commercial success. The article thus implies that
populist aims and “high” artistic ambitions cannot be reconciled, and
that trying to do so results in drama that is neither artistically sound nor
marketable.6
The other target of the article’s criticism is the “incongruous” nature
of the Tercentenary tributes. The author clearly did not appreciate their
intermedial character, describing them as “weird” and “half-baked.”
This suggests that, to this reviewer, the chief criterion of aesthetic value
was unity, and that mixing genres and media led to the “violat[ion of]
… artistic beauty.” The critic quoted above singled out MacKaye’s

masque as one of the “most pretentious” of the Tercentenary tributes,
denouncing his “imitation of Shakespeare” as “simply pathetic.”7
Similarly, Lawrence Reimer, dramatic critic of the New York Sun, was
vocal in his criticism of the show:
Admirers of the stage and, above all, of Shakespeare, must have felt a bit-
ter regret at the amount of money expended on the so-called masque at the
College of the City of New York … There is no end of mediums hopelessly
confused in the production of this spectacle. As a gigantic show, Caliban of
the Yellow Sands [sic] may be notable. As a contribution to the art of the
theater, it is not important. Even in its most superficial features it is disap-
pointing. (Quoted in Davies 1916, n.p.)
Again, the brunt of the criticism was the show’s “hopelessly confused”
combination of media. Reimer went on to ask rhetorically: “Is it possi-
ble to suggest that in honor of Shakespeare … there might have been
arranged in place of this massive conglomerate of unassimilated arts a
performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays?” (quoted in Davies 1916,
n.p.). Both critics’ use of words such as “incongruous,” “confused,” and
“unassimilated” condemns the Tercentenary’s attempts at combining
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genres and media, and Reimer explicitly privileges traditional drama

over intermedial experiments.
One of Reimer’s objections was the “negligible” effect of the spoken
dialogue in Caliban (quoted in Davies 1916, n.p.). This was in fact a re-
peated criticism even among those commentators who, overall, were
positive about the masque. Thus, in the Evening Mail on 25 May 1916,
Burns Mantle praised the show for “Arousing Community Spirit,” de-
claring: “Here, in the spirit of it, is probably the finest thing New York
has ever done, made possible by the enthused co-operation of its citi-
zens. Here are 1,500 actors at least who are hereafter certain to have
more respect for their city as a community of common interests.” While
acknowledging the community-building value of the enterprise, he
was less impressed with its dramatic standards:
Judging “Caliban” as a work of art, we should say that so long as it holds

to pageantry and pictorial pantomime, to its wonderful interludes and the
more simple methods of illustrating a simple symbolism, it is a complete
success. But whenever it calls upon the spoken drama … it fails, for there
is little drama in it, and that little is more amusing than impressive.
(Mantle 1916, n.p.)
Therefore, according to some critics, Caliban succeeded in its social

aims, but failed to become proper drama. Instead, as an art form it was
relegated to “more simple methods” – those of spectacular, participa-
tory, and popular media, such as “pageantry and pictorial pantomime.”
The repeated use of the word “simple” indicates that Mantle sees these
media as less complex and less advanced than the medium of the spo-
ken drama. Again, in the eyes of contemporary commentators, the two
key aims of the Drama League of America – the active involvement of
large sections of the community and high dramatic standards – proved
difficult to reconcile.
The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Tradition or Innovation?
Another reason why the Shakespeare Tercentenary may have been seen
as confused and incongruous was its mixture of new and old dramatic
forms and traditions. Two of the artists involved in the production of
Caliban, Joseph Urban and Robert Edmond Jones, represented inno-
vative, modernist theatrical developments, following the experiments
of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia. Their designs for the
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masque were bold and non-naturalistic, including the representation of

Sycorax as a “Super-puppet” (MacKaye 1916, xxxi); masks for some of
the characters (see figures 9.3 and 9.4); extensive symbolic use of light
and darkness (achieved through a powerful electric lighting system),
colour, movement, and shape. Gary Taylor associates these modernist,
non-naturalistic staging methods with the need of the theatre at the
turn of the century to compete with the rapidly developing medium of
cinematography. Since the theatre could not hope to reproduce rapid
changes of scenery with the film’s photographic accuracy, it shifted
towards consciously artificial, schematic representation, aiming at cre-
ating poetic mood rather than “scenic verisimilitude.” This was ac-
companied by a move towards poetic speech rather than everyday,
realist dialogue (Taylor 1990, 274–6). Interestingly, Caliban utilized both
innovative scenography and poetry (not only in the scenes taken
directly from Shakespeare, but also in MacKaye’s original dialogue,
written predominantly in iambic pentameter). Overall, the spectacular
stage effects elicited praise, with one newspaper commenting that “it is
largely upon its spectacular merits that ‘Caliban’ must rest its case”
(“‘Caliban’ Huge and Impressive” 1916, n.p.). Meanwhile, as men-
tioned above, the masque’s spoken dialogue came under criticism, not
least because it could not be heard clearly in the large outdoor space. As
Mantle sarcastically commented,
To strain the ear to hear what it is Lorenzo is saying to Jessica, to expect the
familiar verse and to hear coming ever so faintly across the yellow sands
some such Shakespearean message as:
“Blah, blah-r-r-r-moonlightsleeps-blah,
Here, blahblah-the-sounds-blah-sic, Jessica.”
is to have one’s ascending interest in the proceedings rudely interrupt-

ed. Better, we should say, the pictures alone unmarred by hoarse speech
(Mantle 1916, n.p.).
Clearly, poetic drama does not really work in a huge outdoor arena
with no amplification systems.
Mantle’s criticism focuses on a practical aspect of the performance,
not its overall concept, which seems to have been consistent with the
cutting-edge dramatic developments of the time in its stylized staging
and poetic language. Another critic, Simeon Strunsky, presented a more
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9.4. The masked figure representing War in Caliban. Photo courtesy of

Dartmouth College Library.
thoroughgoing condemnation of the modernist methods Caliban em-

ployed. Strunsky wrote his article in the form of an ironic dialogue be-
tween Caliban and the Printer’s Devil, which he entitled “CALIBAN
and the Yellow Press: An Interlude” (Strunsky 1916, 3). In the opening
exchanges, the Printer’s Devil enquires about Community Drama,
which Caliban claims to “like … first rate, though it gets rather chilly
towards ten o’clock.” Yet when the Printer’s Devil probes him on what
exactly he liked about the show, cracks start to appear, as Caliban re-
sponds: “Nearly everything. The lights, the music, the dancing, the cos-
tumes. The only trouble is finding out what it’s all about.” He seems to
find the intermedial components of the show perfectly pleasing, but
the overall meaning of the affair eludes him. The Printer’s Devil has the
answer to the problem: “Get an electric pocket torch and a copy of the
official programme. Unless you prefer to take the afternoon off and
read Mr. MacKaye’s text.” His interlocutor, clearly familiar with the
ideas of the community theatre, demurs:
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It seems a pity, after a lot of people have gone to the trouble of creating a
new art form with lights and costumes and dance and pantomime and
music, to have to bone up on the meaning of it all in a paper covered book
or an official programme.
Nevertheless, he is soon forced to admit that he only understood the

meaning of the masque’s symbolic lights and dances after the newspa-
pers and the program explained it to him. The Printer’s Devil sums up
tersely:
So you see that the Community Drama, which we may define as the dra-
ma which you can’t hear, includes one essential art which is never men-
tioned. In addition to the arts of dance, lights, music, costume, and panto-
mime, there is the art of the Printed Programme. This may be the official
programme or it may take the form of preliminary interviews and press-
notices, the stuff that is technically known as dope. (Strunsky 1916, 3)
Unexpectedly, MacKaye’s “drama of and by the people” emerges here

as quite an esoteric, literary form, which has to be explained to the
masses through the printed word, particularly the press – the mass me-
dium they understand. This was borne out in the actual production of
Caliban, which was accompanied by an extensive printed program and
preceded by a wide newspaper campaign, as well as the publication
of the full text of the masque, which included MacKaye’s explanations
of its meaning, together with a remarkable aside:
An interesting American phase of the New York production is the problem

of carrying its community meaning to the still polyglot population, so that
steps have been taken for the immediate translation of the Masque into
Italian, German, and Yiddish. (MacKaye 1916, 152)8
Contrary to the hopes of the community theatre’s advocates, the cut-

ting-edge artistic methods employed in Caliban did not automatically
guarantee its participants’ comprehension or community integration.
Instead, the entertainment came out as quite an arcane affair, for which
expert guidance and interpretation were needed (see figure 9.5).
What is also striking is how the masque combined innovative tech-
niques with a nostalgic harking back to and reconstruction of an imagi-
nary past. The community Interludes culminated in a representation of
the “antic rites of Merry England” (MacKaye 1916, 109), complete with
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9.5. Sample pages from the printed program of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, explaining the
masque’s action, time, setting, and symbolism. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
such paraphernalia as a Maypole, Morris dancers, and a hobby-horse.

These popular pastimes brought back Miranda, who had been carried
off by Death and his troop of killjoy Puritans. In this way, the masque
rejected the traditional foundations of modern America – thrift and seri-
ousness – in favour of an idealized version of a pre-industrial, rural com-
munity life.9 Moreover, such reconstructions of the Elizabethan “golden
age” were a common feature of Tercentenary activities across the US (see
Smialkowska 2012). As we have already seen, the “Shakespearian circus”
included an impersonation of “good Queen Bess.” She also appeared in
entertainments in Atlanta (Carroll 1916), Wellesley, Massachusetts
(Conant 1916), and the University of North Dakota (Bittinger et al. 1916),
as well as being a feature of a masque by Alice Riley, published in The
Drama for public use during the Tercentenary (Riley 1915). Overall,
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Elizabethan popular customs such as May Day festivals were seen as a

particularly apt way of introducing “the folk-spirit … and community-
spirit” (Drama League of America [1916], 12). While seemingly incon-
gruous with the modernist dramatic techniques, this nostalgia for a
romanticized Elizabethan era in fact responded to some key early twen-
tieth-century American concerns: as David Glassberg argues, it pre-
sented “artistic alternatives to the drabness of modern industrialism
and the wanton revelry of commercial amusements, while reinforcing
social order and the nation’s Anglo-American identity” (Glassberg
1990, 37).10 In this respect, it was not far removed from the political and
aesthetic principles of high modernists such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, principles which John Carey argues were deeply elitist, ideal-
izing an imaginary, pre-industrial, pastoral era, while aiming “to ex-
clude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to
preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’” (Carey 1992, vii).
Conclusion
This brings us full circle to the debates surrounding the nature and
function of art, particularly drama, embodied in the American celebra-

tions of the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary. What underlay the aston-
ishingly intermedial and intercultural nature of these celebrations
were the attempts to create a theatre that would fulfil multiple – and
sometimes conflicting – social and artistic aims. This theatre was ex-
pected to adhere to the most exacting aesthetic standards while ap-
pealing to the masses; to be artistically controlled yet participatory;
unified yet heterogeneous; highbrow yet popular; literary yet spectac-
ular; innovative yet traditional. No wonder that it produced unlikely
(even extraordinary) hybrid forms in which Shakespeare rubbed
shoulders with Al Jolson, and good Queen Bess risked too close an
encounter with a baby elephant. In effect, the Shakespeare Tercentenary
encapsulates a unique historical moment when a battle was waged for
mass audiences and participants in art and leisure forms defined in
equal measure by their aesthetic and social functions. In this respect,
the Tercentenary presents a microcosm of complicated intermedial
and intercultural transactions, in which established and emerging art
forms combine and adapt to one another not only as a result of techno-
logical innovations but also in response to competing social and ideo-
logical imperatives, particularly those concerning the demarcation of
high and popular culture. Eventually, the popular following would be
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decisively won by the movies and the theatre would be removed even
further into the domain of the minority, highbrow audiences. For a
short time, however, community theatre experiments captured the at-
tention of significant numbers of the American populace, resulting in a
fascinating, though by no means harmonious, fusion of high and pop-
ular cultural forms.
NOTES
1 This research is associated with two research projects: “Locating the

Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic
Perspective, 1760–1950,” funded by Arts and Humanities Research
Council, and “Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration II:
Remembering Shakespeare” (FFI2011/24347), funded by the Spanish
Plan Nacional de I+D+I (MICINN-ANEP).
2 In Europe, Romain Rolland and Edward Gordon Craig published pioneer-
ing work on the subject between 1903 and 1913 (see Prevots 1990, 59–68).
3 Many of his shorter contributions are included in his volumes, MacKaye
1909 and MacKaye 1912.

4 It is worth noting that, while in The Community Theatre Burleigh advocated
the integration of new European immigrants into American society, in the
1920s she was active in white supremacist movements in Virginia. This
suggests that the politics of the activists of the community theatre were
not always unequivocally democratic and inclusive (see Bair 1999).
5 MacKaye initially proposed “charging admission to about 20,000 or 25,000
of the 50,000 persons who are expected to witness the Masque” (“Park
Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show” 1916, 1). In the actual event, it seems
that all seats had to be paid for, even though the cheapest tickets only cost
25¢. The highest prices came to $50 for a six-seat box.
6 This untitled article appears as a newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban
III, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College,
ML-5 (72), n.p. The scrapbook attributes it to Denver Post, 2 July 1916.
Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
7 Ibid.
8 I have found no evidence that these translations ever materialized.
9 For corresponding movements aiming at “the restoration of the organic
society, the return to an imagined collective artisan life of unalienated la-
bour” (101) in early twentieth-century amateur drama in Britain, see
Dobson 2011, 92–108.
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10 For extensive discussions of the Tercentenary’s involvement in early twen-

tieth-century debates concerning immigration and American national
identity, see Cartelli 1999, 63–83; Kahn 2000; and Smialkowska 2010b.
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Riley, Alice C.D. 1915. The Lover’s Garden: A Flower Masque, Arranged from
Shakespeare for the Tercentenary. In The Drama 20 (November): 695–714.
Roberts, Mary Fanton. 1916. “Shakespeare – The Man of Wisdom: Our
National Celebration in His Honor.” The Craftsman 29.2 (January): 347–63.
“Shakespeare in a Circus.” 1916. New York Times, 31 March, 9.
“Sisters Shine on Two Stages.” 1916. Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 February, 11.
Smialkowska, Monika. 2010a. “‘A Democratic Art at a Democratic Price’:
American Celebrations of the Shakespeare Tercentenary, 1916.”
Transatlantica 2010.1: n.p. http://transatlantica.revues.org/4787.

– 2010b. “Shakespeare and ‘Native Americans’: Forging Identities through
the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary.” Critical Survey 22.2: 76–90.
– 2012. “An Englishman in New York? Celebrating Shakespeare in America,
1916.” In Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010, ed. Tanja Bueltmann,
David T. Gleeson, and Donald M. MacRaild, 205–21. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Strunsky, Simeon. 1916. “Post: Impressions.” New York Evening Post Saturday
Magazine, 3 June, 3. Cutting posted in Scrapbook: Caliban III, in Papers of
MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (72). Courtesy
of Dartmouth College Library.
Taylor, Gary. 1990. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the
Restoration to the Present. London: Hogarth Press.
“To Commemorate Shakespeare.” 1916. Dallas Morning News, 2 April, 5.
“Wanted – An Elephant.” 1916. New York Times, 9 April, X7.
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Upcycling Shakespeare:
Crafting Cultural Capital
S ujata I yengar
“Shakespeare” offers a liminal, intermedial space between branded,

profit-generating, mass-market industry and independent, financial-
ly threatened, idiosyncratic cultural production. On the one hand,
Shakespeare represents a multimillion-dollar business, concentrated in
particular sites of cultural capital on both sides of the Atlantic such as
Stratford-on-Avon, the London Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Compa-
ny, and the Shakespeare Festivals of Stratford, Ontario, and Ashland,

Oregon, and in college and school classrooms.1 On the other, there is no
one “authentic” Shakespeare text, as Stephen Orgel (2002) and others
have argued, no definitive “script” for the plays or poems, which are in
any case off-copyright and freely available in multiple versions on- and
off-line.
Shakespeare’s life and biography remain comparatively mysterious,
hence the proliferation of Shakespearean lives and the persistence of the
anti-Stratfordian or anti-Shakespeare movement (the stubborn belief
that despite the overwhelming documentary and material evidence, the
glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon called William Shakespeare could
not have written the plays attributed to him). Adaptations of all kinds
flourish, in multiple media and genres – film, dance, opera, chamber mu-
sic, novel, television drama, and so on. So rich is Shakespeare as a source
of cultural production that at least one scholarly journal is devoted
predominantly to the analysis of performances of Shakespearean plays
on stage and on film (Shakespeare Bulletin), one concentrates solely upon
appropriations of Shakespeare (Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of
Shakespeare and Appropriation), and the other major critical venues devote
special issues or sections to Shakespeare in performance at least once a
year (Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Newsletter). In
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 348 Sujata Iyengar
counterpoint, Shakespeare studies has for the past fifty years at least de-
voted itself to removing Shakespeare from the heart of the study of early
modern society and returning him to his place in the wide field of early
modern cultural production – among other playwrights, such as Thomas
Middleton or John Fletcher or Christopher Marlowe; among booksellers,
publishers, and printers, such as Nathaniel Butter or Thomas Thorpe or
Valentine Simmes; among scribes and actors, such as Ralph Crane or
Will Kempe – and in seeing the plays as collaborative creations. It is iron-
ic, then, that both high and low cultural adaptations of “Shakespeare”
might appear to reauthorize the playwright by using Shakespearean
texts and stories as the starting points for new works.2
But I want to argue for the opposite – that the ambiguity within the
Shakespeare brand (the fact that it’s not really a “brand” at all) does not
restrict the meanings of “Shakespeare” but instead allows Shakespeare
to function as a creative space for artisans and artists (among whom, I
will suggest, we can include critics and scholars). In Ourspace, Christine
Harold (2007) argues that postmodern pranks, “hoaxes,” and appro-
priations of iconic brands and advertisements (such as those featured
in the alternative magazine Adbusters) ultimately support rather than
demolish the profiteering enterprises they parody. She suggests, how-

ever, that a solution to the increasing corporate domination of creative
enterprises might be to bypass established cultural products and brands
altogether, and instead to use to the utmost newer technologies and
fora such as Creative Commons to produce an art that is more indepen-
dent from entrenched business interests (Harold 2007).3 In what fol-
lows, I identify what I am calling a “Shakescrafting” movement and
suggest, first, that the intermedial status of the brand “Shakespeare”
enables both academic knowledge workers and artisans or crafters to
create original work or products that they market themselves directly
to consumers, so that “Shakespeare” serves simultaneously as iconic
and established destination and publicly available, common land.4
Second, I investigate Shakescrafts derived from Shakespearean text
(i.e., inspired by Shakespeare stories or quoting Shakespearean words
or fabricated from printed Shakespeare editions). I should add at the
outset that I am not interested in uncovering the motives, knowledges,
or social standing of Shakespearean crafters, although such an endeav-
our would be worthwhile. Rather, I am interested in Shakespeare as
author-function in bound, printed books in an era of changing media
literacies: an intermediated Shakespeare. I am here using Christina
Ljungberg’s helpful and pithy of summary of intermediality as “what
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital 349
happens when various sign systems interact” (2010, 84) in order to ex-
plore the limits of what Linda Hutcheon, and Siobhan O’Flynn, in her
epilogue to the second edition of Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation,
understand as adaptation: “a transcoding process that encompasses
recreations, remakes, remediations, revisions, parodies, reinventions,
reinterpretations, expansions, and extensions” (O’Flynn 2012, 181).
Obsolete or remaindered Shakespeare editions, I conclude, like the
cultural artefact of “Shakespeare” itself, serve as both adaptation and
appropriation, as both commerce and critique. On the one hand these
codices exist as waste matter ready to be rescued from a recycling bin
by a canny crypto-capitalist crafter, and on the other, in the world of
fine arts and “altered books,” they survive as high-cultural, high-con-
cept emblems of the gradual process through which the reading of
long-form texts, particularly in the form of bound and ordered bundles
of paper sheets, is becoming a residual activity, a marker of archaic,
high, or elite culture.
Crafting, Culture, and Capital

Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2009) (which itself appropriates a line

from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “I am my own maker,” for its epigraph)
includes the writing of code as “craft,” along with brick making, build-
ing, and any other job undertaken with a spirit of doing it well “for its
own sake,” learning how to complete a process or a made object thor-
oughly and perfectly. He rereads the grand ideals of the Enlightenment
as triumphs of artisanal knowledge. Working with and against thinkers
as diverse as Kant, Wittgenstein, Diderot, Arendt, and Engels, Sennett
argues that it is through this crafted making – objects, texts, code –
especially with the hand, that thinking can take place. Competence
and engagement characterize these thoughtful processes, which are far
from antique; Sennett extends modern craftsmanship to computer pro-
grammers, physicians, parents, and, ultimately, to all citizens in a de-
mocracy. He defines this universal and ethical craftwork through the
craftsman’s ability to take instruction, to work in a team, to enter a flow
state, and to allow the authority of the flesh rather than the rule of law
or of print. Craft here is democratic: everyone has the power to be a
good craftsman.
In a narrower but still useful volume, Glen Adamson (2007) distin-
guishes between craft and art by attributing to craft the following quali-
ties: supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur.
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Craft is supplementary in a Derridean sense, argues Adamson, because

one needs craft or skill with material objects (including with one’s body,
in performance) to make art, but art rejects the material world (an argu-
ment he develops from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and its notion of im-
manence or the intrinsic meaning or value of the art-object). Craft
functions as a supplement to Art or to the artwork in that the material-
ity of the object (its thingness) draws attention to the process of its mak-
ing as well as the product that ensues. The crafted work is sensual in
the features that deploy specific qualities of the material used (the kind
of wood used for a Stradivarius violin; the “grain” of the paper in an
eightfold “origami” handmade book). The crafted work demonstrates
(through the combination of its supplementarity and its sensuality or
use of materials) skills that are very specific to its manufacture (the
twisting of wire, the cleaving of wood, the mixing of pigments). Craft
evokes the pastoral through an imagined world of unalienated labour
(where the worker owns the means of production and the process of
manufacture or recycling or upcycling) and through nostalgia or belat-
edness. Finally, observes Adamson, the crafting process is performed
by an amateur, not a professional, engaged in it for love rather than for
money (even if the end result of that loving process is an object that can
be sold for gain).
The qualities of craft identified by Sennett (2009) and by Adamson
(2007) – an engagement with the world even as one turns away from it,
an emphasis on materials, a pride in the process of fabrication, a nostal-
gia for an imagined, idealized past in which one worked for love rather
than for money, and a delight in a completed object or system – charac-
terize the “online craft fair and art show,” the for-profit but professedly
“green” or sustainable market Etsy.com. New York Times journalist and
author Rob Walker first identified the growing financial and social clout
of the crafting movement after the social networking revolution in
“Handmade 2.0.” Etsy.com allows crafters to set up online storefronts
and “to sell work that they have made” (Walker 2007). Online store-
fronts created the reduction or removal of overheads, an instant, con-
stant, wide and global audience, and the ability for artists and crafters
to market their work anonymously, thus removing many of the barriers
(financial and psychological) preventing such sellers from previously
entering the marketplace. In 2007, when Walker first discussed the phe-
nomenon, “more than 70,000 [sellers] – about 90 percent of whom were
women – were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes,
dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane
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to the highly idiosyncratic.” Etsy advocates “Craftivism” and localism

(organizing crafting classes in real time and real space as well as online;
urging members to support the “Handmade Pledge” against the ex-
ploitation of factory workers and against unethical mass production)
even as it exploits the latest business news and markets (training mem-
bers to develop their own websites and to become financially literate).
Walker found that Etsy crafters are mostly women in their mid-thirties.
Many of them have been laid off from more traditional forms of em-
ployment, or have chosen to integrate artistic endeavour into their dai-
ly, working lives rather than relegate their crafting to the status of a
“hobby” or a pastime. They therefore note that “‘If [they] can’t have a
job where [they] make enough money … then this movement isn’t sus-
tainable’” (anonymous, quoted in Walker 2007). The site continues to
thrive, even with the downturn in the global economy. In June 2010,
Etsy shifted $22.1 million worth of items, “a 71% increase from 2009’s
total” and a 54% increase in the number of objects sold (Etsy.com 2010).
The qualities of nostalgia and the pastoral associate crafting with
Heidegger’s ecological world-view in “The Thing.” A long-standing
tradition from Husserl and Heidegger to Bill Brown and Matt Crawford
focuses upon objects, items, things, materia, in literature and in the

world. Husserl (1965) had suggested that subjects (human beings) con-
stitute objects as a group of ideas or functions. Heidegger argued that,
while an “object” exists only in regard to the subject who uses it, an
“object” becomes a “thing” when it stops being purely functional (when
it stops working, or when we become aware of its status as a “made”
object) (1975, 167).5 In his example, a jug is not only a “container” for
water or for air or any other fluid but in its “thingness” represents a
“gathering” or accretion of the acts of containing, of holding, of pour-
ing out libations and thus of uniting “earth and sky,” “divinities and
mortals,” the most elemental gifts of the earth (169–70). Linguistically,
he argues, “thing” (Ding) means “gathering,” the experiential gather-
ing or collection of the meaning of the object (in this case, the jug) and
its action in a single “space-time.” And yet, paradoxically, “Only what
conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing”: the thing (in order to be a
thing) participates (“conjoins”) in a fundamental unity of history, expe-
rience, topography, and so on, and yet when it manifests its quiddity, its
thing-i-tude, it separates itself “out of world” by drawing itself to our
attention (182).
Bill Brown deploys the “object/thing dialectic” in his manifesto for
“Thing Theory” in order to comment upon the culture of things” rather
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than “the nature of things,” especially their “belatedness” and histo-

ricity. “[T]he thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it
names something else” (Brown 2001, 5). Brown’s 1998 analysis of Claes
Oldenburg’s massive sculptures of objects (in particular, the typewrit-
er eraser in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC) identifies artistic production and labour history (the
history of office work and typewriting, the obsolescence of tools, the
reconfiguring of that historical tool as an artwork in order to draw at-
tention to its now-antiquated functionality and to changing media for
both communication and art) as the “thingness” of a thing, and “thing
theory” as the “joking” term to describe an attempt to understand how
material and especially made objects alter human beings. In literature,
objects become “things” by virtue of the attention paid to them within
the text: “Literature might … serve as a mode of rehabilitative reifica-
tion – a resignifying of the fixations and fixities of thing-ification that
will grant us access to what remains obscure (or obscured) in the rou-
tines through which we (fail to) experience the material object world”
(Brown 1998, 937). Literature in this model turns objects into things not
for capitalist or Marxist “reification” (the separation of use-value from
exchange-value and of both consumer and maker from owning the

means of production, the rendering invisible of labour) but to illumi-
nate qualities of design, history, social significance, and function that
we might miss when using the object in the real world.
We might want to add that literature in this model “things” things by
reminding us that such objects both transmit meaning and extend the
senses of the body through space in time: in other words, these objects
themselves are interpellated as media, “extensions of the self,” in
McLuhan’s well-known phrase. We could further suggest that thinged
objects in literature display all four of Jens Schröter’s types of interme-
diality: synthetic, formal or transmedial, transformational, and onto-
logical. Schröter does not discuss thing theory or objects in literature,
but his fourfold system is immediately helpful in this context, and par-
allels the discussions of Hutcheon and others about adaptation as well
as Lars Elleström’s own fourfold system to define and characterize the
four “modalities” of media, namely that media are “material, sensorial,
spatiotemporal and semiotic” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006
and 2013; Elleström 2010, 11). (1) Thinged things display a “synthetic
intermediality” (in which objects move from being “life media” to “art
media” through their very representation in art [Schröter 2012, 18–19]),
and we shuttle between their two aspects just as, as Hutcheon suggests
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of adaptation, we “oscillate” mentally between source text and adapted

text (Hutcheon 2013; 121, 172; Desmet and Iyengar 2009, 245–8). (2)
Literature presents such objects to the reader or viewer through trans-
medial, formal approaches that are only, Schröter suggests, comprehen-
sible in retrospect, when we consider the literary history of an art form,
formal approaches such as “fictionality, rhythmicity, compositional strate-
gies … [or] seriality” (Schröter 2012, 22). (3) Quiddity or thingness in
literature enacts a “transformational intermediality,” in which one me-
dium represents another in order not only to theorize or critique one
medium through another but also to estrange us from the quotidian (an
instance where Schröter’s taxonomy most clearly parallels Brown’s)
(4). Finally, Schröter deploys Saussurean linguistics in order to argue
that we define media through what they are not in order to create new
subdivisions and subtypes of media. “Shakespeare in performance”
meant Shakespeare on stage until the advent of cinema; “Shakespeare
on screen” meant Shakespeare on cinema until the advent of television;
“Shakespeare on the small screen” meant Shakespeare on television
until the appearance of mobile media; and “Mobile Shakespeare” will
soon need to be subdivided further once wearable computing and geo-
locative technologies become ubiquitous. Similarly, objects in literature

are thingly because of the information we don’t have about the rest of
their imagined world or the qualities of the thinged objects that we
don’t see.
Shakesthings
But if literature can re-thing things through what Brown calls “rehabili-
tative reification,” what happens when crafters thing literature, both
the raw information or story or fabula and the mediated matter that
disseminates it, most often the paper of printed books? Schröter in fact
(following Seymour Chatman) singles out “fabula” as one of the “trans-
medial” or formal characteristics that can alert us to an intermedial ob-
ject (Chatman, quoted in Schröter 2012, 22), and Shakespeare as brand
or anti-brand is medium: it transmits literature, distilled. Its dual status
as supreme signifier of Western culture and ubiquitous global source-
material to be exploited by popular culture allows it to provide the in-
tellectual or artistic content for anti-branded or personal marketing,
especially in contexts where craft self-consciously markets itself as
anti-branded, handmade, and personally liberating to both artists and
consumers. What we find in Shakespeare-themed crafts (Shakescrafts)
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bears out Adamson, Brown, and Sennett through an emphasis on nos-

talgia, and vintage technologies and techniques (belatedness, sensuali-
ty, the antique and rural past, and the amateur); on “natural” or recycled
or sustainable processes (the pastoral, the sensual, the supplementary),
and on an idealized historical femininity (both in the adopted personae
of sellers and in the Shakescrafts they sell). Crafters market Shakespeare-
named or -themed products (makeup, shoes, jewellery, baby clothes,
hand-dyed yarn, overprinted decorative pages from old Shakespeare
editions, “papercraft,” screen-prints, photographs, hand-painted fab-
ric, wedding invitations, self-published and -produced young adult
literature, candles, “gewgaws and regalia,” and so on) as handmade or
crafted or local, both on small crafting sites and catalogues and on
large social networking sites such as Facebook. Shakescrafted jewel-
lery might be named after and intended to evoke characters from
Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s own life, such as idolceremo-
ny’s “Dark Lady” earrings, “Charcoal glass and black pearl accented
with silver” (in which the colour and rarity of the materials mimic the
mystery associated with the personages of the sonnets).6 Screen-printed
fabrics or scarves include the nostalgic garments on sale as found ob-
jects from Ophelia’s Attic, and hand-dyed yarn is sold in colours, pat-
terns, and textures thought to characterize persons from the plays, such
as creaturecomforts’s silk roving hand-dyed “black and green [to] rep-
resent the malice and envy of Shakespeare’s Iago, the colors separated
by stretches of natural color” (“Iago”).
When Shakespeare criticism (Shakescrit) overlaps with (or is framed
by) Shakescraft in many of the descriptions and backstories given to
items associated with Shakespearean characters, we can more confi-
dently call them intermedial adaptations, intermedial in formal terms.
Idolceremony and creaturecomforts demonstrate a familiarity with
Shakespeare’s works and even with critical debates surrounding them,
making their work clearly “adaptation” in Hutcheon’s and O’Flynn’s
sense; O’Flynn argues that we should consider fan-generated content,
existing across multiple platforms with a coherent narrative, as “trans-
media” adaptation, because it presupposes a consistent imaginary uni-
verse (O’Flynn 2013, 206). Other crafters, I will later suggest, seem to
have little or no knowledge or interest in the words from which their
works derive, and these crafters take over or appropriate “Shakespeare”
as a signifier of literacy, nostalgia, and romance, rather than adapting
Shakespeare’s words as part of a fantasized and coherent Shakespeare-
world. “The Dark Lady” earrings can be so named only by someone
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familiar with biographical interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets that

identify a “fair youth,” a “Dark Lady,” and a “rival poet” as characters
within a sequence of poems that tell a story. The hand-dyed yarns of
self-described “Shakespeare fanatic” creaturecomforts provide an out-
let for character studies of the people of the plays, indeed, for an entire
theory of character (this would be the kind of “formal or transmedial
intermediality” that Schröter observes we can only note retroactively).
The “Iago,” “Desdemona,” and “Othello” yarns are dyed in deliber-
ately complementary colours, as if choosing yarn is like casting a play,
and as if plays are woven out of interiority or character just as clothing
is knitted from yarn (creaturecomforts). Desdemona’s is “rosy pink
and spring green” because of her “innocence and naïveté,” while
Othello’s yarn is hand-dyed in “black and burgundy, dark colors to
represent the troubled Moor” (creaturecomforts “Desdemona”; creature-
comforts “Othello”). The Animated Shakespeare used a similar palette for
the flickering cels of its own Othello, as do Michael Foreman’s waterco-
lour illustrations for Leon Garfield’s young adult Shakespeare adapta-
tions, Tales from Shakespeare. Celia, “the lesser known heroine of As You
Like It … [t]he more frivolous of the two young women” gets “green,
gold and rosy pink … brighter, fun colors” (creaturecomforts “Celia”).

Character here literally embodies the play, to such an extent that a line
called “star-crossed” that is inspired by Shakespeare’s tragic lovers (in
particular, by Othello and Desdemona) includes strands of “black … and
burgundy” but also a “natural” strand, as if to present an alternative fu-
ture for the imaginary lovers in which skin colour (in the case of Othello)
or vendetta (in the case of Romeo and Juliet) does not disable the lovers’
future (creaturecomforts “Othello”; creaturecomforts “Desdemona”).
The descriptions of yarn also provide capsule summaries of the plays’
characters and action, so that a purchaser can feel that she is acquiring a
cultural product as well as a handcrafted one and a seller can feel that she
is combining instruction and art in a Horatian or Sidneian demonstration
of the art of poetry.
Particular Shakespearean names or characters demonstrate the ambi-
guity of the Shakespeare brand and its raw material aptly. Seller names,
store names and product names of Shakescrafted products that use the
name of Hamlet’s tragic heroine Ophelia, for example, either exploit the
so-called Ophelia Complex – the triad of feminine beauty, sudden
death, and water – or resist traditional Shakespeare branding by figur-
ing Ophelia in opposition to conventional or ladylike behaviour and
affect.7 Both sets of Ophelias deliberately evoke a nostalgia associated
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with natural objects, found objects, recycled objects, and the pastoral
world, such as gracestudiosart’s “Ophelia necklace,” the design of
which incorporates copper “violets,” chalk pastel, and a miniature,
handmade book. These gentle or genteel Ophelias often redefine the
notion of purity to transcend the sexual virginity discussed at length in
Shakespeare’s play and instead to evoke unadulterated, natural ingre-
dients and a transparent manufacturing process for cosmetics and
clothing. Featherheartflower tags “Ophelia’s Orange blossom lotion”
as “paraben free” and “natural,” while Ophelia’s Apothecary (present
both on the online social network Facebook and on Etsy) prides itself
on freedom from parabens and sulphates, and on its hand-blended
cosmetics. Many of the Ophelia-named sellers advertise their cosmetics
as “cruelty-free” or “vegan,” along with an assertion of their “green” or
sustainable credentials; the “headdresses” in OpheliazGarden are
“handmade from cruelty-free, professionally sterilized feathers.” These
Shakecrafts imply that the Ophelia complex can be redemptive, as if by
dying in the river Ophelia returned to the natural world and became an
immutable part of it, returning to the pastoral world of craft rather than
the artificial (in its Renaissance sense) world of the court, or to the
world of Heidegger’s things that contain and evoke the elemental, eco-
logical gifts of the earth.
This redemptive movement differs from what Jay Bolter and David
Grusin (2000) have termed “remediation,” because sellers alter, adapt,
and remedy events from Shakespeare’s plays through creative and
simultaneously curative appropriations of the story or words.8 We
might prefer to call this redemptive crafting a therapeutic intermedia-
tion, since crafters transform the plays not just into other media than
print or live performance, but into discrete, consumable commodities
that lack the physical affordances we might seek in a remediation,
while they simultaneously retain the background and associations of
Shakespeare’s play. Ophelia herself, in a nod both to Lisa Klein’s pop-
ular young adult novel of the same name and to Mary Pipher’s best-
selling social science volume about teenage girlhood, Reviving Ophelia,
is remediated both in shop names such as OpheliazGarden and in
the repeated emphasis of crafters upon the “natural” and “recycled”
or “upcycled” objects they sell.9
Crafted Ophelia-stores are multimodal, multi-platform intermedial
appropriations of “Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” however, rather than adap-
tations of Hamlet. What I mean by this is that the text (or any of the
printed texts, for that matter) of Hamlet is nowhere to be found
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in OpheliazGarden’s sterilized feathers or Ophelia’s Apothecary’s

cruelty-free cosmetics. The online shop Ophelia’s Treasures might or
might not refer back to the text itself; it announces that it is a “mother/
daughter team” making bead-and-wire jewellery and “papercraft,” si-
multaneously reconstructing an imagined maternal relationship for
Shakespeare’s motherless Ophelia, remedying Ophelia’s relationship
with Gertrude, who had hoped to be her mother-in-law, and intermedi-
ating the imagined, textual “Treasures” given from Hamlet to Ophelia
in the play and then returned to him by Ophelia in the “Nunnery”
scene into beautiful objects made by Ophelia herself – and by her re-
vived mother. Text turns into transmedial (bead-and-wire) treasure, but
whether or not these intermedial objects are also adaptations here de-
pends upon the knowledge and self-consciousness of the purchaser.
Jewelled Shakesthings engage in a kind of “synthetic intermediality”
(Schröter 2012, 20): they register as intermedial only when we pause to
consider the Shakespearean back-story, but as we do so, we create a
new kind of medium or art form.
Remediating, Demediating, and Intermediating Shakespeare:

Paper-, Type-, and Book-craft
Perhaps it would be more accurate to identify what is done to

Shakespeare as “upcycling” rather than as remediation. In “upcycling,”
a term coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, sources
that would otherwise be of little worth are crafted into items of greater
financial or environmental value rather than “downcycled” into things
that are worth less than the original objects, as in traditional recycling.
For McDonough and Braungart, upcycling is no less than the complete
rethinking and redesign of all the made objects in the world. Even an
object as seemingly benign and recyclable as a book must be rede-
signed, since both conventional paper and recycled paper leach chlo-
rine into the air we breathe; the plasticized covers of paperbacks remain
stubbornly in landfill for decades. McDonough and Braungart’s book,
therefore, “is not a tree,” but instead “a technical nutrient … plastic
resin and inorganic filler … a product that can be broken down and
circulated infinitely in industrial cycles, made and remade as ‘paper’ or
other products” (2002, 5).
Upcycled Shakespeare is often demediated rather than remediated,
to borrow Garrett Stewart’s coinage (2011) the crafter transfers printed
texts from one medium to another but in and through the process
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renders the matter within the book illegible, or at least unreadable as

text (though it is still, as Stewart demonstrates, available for analysis as
culture-object). Such demediations, Stewart adds, may reify the book
as a thing at several levels, for example by building a library (a reposi-
tory for books, which are themselves repositories for words) out of
bound volumes previously censored or prohibited (thus re-enacting
the process by which the words in the books were rendered illegible).
This at-once cheeky and reverential appropriation of the book as a
thing that stores words (which are, arguably, themselves repositories
for the thingness or quiddity of their referents) is particularly evident
in crafters’ networks through the Shakespeare-themed paper-crafts,
which range from jewellery, home decoration, and handmade notepa-
per to personalized greeting cards.
Consider bookity’s votive holder “made using a real page from
Romeo and Juliet, taken from a vintage compendium of Shakespeare.
The paper is pale gold from age and gives out a gentle golden glow as
the candle burns.” The description of the “Romeo and Juliet tealight”
begins with the well-known lines from Romeo and Juliet, “soft, what
light from yonder window breaks?/It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.”
The text on the candle-holder is demediated, rendered unreadable as

play-text by its being glued to a glass container and also by the back-
lighting from the lit candle that makes the printing on the opposite side
of the page overlie the first. The Shakespearean quotation is relevant
only because it refers to a light-source, and the product is a light-source,
too, archaic in both content (a candle) and form (it is made from a cheap
nineteenth-century edition of Shakespeare). The print pages used show
act and scenes 2.4 and 2.5, not 2.2, the so-called balcony scene in which
the famous lines appear. The yellowing of cheap, acidic, wood-pulp
paper becomes the “pale gold [of] age,” a semantic and commercial ap-
propriation (yellow to gold, trash to treasure). Any old edition of any
old literary author that described any old or natural kind of light-source
might serve the same function: Shakespeare as author is fully demedi-
ated even as the author-function remains culturally legible. We can take
this Shakesthing through Schröter’s four kinds of intermediality. It’s
synthetic, because it literally glues a print medium to a “life medium,”
the glass tea-light. It’s formal or transmedial, because it takes on the
deep structure of the play in associating love with illumination; clev-
erly, it is, as Schröter requires, “media-specific enough in order to still
be able to point in its new media context to the medium from which it
was borrowed, or from which it originates” (2012, 24–5), alluding to the
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10.1 Romeo and Juliet votive holder. Bookity.etsy.com

historical material artefact of the candle and to the metaphorical world

of the play. It’s transformational, because it presents and comments
upon the medium of the printed book through the medium of the can-
dle, formerly used to light readers but now only used for ambience:
books, and Shakespeare, like candles, are archaic. And finally, it’s onto-
logically intermedial, reproducing the balcony scene through not repro-
ducing the balcony scene.
Or take PaperAffection’s “Shakespeare hair flower bobby pin.” The
seller tells us that the pages used for the flower’s petals were “upcy-
cled from the Folger Library edition of King Lear – which was des-
tined for the recycling bin” and describes the colourful contrast
between the “browning petals of this old tome” and “crisp white pa-
per” (PaperAffection). The Folger Library editions are relatively new,
from a series developed in the early aughties, and certainly not “tomes,”
being bound in lightweight paper covers and running to 200–300 pag-
es. What the crafter sells here is the aura of antiquity or rarity or exclu-
sivity surrounding “Shakespeare.” The aptly named ddeforest offers
a kind of mise-en-abime of paper-cycling, selling “bundles” of pages
(also from an old edition of Romeo and Juliet) expressly intended for
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further papercraft. Papercrafters emphasize the obsolescence of paper

media and rapidly outdating communications technologies such as the
postal system. 42things develops bookmarks made from “vintage”
stamps and “a discarded poetry book” containing lines from Antony
and Cleopatra (it is unclear whether the book was an edition of the play
or an anthology of well-known extracts from Shakespeare). Crafters
freely appropriate Shakespearean tags or quotations in different print
media. Often these are clearly appropriations, not adaptations in my
sense; that is to say that although they often use words from Shakespeare,
the words themselves in Shakespearean context are often irrelevant or
even at cross-purposes to what is being communicated, namely literacy,
nostalgia, and beauty. Hoolala comments on a Shakespeare brooch
printed with “A Plague on all your houses” that “this might not be the
original quote Shakespeare wrote but I am sure you understand [the]
meaning,” and EverythingELB markets a glass pendant with text from
the comic Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in Midsummer Night’s Dream
as straightforwardly romantic, with no sense of the source’s parody.
Bouncingballcreation takes appropriation a step further in a Taming of
the Shrew pencil set in which pages from the play have been hand-
wrapped around pencils that, the seller carefully notes, have been
“sharpened” ready for use. Instead of the pencil being used to annotate
the play, the play is being used to annotate the pencil.
In its invention of a post- or meta-Shakespearean world and charac-
ters, and its free intermediation of Shakespeare’s words, Shakescraft
overlaps with “Steampunk” and other “alternative history” move-
ments that seek to integrate modern or postmodern or postcapitalist
technologies (internet store-fronts; virtual worlds; Kindles and Cloud-
centred computing) with crafted containers, clothing, and cosmetics,
another tenet of upcycling (in which “biological nutrients” and “techni-
cal nutrients” are to be kept apart from each other but both serve vital
functions in the human world) (McDonough and Braungart 2002, 92–
117). Some crafters also use “upcycling” to refer to the revaluation of
vintage clothing or antiquated technology and processes. Such crafters
upcycle Shakespeare in order both to evoke what it offers as text and
performance and to rediscover the pre-industrial processes and crafts
of the imagined Shakespearean world.
Some upcycled items only partially demediate Shakespearean texts,
such as the overprintings of single pages taken from nineteenth-
century editions of Shakespeare by the Steampunk artist SteamBath-
Factory. SteamBathFactory parodies the language of present-day
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antiquarian booksellers and early modern cabinets of curiosities: “In-

troducing a rare curiosity. One vintage anatomical heart printed on one
1877 antique page from Will Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (SteamBathFactory
n.d.). History and craft have “thinged” the printed page as well as the
matter upon it, or rather, the matter or information transmitted
has changed its meaning: Shakespeare is both “antique” and “vintage,”
and is here given a printed heart transplant for a “second life” as art
rather than literature, “very chichi” both materially and intellectually. It
is theoretically possible to read the lines from Hamlet underneath the
overprinted heart, but there is no suggestion in the description that the
image of the heart is particularly relevant to the extract from Hamlet in
a metacritical or intertextual way. Not only Shakespeare but also the
technologies of printing and the medium of the book itself now partici-
pate in craft. It would be hard to call this artefact an adaptation of
Shakespeare, because it does not tell a coherent story across multiple
platforms, as O’Flynn suggests that fan-generated transmedial adapta-
tions do. Rather, it appropriates Shakespeare in the service of adapting
or transmediating book- and print- craft. Perhaps we could say, remem-
bering Schröter’s comment that we are driven to describe “ontological
intermediation” through metaphors taken from other media, that it

resonates at the frequency of Shakespeare.
YourKeepsakeCo offers multiple remediations or rather intermedia-
tions of the Shakespearean sonnet, suggesting as a present for newly-
weds a glossy black-and-white photographic print of a typewriter with
the sonnet or other poem of one’s choice typed on a sheet of paper
loaded into the machine, as if a human being had just typed it on the
machine, even down to the bar that covers up a line of the poem. Tagged
“vintage” and “personalized,” the description omits to mention that
the sonnet is placed on the sheet in the typewriter through Photoshop
or another photo editing program, rather than manually typed on the
vintage machine and then photographed by the artist. We can take such
an image through Schröter’s four categories of intermediality once
more. At first glance, the computer-enhanced photograph of the type-
writer produces a synthetic intermediality, a new art-object that extends
the “life medium” of the wedding gift (across space and time, so that
the lovers have existed as a couple for four hundred years) and the “art
medium” of the wedding photograph (which is itself an extension of a
life medium in its capacity as a supplement to human memory). The
typewriter photograph shares and draws attention to the formal or
transmedial intermediality of the verse line as a unit of composition in
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both poetry and manual typing, since the paper bail demediates the
sonnet by covering up the text behind it; it additionally draws attention
to the obsolescence of typewriting as medium. The image is trans-
formationally intermedial, as it estranges us from the archaic media it
represents (not only the typewriter but also the silver nitrate, black-
and-white photograph) by drawing attention to the limitations or con-
straints of such media. It is, finally, ontologically intermedial, since in
order to define it one has to exclude the various media categories that it
paradoxically represents (it is not composed by hand, nor typewritten,
nor developed with a photographic emulsion, and so on).
A Marxian analysis might further suggest that what makes an object
into a Heideggerian or Brownian “thing,” especially on Etsy and other
online crafting fora, is the labour that went into it and the circumstanc-
es surrounding that labour. Objects that are self-described as “hand-
made” draw attention to their thingness by directly turning a transaction
into a handing-over, as it were. The labour of the crafter is visible
through the thing’s uniqueness and imperfections and through the vis-
ibility of her personal history through the shop “profile” or the seller’s
“bio” or biography. Idolceremony’s biography neatly combines eco-
nomic, emotional, and intellectual attributes: “I seek out inexpensive

metals and glass in interesting patterns and vibrant colors in order to
provide starving philosophers like myself something joyful and shiny
at an affordable price. Check the sale category for older pieces that have
been marked down!” (Idolceremony, “Shop Policies” n.d.). “Inexpensive
metals and glass” are the materials of skill; “something joyful and
shiny” is the escape to pastoral by the amateur. “Interesting patterns
and vibrant colors” allude to the sensuality of the crafted work, while
the phrase “starving philosopher” points out an inadvertent supple-
mentarity of the crafted work, the seller’s secret hope for a “joyful and
shiny” escape from the world of work. Adamson (2007) further sug-
gests that craft provides the “frame” for Art: similarly, Shakescraft
frames “Shakespeare” and the practice of literary criticism as analo-
gous to artistic production in its insecurity, creativity – and, for its prac-
titioners – necessity.
Conclusion: Reading as Craft and Books as High Art
What are we to make of the ubiquity of Shakescrafts and, among this

category itself, the significance of paper- and book-craft? Shakespeare
himself, as ubiquitous brand, bearer of high and low culture, printed
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and bound in multiple mass-market editions as well as collected in rare

quartos, folios, and small-press printings, offers at once cultural capital,
an inexhaustible vein of language for artists to mine, and a form or me-
dium that is deceptively accessible, making Shakespearean books a
compelling category for book artists (Peter Greenaway’s evocative film
Prospero’s Books has inspired particularly rich artistic responses to The
Tempest).10 Shakespearean books by artists comprise artist’s books, or
unique art-books made entirely by artists, such as Sue Doggett’s The
Tempest (1995); livres d’artiste, or illustrated editions by particular art-
ists, such as John Gould’s What a Piece of Work Is Man: The Shakespeare
Suite (1980); letter-press or small-press limited editions of Shakespearean
texts, such as Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), which is also an altered book;
and altered books, or printed and bound codices turned in various
ways into sculpted or printed artworks, such as Philip Smith’s The
Tempest (1980).
The category of altered books, which turns printed and bound codi-
ces into the raw material for new works of art and literature, is cur-
rently undergoing its own Renaissance, perhaps in response to the
changing status of a bound and printed codex in a world of electronic
media and virtual paper. Altered Books as a form begins, arguably, with
the palimpsests of ancient civilizations, extends through Shakespearean
“Grangerized” Victorian volumes that were to be “extra-illustrated”
with the clippings of a diligent reader, and culminates in the sculptural
works of present-day book artists.11 Such books include Tom Phillips’s
A Humument, which scores through words, overpaints portions of pag-
es, and cuts out sections of an obscure nineteenth-century novel, W.H.
Mallock’s A Human Document; the carven sculptures of Brian Dettmer;
or Georgia Russell’s organic, coralline and labyrinthine structures
(2011).12 And in an era of electronic textuality, even the very reading of
a printed book – and certainly the exercise of literary criticism – takes
on the status of high craft, while printed books themselves, even those
that are mass-produced commodities, may accrue through artistic al-
terations and the forces of history what Walter Benjamin famously
called “aura,” the unique and precious glow of rarity, and become Art.
Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009) guides a reader through a
traditional or “monumental” text such as Hamlet in order to combine
the historically rich literary tradition of printed books with the deeply
personal and tactile experience of a present-day reader who holds
a physical codex. The volume began as a sewn, bound, printed, mass-
market edition of Hamlet from the 1940s before Ecke unbound it and
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encased each page in red Ingres paper from which she had cut win-
dows that revealed only the heroine’s lines.
Ecke then rebound the volume finely (now three times as thick as it
was originally, since each page was enveloped in red). For Ecke, in the
scenes in which Ophelia appears, her exposed lines against the red in-
sistently demand our attention. Ecke chose red for Ophelia’s encased
pages both in honour of the book’s original red, gold, and black bind-
ing and for its passion, “the living, the breathing, the here, the now”
(Ecke 2011). She suggests that the experience of reading Ophelia’s lines
in isolation like this forces us to consider Ophelia’s language carefully,
“as though you were an actor in a play” (in an unwitting echo of early
modern theatrical practice, in which each actor received his own part
on a roll, rather than a copy of the complete play), and helps us devel-
op a “one-to-one” or more personal relationship with the character
(2011). Both the artist’s concentration upon Ophelia’s/Shakespeare’s
words and her consistent, multi-platform or multimodal imagining of
Ophelia’s voice and narrative render The Tragedy of Ophelia an adapta-
tion of Shakespeare’s texts, rather than solely an appropriation of
Shakespeare as a signifier of literacy and nostalgia. This adaptation is
by definition intermedial, in all its senses. It synthesizes a new art me-

dium, that of the altered book (sculpture and printed book, or even
sculpture, book, and performance), in order to exploit the dual status
of printed books as life media and art media. It deploys the formal
constraints of Shakespearean verse drama and the print conventions of
speech prefixes and lineation in order to isolate Ophelia’s speeches, so
it is formally or transmedially intermedial. It refers knowingly to the
practice, phased out in the twentieth century, of hand-binding books,
and unknowingly to the early modern medium of the actor’s roll, so it
is transformationally intermedial, changing how we feel about these
earlier media. And it is ontologically intermedial, making Ophelia her-
self into a medium through “purposeful and institutionally caused
blockades, incisions, and mechanisms of exclusion” (Schröter 2012,
30), in this case by literally excluding words that are not attributed by
the play to Ophelia in order to alert a reader or viewer to the historical
or institutional suppression of women’s and girls’ voices.
Book artist Buzz Spector (1996) identifies book arts as unusually dem-
ocratic, even erotic, in the sense that books are familiar objects that, un-
like other forms of art, we can and do take to bed with us.13 Altered books
are intermedial (print/sculpture/paint) and intercultural (bridging fine
arts and familiar craft, the unique and the mass-produced). They imply
theWESTERN
potential for what Benjamin called immanence – an ontological
RESERVE UNIV
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10.2 Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009)
essence of art – that comes into being through individual encounters

with texts and art, even in mass-produced commodities. Shakespearean
altered books intermediate the archaic past of Shakespeare’s words, the
recent past of printed and bound codices, the immediate present of the
reader’s experience of words on a page, and the unborn future readers
who will respond to Shakespeare’s words through intermedia that we
cannot yet fully imagine but can only glimpse, like Ecke’s Ophelia,
through cut-paper windows.
NOTES
1 I thank the members of the 2010 International Shakespeare Conference

seminar, “Shakespeare the Brand,” especially Pascale Aebischer, Susan
Bennett, Kate Rumbold, and Julie Sanders, and my colleagues in the
University
WESTERN RESERVE of Georgia discussion group “Books as Things” in fall 2010,
UNIV
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especially Jed Rasula, Richard Menke, Miriam Jacobson, Ben Hudson,

and Nick Crawford. My greatest gratitude, however, extends to Christine
Harold, who first recommended that I combine my interest in Shakespeare-
themed crafts with “Thing Theory.”
Kate Rumbold (2010) offers some background on the financial under-
pinnings of various Shakespearean institutions in the UK in her analysis of
these venues’ deployment of “new media.” See also Bennett 2008.
2 There is a rich secondary literature contextualizing Shakespeare among his
contemporaries. On Shakespeare as one among many dramatists, see, for
example, Gary Taylor's recent edition of the Collected Works of Thomas
Middleton; Suzanne Gossett’s recent Middleton in Context (2011); on early
modern publishing culture as a collaborative process, see Petersen 2010;
on early modern dramatic practice as collaboration, see Stern and Palfrey
2007; on Shakespeare as co-author, see Vickers 2002.
3 The classic guide to brand resistance is Klein 2002, recently reissued and
revised.
4 I am borrowing the spatial metaphor from the Creative Commons
movement, “a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance
inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law
creates” (http://creativecommons.org/about). Julie Sanders

compares Shakespeare’s sonnets to “an open-source initiative”
(Sanders 2011).
5 I am indebted for this summary to Jed Rasula’s comments on Heidegger’s
ecological perspective.
6 Etsy distinguishes among seller names, store names, and product names
through live web-links; I will put the names of products in inverted com-
mas, but leave stores and sellers without.
7 The Ophelia complex was so named by Gaston Bachelard. The essays in
Peterson and Williams 2012 historicize both elite and popular appropria-
tions of the character. See esp. Seth Lerer, “I’ve Got a Feeling about
Ophelia,” which traces nineteenth- and twentieth-century associations of
the name with gentility, delicacy, and vulnerability (Peterson and Williams
2012, 11–28), and Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet, “Rebooting
Ophelia,” which offers a snapshot of Shakespeare’s character in “Web 2.0”
(user-generated consumer content, often incorporating social networks;
Peterson and Williams 2012, 59–78).
8 See Bolter and Grusin (2000) for remediation as the formal translation or
recalcitrant persistence of the affordances of one medium into those of a
new one, but Levinson 1998, esp. 113–15, for the “therapeutic” overtones
that Boulter and Grusin cite but repudiate.
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9 The resistant Ophelia likewise remediates Shakespeare, and has already

appeared in Shakespeare criticism; Theodora Jankowski (2000) has argued
that women’s virginity could function as a “queer” sexuality in early mod-
ern culture, as the denial of male control, and Kaara Peterson (1998) has
read Ophelia’s floral grave not as the deflowering or loss of virginity taken
for granted by popular interpretations such as Kenneth Branagh’s film of
Hamlet but as an “enflowering” or willed resistance to patriarchy. Etsy
Ophelias are not necessarily “queer virgins,” but they are queerly and
gothically sexual. The Brighton- and online-based shop Ophelia Fancy,
winner of the Swatch Alternative Designer Award in 2006, sells bespoke,
vintage, burlesque underwear in a third-wave assertion of overt and per-
formed sexuality.
10 I thank Susan Rosenbaum for suggesting to me Greenaway’s influence on
Shakespearean book artists.
11 For a stimulating discussion of Altered Books as an art form, see Stewart
(2011), esp. chapter 5, although Stewart misidentifies Tom Phillips’s
Victorian source text as A Human Monument; it should be A Human
Document. The error perhaps testifies to Stewart’s own argument about the
difficulty of reading the words of such “demediated” books. On
“Grangerized” Shakespeare books from the nineteenth century, see Blake

and Sillars 2010.
12 Phillips has been working steadily on A Humument since 1966, and writes
in 2008, “I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have
yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be
adapted to cover.”
13 I thank Margot Ecke for this reference and for her pithy summary of
Spector’s work.
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Beyond Adaptation
Ma rk For ti er
This essay is somewhat strangely situated at the conclusion of a collec-

tion focused on new media and intermedia inasmuch as I argue for a
more or less unlimited field in which the ways of adaptation always
operate, no matter the change in circumstances. There is nothing new
or capable of unmitigated newness within this generalized regime.
New media and intermedia are just the latest turns within this field.
That being said, adaptation in general always manifests itself in the

particulars of time and place. Not all finches, even within the Galapagos
Islands, have developed long pointy beaks, but those that have devel-
oped them have done so in particular circumstances ruled by general
principles of adaptation. The epiphenomena of new media and inter-
media, therefore, are guided by the same principles as Darwin’s finch-
es, although their specifics arise in a particular situation. Intermedia, as
a place of hybridity and crossbreeding, where old work is transcribed
in new ways, would appear to be an especially promising place for
adaptation to unfold, although promising sites do not always live up to
their promise. Nor are more traditional sites necessarily less rich as
fields of adaptation. Towards the end of this essay I will examine one
instance of Shakespeare in new media – the graphic series Kill
Shakespeare – to explore the development of the “new,” with promises
kept and not kept, within the general and unchanging laws of cultural
development.
My reflections have their source in what Shakespeare might have called

a misprision – an accident of misinterpretation happy or disastrous as
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Beyond Adaptation 373
the case may be. The object of this misprision was the phrase “Beyond
Shakespeare Adaptation.” Within a few seconds of encountering this
phrase I came to what I take to be its intended meaning – adaptations
of other writers, Marlowe, Webster, whomever. But for a moment or
two I had read it differently – what can be done with Shakespeare (or
whomever) that was not adaptation, that was beyond adaptation. Even
after I understood that I had been mistaken, this earlier understanding
stayed with me – now an intentional misprision – because it raised for
me a number of issues and questions that had been preoccupying me.
All of these issues and questions unfold from the basic question, “What
is there, if anything, beyond adaptation?”
Let me begin with a set of issues and problems that arise from a criti-
cal debate that has been going on for some time, and that my work –
and my work with Daniel Fischlin – has been part of, concerning the
relative prudence of a more narrow or a more expansive definition of
adaptation. Many, if not most, scholars of reworkings of Shakespeare
have adopted a more or less limited sense of adaptation.1 Some treat

adaptation as a process across media: novel into film for example.2
On another tack, adaptation, narrowly defined, is a different thing
from pastiche, parody, travesty, sequel, and so forth.3 Adaptation is
one genre of reworking among many, defined variously as adding to
the source, standing in for the source, with this set of features or that
set of features. In this analysis all of these other genres would be be-
yond adaptation, beyond the confines and scope of adaptation as a
highly particularized genre. This is an important debate, but I am
going to give it short shrift here. From my perspective this activity of
making distinctions has a bit too much of the bureaucrat and the bean
counter about it. What interests me is what these genres have in com-
mon as part of a larger activity that I call, for lack of a better word,
adaptation. From my perspective, therefore, these various genres are
not beyond adaptation but are rather part of adaptation in a more
expansive sense.
Another issue arises for some theorists of cultural adaptation at this

point, which is where does adaptation in this larger sense stop, since
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 374 Mark Fortier
stop it must. If adaptation is a general activity of cultural reworking,

then editing, translation – however faithful in intent – scholarly inter-
pretation, theatrical production, in effect anything you can do with
Shakespeare would be adaptation of Shakespeare. Nothing you can do
with Shakespeare would be beyond adaptation. Some critics are un-
comfortable with this, but discomfort with something doesn’t mean it
is incorrect. I myself have never been able to find a compelling reason
not to understand adaptation, at least in one of its meanings, in this
unlimited sense.
One way of explaining my understanding of adaptation is to borrow

an insight from Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s work in one of its aspects
elucidates a structure that holds for various historically subordinated
notions, most prominently, perhaps, writing. Writing, which is tradi-
tionally taken as secondary to language and speech, has an affinity
with archewriting, the basic possibility of inscription and prolifera-
tion necessary for there to be language and speech at all.4 Writing in
the narrow sense could be, for example, the text you are reading.
Archewriting, on a deeper level, is the very possibility of expression.
This Derridean structure works for many other seemingly secondary
terms. In law it elucidates equity – which is not only particular excep-
tions to preceding law but on a deeper level the infinity of circum-
stances that constitute the very possibility of law. Returning for a
moment to the notion of misprision, misunderstanding would appear
to be a momentary lapse in the process of communication; but as Caryl
Emerson observes in his preface to Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, if we ever really understood each other, there would be no
further need to communicate (Emerson 1984, xxxii): misprision is the
necessary and primal ground of whatever understanding we can ef-
fect. And this structure is also true of adaptation, which is not only
particular works of secondary creation but the very possibility of cul-
tural activity going forward.
In the realm of culture, therefore, one might postulate that there is
nothing beyond adaptation. Derrida famously declared that there is
nothing outside the text. Just as apt might be these lines from a recent
song by Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter: “Beyond here lies nothin’, noth-
in’ that we can call our own.”
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I am not going to say much at the moment about the obviously drastic
and unsettling effect that primal archewriting, equity, misprision, or
adaptation has on speech, law, understanding, or cultural creation.
Suffice it to say that everything is changed, with origin and constancy
adrift and always at risk on a sea of primal variation.
Adaptation has been a fraught word in cultural studies inasmuch as it

has currency in natural science as well as in cultural activity and under-
standing. The flight from essentialism, natural and otherwise, has in
the past meant for some, myself included, a suspicion of cultural con-
tamination by scientific naturalism. But that has been changing for
some time now. As far back as 1980 Deleuze and Guattari wrote of a
“neoevolutionism” that is not strictly either natural or cultural (1987,
239). Somewhat more recently, the feminist philosopher of becoming
Elizabeth Grosz has explored Darwinian understanding as explaining
“both biological and cultural emergence” (2004, 9).5 Adaptation so gen-

eralized and writ large is even more inclusive and inescapable than cul-
tural adaptation as discussed above. To cite once again Dylan and
Hunter: “Beyond here lies nothin’, nothin’ but the moon and stars.”
And maybe not even the moon and stars.
Is there nothing, then, beyond adaptation? Is this the conclusion to

which an expansive understanding must lead? When I contemplate
possibilities, I can imagine three types of phenomena that might be con-
sidered to some extent outside of adaptation. The first would be that
which is completely new. Second would be that which doesn’t change.
Cockroaches, we are told, have been as they are for millions of years
and might stay that way no matter what for millions more. The final
group would be the completely annihilated, that which has entered
into oblivion (the extinct, the forgotten, the lost) – the dodo bird, the
dinosaurs, the lost plays of Shakespeare. Human and global experience
shows that oblivion is a highly conceivable phenomenon, although we
now surmise that dinosaurs are all around us in the form of birds and I
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recently saw a lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, at the RSC in Stratford.

Oblivion isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be.6
Scholars have noted a recent presentist turn in Shakespeare studies, es-

chewing the detachment of historicism to treat Shakespeare as once
again very much our contemporary. Certainly the study of adaptation
has always had a strong presentist streak – few, I suspect, would be in-
terested in adapting Shakespeare if his work were taken to be entirely
dead and anachronistic. One recent presentist trend in Shakespeare
studies, one with a long historical pedigree, is to treat Shakespeare as a
thinker or philosopher, and as a fellow traveller as one puzzles though
ideas in the present. Examples of this trend are Colin McGinn’s
Shakespeare’s Philosophy (2006), A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker
(2007), David Bevington’s Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), and most recently
Julia Lupton’s Thinking with Shakespeare (2011). In the spirit of these
works I would like next to think with Shakespeare about newness, con-
stancy, and oblivion.
In a short essay such as this it is at most possible to give only a very

rudimentary and provisional account of how one might think with
Shakespeare and where that thinking might lead. One of many pos-
sible techniques would be to follow particular keywords through
Shakespeare’s works. Let’s start with the word “new,” which regularly
appears under a cloud of suspicion.7 There are relatively rare positive
evocations of newness – in Measure for Measure the giver of mercy be-
comes “Like man new made” (2.2.77) and near the joyful conclusion of
The Winter’s Tale “Every wink of an eye some new grace [is] born”
(5.2.110–11). Much more often, however, the love of novelty and new-
fangledness is presented as a social and cultural problem, a misguided
and damaging social trend:
New customs,
Though they be never so ridiculous
(Nay, let ’em be unmanly), yet are follow’d.
(Henry VIII 1.3.2–4)
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This is especially true of the young,
whose apprehensive senses

All but new things disdain; whose judgments are
Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies
Expire before their fashions.
(All’s Well That Ends Well 1.2.60–3)
Moreover, there is doubt as to whether real newness does or can exist

– as in Ecclesiastes,
What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Shakespeare expresses this hypothesis almost exactly in the Sonnets:

“there be nothing new, but that which is/Hath been before” (Sonnet
59.1–2). This scepticism about the new is expressed most famously in
Prospero’s response (wistful, understanding, dismissive) to Miranda’s
exclamation “O brave new world/That has such people in’t!”: “’Tis

new to thee” (Tempest 5.1.183–5). More complexly resonant is Antony’s
response to Cleopatra’s claim that she can measure love: “Then must
thou needs find out new heaven, new earth” (Antony and Cleopatra
1.1.17–18). Measuring love is as impossible as finding a new heaven
and new earth. Moreover, such a new heaven and earth, unlike that
promised in Christian eschatology, would be a perverse place where
the limitlessness of love is bounded. Here profound newness is both
impossible and undesirable. This double rejection of newness is also
expressed in Troilus and Cressida: “all with one consent praise new-born
gawds,/Though they are made and moulded of things past” (3.3.176–
7): the love of the new is a mistaken and tasteless idolatry.
Often in Shakespeare the word “new” implies a renewal of some-
thing past rather than something completely novel: “I sigh the lack of
many a thing I sought,/And with old woes new wail my dear time’s
waste” (Sonnet 30.3–4). Here we get a coming together of the new and
the old, which is also at work in the reference in King John to “an ancient
tale new told” (4.2.18). It is not surprising therefore that Shakespeare
expresses a limited view of human creation, in opposition to divine
“prime creation” (Richard III 4.3.19). Thus Prospero expresses the stages
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of a diminishing account when he says that his treacherous brother

“new created/The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang’d ’em,/Or
else new form’d ’em” (Tempest 1.2.81–3): he moves from creation to al-
teration and adaptation. Finally, for now, we might note the use of the
word “original” by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when she
says to Oberon of the environmental disasters of the day, “We are their
parents and original” (2.1.117). Here original implies they are the source
of something else, but not that they lack a source themselves, some-
thing like the sense it has in Darwin’s view of the origin of species and
the descent of man – a series of causes rather than a pure beginning.8
10
Shakespeare’s work shows a different but equally fraught understand-

ing of constancy. The strongest assertion and praise of constancy is in
Sonnet 116: “love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds”
(2–3): love does not adapt to changing circumstances (not adapting to
changing circumstances, in an evolutionary context, unless you’re a
cockroach, is a recipe for extinction).
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
(9–12)
Similarly, in Sonnet 14, the speaker says of his lover,
from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,

And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive.
(9–11)
The view of procreation in the Sonnets as male cloning is another bul-

wark of constancy against time:
As far as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st,

In one of thine, from that which thou departest,
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st
Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest.
WESTERN RESERVE UNIV (11.1–4)
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Yet, in the highly troubled amatory context of the sonnets, these mo-
ments come across as a cri de coeur and a desperate act of faith in the
face of ubiquitous inconstancy. Inconstancy is a more common referent
in Shakespeare’s work than constancy is – inconstant wind, sea, moon,
fortune, women, and especially men:
O heaven, were man

But constant, he were perfect; that one error
Fills him with faults, makes him run through all th’ sins:
Inconstancy falls off ere it begins;
(Two Gentlemen of Verona 5.4.110–13)
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
(Much Ado about Nothing 2.3.62–5)
Caesar’s “I am constant as the northern star” (Julius Caesar 3.1.60) is, I

dare say, less than entirely convincing, and when Titania in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream says of the lovers’ accounts,
all their minds transfigur’d so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable …
(5.1.24–7)
the constancy they bear witness to is of misprision and sudden trans-

formation. Like indeterminacy and openness in evolution, Fortune,
Fluellen tells Pistol,
is painted blind, with a muffler afore his eyes, to signify to you that
Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you,
which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability,
and variation.
(Henry V 3.6.30–5)
What we get in Shakespeare’s work is more often a longing for absent

or impossible constancy than a celebration of its presence.
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11
The doubt and suspicion that feature in Shakespeare’s work concerning

newness and constancy are sorely absent when the issue is oblivion.
Here there is surety. There is for each of us the inevitable personal
oblivion:
Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.
(As You Like It 2.7.163–6).
There is the oblivion that has faced great civilizations of the past,
When water-drops have worn the stones of Troy,

And blind oblivion swallow’d cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing.
(Troilus and Cressida 3.2.186–9)
Finally there is the “general doom” (Rape of Lucrece 975) to come:
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(Tempest 4.1.151–6).
Oblivion comes to each in time. Grosz draws from Darwin the essential
temporality of natural and cultural systems: “The evolution of life and
the evolution of language are possible only through the irreversible
temporality of genealogy” (Grosz 2004, 32). Time the destroyer figures
strongly in the Sonnets and even in The Winter’s Tale: while the passage
of the years is there locally a force for healing and good, Time declares
that he shall take “the freshest things now reigning, and make stale/The
glistering of this present” (4.1.13–14). Thus in Sonnet 122 an initial asser-
tion of constancy beyond time is reduced to the short time before senil-
ity or death:
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Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain

Full character’d with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity;
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist,
Till each to raz’d oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss’d.
(1–8)
12
To summarize, then, in the style of a CliffsNotes for pessimists and ni-

hilists, in Shakespeare’s work there is a dismissal of the new, a mainly
futile longing for constancy, a fear of change, and an expectation of
oblivion. There is, in effect, nothing beyond adaptation except the ever-
present but complex possibilities of oblivion. On one level, such a vi-
sion speaks to the anxiety, even terror, of a quasi-Lacanian captated self
– a psycho-structure to which few, if any, of us are immune.9 At the fu-
neral of the Canadian social democratic politician Jack Layton, one of

the inspirational messages suggested was “Have a dream longer than
a life,” but for us (dis)possessive individualists, even if such a dream
can be mustered, it ends nowhere happy. Après moi, le déluge. The pos-
sibility exists, I suppose, to think this deluge otherwise, but that will be
hard slogging.
Rather than dwell solely on this pessimistic individualism, howev-
er, I would like to pull various threads of my exploration together by
saying a few things about the recent Canadian graphic novel series
Kill Shakespeare (McCreery, Del Col, and Belanger 2010, 2011) and
how it might play in these reflections. Kill Shakespeare imagines a
Shakespearean world where an attempt is made to wrest power from
the god Shakespeare and which pits Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, and
Falstaff, among others, against Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Iago, and
their forces.
A few reflections: generically, Kill Shakespeare might be called an
intermedial mashup – piling characters from a number of plays into
one new work – although there is less new about this than one might
imagine: when I was a child, at bedtime, to my delight, my father
(not much of an expert in intermedia) used to bring characters from
different fairy tales together.10 The authors of Kill Shakespeare claim
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inspiration from such things as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

As an aside, I won’t speculate as to which scholars of adaptation
would or would not call Kill Shakespeare an adaptation or would insist
that mashups are a specific and different genre: in the big picture, Kill
Shakespeare exists in the realm of adaptation. The mashup, however,
is an interesting adaptive and evolutionary idea, the cultural version
of recombinant genetic engineering. However, if one were to follow
the keywords and ideas in Shakespeare discussed above – newness,
constancy, and oblivion – through Kill Shakespeare, one would have
relatively little to reflect on. In their place one would find words and
notions such as struggle, survival, freedom, prophecy, and fate,
smeared with a large dollop of mutilation and torture. The result is a
work that is, underneath the gore, much less dark at its heart, in its
genes. Shakespeare’s bitter rapeseed has been modified into more pal-
atable canola.
Second, Kill Shakespeare, like all adaptation, points to the essential in-
constancy of cultural development. In this light Kill Shakespeare contin-
ues an English Canadian tradition (I’m thinking of Ann-Marie
MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona [Good Morning Juliet]) of calling
Juliet’s constancy to Romeo into question and finding her a more suit-
able partner (in this case, Hamlet). Also, as in MacDonald’s play, this
repartnering of Juliet is related to a change in genre: MacDonald turns
tragedy to comedy and romance; here Shakespeare’s tragedies are re-
done as melodrama and romance.
Third, what is noteworthy about this work, or any other adaptation,
is not its novelty. No matter how cutting-edge and recent the medium,
newness is not its calling card. Newness is a misleading epiphenome-
non of adaptation, which unsettles simple distinctions between old
and new. The new always has its source in the old. Adaptation is not
innovation but renovation. In Kill Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s heroes are
given a chance at a do over; they are given a second chance at life –
having somehow survived the tragic events attached to their names – a
chance at renewal and redemption. Shakespeare’s world itself is pre-
sented as a bit of a fixer-upper whose beauty is in need of renewal.
Shakespeare himself finds redemption. Whatever the éclat, adaptations
in new media, like all cultural work, do not involve newness or inno-
vation as much as they do renovation and do not kill the past so much
as carry it on.
Fourth, Kill Shakespeare is a somewhat muddled engagement with
who or what Shakespeare is: god, man, character, ideal, texts, a world.
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11.1 Kill Shakespeare © Kill Shakespeare Entertainment, images by Andy

Belanger
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The Shakespeare who might be killed is an individual who has creat-

ed a world but exists within it as a privileged entity, though one simi-
lar to those he has created. But this is not the same Shakespeare that
the authors of Kill Shakespeare have in mind when they ask, like many
before them, “How do we get kids interested in Shakespeare?” Nor is
Shakespeare the man, the author, the character in a fiction, the same as
the world he has created, or as what Graham Holderness has delimited
– Shakespeare as “what is here, now, always, being made of him” (1998,
xvi). This Shakespeare is not an unchanging individual but rather
something collective and inconstant.
This leads to some preliminary thoughts on Shakespeare and
oblivion, on killing Shakespeare. Without giving anything away, kill-
ing Shakespeare the man turns out to be easier said than done; kill-
ing Shakespeare writ large is a different undertaking altogether. This
Shakespeare cannot be killed while invoking Shakespeare. Invoking
Shakespeare gives Shakespeare renewed life. In this way, Kill
Shakespeare, like “Beyond Adaptation,” is a completely ironic title,
one that points to, even effects, the opposite of what it says. At the
end of the work Shakespeare the author-god-man asks to be forgot-
ten in the future when his words are brought to mind.

This is done by reciting Sonnet 71, which in the psychodrama of
Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is an ironic call to be forgotten: forget-
ting is not voluntary and the call to forget is a reminder. On the surface
the Shakespeare of the graphic series seems much less conflicted about
his own oblivion than is the Shakespeare we derived above. But this re-
deemed Shakespeare (if not his creators) is being naïve or disingenuous.
There may come oblivion for Shakespeare, but it can only come unnoted
and unnoticed, not by any evocation of his death or his forgetting. Kill
Shakespeare could have been called, with just as much irony and futility,
Forget Shakespeare. As long as we speak of or through Shakespeare, his
oblivion has not come and we are not beyond adaptation.
NOTES
1 See, for instance, Hutcheon 2006 and Kidnie 2008.

2 See, for instance, Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies.
3 See, for instance, Schoch 2002. Strenuous categorization and separation
also dictate the approach of Ruby Cohn’s groundbreaking Modern
Shakespeare Offshoots 1976.
4 WESTERN
See, inter alia,
RESERVE UNIVDerrida 1976.
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5 “According to Darwinian precepts, culture is not different in kind from

nature … Nature and culture can no longer be seen as dichotomous or op-
positional terms, when nature is understood as the very field on which the
cultural elaborates and develops itself” (Grosz 2005, 30–1).
6 We require a differential taxonomy of what might be called oblivion,
which comes in different forms and affects its subject or object in different
ways. Oblivion can affect a species, a society, an individual. Oblivion in
one sense is a synonym for extinction, yet its root suggests not only ex-
tinction but being forgotten. Thus oblivion can obliterate life and afterlife
– the living person and the person remembered. Oblivion as a concept can
give a kind of presence to the subject or object of the concept, in as much
as it memorializes it; but conceiving of dinosaurs does not make them any
less, in a real sense, extinct. Shakespeare’s sonnets distinguish among the
oblivion of an individual who dies without children, oblivion of an indi-
vidual unloved, and the rescue from oblivion of an individual memorial-
ized in verse. The umbrella term “Shakespeare” covers a range of entities
that can be subjected to oblivion in a variety of interconnected but some-
what distinct ways. The Shakespeare that lives on, in our world or in the
world of Kill Shakespeare, is distinct from the body buried in a Stratford
church and cannot be killed in the same way. In culture there is no com-
plete oblivion without forgetting. That which has suffered complete
oblivion leaves no trace.
7 All references to Shakespeare’s works are to The Riverside Shakespeare.
8 See Grosz 2004, 20–32.
9 See Lacan 1977.
10 I am somewhat sceptical of the outlook taken by Sinnreich, that the pres-
ent moment (as opposed to other historical moments) is “a moment of
profound change, a moment when the old definitions no longer apply, and
when the new definitions have yet to be written” (2010, 3), and that his
field of interdisciplinary study – “critical information studies” – is “some-
thing new” (5). Old definitions can be surprisingly useful, and interdisci-
plinarity is, by definition, at least as much about bringing things that
already exist together as it is about novelty. I am more sympathetic to the
view expressed in the modest 1981 section of Dick Higgins’s “Intermedia”:
“Intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient of
times” (2001, 52).
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Nuttall, A.D. 2007. Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Sinnreich, Adam. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of
Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Adaptation
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Contributors
Jennifer L. Ailles is a Renaissance, gender scholar, and adaptation

specialist at Columbia College Chicago. She writes and teaches on
Shakespeare, gender and queer studies, alchemy and witchcraft, mon-
archy, fairy tales, adaptations, digital access, and ecocriticism. She has
taught at a number of institutions including Rollins College, the
University of Rochester, and Full Sail University. She also had the privi-
lege of being the first Project Manager of the Canadian Adaptations of

Shakespeare Project at the University of Guelph. She has written a
book-length study on the cultural history of Queen Mab and is co-
author of Key Concepts in Writing and Rhetoric (2014). Her current book
project focuses on the symbolic and material relationships between
jewelled and decorative items such as illuminated treasure books, jew-
ellery, monarchical regalia, insignia, and sacred magical objects, their
human interlocutors, and the subsequent literature and drama they cre-
ated in medieval and Renaissance England.
Andrew Bretz is a post-doctoral researcher with the Canadian

Adaptations of Shakespeare Project at the University of Guelph. He
teaches at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph,
where he was recently awarded the sole CSA Teaching Excellence
award for 2013. His dissertation was on the topic of the representation
of the rapist on the early modern stage and presently he is researching
the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare. He has been previously published
in Notes and Queries and Modern Philology. He is also preparing the in-
troduction to Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Shakespeare Made in
Canada series from Oxford University Press (Canada).
Adaptation
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 388 Contributors
Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at

the University of Georgia and (with Sujata Iyengar) co-founder and
co-general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and
Appropriation. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare’s Characters:
Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and editor or co-editor of several
books on Shakespearean appropriation: Shakespeare and Appropriation
(with Robert Sawyer, 1999); Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (with Robert
Sawyer, 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, 2009); and
Helen Faucit (2011). She has recently published essays on Shakespeare
and Media, including “Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: From
Tom Stoppard to YouTube” (Shakespeare Survey 2008); “Appropriation
and the Design of an Online Shakespeare Journal” (with Sujata Iyengar,
in Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, ed. Alexa Huang and
Charles S. Ross [2009]); and “Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the
Rhetorics of Appropriation” (with Sujata Iyengar, in The Afterlife of
Ophelia, ed. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams [2012]).
Kim Fedderson is the Founding Dean of Lakehead University’s Orillia

Campus. Immediately prior to his returning to Lakehead University,
where he had held a variety of positions including Professor of Eng-

lish, Chair of the Department of English (1997–2001) and Dean of
the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (2001–6), he was Vice-
President, Academic and Student Services at Confederation College.
He holds an Honours BA and MA from the University of Toronto and
a PhD from York University. He has taught at York University, Seneca
College, Yunnan University in China, and Gifu University for Lan-
guages and Education in Japan. He has published extensively on rhe-
torical theory and post-secondary pedagogy, and continues his work
on Shakespearean adaptation with his long-standing collaborator,
Dr J.M. Richardson.
University Research Chair and Professor Daniel Fischlin is co-editor

with Mark Fortier of Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of
Plays from the 17th Century to the Present (2000) and is the founder and
director of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP),
the largest, most complete online resource in the world for the study of
Shakespeare’s relation to a set of national theatrical practices. In 2007
Fischlin curated the Shakespeare Made in Canada Exhibit at the Macdonald
Stewart Gallery in Guelph, which housed over six thousand square
feet of resources that documented the relationship between Canadian
Adaptation
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Contributors 389
culture and Shakespeare. Dr Fischlin serves as the General Series Editor

for Oxford University Press’s re-edition of the Shakespeare plays
(Shakespeare Made in Canada) from a specifically Canadian point of
view, featuring prominent Canadian scholars, authors, and theatre
practitioners.
Mark Fortier is a Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the

University of Guelph. Among his publications are Adaptations of
Shakespeare (with Daniel Fischlin), Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, The
Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, and forthcoming, The Culture
of Equity in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Britain and America.
Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the

author of Shades of Difference (2004) and Shakespeare’s Medical Language
(2011), and the editor of Disability, Health, and Happiness in the
Shakespearean Body (forthcoming 2014). Her articles have appeared in
the scholarly journals Shakespeare Survey (2014), ELH (2002), and
MaRDiE (2007), and in many edited collections, including the widely
referenced Color-Blind Shakespeare (2006) and Sensible Flesh (Penn Press,
2003), the award-winning The History of British Women’s Writing, vol-

ume 2 (2010), and the exhibition catalogue Voices of Tolerance in an Age of
Persecution (2004). Her essay for OuterSpeares draws upon research from
her current book project, “Shakespeare and the Art of the Book.” This
monograph argues that through nineteenth-century printing techno-
logy (wood-pulp paper, stereotyping, lithography), twentieth-century
innovations (full-colour printing, polymer plates), and electronic pub-
lishing, Shakespeare inspires book arts as a proxy for the crafted, the
handmade, and the artisanal. Professor Iyengar’s forthcoming work on
intermedia Shakespeares includes her essay “Othello on Screen” for the
Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and
David Schalkwyk, and one on intermedia Ophelias for the collection
Rethinking Feminism, edited by Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez.
With Christy Desmet, Professor Iyengar co-founded and co-edits
Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, a
peer-reviewed, scholarly, online, multimedia publication that won the
CELJ’s “Best New Journal” award in 2007.
Tom Magill is an ex-prisoner who transformed his life through arts edu-
cation while in prison for violence. While incarcerated he met his enemy
– and his enemy became his teacher. On release he earned a BA (Hons) in
Adaptation
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 390 Contributors
Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Birmingham and an MA

in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
He is an award-winning filmmaker, drama facilitator, actor, writer,
director, and producer. He specializes in utilizing Augusto Boal’s
“Theatre of the Oppressed” methodology and the works of William
Shakespeare in transforming community and prison settings. After
training with Michael Bogdanov, he became his and Augusto Boal’s
personal representatives in Northern Ireland. In 1999 he co-founded
the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) to develop drama and
film with prisoners and ex-prisoners. ESC is an award-winning arts
education charity, empowering marginalized people to find their voice
and tell their stories through film. In 2007 he directed Mickey B, an
award-winning feature film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, cast
with prisoners from Maghaberry maximum-security prison. Mickey B
won the 2008 Roger Graef Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film
at the Arthur Koestler Awards. For his work in criminal justice he re-
ceived the 2011 Justice in the Community Award (from the Northern
Ireland Department of Justice). He has presented his film work in
Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel,
Nigeria, South Korea, and the United States.
James McKinnon is a theatre scholar, director, and educator. His research

interests include dramaturgy, devising and theatre pedagogy, and dra-
matic adaptation, particularly contemporary Canadian appropriations
of Chekhov and Shakespeare. Since completing his PhD (Toronto) in
2010, he has been a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, and is
currently the director of its Theatre Programme.
Don Moore teaches critical theory, literary theory, film, and media
studies. His recent work focuses on post-9/11 global cinema and cine-
matic depictions of “terrorism,” with particular emphasis on how they
are implicated with contemporary shifts in discourses of ethics, politics,
human rights, and globalization. Don has authored over a dozen arti-
cles and book chapters on the topics of contemporary critical theory,
cultural studies, post-9/11 ethical rhetoric, globalization, and film. He
is the co-editor of “Beyond Ground Zero: 9/11 and the Futures of
Critical Thought,” a collection of essays published as the summer 2008
double issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.
He is currently working on a book about post-9/11 global cinema,
called Terrorizing Cinema: Learning from Post-9/11 Global Film.
Adaptation
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from Contributors 391
J. Michael Richardson is a professor in the English Department at

Lakehead University, Thunder Bay campus, with a specialization in
early modern literature. His work in this area includes the book
Astrological Symbolism in Spenser’s “The Shepheardes Calender.” He and
Dr Kim Fedderson have been collaborating since the mid-1990s on the
study of pop cultural adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare in
film, television, and graphic novels. Their work has appeared in jour-
nals such as College Literature and in collections such as Apocalyptic
Shakespeare and Macbeth: New Critical Essays. Working with Dr J.D. Rabb,
Dr Richardson has also published on the works of Joss Whedon, most
notably the book The Existential Joss Whedon and the forthcoming Joss
Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist.
Jessica Riley is a PhD candidate at the School of English and Theatre

Studies, University of Guelph. Her research interests include develop-
mental dramaturgy, theatre history and historiography, Canadian the-
atre, and early modern English drama. A former editorial assistant for
Theatre Journal, her work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review
and in the New Essays on Canadian Theatre collection, Latina/o Canadian
Theatre and Performance. Jessica’s current research involves the archival

analysis of past play development processes, focusing on scripts devel-
oped by influential Canadian dramaturge Urjo Kareda at Toronto’s
Tarragon Theatre. She is also editing Kareda’s collected letters, a project
for which she received the 2013 Heather McCallum Award from the
Canadian Association for Theatre Research.
Monika Smialkowska is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria

University. Her research interests fall into two categories: the early
modern genre of court masque, and post-Renaissance adaptations and
appropriations of early modern authors and genres. She has published
articles in journals such as Shakespeare, Critical Survey, and English
Literary Renaissance. Currently, she is working towards a monograph
exploring the ways in which the three-hundredth anniversary of
Shakespeare’s death in 1916 was celebrated around the world.
Adaptation
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Adaptation
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Index
access: to apps, 75, 89–90; to culture, 168, 178, 243, 252, 260, 272, 276,
232–3, 297; issues of, 91–2, 175; and 290, 295, 347–9, 354–61, 364, 366n7;
language, 236, 253n6; and literacy, and YouTube, 62–6, 69–70
91–2, 103–4n30; to radio, 230, 232; apps, 34, 36, 285n8; accessibility of,
to Shakespeare, 171, 194–5, 240; to 75, 89–90; and audience, 81; educa-
Stratford, 297, 315n25; to technol- tional, 82–7, 89, 102n18, 103nn21–2;
ogy, 89–90, 91–2, 96, 233 native vs web, 78; popularity of,
adaptation: beyond, 373–82, 384, 79, 100–1n4; promotion of, 81
385n6; cultural, 373–5; intermedial, archive: cultural, 122, 128; as incom-
effectiveness of, 10; intermedial, plete, 244; media, 116, 124; Shake-
politics of, 29; limits to, 27; social spearean, 94, 98, 274; YouTube as,
uses of, 174–5, 177–9; sound and, 8; 35, 55, 61, 66, 68–70
television, 19, 37, 61–2, 64, 66, 71n9, arts: and community-building, 152,
104–5n37, 195n1, 347, 353; theory, 183–4; and social change, 152, 156,
7–8, 196n3, 312n2, 349, 352–3, 373; 193; transformative power of, 220
as translation, 211–12; wild, 34 As You Like It, 82, 241–2, 270, 355, 380
Adelaide Road (app), 82, 97 audience, 205, 207, 209–13, 215–17,
Akala, 281–3, 284n1 220–1, 226–7; as curator, 56; glob-
All’s Well That Ends Well, 377; radio al, 15–17, 30–1, 154, 157, 169, 267,
adaptation of, 245 279, 350; and media, 4, 10–13, 258;
Android, 78–9, 100-1n4, 101n5 as participatory, 15, 31, 82, 93–4,
Antony and Cleopatra, 274, 283, 97–8, 308–9; perception of, 212;
285n10, 377; and Shakescrafting, and Prison Shakespeare, 161–2,
360 164, 166–9, 179–81, 192, 197n6,
Apple, 78–9, 86, 100–1n4, 101n5, 198n9; of radio, 231–3, 235–52,
102n17, 103–4n30 253n3; traditional boundaries of,
applications. See apps 36–7, 76–7, 80, 100; YouTube, 53–4,
appropriation, 6, 9, 46, 53, 56–7, 99,
56
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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from 394 Index
ballads, 188, 266–7 colonialism, 8, 23–6, 33, 117, 119,

“Banquo” (app), 97–9 121–4, 127, 139–43, 145, 153–4,
Bardbox, 69–70 157, 169, 183, 271, 276; neo-,
Battle of Wills (2008), 21 139–40; post-, 33, 117, 119, 121,
Beatles, The, 56–8, 60–2, 71n9 134, 138–41, 183, 226, 271
Bin Laden, Osama, 121–2, 131–2, 149n8 Columbia Broadcasting System
Boal, Augusto, 37, 152–3, 156, 158, (CBS), 231, 248–52
174–81, 187, 190–1, 194, 199n14 Comedy of Errors, The, 278
Bogdanov, Michael, 165, 167, 171, community theatre, 324, 328–37,
179–81, 186 340, 342–3, 343n4; aesthetic vs
boundaries: cultural, 89, 153, 156–7, social functions of, 331–2, 342; as
161, 171, 190, 263, 321–2; of media, participatory, 329; social purpose
27–9, 36, 156–7, 277; of perfor- of, 336–7
mance, 15, 76, 232–3; religious, copyright, 53, 56, 58, 63–4, 71n5,
11–15; virtual, 18 71n10, 347, 366n4
Branagh, Kenneth, 64, 66, 69, 152, Coriolanus, 20, 44n7, 349
272, 367n9 craft: as democratic, 349; vs art,
Brave New World, 23–6 349–50; process vs product,
Broadway, 38, 81, 206, 231, 241–2, 350; qualities of, 349–50. See also
244, 261, 278, 285n9, 323 Shakescrafting

Burleigh, Louise, 328–30, 343n4 Crime of Castlereagh, The, 178, 186–7,
191, 199n15, 200nn18–19
Caliban by the Yellow Sands, 322, cultural capital, 38–40, 62, 95, 154,
324–7, 331–41; as community 206, 262, 297, 347–65
theatre, 333–4; as intercultural, cultural economy, 4–5, 242
332; program, 339–41; promotion culture: access to, 232–3, 297; ama-
of, 331; success of, 336–9 teur, 53, 57; high vs low, 21, 64,
Canadian Adaptations of Shake- 206–7, 232–3, 237, 252, 262, 321,
speare Project (CASP), 6, 44n10, 323, 325, 330–5, 343, 348, 363
85, 268–74, 284n1, 285n7 curation, 99–100; of YouTube Shake-
censorship, 14, 159, 172, 326 speare, 55–6, 59–63, 68
chat rooms: use in performance,
15–17 dance, 5, 8, 267, 278, 280, 322–4, 332,
circus: Shakespearean, 322–4, 341 333, 340–1, 347
civic theatre, 328–31 De-ba-jeh-mu-jig, 23–5
Clear Channel Communications, de la Rocha, Zack, 282–3
261, 284n5 demediation, 357–60, 362, 367n11
Cloud computing, 28, 32, 36, 75–7, Drama League of America (DLA),
79, 86, 89–91, 97, 360 321–2, 325–6, 329–30, 335, 337,
Collins, Suzanne, 11–14, 43n4 342
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ebooks: popularity of, 103–4n30 Globe Theatre, 206, 266, 271, 275–6,
ecology of knowledges, 170–1 347
editing: live, 15–16 Google, 7, 32, 35, 71n8, 71n10, 78–9,
education: and apps, 79–83; experi- 278
ential, 177–8; industry, 38; open graphic novel, 41, 82–3, 372, 381–4.
access, 86–8, 90, 99, 103nn22–3. See See also Kill Shakespeare
also flipped classrooms; pedagogy
Educational Shakespeare Company Hamilton, Clayton Meeker, 245–7,
(ESC), 152, 157, 169, 177, 180–2, 250, 254n8
200n20 Hamlet, 15–17, 21, 39, 82, 85, 87,
Ellington, Duke, 273–6, 280 93, 102n16, 163, 206–7, 233, 278,
Eminem, 257–60, 276, 283, 284n2 381–2; adaptations of, 56–9, 63–7,
English Shakespeare Company, 165, 69–70, 367n9; radio adaptation
180 of, 244, 248–9; in Shakescrafting,
ereaders, 75–83, 89, 103n20. See also 354–7, 361, 363–5; in Slings & Ar-
iPad; Kindle; Kobo; Nook rows, 208–10, 214–18, 222–5
Etsy, 350–1, 356, 359, 362, 366n6, “Hamlet is back … and he is not
367n9 happy” (2008), 58–9, 65
Ex Machina, 8 Hamlet Live, 15–17, 20, 31
“Hamlet Mash Up” (2011), 64–5

Facebook, 10, 77, 91, 94, 101n5, 277, “Hamlet – the Mashup!!!” (2011), 65
291, 354, 356; use in performance, “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’
16, 97 Mashup” (2008), 69–70
fidelity criticism, 19, 27, 162, 347; of Harlem Duet, 39; effects of, 310–11;
Harlem Duet, 294, 313n6; in Slings and fidelity criticism, 294, 313n6;
& Arrows, 210–14, 218, 226–7 importance of, 302–3, 310–11; as
film: adaptation, 41; as an interme- original work, 294; publicity of,
dial form, 5; and self-evaluation, 290–1, 296–301; and race, 290–3,
193–4, 200n20; vs theatre, 4, 152, 296, 298–300, 304, 306, 315n20,
164, 181 315n23; reception to, 291–6,
First Nations: Shakespearean adap- 301–12, 313n5, 313n7, 315n23;
tations, 8–9, 23–6 relationship to Shakespeare, 39,
Fischlin, Daniel, 139, 146n2, 237, 373 291, 293–6, 299, 308, 313n3, 313n8,
flipped classrooms, 83–8, 99, 102n15 314n16, 315n23; and risk, 304;
Fluxus, 27. See also Higgins, Dick and role of audience, 308–12; as
Forum Theatre, 179. See also Boal, symbol of diversity, 290–2, 297–9;
Augusto venue, 303–4
Henry IV, 245, 286, 305
Gilligan’s Island : adaptation of Ham- Henry V, 245, 276, 379
let, 56 Henry VI, 247
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Henry VIII, 321, 376 Kill Shakespeare, 41, 82, 372, 381–4,
Higgins, Dick, 27–9, 33, 80, 207, 385n6; as mashup, 381–2
385n10 Kindle, 7, 77–8, 101–2n9, 360
hip hop, 38, 260–2, 281–3. See also rap King John, 377
human rights, 123–4, 143–4, 146–8n2, King Lear, 9, 82, 93, 95, 102n16, 206,
148n3, 186, 199n17, 200n18 244; as comedy, 227; as m-novel,
Hunger Games, The, 11–14, 20, 34, 93; radio adaptation of, 244; and
42n2, 43n4 Shakescrafting, 359; in Slings &
Huxley, Aldous, 23–6 Arrows, 208–9, 218–19, 223, 226–7
hyperlinking, 60 Knowles, Ric, 290–4, 296, 299, 301,
hypermediation, 120, 132, 146, 301 303–5, 311–12, 315n21
Kobo, 7
Image Theatre, 178, 187
IndieGogo, 16 language: access to, 236, 253n6;
intermediality: of 9/11, 118–20; cul- Shakespearean, 236, 253n6
tural, 155, 173; defining, 3–4, 27, Last Action Hero (1993), 58, 65, 67
63, 76, 153, 258, 348–9, 372; as in- Lepage, Robert, 8–9
herent, 43n6, 45n13; and learning, literacy, 6, 76–7, 89–92, 99, 103–4n30,
83–4; origins of, 28; and paratex- 156, 165, 176, 190, 281; digital, 89,
tuality, 291–3, 309; and play, 258; 91–6, 175, 178; new, 95–6; Shake-
race and, 141; social utility of, 28; speare’s contributions to, 91, 270–1,
types, 352–3, 358, 361 354, 360, 364; texting and, 92–4
iBooks, 78, 86 liveness, 7, 15–18, 30–1; and aurality,
iPad, 79, 81, 86, 89–90, 100–1n4, 234. See also Hamlet Live
285n8
iPhone, 77, 79, 90, 100–1n4, 101n6 Macbeth, 14, 17–18, 35–6, 206, 280,
iPod, 79, 100–1n4 285–6n10, 321, 381; apps, 82–3, 85,
Iraq, 283; and Shakespearean adap- 87, 93, 95, 97–9, 102n16, 104n32;
tation, 14–15; war, 121, 133, 139, Indian adaptation of, 279; moral
144, 149n7, 284n5 of, 176–7, 280; Orson Welles adap-
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 157, tation, 236–9, 248; radio adapta-
169, 178, 185–9, 200nn18–19 tion of, 236–7, 239; in Slings &
iTunes, 7, 76, 78–9, 82 Arrows, 208–9, 211–18, 220–2, 227.
iTunes U (app), 83, 86 See also Mickey B (2007)
MacKaye, Percy, 324–34, 336, 338–40,
Jay-Z, 258–60, 283 343n3, 343nn5–6
jazz, 38, 262, 273–4 Maghaberry Prison, 152, 159, 172,
Julius Caesar, 84–5, 95, 102n16, 176, 189, 199n13
195–6n2, 271, 283, 379; radio adap- Magill, Tom, 35–7, 152, 195n1, 253n2;
tation of, 249–51 relationship to Shakespeare, 163
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Manga Shakespeare (app), 82, 102n14 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 58, 60,
mashups, 10, 35–6, 53, 55, 58, 62–7, 62, 85, 102n16, 206, 280, 378–9;
69–70; Kill Shakespeare as, 381–2 and Shakescrafting, 360; in Slings
masque, 266, 322; community, 324–6, & Arrows, 208, 213, 225–6
332–41, 343n5 misprision, 372–5, 379
Massive Open Online Courses m-novels, 77, 91–6, 104nn31–2; and
(MOOCs), 76, 86–90, 96, 99, commentary, 93–4
103nn21–4, 103n26 Mobile Phones for Literacy (m4Lit),
Matheson, Dawn, 270–1 77, 92–5, 104n33
McKellen, Ian, 206, 211–13, 217 Monty Python Hamlet, 66–7
McKennitt, Loreena, 271, 275, morality: post-9/11, 123–4, 126,
285–6n10 146–8n2
McLuhan, Marshall, 20, 43–4n6, 119, Much Ado about Nothing, 195–6n2,
241, 352 305, 379
Measure for Measure, 376; radio adap- Mudlark Production Company, 30–1,
tation of, 245 96, 105n39
media: as archive, 116, 124; bound- multiculturalism, 8–9, 34, 199n16; at
aries of, 27–9, 36, 156–7, 277; as Stratford Festival, 290–2, 297–9,
cultural, 7; and meaning-making, 315n20
6; melted, 116–17, 146; new vs old, music: as an intermedial form, 5; use

30, 34–6, 40, 80, 118–19; power in Shakespearean plays, 264–6; as
of, 12–13, 43n6; spectacle, 118–19, soundtrack, 279. See also ballads;
126–7, 130–1, 141, 146 popular music
memory, 97, 136–7, 263, 265 MXit, 94, 104n35
Merchant of Venice, The, 195–6n2, 208, myShakespeare, 77, 91, 97
271
metaphor, 60–2 narration: and authority, 231, 241,
metonymy, 60–2 247–52, 252–3n1
Mickey B (2007), 35–7; and Boalian National Broadcasting Company
methodology, 177–81; challenges (NBC), 231, 244–5, 249, 252
of, 171–4; as collaborative, 153, New World Brave, 23–4
158, 164–5, 168, 179, 182, 190–1; 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 34, 36,
development of, 153, 190; influ- 284n5; cinema, post-, 116–17,
ences on, 175–6; and literacy, 123–8, 132; as cultural trauma,
165; reception of, 152, 154, 161–2; 119; as inherently cinematic,
use of language, 167–9, 192, 131–2, 148n5; as intermedial phe-
198n9; and violence, 157–61, nomenon, 118–20; as limit term,
164–6, 170, 173, 184, 190–4; and 127–8; morality, post-, 123–4, 126,
women, 165–6. See also Prison 146–8n2
Shakespeare No Fear Shakespeare (app), 84–5
Adaptation
Account: s8481523
Nook, 77–8 race: politics of, 39, 124; and Harlem

Northern Ireland, 35, 37, 152–95, Duet, 290–3, 296, 298–300, 304,
253n2; conflict in, 185–9, 198n10, 306, 315n20, 315n23
199n15, 200n18 racism, 24, 120, 140, 142–3, 169,
Northern Ireland Prison Service, 152, 195n1, 198–9n11, 226, 237, 274
172 radio: access to, 230, 232; adaptation,
38; adaptation of theatre, 231, 234–
Olivier, Laurence, 61, 65, 295, 307 5; and All’s Well That Ends Well,
Ophelia complex, 355–7, 366n7, 245; announcer, 245–8; and audi-
367n9 ence engagement, 231–3, 235–52,
Otello, 82 253n3; as boundary defying, 230;
Othello, 70–1n2, 102n16, 163, 208, commercialization of, 243–4; and
244, 291; adaptation of, 269, 321, Hamlet, 244, 248–9; and ideology,
381; as m-novel, 93; relationship 230–1; and intimacy, 235; and Ju-
to Harlem Duet, 39, 291, 293–6, lius Caesar, 249–51; and King Lear,
299, 308, 313n3, 313–14n8, 314n16, 244; as lacking, 234, 242; legitima-
315n23; use in crafting, 355 tion of, 230–1; limits of, 240–1; and
Macbeth, 236–7, 239; and Measure
patchwork Shakespeare, 10, 40, for Measure, 245; popularity of,
321–43 252, 253n3; and role of narration,

pedagogy, 37–8, 76, 90, 177, 205–6. 235–6, 240, 249–52, 254n8; and
See also flipped classrooms Richard III, 246–8, 254n8; and Ro-
performativity, 17–19, 80, 153, 157, meo and Juliet, 231; success of, 230;
264 and “Shakespeare Cycle,” 249–51;
popular music: and adaptation, 38; and “Streamlined Shakespeare,”
commercialization of, 263; defin- 249–51; and the “Summer of
ing, 261–4, 284n5; globalizing Shakespeare,” 231, 244, 249, 251;
Shakespeare through, 275–83; and The Winter’s Tale, 245
Shakespearean influence on, Radio Corporation of America
267–8; and technology, 263 (RCA), 240, 242, 251–2
postmodernism, 9, 118, 125–7, 129, Radio Guild, 244–9
133, 141–3, 253n4, 360; of theatre, rap, 38, 258–60, 281–3. See also hip
225 hop
premediation, 118, 120–2 Reduced Shakespeare Company, 67
Prison Shakespeare, 153, 168–70, 181, remediation, 8, 127, 140, 205–7, 233,
195–6n2, 196–7n4; effectiveness 251, 254n8, 258; defining, 118;
of, 156 intermediality and, 117–20; vs re-
promotion: of theatre, 39, 290–1, demption, 349, 356–7, 361, 366n8,
296–301; YouTube, 57, 59 367n9; taxonomy of, 301. See also
Prospero’s Prison, 157, 181–4, 194 upcycling
Adaptation
Account: s8481523
Richard III, 61–2, 195–6n2, 233, 377, Shakespeare: access to, 171, 194–5,
381; radio adaptation of, 246–8, 240; Canadian scholarship of, 6–7,
254n8 21–2; centrality of, 5–6; Chinese
Richard III (1955), 61–2 adaptation of, 9; circus, 322–4, 341;
Richard III (1995), 206, 211–13 commercialization of, 223, 323,
Richard III (2001), 9 347–8; as cultural signifier, 24, 208,
Romeo and Juliet, 11–14, 30–1, 42n2, 259–60, 292, 297, 353; as decen-
43n4, 77, 80–2, 85–7, 91, 93–4, tred, 5–6, 10; economies of, 156,
96–7, 102n16, 104n32, 196–7n2, 196–7n4; fidelity to, 210–12, 214,
206, 245, 278–80, 285–6n10, 321, 218, 227; First Nations adaptations
355, 382; radio adaptation of, 231; of, 8–9, 23–6; as global brand, 7,
in Slings & Arrows, 208, 225; and 22, 27, 30, 40, 206, 219, 260, 269,
Shakescrafting, 358–60 348, 353, 355, 363; Iraqi adaptation
Romeo + Juliet (1996), 196–7n4, 206, 279 of, 14–15; language, 236, 253n6;
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and multiculturalism, 8; scholar-
30–1, 69, 77–8, 81–3, 91, 96–7, ship of, 42, 45–6n14; South African
102n13, 105n39, 211–12, 347, 376 adaptations of, 77, 91–6, 104n33,
104n35, 104–5n37; Thai adaptation
sampling, 34–5, 267, 278–9; as inven- of, 14, 19–20
tion, 65–70 Shakespeare in Bits (app), 85–6,

Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare, 21–2 102n18
Sands, Bobby, 178, 186–8, 191, Shakespeare Must Die (2012), 14, 20
200nn18–19 Shakespeare (app), 78; Pro, 78–9
Schröter, Jens, 352–3, 355, 357–8, 361, Shakespeare’s Face (2002), 21
364 Shakespeare in Love (1998), 80, 196n4,
Sears, Djanet, 39, 290–315 206
semiotics, 3, 7, 54, 63, 119, 155, 259, Shakespeare Tercentenary, 40, 321–
352 43; aesthetic vs social functions of,
Shakescrafting, 10, 40, 347–65; 342–3; artistic vs populist aims of,
altered books as, 363–5, 367n11; 336–7; success of, 336; tradition vs
appropriation vs adaptation, 354, innovation, 337–42
356–7, 361; as demediation, 358; Skype, 77
intermediality of, 358–9; use of Slings & Arrows, 37–8, 205–27; fidel-
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 360; ity to Shakespeare, 210–12, 214,
use of Antony and Cleopatra, 360; 218, 226–7; and Hamlet, 208–10,
use of Hamlet, 354–7, 361, 363–5; 214–18, 224–5; and King Lear,
use of King Lear, 359; use of Romeo 208–9, 218–19, 223, 226–7; and
and Juliet, 358–60; use of The Tam- Macbeth, 208–9, 211–18, 220–2, 227;
ing of the Shrew, 360; use of The and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Tempest, 363. See also craft 208, 213, 225–6; and pedagogy,
Adaptation
Account: s8481523
205–6; and Romeo and Juliet, 208, tablets, 19, 36, 75–7, 89, 91
225; and The Tempest, 208 Taming of the Shrew, The, 10, 56,
Smith, Wadada Leo, 280–1 195–6n2, 196–7n4; and Shakes-
SMS: novel, 91–6, 105n38 crafting, 360
social media, 16, 31, 55, 70–1n2, 97, Tate, Nahum, 226–7
153. See also Facebook; Google; Taymor, Julie, 36, 115–46
Twitter; YouTube television: and 9/11, 132; and
social networking, 17, 28, 30–1, 35, adaptation, 19, 37, 61–2, 64, 66,
77, 94, 97–8, 102n14, 261, 277, 291, 71n9, 104–5n37, 195n1, 347, 353;
350, 354, 356, 366n7 as an intermedial form, 5, 35, 252,
sonnets, 80, 88, 93, 206, 271–3, 280, 254n7, 263, 353. See also Slings &
354–5, 361–2, 366n4, 377–80, 384, Arrows
385n6 Tempest, The, 8–9, 23–6, 86, 195–6n2,
SoundCloud, 7 271, 363, 377–8, 380; and Shakes-
soundscapes, 5, 27, 97, 293 crafting, 363; use in Slings &
South Africa: and Shakespearean ad- Arrows, 208. See also Caliban by the
aptation, 77, 91–6, 104n33, 104n35, Yellow Sands; Prospero’s Prison; The
104–5n37 Tempest (2010)
spectacle, 16, 22, 32, 125–6, 129, 137; Tempest, The (2010), 36, 115–46, 271;
of deception, 138–9; intermedial, and dehumanization of Caliban,

134–5, 138; media, 118–19, 126–7, 141–3; and dream, 136–7; free-
130–1, 141, 146; open, 137; theatri- dom in, 138–9; and hyperreality,
cal, 132–3, 212–13, 225, 331, 336; of 125–6, 133; ideological training
the war on terror, 118–19, 139–40, in, 135–8; and memory, 136–7;
146 and setting, 125, 129; similarities
star-crossed lovers: trope of, 11–14, to 9/11, 115–16; terrorism in, 120,
42n2, 43n4, 95, 355 125–6; use of power, 126, 134; and
Stratford Festival, 37, 39, 81, 205–6, violence, 115, 120, 126, 130–1, 134,
270–1, 273–4, 290–312, 347, 376; 139–40, 143–4; women in, 143–4
access to, 297, 315n25; bureaucra- Ten Things I Hate about You, 10,
cy of, 304–5, 314n19; and diversity, 196–7n4
290–2, 297–9, 315n20; ideology terrorism, 120–1, 125–6, 139, 144,
of, 297; name, 297–8, 314n13; 185; global, 130–2. See also war on
publicity, 290–1, 296–301. See also terror
Harlem Duet texting: and literacy, 92–4; mobile
Stratford-on-Avon, 194, 323, 347 Shakespeare as, 76. See also m-novel
Such Tweet Sorrow, 30–1, 33, 77, 80, theatre: adaptation, 41; African
91, 96–8, 105n39 American, 39, 236–7, 290–312, 321;
suicide: narrative of, 11–14, 159, 165, commercial, 224–6; democratic
172, 197n5 principles of, 328–30, 343n4; as
Adaptation
Account: s8481523
inherently intermedial, 43n6, 153– The Tempest (2010), 115, 120, 126,
4; and poetry, 188–9; production, 130–1, 134, 139–40, 143–4
8, 15–17; significance of, 30, 45n12;
and social awareness, 327–8; Wainwright, Rufus, 271–3
spectacle, 132–3, 212–13, 225, 331, war on terror, 115–45, 146–8n2,
336; as transformative, 185. See also 148–9n6; marketing of, 138, 149n7;
civic theatre; community theatre as spectacle, 118–19, 139–40, 146
Theatre of the Oppressed, 37, 152–3, Web 2.0, 53–6, 60, 65, 68, 100, 366n7
177, 199n14. See also Boal, Augusto Welles, Orson, 236–9, 248–9, 251,
thing theory, 350–3, 358, 362, 252–3n1
365–6n1 West Side Story, 81, 278
Timon of Athens, 274 Williams, Saul, 282–3
Titus Andronicus, 208 Winter’s Tale, The, 81, 266, 376, 380;
transmediality, 10, 16, 42n1, 352, 355, radio adaptation of, 245
357–8, 361–2, 364 World Shakespeare Festival, 77, 91,
trauma, 238, 293; cultural, 119–20, 97
122, 127 World Trade Center, 115–16, 127, 133
Troilus and Cressida, 245, 377, 380
Twelfth Night, 196–7n4, 257–8, Xbox: use in performance, 31, 97
285–6n10, 305
Twitter, 10, 91, 104n32; use in perfor- YouTube, 10, 33–5, 53, 76–7, 82, 91,
mance, 16–17, 30–1, 33, 77, 80, 91, 97, 99, 252, 277–8; algorithm,
96–8, 105n39 58–62, 71n3, 71n6; and appropria-
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 271, 379 tion, 62–6; as archive, 35, 55, 61,
66, 68–70; audience, 53–4; com-
upcycling, 40, 350, 356–7, 360: as mentary, 53, 61, 70n2; curation
demediation, 358, 360; vs down- of, 55–6, 59–63, 68; filtering, 56–7;
cycling, 357 and invention, 54, 59–62, 65–8;
mashup, 35, 62–5, 67, 69–70; para-
Vacation Association, 322–4 text of, 53; use in performance, 16,
video games, 31, 97, 127 31; promotion of, 57, 59
virtuality, 7, 17–18, 20 Yoza Cellphone Stories, 77, 91–6, 99
violence, 36–7; in Mickey B, 157–61,
164–6, 170, 173, 184, 190–4; in Zhaohua, Lin, 9
Adaptation
Account: s8481523

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Copyright © 2014. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. All rights reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission from

Edited by Daniel Fischlin

For Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, the global digital me-

dan iel f is chlin is a University Research Chair in the School of

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EDITED BY DANIEL FISCHLIN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

© University of Toronto Press 2014

ISBN 978-1-4426-4785-5 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, intermedia, and the limits of adaptation/edited

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Adaptations. 2. Shakespeare, William,

PR3100.O98 2014 822.3'.3 C2014-904024-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 30)

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Introduction: OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits

Daniel Fis ch lin

Part One: “Strange Invention”: Shakespeare in the New Media

YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention 53

“Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone

Part Two: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”:

Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation

Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy

Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Shakespearean Adaptation 205

Your Master’s Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial

Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular

Part Four: “Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to

Speak”: The Limits of Adaptation?

Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American

Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital 347

Beyond Adaptation 372

1.1 The Beatles in “Pyramus and Thisbe” 57

Shawn Williams (Othello) 300

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through to mobile technologies associated with apps. Along this jour-

ly appreciated. To my editor at University of Toronto Press, Suzanne

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Prelude: Intermedia and Co-productive Form

The word “intermedia” references a vast, ongoing set of practices as-

diffuse histories, technologies, and creative practices. The word inter-

they are as a result of the simultaneous commingling of discursive and

analysis of intermedial performances cannot rest on assumptions about

In short, the place of Shakespeare in the general cultural economy shifts

Shakespeare’s plays themselves” (3). This decentring is at the crux of

intermedial approach and theoretical framework coming out of a spe-

use of technology as well as symbolic forms that employ simultane-

be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accre-

ways. Which is to say, his work is thoroughly intermedial for how it

inspired by a Joseph Légaré painting (c. 1826), “Edmund Kean Reciting

The through-line from Kean and his connection to English produc-

media interface to produce sedimented new relations that intermedial

interpretative schema of the production tells us something about how

A chat-room conversation to a conventionally published essay? A vi-

only of Shakespeare as a fetishized site of cultural devising and revis-

“The Earlier Revision Has Been Revoked”: Shakespeare

Sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way.

specific set of circumstances governing how Shakespearean adaptation

networks) produce new forms of identity through convergence, revi-