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REPRODUCING SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare’s Serial Returns

in Complex TV
Christina Wald
Reproducing Shakespeare
Series Editors
Thomas Cartelli
Department of English
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA, USA
Katherine Rowe
Office of the President
The College of William & Mary
Williamsburg, VA, USA
Pascale Aebischer
Languages & Literature, Queens Building
University of Exeter, School of Arts
EXETER, UK
Reproducing Shakespeare marks the turn in adaptation studies toward
recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence. It builds on
two decades of growing interest in the “afterlife” of Shakespeare, show-
casing some of the best new work of this kind currently being produced.
The series addresses the repurposing of Shakespeare in different technical,
cultural, and performance formats, emphasizing the uses and effects of
Shakespearean texts in both national and global networks of reference
and communication. Studies in this series pursue a deeper understanding
of how and why cultures recycle their classic works, and of the media
involved in negotiating these transactions.
Editorial Board Members: Gina Bloom (University of California, Davis);

Alice Dailey (Villanova University); Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth
University, Ireland); Sujata Iyengar (University of Georgia).
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14505
Christina Wald
Shakespeare’s
Serial Returns in
Complex TV
Christina Wald
English and Comparative Literature
University of Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany
ISSN 2730-9304 ISSN 2730-9312 (electronic)

Reproducing Shakespeare
ISBN 978-3-030-46850-7 ISBN 978-3-030-46851-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Für Hans und Heinrich
Acknowledgements
This book, which is concerned with returns and recyclings, is itself very
much the product of a long process of rethinking, rewriting, and many
conversations with colleagues and friends. My interest in Shakespeare and
TV series started with the research for my inaugural lecture at the
University of Konstanz in 2016 on Coriolanus and Homeland, and I am
grateful to my colleagues for their generous and thought-provoking
responses to my ideas. The most decisive work on this book was accom-
plished when I was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz
in the academic year 2017–2018, and I would like to thank the staff, my
co-fellows, and the outstanding academic community at Konstanz for
their intellectual inspiration.
In summer 2019, Tobias Döring and I co-organised a workshop on
“Shakespearean Transections and Translocations” at the University of
Konstanz, where I presented my research, and I would like to thank every-
one for our lively and stimulating discussions: Dympna Callaghan, Ewan
Fernie, Sandra Fluhrer, Ina Habermann, Sabine Schülting, and Stefan
Willer. My thanks go to Elisabeth Bronfen, too; our conversations between
Zürich and Konstanz on our shared intellectual curiosity about Shakespeare
and TV have been a pleasure. I am very grateful to the participants of the
London Shakespeare Seminar and the Harvard Renaissance Colloquium
for their insightful comments on my project, in particular to Gordon
McMullan, Stephen Greenblatt, and James Simpson. My special thanks go
to Tobias Döring, who has offered precious advice and encouragement
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
through all phases of this project, and to Juliane Vogel for much inspira-
tion and her enthusiasm, which has guided me through less-enthusiastic
moments.
While working on this book, I taught several seminars on Shakespeare
and TV series and I appreciate the contributions of my students as well as
their passion for the topic. I would like to thank all participants of my
research colloquium in Konstanz for their astute feedback, in particular
my wonderful doctoral students (some of whom are post-docs now)
Jasmin Bieber, Anja Hartl, Jonas Kellermann, Susanne Köller, and Marit
Meinhold. My student assistants Maria Litherland, Evelyn Mohr, and
Felix Sauer have supported me in researching and writing this book—
thank you. I am indebted to Sofia Meyers for her meticulous and percep-
tive proofreading of the manuscript. Thomas Cartelli drew my attention
to some of the TV series discussed in this study, and I would like to thank
him and his co-editors Pascale Aebischer and Katherine Rowe for their
interest in my project and for accepting it as part of their “Reproducing
Shakespeare” series. I am also grateful to the three anonymous peer
reviewers, whose comments helped to substantially improve this study.
An earlier and shorter version of Chap. 5 has appeared as “The
Homeland of Coriolanus: War Homecomings between Shakespeare’s
Stage and Current Complex TV” in Shakespeare Survey 72 (2019),
136–149. I am grateful to the editor Emma Smith for granting me per-
mission to recycle this material. This book was supported by funds made
available by the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF) at the University of
Konstanz.
Contents
1 Shakespeare and Complex TV: “Our Old Work Coming

Back to Haunt Us” 1
2 The Tempest and Westworld: Returns of the Dead 21
3 King Lear and Succession: Returns of the Predecessor 83
4 Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots137
5 Homeland and Coriolanus: Returns of the Soldier187
6 The Serial Shakespeare Aggregate: “This is Your World.

Or What’s Left of It”227
References239
Index263
ix
CHAPTER 1
Shakespeare and Complex TV: “Our Old

Work Coming Back to Haunt Us”
In the first episode of Westworld, the administration of an amusement park

peopled with robots faces technical problems with one of the androids,
who threatens the technicians with lines like “By most mechanical and
dirty hand / I shall have such revenges on you both / The things that I
will do / What they are yet I know not, but they will be / The terrors of
the earth” (1.1.61). While the team is unsettled by these off-script men-
aces, wondering “What the hell was that?” and emphasising “We didn’t
program any of those behaviors” (1.1.62), Dr Robert Ford, the creator of
the park, attributes them to “Shakespeare” (1.1.60). He explains to his
bewildered colleagues that in a previous role in one of the park’s pre-
programmed scenarios, the android played a professor of English litera-
ture who had such quotations at his command. The memories that the
team thought had been deleted have somehow found their way back into
the android’s program. According to Ford, there is “no cause for alarm
[…]. Simply our old work coming back to haunt us” (1.1.63).
Such unexpected Shakespearean returns are the focus of this study.
Through selected case studies, I am exploring how the “old work” of
Shakespeare’s topics, plots, dramaturgical devices, characters, and poetry
surfaces in current complex TV series. The following chapters will ask how
such unforeseen Shakespearean returns impact the TV series. Do they
affect the “core code” of the new narratives (1.1.64), as the technical team
in Westworld suspects? Are these returns intentional or surprising afterlives
of a past considered forgotten? How can we account for this haunting
© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. Wald, Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV, Reproducing
Shakespeare, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4_1
2 C. WALD
quality of the Shakespearean legacy? Do the Shakespearean returns help us

understand topical concerns negotiated in the series? And what new
insights may the twenty-first-century remediations grant us into
Shakespeare’s texts? Pursuing these questions, the book offers four case
studies that read Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the science fiction-West-
ern Westworld, King Lear with the satirical dynastic drama of Succession,
Hamlet with the international legal thriller Black Earth Rising, and
Coriolanus with the political thriller Homeland. The final chapter will
bring the insights together, aiming to distil important characteristics of the
emerging adaptational aggregate of ‘serial Shakespeare’.
The four series discussed in my study were selected because their
engagement with Shakespeare covers a broad spectrum of adaptational
strategies that allows for mutually illuminating readings as well as for theo-
retical insights. Westworld, with which I begin, features direct quotations
from several Shakespeare plays including The Tempest. Succession explicitly
refers to a number of Shakespeare plays in its diegesis, but does not directly
mention King Lear. However, the Lear legacy has been highlighted in the
marketing and journalistic reception of the series. Black Earth Rising con-
tains only one direct reference to Shakespeare in a Hamlet allusion at the
very end of the series and has never been marketed or received as
Shakespearean, while Homeland does not refer to Shakespeare at all and
has not been publicised as related to Shakespeare. In the course of examin-
ing the case studies that this study offers, the relation between Shakespeare
and the respective series hence becomes increasingly subtle and debatable,
which raises pertinent questions that are currently discussed in adaptation
studies regarding what is ‘Shakespeare’ and what is ‘not Shakespeare’.1 In
each of the series, I will argue, a particular form of a return is taken over
as a topic from Shakespeare, and at the same time, this serialised form of
return speaks to the series’ adaptational stance: returns of the dead in
Westworld, returns of the predecessor in Succession, returns to the roots in
Black Earth Rising, and returns to the home in Homeland. The four series
were also chosen because they negotiate urgent political and social con-
cerns, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, post-
genocidal and postcolonial justice, and terrorism. They all premiered after
2010, and three of them are ongoing as I complete this manuscript, with
Homeland’s eighth and final season and Westworld’s third season being
broadcast in 2020 and Succession’s third season announced for 2020 or
2021. There are (as yet) no plans for a continuation of the miniseries Black
1 SHAKESPEARE AND COMPLEX TV: “OUR OLD WORK COMING BACK… 3
Earth Rising, the most recent of the series discussed in this study, which
was first aired in 2018.
My study traces the Shakespearean legacy in an aesthetic phenomenon
that has recently gained as much popular as scholarly attention: in TV
series that are characterised by long narrative arcs; large budgets; high
production standards; a cinematographic look; elaborate scripts written by
teams of prestigious authors, many of whom are known for their previous
film work; casts that include well-known actors; and, above all, narrative
complexity and self-reflexivity. The series are typically developed with mul-
tiple seasons in mind, but decisions on their continuation are usually made
during or even after the broadcast of each season, so that season finales
have to be conclusive enough to be the end of the entire series but open
enough to allow for new seasons. As the series can develop their characters
over many episodes, they can offer psychological complexity and depth.
The scripts are responsive, since the authors, directors, producers, and
actors can take into account audience reactions and journalistic criticism in
the writing and filming of later episodes and seasons. Scholars have offered
competing labels to categorise this new kind of TV series, including ‘qual-
ity TV’ (Thompson 1996), ‘prestige TV’ (Bignell 2013), ‘transgressive
television’ (Däwes et al. 2015), and, most influential, ‘complex TV’
(Mittell 2015), Jason Mittell’s term that I will be adopting, too.
Historicising the development, Mittell has shown how the new form of
TV storytelling has spread since the late 1990s, deliberately offering an
alternative to conventional episodic series that require some plot closure at
the end of each episode (2015, 17). Instead, complex TV unfolds cumula-
tive narratives with long story arcs. It experimentally merges established
genres to create new forms; Black Earth Rising’s combination of a legal
thriller with a coming-of-age drama or Westworld’s blending of science
fiction and the Western are typical examples. Mittell notes that serials are
a minority phenomenon, with most television shows still working with
more conventional narrative patterns, but it is one that has gained consid-
erable public attention and cultural capital in recent decades (cf. 31). Such
narrative experiments in the commercial medium of TV became possible
because the number of channels and networks rose and audiences for each
show shrunk. Therefore, shows which attract a small but dedicated audi-
ence have become commercially viable. What is more, the cultural prestige
of particular series has helped to make a channel’s brand seem more
sophisticated (cf. 34). Thus, a commercial for HBO, the channel that has
produced a number of award-winning shows including Succession and
4 C. WALD
Westworld, claimed “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”. Like Shakespeare’s plays,
‘complex’ or ‘quality’ TV is hence situated ambiguously between high-
brow and popular culture. References to Shakespeare frequently function
as markers of high cultural learning while at the same time self-reflexively
raising the question of where the TV show itself belongs in this stratified
notion of culture. In this respect, the series participate in a common post-
modern trend of Shakespearean appropriations, which self-reflexively
negotiate their own status (cf. Lanier 2002). It might be part of this par-
ticipation in Shakespearean ‘high culture’ that the prestige series predomi-
nantly use Shakespeare’s tragedies as references, traditionally the more
esteemed form of dramatic art.
The new trend of serial Shakespeare was prepared by TV and film ver-
sions of Shakespeare that contributed to the fact that many people today
predominantly encounter Shakespeare’s oeuvre through filmic adapta-
tions, which frame the experience of reading the plays or seeing them on
stage (cf. Ryle 2014, 9). Current TV series keep drawing inspiration from
and in turn influence filmic, literary, and theatrical Shakespeare versions in
what can be considered a transmedial transformation of Shakespeare’s
oeuvre. As Douglas Lanier noted ten years ago, “[i]nstead of being par-
ticular texts, ‘Shakespeare’ […] becomes a collection of narratives highly
mobile from context to context, verbal style to style, genre to genre, media
platform to platform” (2010, 107). According to Lanier, after the peak of
Anglophone mass-market Shakespeare films in the 1990s and early 2000s,
“the adaptational energy once associated with Shakespeare on film has
migrated elsewhere” (105). This study argues that the adaptational energy
has partly travelled to complex TV, which offers a new field for fruitful
examinations of the Shakespearean legacy and which has taken up charac-
teristics of the earlier films, such as contemporary settings, modern lan-
guage, revised plots, and a high degree of intertextuality (Cartelli and
Rowe 2007, 2).
Several precursors to the recent phenomenon of complex TV’s serial
Shakespeare can be identified. From 1978 to 1985, all Shakespeare plays
were filmed and broadcast by the BBC and PBS with considerable eco-
nomic success. BBC Television Shakespeare popularised the oeuvre but at
the same time drew attention to the aesthetic challenges of airing
Shakespeare on the small screen while trying to maintain part of the the-
atrical experience, that is, theatrical sets and shots that allow one to see all
interacting characters. Furthermore, the creativity of directors was cur-
tailed by “a strict house style: sets and costumes were to be ‘traditional’
and radical or revisionist interpretations were out of the question” (Purcell

2011, 526). In addition to a wealth of TV productions of particular plays,
the next serial BBC endeavour more innovatively transformed selected
Shakespeare dramas for TV. ShakespeaRe-Told, broadcast in 2005, rewrote
four plays in contemporary English, with topical settings and adapted
plots. The TV project thus participated in a development instigated by
filmic Shakespeares of the 1990s, namely, “to bring Shakespeare in line
with late twentieth-century visual culture and in the process loosen the
equivalence between Shakespeare and text. Through film of this period
Shakespeare became definitively post-textual” (Lanier 2010, 106). In con-
trast to the BBC’s earlier project, the aesthetic aim of ShakespeaRe-Told
was to create works “made for, not translated to, television” (Kidnie 2009,
120) by using techniques that were once regarded as cinematic but which
have by now become typical of ‘quality’ TV, such as “[l]ow lighting, track-
ing shots, extreme close-ups, camera positions strikingly above or below
eye height, digitally enhanced images, and point-of-view shots” (121).
The Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows (2003–2006) dedicated each
of its three seasons to one specific Shakespeare play. In every season, an
artistic team attempts to stage a Shakespeare tragedy (Hamlet, Macbeth,
and King Lear) and find themselves haunted by its plot in their everyday
lives. As Laurie E. Osborne has noted, Slings & Arrows is one of the earli-
est examples of how Shakespearean dramaturgy can be serialised: “Whereas
televising Shakespeare in Britain and the U.S. has most frequently taken
the form of full performances or adaptations of individual plays, Slings &
Arrows embraces the serial nature of television as a medium and deploys
both sequencing and seasons to create a more extensive and sustained
engagement with the problems of intermedial performance” (2011, 2).
The artistic team of Slings & Arrows has acknowledged that examples of
complex TV, specifically The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, inspired their
aesthetic choices and their writing (7). In 2012, BBC Two aired the inter-
national co-production The Hollow Crown, featuring Shakespeare’s second
historical tetralogy as a miniseries, followed in 2016 by The Hollow Crown:
The War of the Roses, which presents the first tetralogy. While The Hollow
Crown uses Shakespearean lines and historical settings, its filmic style
clearly participates in current complex TV and was meant to draw on the
success of historical fiction series such as The Tudors (2007–2010) (Wray
2016; Pittman 2015; Mullin 2018).
Looking at Shakespearean motifs in complex TV, this book is an inter-
vention at the intersection of Shakespeare adaptation studies and m edia/
6 C. WALD
TV studies, two fields which too rarely speak to each other. Not only have
“[a]daptations of Shakespeare’s plays to television […] been a relatively
neglected field of inquiry, despite the commonplace remark that
Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be a cinema or TV scriptwriter”
(Ribeiro de Oliveira 2016, 1807), but also recent publications on complex
TV have paid little attention to Shakespeare. For instance, the collection
Reading Westworld briefly acknowledges the Shakespearean quotes and
allusions of the series, but does not discuss them in any detail (Goody and
Mackay 2019). Therefore, the following chapters seek to initiate a dia-
logue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and serial TV stud-
ies. For instance, the insights into dramaturgical seriality that have been
developed in studies of complex TV such as Mittell’s can be utilised for
Shakespeare studies. Discussing how Shakespearean constellations resur-
face in a serialised manner, that is, in repetitions and variations, this study
proposes that the evident dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV
allows insights into the less pronounced seriality that Shakespeare
employed in structuring his plays. My book thus aims at making a contri-
bution to what Thomas Leitch has projected as ‘Adaptation Studies 3.0’
(2017, 5–7) and to what Stephen O’Neill has called the “media turn” in
Shakespeare studies (2018, 1), which is guided by an awareness “of
Shakespeare as always already existing in and reappearing through media,
as well as an acute recognition that a medium brings to Shakespeare its
own frame effects” (21).
Beyond Westworld, Succession, Black Earth Rising, and Homeland, a
number of other series can be and have been discussed as Shakespeare revi-
sions, among them The Wire (Bronfen 2015b; Pittman 2020), Lost
(Stockton 2011; Barnes 2015; Hatchuel and Laist 2017), Person of Interest
(Hatchuel 2019), Deadwood (Cosby Ronnenberg 2018), House of Cards
(Dyson 2019; Bronfen 2020), Breaking Bad (Cantor 2019), Peaky
Blinders (Fernie and Gibbs 2019), and Game of Thrones (Rodgers 2015).
This list could be extended by taking into account series beyond the
Anglophone sphere, such as the Danish Borgen, which have become part
of the ‘complex TV’ phenomenon. While the shows that this book dis-
cusses are all produced by American and British channels and networks,
they are distributed worldwide via national TV channels, international on-
demand streaming platforms, as well as DVD and BluRay. These new
forms of distribution facilitate complex storytelling as they allow for con-
centrated, uninterrupted, and multiple viewing strategies. As Mittell has
argued, “complex television encourages, and even at times necessitates, a
new mode of viewer engagement” (2015, 52). He calls this active, atten-
tive watching, which sometimes includes online discussions in fan forums
and blogs, “forensic fandom” (52).
The way in which the serials introduce their Shakespearean link also
inspires forensic viewership. For instance, Black Earth Rising places its
only intertextual reference to Hamlet in the penultimate episode, thus
inviting audiences to reconsider, and possibly to rewatch, the action
through this lens. The fact that Succession was promoted as a version of
King Lear even though the series itself never explicitly refers to the play
encourages audiences to actively look out for reverberations of King Lear
in the leadership crises of a twenty-first-century media conglomerate. The
many riddles of Westworld have produced particularly lively viewership
communication in several fan forums. Among the concerns discussed are
the references to Shakespeare, for example in the Westworld Wiki “Literary
References” and the Reddit thread “Shakespeare References in Westworld?”.
These conversations prove that just as in Jonathan Nolan’s earlier TV
series Person of Interest (2011–2016), Shakespeare here functions as “a
narrative clue, an Easter egg with high cultural value, calling for the spec-
tators’ literary knowledge to understand the series’ subtleties and decode
its mysteries” (Hatchuel 2019, 6–7). The interactive engagement with the
Shakespearean legacy of Westworld also demonstrates that we may have to
speak of the ‘Shakespeare user’ rather than the ‘Shakespeare reader’, as
Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes have proposed: “the value of
Shakespeare lies in its usability, in that the texts […] can be broken down
and reassembled by a body of users whose valuation of Shakespeare is
unpredictable and often resistant to pre-conceived notions of cultural
hegemony” (2017, 3–4). The “dialogic opportunities” (4) created by
these uses of Shakespeare include the creators of the series, who adapt
their responsive scripts to the reactions of viewers and who can assess the
knowledgeability of their audience when it comes to the intertextual refer-
ences. As Frank Kelleter puts it, complex TV shows are “evolving narra-
tives: they can register their reception and involve it in the act of (dispersed)
storytelling itself. Series observe their own effects—they watch their audi-
ences watching them—and react accordingly” (2017, 14). Viewers fre-
quently not only watch the series itself but also explainer videos and read
discussions in fan forums, thus pursuing a hyper-watching or hyper-
reading of Westworld that may include its Shakespearean sources.
Homeland includes a particularly striking case of responsiveness. Its
reception was marked not only by speculations about plot twists but also
8 C. WALD
by intense debates about its political stance. In a spectacular intervention

in this debate, viewers of Homeland managed to ‘hack’ the aesthetic code
of the series, smuggling in their own message. For the filming of the sec-
ond episode of the fifth season, when protagonist Carrie Mathison visits a
refugee camp on the Syrian-Lebanese border, the producers asked graffiti
artists able to write in Arabic to give the set “visual authenticity” (Amin),
despite it being filmed in Berlin. The artists Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and
Don Karl a.k.a. Stone used the opportunity as a “moment of interven-
tion” to write sentences like “Homeland is racist”, “Homeland is a joke,
and it didn’t make us laugh”, and “This show does not represent the views
of the artists” on the walls of the refugee camp set (Amin). No one in the
artistic team noticed this, and the episode was broadcast including these
statements by defiant viewers, in whose eyes Homeland offers “thinly
veiled propaganda” that “has maintained the dichotomy of the photoge-
netic, mainly white, mostly American protector versus the evil and back-
wards Muslim threat” (Amin). Showrunner Alex Gansa in turn tried to
present this intervention as part of the dialogue between the artistic team
and viewers that has become characteristic of complex TV: “as Homeland
always strives to be subversive in its own right and a stimulus for conversa-
tion, we can’t help but admire this act of artistic sabotage” (Phipps 2015).
As explained above, the following chapters discuss a variety of adapta-
tional constellations, proceeding from explicit to more uncertain relations
between Shakespeare and the respective series. These constellations help
to explore the foundational question for the study of Shakespearean after-
lives of how we measure Shakespeare’s influence on other artists. Do we
need direct intertextual references, comments by writers themselves, or
other material that proves their knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays? Or can
we assume a more indirect cultural influence of his plays on modern cul-
ture? Should we avoid the risk of obsessive readings that detect
Shakespearean traces in later works simply because we as early modern
scholars are so familiar with his oeuvre, or should we acknowledge that
intertextual relations are created by readers as much as by authors? Christy
Desmet has proposed just this, arguing that “[i]n Shakespeare sightings of
all kinds, what matters is less what the author intended than how a con-
nection to Shakespeare is recognized” (2014, 55). The problematic ques-
tion of influence is further complicated by the fact that it can be hard to
pin down intentions in artistic processes that are not always self-reflexive
and rational. As Homeland’s graffiti has demonstrated, this difficulty is
enhanced by the collaborative writing and production process that
characterises complex TV serials, where auteurism is “an overlapping phe-

nomenon, one that allows for more than one creative approach to be
entertained” (Wray 2016, 471).
The existing models which account for uncertain Shakespearean returns
can generally be divided into models that assume cultural influence (which
scholars uncover and explicate) and models that instead emphasise the
scholar’s own work of bringing historically distant texts together irrespec-
tive of their marked intertextual relation. A prominent example of the first
approach is Marjorie Garber’s work, which accounts for Shakespeare’s
‘uncanny modernity’ by arguing that “the plays, and the high regard for
Shakespeare in the centuries following his death, have created […] ‘mod-
ern’ types as much as they have paralleled or predicted them” (2004, 776).
Garber argues that in modern culture, Shakespeare’s plots have gained a
cultural pervasiveness comparable to myths. Her argument that
“Shakespeare has become the ‘other scene’ (the unconscious) of modern
life” (2008, xxix) can be well applied to Westworld’s above-quoted pilot,
where unconscious, repressed Shakespearean traces of an earlier script, of
a different scenario, return unexpectedly. It also aptly describes the resur-
facing of Hamlet in Black Earth Rising, where someone suggests to the
protagonist that she is performing a Hamletian scene even though she is
not aware of this reenactment. The creative team of Succession have pro-
posed King Lear as ‘the other scene’ of their series, whereas the showrun-
ners of Homeland seem to have returned to the plot and concerns of
Coriolanus unintentionally. Judith Buchanan, in a discussion of the film
Forbidden Planet as an unintentional Tempest adaptation, has argued that
Shakespeare’s plays have taken up and reformed what Carl Gustav Jung
has described as narrative archetypes, which can be transmitted unknow-
ingly: “An individual tale may […] endure through constant recycling
even when a particular telling of it demonstrates no conscious awareness
of its affinity with and contribution to a wider tradition” (2001, 153). Eric
S. Mallin’s study of unmarked revisions of Shakespeare’s plays in current
movies has recently reaffirmed that the “vastness of Shakespeare’s cultural
influence cannot be overstated, because few screenwriters, directors, actors
could possibly be unfamiliar with his best-known works. The thought of
Shakespeare is already present, nearly unavoidable in part or in whole
when certain themes or ideas are entertained” (2019, 237). In their intro-
duction to the collection Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, Christy Desmet,
Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey have likewise acknowledged that
10 C. WALD
“adaptation sometimes works not as a conscious process but as an embed-

ded element within the cultural (un)conscious” (2017, 13).
Lanier has shown how such assumptions can be brought together with
his rhizomatic notion of adaptation, which was inspired by the theory of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It understands each play as a network of
Shakespearean text(s), theatrical productions, film versions, adaptations,
allusions, and interpretations. Rather than claiming a stable archetypical or
universal validity of Shakespeare’s plays, the rhizomatic perspective
assumes that ‘myths’ or ‘archetypes’ can be transformed by their adapta-
tions: “a rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare stresses the power of those
ever-differentiating particulars—specific adaptations, allusions, perfor-
mances—to transform and restructure the aggregated Shakespearean field
into something forever new” (Lanier 2014, 31). The cover image of this
study visualises this understanding of ‘Shakespeare’ as a network of mir-
rors, which connects forms whose shapes and colours change according to
the perspective taken. It is not always easy to tell whether two particular
forms are similar or identical to each other nor whether and how they are
connected in the intricate network created by Shakespearean performances
and texts and the long history of their intermedial adaptations. That parts
of this network are hidden from view, stretching out beyond the frame of
the cover, highlights that there are ample research opportunities to detect
particular relations in the constantly growing adaptational network.
Stanley Cavell, Elisabeth Bronfen, and Graham Holderness, among
many others, have offered models to compare Shakespearean texts to later,
non-Shakespearean ones. Cavell sees Shakespeare’s plays as a “subtext” of
Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s coming together in a cultural
conversation (2003, 144). Bronfen has modified Cavell’s method by con-
necting it to Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicist concept of the circula-
tion of social energies. In comparative readings that she calls
“crossmappings”, she explores figures of thought shared by the texts as a
heuristic practice that assumes the survival of Shakespearean energies, but
does not seek intertextual evidence (2018a, 2). She argues that:
What a transhistorical crossmapping uncovers are not just the lines of con-
nection and correspondences between early and late modern texts, but that
Shakespeare’s meaning returns to us inscribed by and intensified by the his-
tory of his rearticulations. The aesthetic energies emanating from his poetic
refiguration of the cultural anxieties and crises of his own times are both
prior to our contemporary concerns and the product of rethinking our his-
torical moment in light of his plays. (2015a, 255)
Holderness proposes a term that he takes from particle physics, “colli-

sion”, and uses it to describe his comparison of Shakespearean and non-
Shakespearean cultural products, which “in their mutual impact generate
an observable and meaningful pattern” (2014, 18). The rewards of these
alternative methods are remarkably similar. Just as conversations, cross-
mappings, and collisions produce insightful comparative readings, so too
have post-fidelity adaptation studies long demonstrated that Shakespearean
plays and their reworkings are mutually transformative when read in rela-
tion to one another. This is also true for what adaptation scholars have
called ‘found adaptations’ (Cartmell and Whelehan 2010, 18), ‘unmarked
adaptations’ (Lanier 2017, 300), or ‘non-adaptations’ (Mallin 2019), that
is, works that do not signal their adaptational status, as with Homeland.
My readings will make a case for the influence, sometimes unacknowl-
edged and unintentional, of the Shakespearean legacy on the selected TV
series. In all of them, Shakespeare’s plays are a source of dramaturgical,
psychological, and political complexity. Based on new scripts, they only
briefly, if at all, draw on the linguistic richness of the plays. While the
shows are indebted to television naturalism and not interested in non-
realistic early modern theatre practices,2 they partly translate the metathe-
atrical comments of Shakespeare’s plays into metafilmic and metaserial
reflections. By pairing each serial with one particular play in comparative
reading, this study does not try to do justice to the wealth of pretexts—lit-
erary works, films, visual art, political discourse—that most of the TV
series refer to. Adaptation studies have pointed out that adaptations in
general have more than one source (Cartmell and Whelehan 2010, 7), and
for the series selected, this is sometimes also more than one Shakespearean
play. In particular, a late play like The Tempest works like an echo chamber,
recycling and transforming many of the concerns, characters, and formal
devices from Shakespeare’s earlier works. As Richard P. Wheeler has put it:
The development of Shakespeare’s art is repetitive […]. There is nothing

like a clear, linear progression from one work to another or from early work
to late. As in the development of the human psyche, nothing is ever just left
behind in Shakespeare’s art. From the Comedy of Errors and the early history
plays to The Tempest and beyond, characteristic themes, conflicts, relation-
ships, configurations of desire and frustration and fear, are repeated over and
12 C. WALD
over again. But nothing is ever just repeated either. Instead we can watch his
art finding new possibilities in old configurations, and renewing the basis on
which the old configurations exist. […] The Tempest, as very late play, appar-
ently written with a keen self-consciousness of coming near the end of a long
and extraordinary career, is, for all its brevity, remarkably comprehensive in
its reworking of major Shakespearean preoccupations. (2001, 296–297; see
also Bronfen 2018b)
Thus, when reading Westworld through The Tempest, we indirectly engage

with earlier Shakespearean plays interested in similar topics. Fittingly, the
android’s threat quoted above combines a line from Henry IV with a King
Lear citation to express a desire for retribution. The assembled citation
signals that revenge is one of the topics that recur throughout Shakespeare’s
oeuvre and that underpins large parts of the action of The Tempest, too.
Acknowledging the series’ rich intertextual and intermedial engagement
with Shakespeare’s plays and far beyond, I am nonetheless interested in
reading each series from the perspective of one specific Shakespearean play
that, as I will argue, offers a particularly productive foil for
interpretation.
The way in which we understand Shakespeare’s plays today encom-
passes not only the original scripts and Shakespeare’s own sources but also
the ways in which they have been staged, interpreted, adapted, and reme-
diated over the centuries. It is a case in point when, in Westworld’s pilot,
the android remembers Shakespearean lines that he was fed as part of one
of Ford’s narratives. Claiming that it is ‘our old work’ that returns in these
citations, Ford emphasises that it is not the Shakespearean ‘original’, but
Ford’s adaptational repurposing that resurfaces. As visualised on the cover
of this book, each of the following chapters traces one strand in the rhi-
zomatic network between a particular series, a particular Shakespearean
text, and the literary, filmic, and artistic adaptations that are connected to
them and that connect them. As Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona
Wray have emphasised, “it is precisely because of Shakespeare’s prior and
continuing absorption in popular culture that, in filmic guise, his plays are
enabled to broach a spectrum of local and global twenty-first-century con-
cerns” (2006, 8). The link to the rich history of Shakespeare adaptations
is signalled in the breakdown of the android in Westworld’s first episode, a
scenario that raises the concerns of my study in a nutshell: the android
answers Ford’s question, “What is your name?” (1.1.59) with “Rose is a
rose is a rose” (1.1.60), a line taken from Gertrude Stein’s poem “Sacred
Emily” that refers to the moment in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet ponders
the nature of referentiality, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
/ By any other word would smell as sweet” (2.2.43–44). Taking up Juliet’s
concern, Stein’s poem deliberately subverts the difference between proper
names and common nouns (see Rabaté 2007, 106). As this quote indi-
cates, Westworld refers not only to Shakespeare’s plays themselves but also
to the many reimaginations that have been inspired by them.
Focusing on four constellations of one Shakespearean play with one
current TV series, I aim at mutual illumination, at a reconsideration of the
current TV shows from the Shakespearean perspective and, vice versa, at a
re-examination of Shakespeare’s dramas through the lens of their twenty-
first-century adaptations. The Gertrude Stein quote, which is anachronis-
tic for the Western world recreated in the amusement park, points out that
we always perceive the past with an awareness of the present. Readers who
are familiar with Stein’s modernist interest in fragmentation, repetition,
and seriality will read Romeo and Juliet differently, just as viewers of
Westworld will read The Tempest in a particular light. Ford himself com-
ments on such ‘preposterous’ reading strategies when he acknowledges
that the Stein quote is “a bit of an anachronism, but I couldn’t resist”
(1.1.62).3 Similarly, he later dismisses the iterative brutal killing and
reawakening of an android with the (abbreviated) line from Julius Caesar,
“The coward dies a thousand deaths / The valiant taste of death but once”
(1.3.20) before wistfully acknowledging, “Of course Shakespeare never
met a man quite like you, Teddy. You died at least a thousand times. And
yet it doesn’t dull your courage” (1.3.20). Ford here circumspectly argues
that while Shakespeare remains a foil for understanding the present, his
plays have to be seen differently from a twenty-first-century perspective.
Each chapter of this study focuses on a particular mode of return that
connects the early modern play to current concerns. The second chapter
discusses how Westworld takes up the concern of the return from the dead
that underpins Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest, transforming
Prospero’s magic and his interaction with spirits into experiments with
artificial intelligence. The third chapter investigates how recurrent returns
of the predecessor heighten the succession crisis in King Lear and its rei-
magination in the business world of Succession. Focusing on a politically
influential family that owns a global media conglomerate, Succession turns
Shakespeare’s crisis of royal sovereignty into a crisis of democracy. The
fourth chapter discusses the return to roots, exploring how Black Earth
Rising translocates the Hamletian search for its concern with the Rwandan
14 C. WALD
genocide and its international entanglement. The fifth chapter examines

the serial return of the soldier from war, whose homecoming raises anxiet-
ies about the very concept of ‘home’ and the ‘homeland’ in Coriolanus
and Homeland. Shakespeare’s early modern depiction of Roman warfare
and intelligence work here returns for an exploration of the psychological
and political complexities of the US ‘War on Terror’. Each thematic focus
also has meta-adaptational relevance, as the return of the dead, the come-
back of the predecessor who interferes in the activities of the successor, the
search for roots, and the return of a dubious figure with unclear affiliations
all speak to pertinent questions of adaptation theory. In each of the dis-
cussed series, the return of the Shakespearean material marks and furthers
a crisis, and they all redeploy Shakespearean figures of return for issues
that are of direct political and social relevance today. This study seeks to
show that Shakespearean comebacks transform the twenty-first-century
narratives in which they intervene and at the same time afford a new per-
spective on the early modern material. The well-known ‘old work’ appears
fresh and estranged in the brave new worlds to which it returns.
Notes
1. I will discuss this question in more detail below. For an exemplary account
of this question, see the substantial introduction and the contributions to
the collection Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare edited by Christy Desmet,
Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey (Desmet et al. 2017).
2. As Simon Ryle notes in his study of Shakespearean film versions, the ‘this-
ness’ of film, its mostly realistic visuality, “is in direct contrast to the ‘radi-
cally synecdochic’ quality of English Renaissance theatre” (2014, 10).
3. Patricia Parker introduced the term ‘pre-post-erous’ as an analytical cate-
gory for reading early modern plays: “Preposterous—from posterus (after or
behind) and prae (in front or before)—connotes a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre’,
behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for begin-
ning” (1996, 21). Mieke Bal employs the concept of ‘preposterous history’
to describe a “reversal, which puts what came chronologically first (‘pre-’) as
an aftereffect behind (‘post’) its later recycling” (1999, 6–7). Bronfen uses
Bal’s concept for her method of crossmapping (2004, 18).
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CHAPTER 2
The Tempest and Westworld: Returns

of the Dead
The first season of Westworld, created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan and
released in 2016, was the most-watched debut on the prestigious HBO
television network. A second season followed in 2018, and a third has
begun to air in spring 2020 while I am completing this manuscript. The
series was nominated for and won a number of prestigious awards, includ-
ing Primetime Emmys for several actors, the writers, and Nolan as direc-
tor. Reprising Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld, the first season, on
which I will focus in this chapter, is set in a theme park called ‘Westworld’,
which is located on an island, peopled with androids, and offers its cus-
tomers an immersive Western experience. The second season extends its
scope to additional theme parks operated by the same company, Delos
Incorporated, including ‘The Raj’ and ‘Shogun World’, and the third sea-
son depicts the entry of the androids into the human world of the mid-
twenty-first century, where some of them plan to take revenge for their
maltreatment in the parks. In the Westworld park, human customers can
act out their often violent and sexual fantasies within the overarching nar-
ratives scripted by the park’s director. Depicting the interaction between
‘hosts’, as the androids are euphemistically called, and ‘guests’, the series
also focuses on the ‘behind the scenes’ setting of the control centre, where
the robots are created, maintained, and repaired by a technical team led by
Dr Robert Ford. In addition to its star actors, among them Anthony
Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, and Thandie Newton, the
attraction of Westworld mainly stems from its innovative combination of
© The Author(s) 2020 21

C. Wald, Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV, Reproducing
Shakespeare, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4_2
22 C. WALD
established popular genres: the Western, science fiction,1 and the mind-
game films that have gained prominence since the 1990s. A number of
these puzzle films were written by Jonathan Nolan and directed by his
brother Christopher Nolan, such as Memento (2000) (which can be seen
as a rewriting of Hamlet2) and The Prestige (2006). The series reflects on
its appropriation of earlier films and genres in a dense network of intertex-
tual allusions, which include several plays by Shakespeare, among them
Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and The Tempest.
Each of these intertexts offers a particular way of reading Westworld, which
is one of the many hermeneutic pleasures provided by the series.3 This
chapter will argue that the relations between The Tempest and Westworld
are a particularly interesting strand in the intertextual and intermedial net-
work into which the series places itself.
As discussed in the introductory chapter to this study, the first episode
of Westworld, in one of its ‘behind the scenes’ moments, shows how the
alarmed technical team tries to repair a robot who threatens them with
menacing words that turn out to be Shakespearean quotes. Dr Ford, who
had once programmed these lines into the robot’s code and was certain
that they had been deleted, placatingly comments on Shakespeare’s intru-
sion into Westworld’s universe: “no cause for alarm. Simply our old work
coming back to haunt us” (1.1.63). For this study, the notion that
Shakespeare ‘comes back’ in a haunting manner is particularly relevant as
a meta-adaptational comment. It is part of this haunting quality that what
returns in Westworld is not only The Tempest itself but also many of its rei-
maginations,4 among them the 1948 Western Yellow Sky5 and science-
fiction reworkings such as Frankenstein, Brave New World, Forbidden
Planet, and Blade Runner.6
As the rich adaptation history of The Tempest illustrates, its significance
for modern culture stems from the play’s interest in the question of what
defines a human being, asked in the contexts of “colonialism, race rela-
tions, master-slave dynamics, psychoanalysis, cognition and the structure
of the mind, ‘science’ and ‘art’ as (post)magical practices, feminism”, and
evolution (Garber 2008, 4). In Westworld, all of these concerns are recon-
figured in the framework of artificial intelligence. By looking at the latest
technical innovations and their future potential, the series updates the
interest in science that characterises The Tempest and many of its adapta-
tions. Whereas in the play books feature prominently as a medium of
learning, in Westworld it is computers. As Karen Raber has pointed out,
just as the early modern invention of the printing press led to “a seismic
2 THE TEMPEST AND WESTWORLD: RETURNS OF THE DEAD 23
shift in the speed and nature of knowledge transmission” and “promise[d]

a transformation of the very essence of human beings” by offering perma-
nent memory (2018, 130), today’s computational progress raises new
possibilities, too. Westworld’s aspiration to build humanoids can also be
traced back to the early modern interest in lifelike machines. For instance,
the philosophy of Shakespeare’s contemporary René Descartes examined
the border between man and machine: “I do not fail to say that I see the
men themselves […] and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats
and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be
determined by springs?” (2008, 84; cf. Raber 2018, 143). Descartes’ lines
could be seen as an inspiration for Westworld, which derives both suspense
and philosophical interest from an unclear boundary between the human
and the posthuman or between man and machine. In exploring this zone
between the human and the machine, Shakespeare’s lines often work as
test cases in Westworld, sometimes functioning, as Sarah Hatchuel has put
it, “as a weapon of massive humanization” for viewers (2019, 6), who are
invited to feel with the androids as they gradually develop a humanlike
consciousness, emotionality, and the capacity to express themselves beyond
pre-programmed replies. Westworld can thus be placed in a group of cur-
rent literary reconfigurations of The Tempest that focus on the posthuman
and robotic, such as Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), Jeanette
Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), L. Jagi Lamplighter’s
Prospero Lost (2009), Penni Russon’s Undine (2006), Dexter Palmer’s The
Dream of Perpetual Motion (2011), and Carol Matas’ Cloning Miranda
(1999) (cf. Desmet 2018).
As part of their exploration of human (im)mortality, both The Tempest
and Westworld are concerned with the notion that the dead return. This
trope is explored in a number of ways: as returns of those who were
wrongly considered dead, as technological reconstructions of the deceased,
as a psychic process of mourning that entails experiences of loss and resur-
rection, and as self-transformation akin to rebirth. Beyond thematic con-
cerns, The Tempest’s plot patterns, character constellations, and aesthetic
strategies resurface in Westworld, such as a labyrinthine plot that leads to
narrative complexity and an interlacing of past and present, as well as of
different reality levels. The enigmatic quality of The Tempest is enhanced in
Westworld, where viewers have to figure out not only the multiple,
unmarked timelines of the non-linear narrative, but also which characters
are human beings and which are machines—or, in some cases, at which
point human beings were rebuilt as androids.
24 C. WALD
The wealth of Tempest adaptations raises the question of how we can

account for its “extraordinary ability (even by Shakespearean standards) to
translate and be translated” (Hulme and Sherman 2000, xii), which began
as early as the seventeenth century, with Dryden and Davenant’s The
Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, which, like Westworld, multiplies some
of the characters. The Tempest’s intense afterlife certainly stems from the
play’s thematic concerns but also from formal qualities. After The Comedy
of Errors, The Tempest is Shakespeare’s shortest play and perhaps his most
elliptical, leaving a number of questions unresolved in its open ending
(xiii). While the relative brevity of The Tempest might have facilitated its
transportations, its enigmatic qualities inspired a range of interpretations,
and the very quality of creating puzzles makes The Tempest a particularly
appealing source for Westworld. Its puzzle quality is partly due to
Shakespeare’s engagement with audience expectations and discrepant
awareness in his late plays. As Barbara Mowat has argued, the late plays
are structured so that we ourselves are kept unaware of growing patterns.

Shakespeare omits the usual preparatory speeches and scenes, he gives occa-
sional bits of misleading information, he arranges circumstances so that one
piece of action prepares us for no particular action as a consequence. […]
[H]e often leads us astray or springs on us some action for which we are
totally unprepared. The effect created is that of wonder and surprise, rather
than of fulfilled expectations. (1976, 67–77)
Anne Righter’s characterisation of The Tempest has likewise emphasised

that it “is an extraordinarily secretive work of art” (1968, 13), which, “like
an iceberg […] conceals most of its bulk beneath the surface” (14). It
operates through “hidden dimensions” (14) and “depends upon the sup-
pressed and the unspoken” (16). In particular its references to past events
often remain “fragmentary in a way that seems to be deliberately tantaliz-
ing” (16). The Tempest is, effectively, a mind-game play: “Spare, intense,
concentrated to the point of being riddling, The Tempest provokes imagi-
native activity on the part of its audience or readers” (19). Mowat likewise
concludes that The Tempest “makes the audience active participants in the
creation of the aesthetic experience and shifts the effect from the single,
unified, coherent, to the complex, diverse, multiple” (1976, 105). This
form of spectatorship anticipates the forensic fandom triggered by the dra-
maturgically enigmatic Westworld, first aired on a weekly basis, which
invites audiences’ speculation on how the narrative might proceed and led
to intense conversation between dedicated viewers in online forums.
The Tempest is famous for its metatheatrical reflection on the possibili-
ties and dangers of stagecraft. Like Prospero’s insular microsphere that
comments on the theatre which “since medieval times […] had presented
itself as a microcosm, a miniature model of the great cosmic geography,
suitable for stories that dramatized the path through life” (Palfrey and
Smith 2016, 125), Ford’s park functions as a gigantic film set and thus
offers metatelevisual comments. While the name of Shakespeare’s Globe
Theatre signalled its ambition to represent the world, the theme park
called ‘Westworld’ features a particular, fictionalised version of the ‘West’.
The park thus looks back to a historical development which The Tempest
captures in its early stages: the exploration, conquest, and exploitation of
the New World. Accordingly, Leo Marx claims that there is a “genetic
connection between The Tempest and America” (1964, 68) and that the
play prophetically functions as “prologue to American literature” for “the
topography of The Tempest anticipates the moral geography of the
American imagination” (72). Westworld offers its visitors the chance to
interact with the dead in a commercialised, fictionalised version of
America’s formative past, which has gained mythic dimensions and an
immense ideological impact through the Western genre. Rather than hav-
ing the “restorative” effect of the pastoral as Marx sees it in the “course,
back and forth, between our social and our natural (animal) selves” (70),
however, the customers’ exploration of the natural/animal self results in
excesses of sexuality and violence. Trips to the park also cause a confusion
in levels of reality for some visitors, most prominently for William, who
feels more real and alive there than in the outside world. In contrast to the
traditional Western genre, which fed into the “genetic” American myth of
“regeneration through violence” (Slotkin 1992, 352), Westworld depicts
William’s mission as a deluded, destructive quest. Thus, while Westworld
uses the popularity of the Western genre and itself shows violent scenes, it
takes an ambivalent stance towards the Western’s violence and ideology.
Reading The Tempest and Westworld in light of each other, this chapter
will explore how the acts of technological (re)creation are gendered com-
petitions between fathers and mothers, how the dead return as melan-
cholic reanimations, and how both The Tempest and Westworld construct
labyrinthine plot lines that culminate in rebirths at the centre of the maze.
The final subchapter will discuss the meta-adaptational potential of
rebuilding the dead and recycling memory traces.
26 C. WALD
2.1 Male Mothers and the Mnemonic Control

of Monstrous Children
The topic of a return from the dead is established in the first two scenes of
The Tempest, which stage and narrate a number of (pseudo-)deaths fol-
lowed by (metaphorical) rebirths. The opening shows a dramatic ship-
wreck that employed all special effects of the early modern theatre.
Audiences both back then and today are invited to feel with the desperate
victims and thus to share Miranda’s pity. However, it turns out that the
tempestuous opening was an illusion staged by the magician, which in fact
all passengers survived with “not so much perdition as an hair” (1.2.30).
Prospero’s shipwreck spectacle involved merely pseudo-deaths, followed
by equally illusory rebirths for the survivors (Nevo 1987, 132). As the
passengers will notice later with surprise, their clothes are not even blem-
ished by the salt water and in fact look as fresh as when they began their
voyage—a vision of perfect restoration that is taken up in Westworld by the
repairing of injured androids for their next narrative loop.
Prospero’s conversation with Miranda also entails a metaphorical
rebirth of his daughter, as he enlightens her about her origin as the daugh-
ter of the banished Duke of Milan: “my daughter, who / Art ignorant of
what thou art” (1.2.17–18). As Garber has pointed out, this chiasmic
repetition of ‘art’ demonstrates that the daughter’s identity depends on
the father’s “so potent art”, at least in his view (2004, 857). The play, just
like Westworld, juxtaposes ordinary being and magical/technical creation
but simultaneously blurs the boundaries between these states. As Stephen
Orgel has noted, the magic staged in The Tempest expresses “a fantasy
about controlling other people’s minds” (1987b, 51). Prospero makes
Miranda aware of the losses that have shaped her identity: “We witness the
magus equipping his daughter with a new identity by building a surrogate
memory into her” (Walch 1996, 229), to which Miranda reacts as intensely
as Prospero desires. Obeying her father’s hints, she seeks to reenact her
forgotten past and to re-experience her emotions to integrate them into
her sense of self: “I, not rememb’ring how I cried out then, / Will cry it
o’er again. It is a hint / That wrings mine eyes to’t” (1.2.133–5). Prospero
describes the voyage on the small, ill-equipped ship, where he metaphori-
cally gave rebirth to his daughter:
Thou didst smile

Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,

Under my burden groaned, which raised in me
An undergoing stomach to bear up
Against what should ensue (1.2.153–158)
In this widely discussed scene, The Tempest presents a vision of partheno-

genetic fatherhood: Prospero ‘groaned’ under the ‘burden’ of the child
‘raised’ in his ‘stomach’ and finally ‘bore’ his daughter (Adelman 1992,
237; Kahn 1980, 236; Orgel 1984, 4; Thompson 1999, 158; Tribble
2006, 159). He not only establishes himself as the maternal parent giving
birth but also asserts his “intellectual fatherhood” (Penuel 2007, 119),
claiming to have given Miranda a better education on the deserted island
than other heirs apparent (cf. Kahn 1980, 236–237). Miranda’s tears
could be seen as a reinforcement of her new identity, as tears in early mod-
ern England were symbolically tied to “the baptismal waters of birth,
death, and rebirth” (Gallagher 2015, 190).
However, Miranda unexpectedly interrupts Prospero’s rhetorical self-
fashioning when she responds to his inaugural rhetorical question:
Prospero 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.
Miranda Certainly, sir, I can. […] ‘Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?
Prospero Thou hadst, and more, Miranda; but how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time? […] (1.2.38–50)
Critics have focused on this retrieved memory of a female nurturing pres-

ence in Milan from “the dark backward and abysm of time” because it
offers an alternative to Prospero’s subsequent tale about male rivalry and
his exclusive parenthood (Tribble 2006, 156; Penuel 2007, 124). As Lina
Perkins Wilder has argued, “[t]he ‘table of [Miranda’s] memory’ contains
the closest thing to a female community that a girl could have who was
28 C. WALD
raised by her father on an island without other female inhabitants”

(2010, 178).
While Miranda presents herself as a naive and unaspiring daughter in
her line “More to know / Did never meddle with my thoughts”
(1.2.21–22), she also indicates a more inquisitive attitude, since she fre-
quently undertook “a bootless inquisition” to learn more about her his-
tory (1.2.35). Accordingly, Prospero stops further inquiries by magically
making her fall asleep, thus enacting a metaphorical version of the death
and reawakening scenarios that the exposition is concerned with
(1.2.184–186). Once Miranda has fallen asleep, Prospero can meet his
second child, Ariel, who remains invisible to all other characters. Their
conversation mirrors the previous encounter because Prospero, in another
retrospective narration, reminds Ariel of his metaphorical rebirth. Prospero
liberated Ariel, who had been confined to a pine tree by Sycorax, on the
condition that he would serve Prospero just as long as he served Sycorax,
for twelve years. The way Prospero phrases this liberation—that he has to
make the mother’s pine “gape” to “let […] out” the child (1.2.292–293)—
has been interpreted as another pseudo-birth (Adelman 1992, 237;
Sundelson 1980, 39). The father who embodies the motherly might have
been a reference to James I, who called himself in his treatise Basilikon
Doron “a loving nourish father” who provides “their own nourish-milk”
for the Commonwealth (James I 1918, 24; see Orgel 1987b, 38). After
the long regency of Elizabeth I, who had presented herself as the virginal
mother of her subjects, James tried to ‘repaternalise’ the political and
social spheres. He emphasised that each father was head of his family, just
as the king is father of the nation: “Kings are compared to fathers in fami-
lies: for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people”
(1918, 307). In the final part of the scene, Caliban appears, whom, accord-
ing to Prospero, Sycorax conceived by mingling with the devil. If The
Tempest was informed by James I’s writing on witchcraft, as Ernest
B. Gilman has argued, then Caliban is in effect the son of a dead man.
James’ speculations in his Daemonologie, “as to whether the devil comes to
his witchly paramours ‘onelie as a spirite, and stealing out the sperm of a
dead bodie, abuses them that way’ or whether ‘he borrowes a dead bodie’
and so appears to them ‘visiblie’” (qtd in Gilman 2007, 105), add context
to the play’s interest in the return of the dead.
Exiled from Algiers when pregnant, Sycorax is the mirror image of
Prospero, the likewise exiled magician who metaphorically gave birth en
route to the island. Prospero replaced Sycorax as ruler of the island and
parent of both Ariel and Caliban. Their history began as a friendly adop-
tion of the orphaned Caliban by Prospero, who treated him “with humane
care” and “lodged” him in his “own cell” (1.2.345–346). These refer-
ences certainly indicate that Prospero nurtured and educated Caliban, and
the image of ‘lodging’ him in the ‘cell’ might continue the birth metaphor
as another “womblike reference” (Penuel 2007, 123). Like Miranda’s
unexpected memory of Milanese women, Caliban’s recollection of his
mother belongs to the “irrepressible revenants” that trigger his rebellion
against Prospero (Wilder 2010, 172): “this island’s mine, by Sycorax my
mother” (1.2.332). While Prospero envisions the relationship between
Sycorax and himself as a contrast between coercive mother and benevolent
father, between “foul witch” (1.2.258) and white magician, their division
is in fact precarious enough to make Sycorax Prospero’s “off-stage neme-
sis” (Buchanan 2014, 339; see also Adelman 1992, 237). The series of
encounters between Prospero and his ‘children’ thus illustrates Prospero’s
far-reaching mnemonic manipulation, which he will take further when he
directs the fortunes of the shipwrecked passengers. As Andrew Hiscock
has argued, “his symbolic practice of remembering is disciplinary in
nature” (2011, 2). Prospero “seeks to control those around him by care-
fully monitoring the relationships between memory and epiphany”, pro-
viding “only restricted access to the changeful materials of the past” (2).
The opening of the play calls attention to the underlying seriality of the
plot and reveals that Shakespeare’s title itself harbours seriality: the epony-
mous opening tempest is a restaging of a storm twelve years earlier that
brought Prospero and Miranda to the island. The title thus sets the stage
for the ensuing action: seemingly original events, like the tempest, turn out
to be fabricated repetitions of earlier incidents, with decisive modifica-
tions. As critics have shown, “[r]epetitions and inversions are […] the
dramatic and theatrical code of The Tempest” (Kott 1977, 30), the plot
pattern of which is shaped by “numerous reappearances and repetitions.
Nearly everything that happens (or threatens to happen […]) echoes the
past” (Baldo 1995, 131). Neill likewise comments on the “elaborate motif
of repetition which reflects the designs of Prospero as memorial-dramatist.
A series of usurping conspiracies, of possessions and dispossessions, of
bereavements and restorations, of shipwrecks and rescues, combines to
suggest a kind of time in which the past is not merely re-enacted, but actu-
ally re-directed, made new” (1983, 46–47; see also Garber 2004, 857 and
Boğosyan 2012, 48). This inherent seriality makes The Tempest particularly
interesting as a foil for a current complex TV series.
30 C. WALD
The exposition of Westworld shares aesthetic choices with The Tempest

as well as the thematic interest in pseudo-births and resurrections, of being
made to fall asleep and wake up, of the relation between memory and
identity. As it fits the overall multiplication tendency, the series presents
two potential Prospero characters, Arnold Weber and Robert Ford, the
co-founders of the park. As I will argue, it privileges Ford as the Prospero
equivalent, while Arnold is associated with Antonio and Sycorax. The
series also introduces a multiplied father-daughter narrative that in many
ways reflects Prospero and Miranda’s encounter. It starts with a black
screen and Arnold’s voice saying, “Bring her back online” (1.1.1). The
very beginning of the series makes viewers wake up into the narrative
together with the android Dolores. It also signals repetitiveness and
rebirth, as Arnold speaks of ‘bringing back’. And indeed, the series will
repeat this device again and again: with one exception, every episode of
the first season begins with a close-up of the face of a character who is
subsequently woken up.7 In the first shot, we see Dolores, naked, sitting
lifeless in the lab. The camera zooms in on her eyes, and we can see a fly
walking across her eyeball. Concomitantly, we listen to the ensuing voice-
over dialogue between Arnold and Dolores, professedly taking place in a
dream, in which Dolores claims never to have questioned the nature of her
reality. Just like the Tempest’s opening storm, the series thus sets up the
epistemological challenge to differentiate between levels of dream, waking
life, reality, and make-believe. Westworld, however, inverts the order in
which illusion and reality are staged.
This inversion is part of the series’ overall interest in puzzles, which
exceeds the enigmatic qualities of The Tempest. While the opening sci-fi
‘dream’ scenario turns out to be real, the next scene showing Dolores’
morning in a realistic manner is part of the theme park’s scripted illusion.
The dialogue spills over to Dolores waking up in her bed on the farm and
beginning her daily routine in her professedly unquestioned reality, which,
to her mind, “has an order” and “a purpose” (1.1.3). Dolores perceives
creation anew every morning, and in this sequence, audiences do so with
her. While initially they can only see the beauty of the impressive Western
landscape, viewers are gradually made to understand why other people, as
Dolores reports, would see “the ugliness in this world” (1.1.2). Asked by
Arnold’s voice-over what she thinks of the guests, Dolores answers, “at
one point or another, we were all new to this world. The newcomers are
just looking for the same thing we are: a place to be free, to stake out our
dreams. A place with unlimited possibilities” (1.1.3). Audiences at this
moment are newcomers, too, and the narrative space of Westworld still has
unlimited possibilities for them. Invoking the American dream of the fron-
tier, Dolores’ statement emphasises her desire to be free, to explore unlim-
ited possibilities—a desire that contradicts the determined, repetitive
quality of her life. Viewers next see Dolores running errands in the town
of Sweetwater, where she drops a can of ‘Maiden Milk’ that is picked up
by a young cowboy called Teddy. This is the first of a series of such encoun-
ters between Dolores and men eager to help—an invitation to guests to
become involved in her narrative. In a voice-over, Dolores is asked whether
she perceives any repetitions in her world, but Dolores instead emphasises
her constant fascination and sense of wonder, much like her equivalent
Miranda: “I never cease to wonder at the thought that any day the course
of my whole life could change with just one chance encounter” (1.1.6).
Yet audiences will soon learn that Dolores hardly has any chance encoun-
ters and that she is caught in repetitive narrative loops that allow only for
minimal variation.
The first episode enacts the repetitiveness of Dolores’ life by replaying
her morning routine four times, using the same filmic material for many
shots. While this technique makes audience experience iteration, it also
draws attention to the variations in the narrative loops. Dolores’ oblivious-
ness to this reenactment makes her similar to Miranda, who is not aware
of repetitive structures either, as the exposition demonstrates when
Miranda takes the renewed tempest as singular and original, not knowing
about her own former experience of a storm (cf. Baldo 1995, 131).
Watching the serialised narrative of Westworld, audiences do remember
past events and their initial sense of wonder as ‘newcomers’ to the fictional
world turns into a sense of horror when Dolores’ parents and Teddy are
killed and Dolores is raped by the Man in Black. However, her voice-over
(taken from the lab situation) comments on these gruesome scenes in
ignorant Miranda-mode, praising “how beautiful this world can be”
(1.1.13). Dolores struggles to maintain her blissful ignorance in the first
episode. When her father, Peter Abernathy, finds a photograph taken out-
side the Western park in a twenty-first-century urban setting, he begins to
question the nature of their reality and has motoric and linguistic malfunc-
tions because of his confusion. While he himself realises that this is “a
question you are not supposed to ask” (1.1.44), which gives “you an
answer you are not supposed to know” (1.1.44), his daughter reacts to the
photograph with the programmed standard disavowal, “This doesn’t look
like anything to me” (1.1.32). Abernathy scares Dolores with various
32 C. WALD
off-script Shakespearean quotations, including the Tempest line, “Hell is

empty and all the devils are here” (1.1.45), the desperate exclamation by
Ferdinand when his ship is destroyed in the play’s opening (as reported by
Ariel). Like Ferdinand, Abernathy senses a ‘supernatural’ presence, as
creatures belonging to an alternative reality interfere in mundane matters.
Taken to the control centre, Abernathy is interrogated by Ford and his
team. Here, he utters further threats, including King Lear’s chiding of his
ungrateful daughters: “I will have such revenges on you both / That all
the world shall—I will do such things—/What they are yet I know not,
but they shall be / The terrors of the earth” (1.1.59). Similar to Caliban,
who confronts Prospero, “You taught me language and my profit is I
know how to curse” (1.2.364–365), Abernathy utilises the lines that he
was fed by his creators against them.
Like Miranda, Dolores is made to fall asleep in the series’ exposition to
keep her ignorant. Brought to the park’s control centre for a maintenance
check with largely the same questions and answers as in the opening scene,
she is also questioned about her father’s aberrant behaviour. When Dolores
is asked what Abernathy whispered in her ear, she reports “These violent
delights have violent ends” (1.1.61), a line from Romeo and Juliet. The
flashback, however, shows that Abernathy must have said more than that.
Like Miranda in conversation with Prospero, Dolores here has an unex-
pected and secret memory, which she, however, does not share with her
interlocutor and which the flashback only makes visually available to the
audience. We are left wondering how Abernathy introduced, continued,
explained, or questioned the quotation. Did he enlighten his daughter
about their condition and infect her with his desire for revenge?8 The
series suggests that the line works like an algorithmic input that has con-
sequences for the androids’ actions. It later turns out that it is not only
metaphorically but also literally used as a computational command: when
Arnold merges Dolores’ and Wyatt’s codes, audiences can briefly see the
input “these violent delights have violent ends” uploaded into Dolores’
program. Accordingly, Arnold utters the phrase just before Dolores shoots
him, and Bernard, his replacement built by Ford, repeats it before Dolores
kills Ford. In the early stage of the series, however, audiences still wonder
whether Abernathy infected Dolores with his anger. If Abernathy did,
then the next narrative loop at first seems to painfully demonstrate Dolores’
obliviousness to her father. When she addresses him on the next morning
with her standard greeting, a different android has taken his role, but
Dolores seems to perceive this new android as her dearly loved father, with
whom she proceeds to interact according to the script. The final shots,
however, question her obliviousness and naivety. While she declares to the
interviewer, “I know that things will work out the way they are meant to”
(1.1.64), she kills a fly. This contradicts her earlier claim that she could
never hurt a living thing and makes audiences question how things are
actually meant to work out.
The first episode thus opens up a spectrum for Dolores’ character
between naive wonder and disabused horror, between forgetful innocence
and knowing vengefulness, between absolute obedience and manipulative
trickery. This double nature is due to her twofold function in Westworld’s
Shakespearean character constellation: Dolores not only corresponds to
Miranda, the loving and obedient daughter with the “signature affect” of
wonder (Lupton 2000, 2), but also to Caliban, the resentful and ‘mon-
strous’ slave, who is, like Dolores, “[h]umanoid without being quite
human” (Fiedler 1972, 234). This amalgamation is etymologically
grounded: “[a]t their roots, before the word ‘monster’ takes on the notion
of deformity, both of these words [‘Miranda’ and ‘monster’] signify some-
thing ‘marvelous’” (Cheyfitz 1991, 171). The mission of this monstrous-
marvellous daughter goes beyond the task that she might have been given
by Abernathy. Dolores is an obedient daughter on a deeper level, too, as is
implicated from episode two onwards, when she repeatedly hears an inter-
nal voice that directs her actions. The series reveals that Dolores was built
by Arnold as his Miranda-like innocent daughter but was later merged
with a newly created character, the archvillain Wyatt, in order to carry out
Arnold’s posthumous revenge. Westworld here quite literally amalgamates
Miranda and the monster into the hybrid character of Dolores.
The idea of mnemonic control by the magician/scientist in The Tempest
encompasses the installation as well as the erasure of memories. Westworld
takes up this idea and repeatedly shows the technicians uploading specific
memories to the androids’ software. For example, Ford tells Teddy a story
of a villain named Wyatt. When Teddy inquires who Wyatt is, Ford presses
“Upload host narrative” on his tablet, and when he asks, “do you remem-
ber now, Teddy?” (1.3.20), audiences share a (pseudo-)flashback to Wyatt,
thus misguiding Teddy—but also the audience, who sees a male soldier
rather than Dolores, Wyatt’s true incarnation. The scene demonstrates
Ford’s control over the memories of both the androids and the audience.
In addition to this confusion of levels of reality, the series puts audiences
in the same situation as the robots when it comes to temporal disorienta-
tion. The androids perceive all memories with the same immediacy and
34 C. WALD
sensual qualities as events in the present, and so do audiences who often

cannot judge on which temporal level scenes take place. Ford’s control
thus exceeds the androids and potentially involves us as viewers, who are
invited to question our own perceptions and meaning-making in the epis-
temological labyrinth of Westworld. Directing the repetitive narratives
within the park and reflecting on its principles of seriality, Ford has a
metatelevisual and metaserial role that remediates Prospero’s metatheatri-
cal function.
The final episode of Westworld’s first season depicts the creation of
Dolores by Arnold, a scenario that makes The Tempest’s metaphorical
vision of parthenogenetic fatherhood come true: Arnold constructs and
wakes up Dolores on his own, and their first encounter is a scene of mutual
wonder and adoration. Like Prospero, Arnold has, in a sense, reborn his
child, as Dolores replaces his dead son Charlie, but he is also reborn as a
father, just as Prospero is given a second chance after baby Miranda
renewed his will to live.9 The soundtrack of the (re)birth scene is Claude
Debussy’s “Rêverie L. 68”, Charlie’s favourite lullaby. The daughter wakes
up to the same piece of music the son fell asleep to. And just like Miranda,
Dolores perceives this gaze into “the dark backward and abysm of time”
as a reverie. To a blank screen and the subsequent images of a half-built
Dolores, while Arnold is still spreading and modelling her skin on the
prosthetic construction, we hear her voice-over: “I am in a dream. I do
not know when it began or whose dream it was. I know only that I slept a
long time. And then one day I awoke. Your voice is the first thing I remem-
ber” (1.10.1). The scene also perfects Prospero’s vision insofar as the
father’s voice is indeed the daughter’s first memory. Unlike Miranda,
Dolores does not harbour primary memories of a female presence. The
previous episodes show how their relationship continues with Arnold’s
passionate education of his daughter whom he eventually guides to
humanlike consciousness, akin to Prospero’s exceptional training of his
princess daughter. By letting audiences gradually understand the order of
the series’ multiple time levels, it turns out that this process of maturation
is cyclical and that it has continued after Arnold’s death, which actually
happened thirty-five years ago.
Miranda’s increasingly disabused view of her world is taken to extremes
in Dolores’ violent rites of passage. Her name not only indicates her
instrumentalisation as an animate ‘doll’, her economic exploitation as
‘dollars’, and her ‘dolorous’ fate10 but also her resulting outstanding
capacity to gain humanlike consciousness. As Ford explains, “The thing
that led the hosts to their awaking: suffering. The pain that the world is
not as you want it to be” (1.10.74). Dolores, she who suffered most, is
thus also the first to gain consciousness, only to be deprived of this aware-
ness and to be sent back to her dolorous narrative loops. The series invokes
a cathartic notion of suffering in line with the Western’s myth of regenera-
tion through violence, but it does not entirely validate it. The sexualised
violence that Dolores repetitively undergoes heightens the question that
critics already raised for The Tempest: “what kind of pleasure can a woman
and a feminist take in this text beyond the rather grim one of mapping its
various patterns of exploitation?” (Thompson 1999, 165). As Nussbaum
has remarked in her review of Westworld, as “an exploitation series about
exploitation”, the unresolved question of whether the series partakes in or
criticises its depiction of sex and violence “is a meta-cliffhanger with its
own allure” (2016; see also Wilkins 2019).
Revolving around male, technological acts of (re-)creation, Westworld’s
Dolores plot marginalises mothers in an even more radical manner than
Shakespeare’s play but makes the mother return with a vengeance in
Maeve’s narrative, which I will discuss below. Miranda’s mother is men-
tioned only briefly, as an epitome of virtue, thus guaranteeing Prospero’s
fatherhood. The fate of Ferdinand’s absent mother is never discussed.
Miranda’s unexpected memory of female nurturing in Milan thus opposes
the repression of the motherly that characterises the entire drama.
Accordingly, the play’s powerful mother figure, Sycorax, is a demonised
off-stage presence. As discussed above, the exposition of The Tempest
introduces the metaphorical connection of magic spells and birth, thus
presenting the paternal magic/science as an equivalent to the female
capacity to give birth. When Prospero reminds Ariel of how Sycorax
imprisoned him in “knotty entrails” (1.2.277), he evokes the symbolic
understanding of childbirth as an act of untying. That the mother binds
her child (or, vice versa, that the mother is bound by or to the child), who
has to be untied, delivered, by the father in the birth act, is part of the
symbolic heritage of knots (Biedermann 1992, 198).11
The Tempest hyperbolically strengthens this idea of the binding mother
by making this particular mother a ‘foul witch’ who has the magical power
to knot free creatures into perpetual confinement. As David Sundelson has
argued in a psychoanalytic reading of the play, “[t]he passage […] lets us
imagine a mother whose ultimate punishment is permanent imprisonment
in a constricting womb” (1980, 39). As part of the posthumous magic
competition with Sycorax that pervades the play, Prospero here models
36 C. WALD
himself as the better magician, who is able to use techniques of both

(maternal) binding and (paternal) unbinding and who creates and resolves
more sophisticated magic knots than Sycorax. It is part of this sophistica-
tion that he employs not only acts of physical tying but also emotional
binding. For instance, Ariel serves Prospero because of his “bond of grati-
tude” (Schalkwyk 2008, 100) before the promised parturition: once
Prospero’s “labours” have ended, Ariel will experience the “air at free-
dom” (4.1.264–265).12
Westworld, too, marginalises mother figures. Ford lives on his own and
Arnold’s wife is never present at Charlie’s bedside in flashbacks. When
Bernard accesses his first memories, the image of his wife during a video
phone call is superimposed by Ford’s face for a split second—possibly sug-
gesting that his wife never existed but is a fabricated memory uploaded by
Ford (Renfro 2016). The scenes in Dolores’ parental home repeatedly
stop short of showing her mother. For example, when Dolores desperately
calls for her, the narrative cuts to a different scene before the mother
appears. Even when her mother is killed, her corpse is hardly visible,
whereas Dolores cries next to her father’s body. When Teddy is about to
turn the mother’s body to examine her, the shot is cut again just before we
see the mother’s face. Thus, just as Shakespeare’s play neglects and vilifies
mothers in the dialogue and relegates them to the off-stage space, the
visual dramaturgy of Westworld cuts mothers off. This effacing of the
mother is so evident that viewers have discussed the question in fan
forums, pondering on the potential significance of this marked absence.13
A closer look at Arnold’s multiple roles shows that the repression of the
mother in Westworld’s Dolores narrative is taken even further than in The
Tempest, as Arnold adopts not only Antonio’s function but also Sycorax’s.
Therefore, Westworld does not stage a competition between mother and
father, between female ‘witchcraft’ and male ‘magic’, but between two
rivalling paternal technicians.
Mothers do return, however, in perverted, monstrous forms in Dolores’
narrative, akin to the visualisations in film versions of The Tempest which
have filled the void of absent mothers in the play. For example, Derek
Jarman’s film The Tempest (1979) presents Sycorax as a monstrous, lactat-
ing mother, who breastfeeds the adult, naked Caliban and then attempts
to force the equally naked, enchained Ariel to her breast. In Greenaway’s
version, Prospero’s Books (1991), audiences see Sycorax as a bald creature
in the process of giving birth to pig-snouted Caliban. The belly of
Prospero’s pregnant wife is folded open to reveal her organs and womb,
signalling her death in childbirth (see Brataas 2017). Just like Westworld,
the films follow a pattern identified by Janet Adelman: “In the character-
istic way of the return of the repressed, […] the excision of the mother
that seems initially to allow for a fantasy of male parthenogenesis ends by
releasing fantasies far more frightening than any literal mother could be”
(1992, 104). The scene of Mrs Abernathy’s murder is a case in point.
When two androids kill Dolores’ parents, they spill milk on the dead bod-
ies, where it intermingles with blood, thus blending imagery of birth,
nurture, and death. Afterwards, they kill all robots they encounter, again
pouring milk on their corpses. When one of the killers eventually drinks
the milk himself, it leaks through the wounds in his body, thus creating the
image of a murderous, male lactating mother (1.1.38). This perverse
notion of motherhood is reinforced when one killer takes the bottle to the
corpse of his comrade, which is already surrounded by several empty milk
bottles, and feeds him, repeatedly shouting “You’re a growing boy”
(1.1.38). This moment of nourishing a corpse in a motherly fashion is
frozen in a tableau vivant by the arrival of the technicians. In the next
sequence, the creation of a new robot is shown, whose model emerges
from a milky liquid, dripping, to the voice-over of Ford saying, “So our
creatures have been misbehaving” (1.1.40). He watches the machines
adding muscles to the new model and philosophises about his triumph
over evolution. The motherly monstrosity of the previous scenes is thus
related to Ford’s technological accomplishment, which likewise imitates
(and, possibly, perverts) the female activity of giving birth and nurturing
with mother’s milk.
As the father’s creation involves continued power over his creatures, the
play and the series set up two opposed, gendered notions of creation: the
biological, female act of delivering a child and the technological, male act
of building a bound creature. The male act of creation has religious over-
tones, invoking Genesis in both The Tempest and Westworld. As Julia
Reinhard Lupton has pointed out, the word ‘creature’ is derived from the
future active participle of the Latin verb creare, with the suffix -ura speci-
fying “that which is about to occur”: “creature indicates a made or fash-
ioned thing but with the sense of continued or potential process, action,
or emergence built into the future thrust of its active verbal form” (2000,
1). Therefore, the creature is not a finished and thus independent product,
but “a thing always in the process of undergoing creation; the creature is
actively passive or, better, passionate, perpetually becoming created, sub-
ject to transformation at the behest of the arbitrary commands of an
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Shakespeares Serial Returns in Complex TV 1St Edition Christina Wald All Chapter

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Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in

Complex TV 1st Edition Christina Wald

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns

Editorial Board Members: Gina Bloom (University of California, Davis);

More information about this series at

ISSN 2730-9304 ISSN 2730-9312 (electronic)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: Mina De La O, Getty Images

1 Shakespeare and Complex TV: “Our Old Work Coming

2 The Tempest and Westworld: Returns of the Dead 21

3 King Lear and Succession: Returns of the Predecessor 83

4 Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots137

5 Homeland and Coriolanus: Returns of the Soldier187

6 The Serial Shakespeare Aggregate: “This is Your World.

Shakespeare and Complex TV: “Our Old

In the first episode of Westworld, the administration of an amusement park

© The Author(s) 2020 1

quality of the Shakespearean legacy? Do the Shakespearean returns help us

and radical or revisionist interpretations were out of the question” (Purcell

by intense debates about its political stance. In a spectacular intervention

characterises complex TV serials, where auteurism is “an overlapping phe-

“adaptation sometimes works not as a conscious process but as an embed-

Holderness proposes a term that he takes from particle physics, “colli-

The development of Shakespeare’s art is repetitive […]. There is nothing

Thus, when reading Westworld through The Tempest, we indirectly engage

genocide and its international entanglement. The fifth chapter examines

Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2004. “Einleitung: Cross-Mapping und der Austausch sozialer

Fazel, Valerie M and Louise Geddes. 2017. “Introduction: The Shakespeare

Mallin, Eric S. 2019. Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2011. “Lost, or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing

The Tempest and Westworld: Returns

© The Author(s) 2020 21

shift in the speed and nature of knowledge transmission” and “promise[d]

The wealth of Tempest adaptations raises the question of how we can

are structured so that we ourselves are kept unaware of growing patterns.

Anne Righter’s characterisation of The Tempest has likewise emphasised

2.1 Male Mothers and the Mnemonic Control

Thou didst smile

When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,

In this widely discussed scene, The Tempest presents a vision of partheno-

Prospero Canst thou remember

Critics have focused on this retrieved memory of a female nurturing pres-

raised by her father on an island without other female inhabitants”

The exposition of Westworld shares aesthetic choices with The Tempest

off-­script Shakespearean quotations, including the Tempest line, “Hell is

sensual qualities as events in the present, and so do audiences who often

himself as the better magician, who is able to use techniques of both

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

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Section 4. Information about Donations to

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

Section 5. General Information About Project

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

You might also like

1 Shakespeare and Complex TV: “Our Old Work Coming

2 The Tempest and Westworld: Returns of the Dead 21

3 King Lear and Succession: Returns of the Predecessor 83

4 Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots137

5 Homeland and Coriolanus: Returns of the Soldier187

6 The Serial Shakespeare Aggregate: “This is Your World.

off-script Shakespearean quotations, including the Tempest line, “Hell is