Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare the Thinker.

I. “Introduction: Time-bound Shakespeare, Timeless Shakespeare” (pp. 1-

 “Hamlet is a prolonged meditation on self-destruction, haunted by the shade of a dead

father, transfixed by the image of a drowned, innocent woman” (p. 4).

Huang, Alexa. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by

Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014.

I. “Introduction”

 Questions about the appropriation of Shakespeare (p. 1)

a. How does Shakespeare make other cultures legible to Anglo-American
audiences?
b. What does it entail for the British media to judge touring productions of
Shakespeare from around the world?
c. What roles do non-Western identities, aesthetics, and idioms play in the rise of
Shakespearean cinema and theater as global genres?
d. To what extent do non-Western Shakespearean productions act as fetishized
commodities in the global marketplace?

 Significance of the study: “In an age when Shakespeare is increasingly globalized,

diversified, spread thin, and applied in service of a multitude of agendas, it is more
urgent than ever to analyze the ethical ramifications, byproducts, and problems that
inevitably attend such appropriations” (2).
 Definition of terms
Shakespeare- “a signifier with rich and unstable connotations”
Ethics

-1-
 a. “focus on how human beings should act and treat one another, and in particular,
what constitutes a good action” (2);
b. “in our contemporary context, ethics are often interpreted specifically in terms of
a responsibility to cultural otherness” (2)

Appropriation
a. “introduces difficult questions about the relationship between Shakespeare and
ethics” (2)
b. “with its connotations of aggressive seizure and forced possession, it might
suggest that Shakespeare is a signifier that can be seized and deploed---against
Shakespeare’s will, as it were” (2)
c. ”To borrow from Diana Henderson, we could also say that Shakespeare
‘collaborates’ with and intervenes in appropriations” (2)
d. “Precisely because appropriation carries strong overtones of agency, potentially
for the appropriated as well as for the appropriator, it can convey political,
cultural, and in our contention, ethical advocacy” (2).

Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” Shakespeare

and the Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin.
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014, pp. 21-

 Shakespeare criticism in twentieth century was preoccupied with the quest to “establish
and reserve an ‘authentic’ Shakespeare text” (21).
o “The reigning assumption has been that the source of Shakespeare’s greatness is
to be identified with the verbal particularities of his scripts, which as we scholars
are obliged to cherish, explicate and place in historical context” (21).
o Professional Shakespearean scholarship became “the professionalization of
Shakespearean editing in the late nineteenth century and the concomitant
demotion of biographical criticism’s prestige” (21).
o “The critical descent of Shakespeare the man enabled the ascent of Shakespeare
the text” (21).

-2-
 “Many have argued that a single definitive Shakespearean text is largely a critical
will o’ the wisp because the documents we have received from the past suggest the
fluid, ever-unfinished state of many plays” (22).
 “The newfound interest in adaptations of Shakespeare is in some ways, then, a
response to restlessness with historicisms new and old” (22).
o “New Historicism’s own preferred modes of engagement with the present,
conducted either through shadow-boxing (using a reading of the past to
engage the present) or through acknowledging the historian’s situatedness
in the present in what is too often little more than a pre-emptive defense
against the charge of insufficient historical self-consciousness” (22).
o “By contrast, cultural materialist readings have always been explicit about
their political aims – their interest in laying claim to the authority of the
past in order to change the present. Yet by exposing the ideological
investedness and discursivity of accounts of the past, they have run into
difficulty with grounding the authority of any appeal to history” (22).

 “The rise in study of Shakespearean adaptations also has multiple origins” (22).
o “It takes sustenance from postmodern reconception of the relationship
between originals and (re)productions” (22).
 “we are now in an age of post-fidelity” (22)
o “adaptation studies have been catalyzed by an accelerated transcoding of
Shakespeare from theater and book to mass media, pop cultural, and digital
form” (22).
 Thesis Statement: “Foregrounding the trope of adaptation, I argue, offers a useful
way forward, a means for reconceptualizing Shakespeare as a disciplinary field,
but only if we revisit the role of the Shakespearean text and the authority it seems
to provide in relation to adaptation” (23).
 Assumptions in the study of Shakespeare and its adaptations:
o “still begins with the proposition that adaptations should be read against the
“original,” that they are supplemental to or dependent upon “real”
Shakespeare, and that the point of criticism is to place such works in
relationship to their originary source, which stands outside them” (23).
o “But far too often the work of comparing Shakespearean scripts to adapta-
tions fosters the illusion that (re)producers of Shakespeare engage directly
and primarily with originary Shakespearean texts rather than with a much
more inchoate and complex web of intervening adaptations or, just as
impor- tant, with the protocols – formal and ideological – of genres and
media that have little to do with the Shakespearean text” (23).
o “To put the matter succinctly, pedagogical practice situates the closely read
Shakespearean text as the origin and ultimate point of return of the adap-
tational process and thereby reinforces the secondary, derivative nature of
adaptation” (23).
 Problems in adaptation studies

-3-
 o “However, one problem of the appropriative model is that it tends to reify the
very cultural authority it purports to contest.6 In practice, accounts of
Shakespearean appropriation too often imagine a process in which
Shakespeare’s legitimat- ing power remains remarkably stable as it is snatched
back and forth between cultural groups in a zero-sum political game of “Bard,
Bard, who’s got the Bard?” (24)
o how the Shakespearean text is often deployed in analyses of appropriation. (24)
o Terence Hawkes takes the provocative position that, to quote his second book,
“Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare,”8 that is, Shakespearean
meaning is avail- able in the present only through processes of appropriation
that actively cre- ate, rather than passively decode, the readings and values we
attribute to the Shakespearean text. (25)
o In our putative post-fidelity moment, the dominant alternative to the fidelity
model has become valuing adaptations according to the political work they do.
This alternative has been recently championed by Denise Albanese, who seeks
to reclaim Shakespeare as a shared public resource, “a repository for social
dreaming, the dispensation toward revolutionary transformation associated
with the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch.” (27).
 Shakespearean Rhizomatics
o “If we conceive of our shared object of study not as Shakespeare the text but as
the vast web of adaptations, allusions and (re)productions that comprises the
ever-changing cultural phenomenon we call “Shakespeare,”17 the rhizome can
offer a compelling theoretical model. (29)
o A rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare situates “his” cultural authority not in
the Shakespearean text at all but in the accrued power of Shakespearean
adaptation, the multiple, changing lines of force we and previous cultures have
labeled as “Shakespeare,” lines of force that have been created by and which
respond to historical contingencies. (29)
o Within the Shakespearean rhizome, the Shakespearean text is an important
element but not a determining one; it becomes less a root than a node that
might be situated in relation to other adaptational rhizomes. (29)
o To think rhizomatically about the Shakespearean text is to foreground its
fundamentally adaptational nature—as a version of prior narratives, as a script
necessarily imbricated in performance processes, as a text ever in transit
between manuscript, theatrical and print cultures, as a work dependent upon its
latter-day producers for its continued life. (29)
o What a rhizomatic mode of close reading would require is scrupu- lous
attention to texts within larger processes of adaptation, to their status as
creative acts; what one leaves behind is the ability to regulate Shakespearean
adaptations—to designate what is and is not properly Shakespearean—
according to fidelity to the Shakespearean text(s). (30)
 Rhizomatic Shakespearean Criticism

-4-
  Instead of beginning with the Shakespearean text and moving to adaptations, a
procedure that only rein- forces the primacy of that text to those adaptations, one
might begin with an adaptation and move back toward and through the
Shakespearean script to other adaptations, situating that script as one element—
albeit a histori- cally important element—in an adaptational chain. (This approach
has the added advantage of mirroring how nearly all audiences actually encounter
Shakespearean text[s].)
 The aim would not be to produce a grand genealogical narrative that unites the
texts under consideration, for such a narrative would suggest an element of
historical necessity to their relation and obscure the extent to which they partake
of relations with non-Shakespearean material.
 Rather, the aim is to stress the crossing lines of association and difference that
give creative energy to each adaptation, to recover something of the qualities of
contingency and choice that these adaptations might exhibit, and to suggest how
those lines of energy might illuminate the nature of “Shakespeare,” both
historically and in the present.
 Crucial to this enterprise is to treat Shakespeare script(s) as themselves
adaptations, rather than as monumental objects isolated from processes of change
and relationality.
o

Holden

 Appropriation studies of Shakespeare thus begin with a contradiction. We can only know the
work by reinventing it, by appropriation.
 But such reinvention is conceived as a violent assault on the work's original identity,
expropriation.
 Yet the work has no original identity. Or rather this "identity" is alternately denied and
assumed, erased and recuperated.
 Writing has no meaning other than what we make of it.
 Yet we believe that the meanings ascribed by our appropriations are different from other
meanings of the work. "Different from" predicates a comparator; there can be no difference
without another.
 But we find ourselves no longer able, with any confidence, to relocate that elusive and
inscrutable stranger.

-5-
Keywords

Textual fidelity paradigm, counter-hegemonic appropriations of Shakespeare

Bristol. “Shakespearean Technologies.” Bigtime Shakespeare.

“Without the enabling device created in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare as a body of works
would have become increasingly remote and inaccessible, available only to a tiny coterie of
antiquarian book collectors. The entertainment industry initially takes the lead here in creating
widespread public demand for Shakespeare’s plays in performance. This in turn opens up a
market niche for printed editions of Shakespeare’s works. Interaction between these sectors of
the culture industry generates accelerating demand and this in turn promotes an even greater
diversification of Shakespearean products. To some observers this aggressive promotion of
Shakespeare is part of the integration of literature into the ideological state apparatus (De Grazia
1991; Dobson 1992). However, this market spiral is both more and less than an ideological
deception foisted upon a credulous public” (p. 48).

***

“To a significant degree, the longue duree of Shakespeare’s cultural authority is the product of
interactions between a body of incompletely determined works and a resourceful theatrical
ingenuity” (p. 49).

***

Sir William Davenant

-his career as a courtier and show business entrepreneur is a remarkable narrative of

upward social mobility

-he was eventually knighted for his various services to the Crown in 1643

Thomas Killigrew

-6-
 -formed a company that was called “The King’s Men”

***

Davenant changed Shakespeare but “precisely these accomodations of Shakespeare to altered

social and institutional conditions that promote wide public interest in his plays” (p. 52).

 Bristol quotes Dobson about Shakespeare as the National Poet

o “Dobson insists throughout his study that Shakespeare is ‘normatively
constitutive of British national identity’ (p. 7). However, this identity is
continually shifting. Although the plays are nominally recruited in the service of a
controlling ideology of English imperial domination, Dobson shows how that
recruitment was mobile and chronically divisive (p. 12).
o “Shakespeare’s value for the Whigs was not the presence of any specific picture
of desirable social order but rather his undeniable but extremely vague and mobile
generic Englishness” (p. 53).
 Shakespeare changed in relation to market-worthy elements
o “During the Restoration, Shakespeare had been enlisted in the service of a
Royalist agenda” (p. 54).
 “This required extremely careful disciplinary regulation both of poetic
diction and dramatic form” (p. 54).
o “Beginning in the eighteenth century, such features of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy
as heterogeinity in language and social decorum, clowning, the mixing of genres,
and the general failure to observe classical rules of composition gradually come to
be interpreted as evidence of his responsiveness to the cultural diversity of his
audience” (p. 54).
 David Garrick
o His strategies were governed by the logic of the box office (p.54)
o What matters is the number of tickets sold, not the political opinions of the
buyers. (p.54)
o In order to accomplish this aim the elements of novelty, sensation, and variety are
far more important than any programmatic agenda (p.54)

-7-
 o The most powerful expression of Garrick’s extraordinary creativity was in the
elaboration of the modern star system (p. 55).
 Crucial that the star has “an extensive network of personal affiliation with
powerful opinion makers and a high level of visibility” (p. 56).

 Nicholas Rowe
o Often credited with producing the first modern critical edition of Shakespeare’s
works

***

Questions: Whig, restoration, longue duree

***

***

VOCABULARY

-8-
  Fatuous
 Clamorous
 Dramaturgy
 Concomitant
 Will’o the wisp
 Rhizomatics
 Litmus test
 Alacrity


Bibliography

Huang, Alexa. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by Alexa
Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014, pp. 1-20.
Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” Shakespeare and the
Ethics of Appropriation. Edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin. Palgrave
Macmillan, New York, 2014, pp. 21-
Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare the Thinker.

-9-