Bard in a Barn

Iconography, Appropriation, and Shakespeare at Winedale

Authors

Matt Kozusko Ursinus College

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Shakespeare and appropriation has contributed to the growing interest in the ways we "mean by" Shakespeare. Studies as wide-ranging as Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare, Michael Bristol's Big-Time Shakespeare, and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human chart the use of Shakespeare in everything from politics to colonialism to films and novels. Largely unexplored, however, is the way in which Shakespeare is used to mean in Shakespeare festivals. This essay examines one such festival, Shakespeare at Winedale, to consider how the festival's student performers and the agrarian community in which the festival is hosted come together to re-make themselves in Shakespeare's image and to re-invent the plays in the style of the rural American Southwest.

Author Biography

Matt Kozusko, Ursinus College

Matt Kozusko is Assistant Professor at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature. He is currently working on a re-evaluation of the place and function of popular theater in early modern London. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of The Bedlam Faction theater company and works extensively with Shakespeare in performance.