"Dressing Old Words New"

Shakespeare, Science, and Appropriation

Authors

Graham Holderness University of Hertfordshire

Abstract

This paper confronts the central question for studies of "appropriation": Is the appropriated work still the same work amended, or an entirely new and different cultural construction? Is appropriation about exploiting the immanent potentialities of the classic work, or rather about foregrounding the struggle between the work and its appropriator? If Shakespearean meaning were immutable, it would always resist and survive appropriation. If, however, Shakespeare does not "mean," in Terence Hawkes's phrase, "but it is we who mean by [him]," then there is nothing other than appropriation. In its search for models to illuminate the process of appropriation, this paper draws on the scientific metaphors found in critical language and on some simple paradigms from philosophy, biosciences, chemistry, and physics: Descartes on stability and change; mutability in the substance of protein; the molecular structure of metals and creation via the Big Bang.

Author Biography

Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire

Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire, and author or editor of numerous studies in early modern and modern literature and drama. Recent books include Shakespeare: The Histories (2000); Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001), Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2002), and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2003). He is also a creative writer whose novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2002, and whose poetry collection Craeft (2002) was awarded a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Current projects include Shakespeare and Globalization; Shakespeare: History, Religion and Death; and the representation of Christ in literature and film.