Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

'Tis I, The Hulk

Emer McHugh — 2024-04-01

In this note, I take a look at the actor Mark Ruffalo's invocation of Hamlet while promoting his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) television series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, released on the streaming platform Disney+ in the autumn of 2022. Referring to a joke on the show that references his predecessor in the role (Edward Norton), Ruffalo quipped that the Hulk is "like our generation's Hamlet. Everyone's going to get a shot at it" (Bucksbaum n.pg). Rather than reading for Shakespearean allusions in Marvel films, this note is more interested in why actors like Ruffalo reach for Shakespeare as a comparison instead--and whether such comparisons actually fit.

'The Tempest' Transformed: John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's 'The Sea Voyage'

Virginia Vaughan — 2024-04-01

This article examines John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's 1622 comedy, The Sea Voyage, as an offshoot of Shakespeare's Tempest. It traces Fletcher and Massinger's reimagination of Shakespeare's plot and characters in ways that reflect the differences between England's aspirations for the Virginia Colony in 1610 and the realities on the ground in 1621-2. Key transformations include the Fletcher-Massinger emphasis on the role of women in plantation economies as well as the hardships endured in the early days of the colony.

Censorship, Artistic Freedom, and Shakespeare Restored

Joshua Kim — 2024-04-01

In this essay, I discuss Thai director Ing K.’s Censor Must Die (2014), a documentary that her attempts to overturn the banning of her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, entitled Shakespeare Must Die (2012). While Ing K.’s Shakespeare Must Die remains banned as of 2022, this essay demonstrates that Censor Must Die may be interpreted as a Shakespeare film in its own right, that is, as a type of futuristic Hamlet, a logical follow-up to Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet 2000. Censor Must Die, not unlike Hamlet 2000, I argue, highlights the struggles of individual artists against what we colloquially term in our contemporary, postmodern society as “the System” or “the State.” In offering such a reading of Censor Must Die, I attempt to restore Shakespeare in Ing K.’s work against the grain of Thai government censors while raising the question of to what extent Shakespeare’s corpus may help to frame, reimagine, and bear witness to international current events.

Performing Race: Interrogating Gareth Hinds’ Graphic Novel Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

J. Katherine Burton — 2024-04-01

Graphic novel adaptations, such as Gareths Hinds’ Romeo and Juliet, are a popular way to introduce audiences to Shakespeare, however focusing on a young audience obscures the fact that these are sophisticated interpretations integrating graphics and text, providing opportunities for adapters to reinterpret classic texts. The combination of visual and verbal resembles performance media (film and stage) and many of the analytical processes used for performance can also be applied to graphic novels. Recent studies of 20^th and 21^st century film and stage adaptations of Shakespeare critique the practices of directors and others involved in the selection process of actors of color for Shakespeare productions where race is not indicated in the original play text. These practices offer different approaches to, and understandings of, the semiotics of race in performance and the critiques identify issues associated with these various approaches. Applying these studies to graphic novel adaptations provides a more detailed understanding of the impact on audience reception of how adapters represent the characters and story lines of Shakespeare’s original texts. This paper interrogates Gareth Hind’s graphic novel adaptation and argues that, contrary to his stated intent of emphasizing universal themes, by racializing the Montagues and the Capulets, he introduces themes such as differential racialism and colorism into the story that problematizes readers’ interpretations of this classic Shakespeare text. This interrogation applies an understanding of the semiotics of race and performance in terms of non-traditional types of casting of characters, with a close reading of the interaction of graphics and text, comparing this reading to similar film and stage performances and how that reading may be interpreted/misinterpreted by readers/viewers.

Brevity is the Soul of Fic

Johnathan Pope — 2024-04-01

Through a focus on Shakespeare fan fiction, this article discusses ‘microfic’ – short-form fan fiction – as a unique genre of microfiction. Sometimes consisting of fewer than ten words, microfiction relies on clever twists or epiphanies rather than character or plot development for its effect. Although microfic is equally brief and compact, as a genre of fan fiction, it is always engaged in a sustained dialogue with a fan object such as Shakespeare that serves to import whole plots, characters, and metatextual debates into the text with the mention of a name or place. As such, the brevity of microfic is illusory, as it continually draws on – and contributes to – the fan object and its archive. Unlike microfiction in general, micofic is never self-contained. Through an analysis of numerous Shakespeare microfics available in the Archive of Our Own fan fiction database, this article indicates the extent to which their silences are seldom silent.

Adapting Whiteness

Zainab Cheema — 2024-04-01

The sources influencing Shakespeare’s representation of racialized queens continue to shape popular media representations of queenship. In this article, I argue that Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman influenced Shakespeare’s representation of Katherine of Aragon’s idealized whiteness in All is True (Henry VIII). Moreover, I show how Vives and Shakespeare in turn influence Starz’s 2019 The Spanish Princess. Firstly, I how Vives represents the domestic space of the royal household a form of racial enclosure intended to manage the paradoxical confluence of the queen’s biological reproductivity and the social circulation of her image. Katherine’s patronage of Vives demonstrates her agency in cultivating her cult of queenship through gendered and racially charged notions of kinship, conduct, and labor. These tropes elevate the racial purity of the queen through and at the expense of lower class and enslaved peoples whose work is often rendered invisible. I also argue that Vives and Shakespeare’s praise of Katherine’s exemplary kinship, conduct and labor function as compensatory mechanisms that serve to reify Katherine’s whiteness even as her marriage to Henry VIII is failing. While Starz’s The Spanish Princess recasts Katherine of Aragon’s story through the contemporary lens of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, it nevertheless borrows from Shakespeare and Vives’ construction of queenly whiteness at the expense of racial others.

Review: Fictional Shakespeares and Portraits of Genius

Edel Semple — 2024-04-01

Book review of Annalisa Castaldo's Fictional Shakespeares and Portraits of Genius (Arc Humanities Press, 2022).

Reviews: Lockdown Shakespeare and Viral Shakespeare

Beth Sharrock — 2024-04-01

Review: Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: "Local Habitations."

Jennifer Topale — 2024-04-01

Review: Shakespeare's Serial Returns in Complex TV

Sophia Richardson — 2024-04-01

Review: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World

Emily MacLeod — 2024-04-01

Brave and Transgressive Appropriations Matter:

Jamie Paris — 2024-04-01

This is a review of New York’s Red Bull theater's Zoom salon, entitled “Exploring Othello in 2020.” The production used a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) cast. This review considers the production in relationship to larger trends within premodern critical race studeis and the idea that theatre can create a brave space for exploring the relationship between race and performance in Shakespeare.