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Serial Shakespeare explores the dissemination and reassemblage of Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary media culture, regarding the way this taps into but also transforms his preferred themes, concerns and constellations of characters. The appropriations discussed include isolated citations in Westworld and The Wire, a typology of the first female president modelled on figures of female sovereignty, as well as a discussion of what one might call a specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy in Deadwood and The Americans. By proposing a reciprocal exchange between the early modern plays and contemporary serial TV drama, the book focusses on the transhistoric and transmedial dialogue a revisitation of the Bard entails. The readings consider the Shakespeare text again, from a different perspective, but also address the fact that his text comes back to us again, from the past. The book claims that serial TV drama keeps appropriating Shakespeare to give voice to unfinished cultural business regarding the state of the American nation because both share the sense of writing in and for a period of interim. Given that the Bard continues to write and read America, what the book draws into focus is how both scriptwriters and cultural critics can, by repurposing him, come up with narratives that are appropriate to our times.
’Neill puts it, ‘that is sowed in the media ecology and scattered through it’. 6 By disseminating and dispersing the original text, these iterations leave the original dramas behind and, instead, favour derivations that mingle Shakespeare with his contemporary media appropriation. In the process, a sense of Shakespeare’s proximity to the current cultural moment is forged, as is an awareness of his historical remoteness. He occupies the present and yet is not properly part of it, instead straddling both temporal sites. Shakespeare is sowed in history, and yet, by virtue
the rogue kernel within democracy, to the included exclusion. The translation that each refiguration of this pathos formula produces also brings with it a subsequent ripening. Something is changed and something is gained in the process. Selina Meyer’s charmed rule The opening of each episode of Veep traces the trajectory of a red line, initially rising steadily to indicate a boost in the polls, only to suddenly plummet again, all the way to the bottom of the screen. Corresponding media images serve as the background for this curve of political luck, revealing
keeps coming back as an uncanny, multi-layered mediatised body, always ‘on the point of vanishing only to reappear elsewhere and in different (media) formats’. 12 Taking his cue from Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, Calbi’s point is that spectrality is an appropriate framework for understanding the heterogeneous and fragmentary presence of ‘Shakespeare’ in contemporary media adaptations, precisely because it draws attention to the way his plays occupy our contemporary cultural imaginary without properly inhabiting it. As Derrida himself argues in Specters
took for her to put on a look of terrified anguish in a snapshot she herself brought into circulation to make the media think she is losing control. She had to imagine ‘America’s worst fear when it comes to a female in the Oval Office’. 17 The irony at play in this self-comment points to the way Claire can only fight against prevailing prejudices by performing the illegitimacy her opponents accuse her of, much as House of Cards itself debunks the very demonisation of female political power which it also reiterates. This first female president’s hands are dirty
within the constraints of a largely visual art form (supplemental captions notwithstanding), Derricke, of course, had to forgo replicating the action-specific sonic register of his diachronically rendered picture, relying largely on physical detail to identify the behaviour of the farters (or defecators) in question. But Derricke’s mixed-media art form was no more exclusively silent than most latter-day pieces of cartoon art (or comix) are. Though Fletcher tells us that comparative visual precedents suggest that the two
salvation. Or, as Steve Mentz puts it, ‘rather like a romance-heroine, the Protestant believer triumphs by submitting to and cooperating with Divine will’. 44 The form and syntax of An Aethiopian History which drew approbation from Melanchthon, also led Sidney to praise Heliodorus’s creation as ‘an absolute heroical poem’, alongside Xenophon’s Cyropaedia . 45 Sidney appears to have shared the Renaissance view that Heliodorus’s romance was founded on the principles of epic derived from Virgil and Homer, beginning, as it does, in medias res . Both Jacques Amyot (the
another dream like that, that I might see such another man! / With a face like heaven / his voice, the music of the spheres. / Do you think there was or could be a man such as I dreamed of?’ This was Shakespeare for a tech-and-media savvy ‘Generation Y’, not a rendering of a text but an interactive event, a live expression of installation art, immersive theatre with a capital I; a project, said the Volkskrant (quoted in publicity) that showed Toneelgroep Amsterdam writing ‘a new and impressive chapter in their ongoing quest for a new theatrical
in its centuries-old establishment: Spenser’s poetry is a via media – sovereignty is established through The Faerie Queene . In this, The Faerie Queene and its greatness are generated by the demand to civilise the land: the land’s mistreatment at the hands of the Irish, merely alleged in A View , is tamed by Spenser’s great poetics. And
of the same commemorative process therefore signals a paradigm shift in Irish nationalism today. These commemorations move beyond just the traditional monument into a range of media and a diverse approach to commemoration. To mark the centenary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 2016, for example, a ‘riverside sound installation’ by artist Christina