The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis argues that fandom offers new models for a twenty-first century reading practice that embraces affective pleasure and subjective self-positioning as a means of understanding a text. Part critical study, part source book, The Shakespeare Multiverse suggests that fannish contributions to the ongoing expansion of the object that we call Shakespeare is best imagined as a multiverse, encompassing different worlds that consolidate the various perspectives that different fans bring to Shakespeare. Our concept of the multiverse redefines ‘Shakespeare’ not as a singular body of work, but as space where a process of inquiry and cultural memory – memories in the making, and those already made – is influenced and shaped by the technologies available to the reader. Characteristic of fandom is an intertextual reading strategy that we term cyborg reading, an approach that accommodates the varied elements of identity, politics, culture, sexuality, and race that shape the ways that Shakespeare is explored and appropriated throughout fannish reading communities. The Shakespeare Multiverse intersects literary theory, fan studies, and popular culture as it traverses Shakespeare fandom from the 1623 Folio to the age of the Internet, exploring the different textures of fan affect, from those who firmly uphold fidelity to the text to those who sit on the very edge of the fandom, threatening to cross over into Shakespearean anti-fandom. By recognizing the literary value of fandom, The Shakespeare Multiverse offers a new approach to literary criticism that challenges the limits of hegemonic authority and recognizes the value of a joyfully speculative critical praxis.

This book makes ample use of approaches to language within linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and sociology, in order to do justice to the subtlety of Shakespeare's verbal artistry. Keir Elam adopts a fresh approach to the language of Shakespeare's comedies, considering it not simply as 'style' but as the principal dramatic and comic substance of the plays. Traditional analysis of the language as 'diction', 'expression' or 'verbal structure' is not adequate to describe the range and importance of linguistic functions in these plays. This book shows that in Shakespearean comedy language, or rather 'discourse', language in use, is always a dynamic, active protagonist of the drama. The author explores the extraordinary gamut of verbal activities or 'language-games' that contribute to the rich rhetorical make-up of the comedies. The historical framework complements the application of critical theory which will assure a readership among students and teachers of Shakespeare as well as those interested in liguistics and semiotics.

Theatres of Value explores the idea that buying and selling are performative acts and offers a paradigm for deeper study of these acts—"the dramaturgy of value." Modeling this multifaceted approach, the book explores six case studies to show how and why Shakespeare had value for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In considering William Brown's African Theater, P. T. Barnum's American Museum and Lecture Hall, Fanny Kemble's American reading career, the Booth family brand, the memorial statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, and an 1888 benefit performance of Hamlet to theatrical impresario Lester Wallack, Theatres of Value traces a history of audience engagement with Shakespearean cultural capital and the myriad ways this engagement was leveraged by theatrical businesspeople.

"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Modeling his new approach to the critical category of fidelity, Newlin closely examines four twentieth-century films and tv series next to their Shakespearean counterparts within the contexts of their casting, genre, and reception. When a director of an unconventional version of The Tempest, for example, chooses to cast a white man as either Caliban or Miranda, they seemingly depart from Shakespeare's original text. Yet with these casting decisions, Newlin argues that The Master (2012) and Brigsby Bear (2017) eerily recall the realities of the early modern theater. The Master unexpectedly depicts something like the mythic "wild man" figure that informed The Tempest's early-colonial context, while Brigsby Bear invokes the exploitative, abusive treatment of boy-actors cast in female roles on the renaissance stage. Similarly, by not explicitly identifying as an adaptation of Othello, the cult comedy series Vice Principals (2016-17) frees itself to more faithfully capture the play's early modern comic context - while also illuminating the parallels between racist discourse in Shakespeare's age and our own. By reading these works as uncannily faithful adaptations, Newlin articulates something like the original response of Shakespeare's audience. Finally, Newlin demonstrates how a filmed adaptation might itself intervene in Shakespeare's critical reception. As a version of The Winter's Tale that ends tragically, the celebrated film Manchester By The Sea (2016) effectively rebuts Stanley Cavell's celebrated reading of Shakespeare's romance. Recognizing the parallels between Manchester By The Sea and The Winter's Tale, Newlin argues that Shakespeare views grief and guilt as forms of certainty - in contradistinction to Cavell's reading of the play as a portrait of skepticism. The first extended treatment of adaptation as a form of uncanny return, Uncanny Fidelity offers students and scholars of Shakespeare in film, adaptation studies, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory a critical framework to further engage the matter of personal response with deeper theoretical rigor. In redefining what constitutes adaptation, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can radically challenge our own conception of what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean"--

If you could have anything but the one thing you really wanted, what would you do? Jack is part of a group of colonists traveling to the distant planet Shylock to build themselves a new home. But Jack has trouble letting go of his past and the world he left behind. He becomes obsessed with what could have been, and with the help of multis – mysterious beings from parallel universes – he begins his search for truth. However, in a world where even love seems impossible to define, what can he find?

Robert Greene holds a significant place in our understanding of Elizabethan literature. This book offers the most rigorous attempt yet undertaken to determine the scope of the playwright’s canon through analyses of Greene’s verse style, vocabulary, rhyming habits, and the dramatist’s phraseology in his attested plays and in comparison to four plays that have long been on the margins of Greene’s corpus: Locrine, Selimus, George a Greene, and A Knack to Know a Knave. The book defines the ranges for Greene’s stylistic habits for the very first time and proceeds to identify parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy that reveal a single author’s creative consciousness. This volume also casts light on Greene as a more collaborative dramatist than has hitherto been acknowledged. Through emphasizing the immediate surroundings in which Greene was writing – the flourishing of popular theatres in two compact areas of London, in which each theatre company and their dra-matists kept a close eye on what their competitors were producing – Greene emerges as an influential playwright, whose restored oeuvre enables us to establish new ways in which his dramatic methods impacted other writers of the period, including Shakespeare.

From their inception, 'low culture' comics have intersected with the 'high culture' of Shakespeare. This is the first book-length collection dedicated entirely to the exploration of this collision. Its chapters illuminate the ways in which different texts, time periods, politics, authors, media, approaches and forms interact. Ranging from Classic Comics to Marvel, from tebeo to manga, from independent to mainstream comics, texts explored include Y: The Last Man, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (The Sandman #19), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I Am Alfonso Jones, Marvel 1602, Doom 2099, and manga adaptations of The Tempest and Macbeth, among many others. As comic books and their big-screen progeny dominate mainstream popular culture, the association of Shakespeare with comics offers creators and critics tools with which to interrogate the place of Shakespeare within the English and global literary and cultural traditions. Shakespeare and Comics argues that, at a moment when the reassessment and reimagining of literary canons has become more urgent than ever, thinking about Shakespeare through the lens of comics invites us to imagine a literary and cultural landscape in which so-called 'great works' exist alongside and in equal conversation with marginalized writers, topics and forms.

W.R. Elton has long been recognized as an eminent scholar in the field of Shakespearean research. His contribution to our study and understanding of the poet's work is celebrated in this international collection of essays by some of the world's leading Shakespeare critics. Balancing both traditional and more recent critical approaches, this book provides an invaluable overview of scholarship and its methodologies today. Areas covered include Shakespeare's treatment of politics and religion, gender, art and music, his use of language, his staging and recent critical perspectives. -- from Book Jacket.

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.

TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age explores how TikTok has revolutionized musical theatre fandom and democratized musical theatre fan cultures and spaces. The book argues that TikTok has created a new canon of musical theatre thanks to the way virality works on the app, expanding musical theatre into a purely digital realm that spills into other, non-digital aspects of U.S. popular culture.