Shakespeare and Geek Culture 9781350107748, 9781350107779, 9781350107762

Citation preview

Shakespeare and Geek Culture

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REL ATED TITLES Shakespeare’s Body Language: Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage Miranda Fay Thomas ISBN 978-1-3500-3547-8 Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England edited by Tiffany Stern ISBN 978-1-3500-5134-8 Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia: Negotiating the Memory of Elizabeth I on the Jacobean Stage Yuichi Tsukada ISBN 978-1-3501-7507-5

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Shakespeare and Geek Culture Edited by Andrew James Hartley and Peter Holland

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THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Andrew James Hartley, Peter Holland and contributors, 2021, 2022 Andrew James Hartley, Peter Holland and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image © iStock / EYESITE / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hartley, A. J. (Andrew James), editor. | Holland, Peter, 1951– editor. Title: Shakespeare and geek culture / edited by Andrew James Hartley and Peter Holland. Description: London ; New York : The Arden Shakespeare, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “From sci-fi to graphic novels, from boy scouts to board games, from cult films to the cult of theatre, Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. Where there is popular culture there are fans and nerds and geeks. The essays in this collection on Shakespeare and Geek Culture take an innovative approach to the study of Shakespeare’s cultural presences, situating his works, his image and his brand to locate and explore the nature of that geekiness that, the authors argue, is a vital but unrecognized feature of the world of those who enjoy and are obsessed by Shakespeare, whether they are scholars, film fans, theatre-goers or members of legions of other groupings in which Shakespeare plays his part. Working at the intersections of a wide range of fields – including fan studies and film analysis, cultural studies and fantasy/sci-fi theory – the authors demonstrate how the particularities of the connection between Shakespeare and geek culture generate new insights into the plays, poems and their larger cultural legacy in the 21st century”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024859 (print) | LCCN 2020024860 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350107748 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350107755 (epub) | ISBN 9781350107762 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Influence. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616– Appreciation. | Popular culture and literature. Classification: LCC PR2976 .S3345 2020 (print) | LCC PR2976 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024859 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024860 ISBN:

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978-1-3501-0774-8 978-1-3501-8561-6 978-1-3501-0776-2 978-1-3501-0775-5

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For Christy Desmet (1954–2018)

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors

Introduction Andrew James Hartley with Peter Holland

Part One

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Geek Culture and Fiction

1 Shakespeare, Tolkien and Geeking Out Andrew James Hartley 2 ‘I Opened a Door; That Is All’: Neil Gaiman’s Decidedly Human Shakespeare in The Sandman Emily Leverett 3 Shakespeare Unfocused in Time: Problems of Memory and Anachronism in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters Kyle Pivetti

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4 May the Bard Be with You: Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital Investment in SciFi/Fantasy Adaptations Ann M. Martinez

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5 Not Now: The Present in Shakespeare’s Past and Ooo’s Future Andrew Tumminia

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CONTENTS

Part Two Geek Culture and the Shakespeare Sandbox 6 ‘Let’s Kill Claudius in the Church!’: Fan Fiction and Wish Fulfilment in Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet Johnathan H. Pope 7 Hiddleston–Shakespeare–Coriolanus, or Rhizomatic Crossings in Fanfic Stephen O’Neill 8 The Bard is Dead, Long Live the Bard: Kill Shakespeare and the Popular Death of the Author Douglas M. Lanier 9 ‘There Lies the Substance’: Richard II and the Adorkable Paratext Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes 10 On Eating Paper and Drinking Ink Matt Kozusko

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Pastimes, Gaming and Shakespeare

11 Shakespeare and the Renaissance of Board Games: Appropriation and Geek Culture Vernon Dickson

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12 The Bard of Boys’ Life: Shakespeare and the Construction of American Boyhood M. Tyler Sasser

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13 Some Women Just Want to Watch the World Burn: Gendered Villainy in Shakespeare and Geek Culture Jessica McCall 14 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as Shakespearean Theatre Rebecca Bushnell

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Part Four Film, Theatre and Geek Culture 15 Liberating the Geek in Recent Shakespeare on Film Keith M. Botelho

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16 Whedonesque Shakespeare and Hyperdiegetic Casting Jennifer Flaherty

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17 Worst. Lear. Ever.: Early Modern Drama and Geek Hermeneutics James D. Mardock

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18 ‘It Was Geek to Me’: Shakespeare, Performance and Geek Cultures Peter Holland

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Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

12.1 Cover image for the first issue of Boys’ Life magazine (1911). 12.2 Opening scenes from For a Scout’s Honor: A Play in Four Acts, Boys’ Life magazine (June 1911). 12.3 Synopsis of the ‘Witch Scene’ from For a Scout’s Honor: A Play in Four Acts, Boys’ Life magazine (June 1911). 12.4 ‘Boy from Stratford’ article, Boys’ Life magazine (April 1964). 12.5 Cover image and first page of Macbeth, Boys’ Life magazine (May 2001). 14.1 Geralt is confronted with the decision to make ‘The Play’s the Thing’ a comedy or drama. CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. 14.2 The player must choose one dialogue line for Geralt, under time pressure (as indicated by ‘time left to decide’). CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Keith M. Botelho is Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity, and he has published articles and essays in journals and scholarly collections including Studies in English Literature, Early Modern Culture, Comparative Drama, MLA Approaches to Teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts, Object Oriented Environs and Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science. He is currently co-editing a two-volume collection of essays on insects in the early modern world, entitled Lesser Living Creatures: Insect Life in the Renaissance, which will be published in 2021. Rebecca Bushnell, the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of books on subjects including Greek and Renaissance tragedy, early modern political thought, humanist pedagogy, early modern English gardening books and, most recently, time in drama, film and videogames. She is currently completing an anthology of writing about the natural world before 1700, but also working on a book on theatre and videogames. Rebecca is a former President of the Shakespeare Association of America. Vernon Dickson is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, where he served as Director of the Literature and Film Programs. His monograph, Emulation on the Shakespearean Stage, explores theories and practices of imitation and emulation, primarily through their enactment on the English Renaissance stage. He has published articles related to Shakespeare, drama, rhetorical theory, exemplarity and emulation in Renaissance Quarterly, Studies in English Literature and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Vernon’s current teaching xi

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examines adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly in popular and global cultures, and his current research studies manifestations of agency within analog gaming and their link to Shakespearean representations. Valerie M. Fazel earned her PhD at Arizona State University where she currently teaches academic composition, business writing and Shakespeare studies for the Department of English. Her research interests include Shakespeare, appropriation, fandom and social media, and her work is published in Borrowers and Lenders and Shakespeare (co-authored with Louise Geddes). Valerie is co-editor, with Louise Geddes, of The Shakespeare User (2017) and is currently co-authoring a book on Shakespeare fandom, and coediting a collection of essays on object-oriented ontology and Shakespeare appropriation. Jennifer Flaherty is an Associate Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Georgia College. Her research focuses on adaptation studies, and she is especially interested in the question of how Shakespeare has been used to address contemporary girlhood. Her work has been published in journals such as Borrowers and Lenders, Comparative Drama, Topic, Theatre Symposium and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Working with Heather C. Easterling, Jennifer is also editing a collection of essays on The Taming of the Shrew. She has contributed chapters to the volumes Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, the Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation and The Horse as Cultural Icon. Louise Geddes is an Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe and has published articles in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. With Valerie Fazel, Louise has co-edited The Shakespeare User (2017) and co-authored work published in Shakespeare. Her monograph, The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis is forthcoming from Routledge. Louise is the co-general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Andrew James Hartley is the University of North Carolina Charlotte’s Russell Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and

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the author of various scholarly books including The Shakespearean Dramaturg, Shakespeare and Political Theatre and a performance history of Julius Caesar. He is the editor of collections on Shakespeare on the university stage and Shakespeare in millennial fiction, and was editor of Shakespeare Bulletin for a decade. Andrew is a director and dramaturg and, under the pen names AJ Hartley and Andrew Hart, is the award-winning, bestselling author of twenty-three novels in a variety of genres, which probably makes him more geek than nerd. Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He was Editor of Shakespeare Survey for nineteen years and is co-General Editor for Oxford Shakespeare Topics, Great Shakespeareans, Arden Shakespeare in the Theatre and the Arden Shakespeare 4th Series. Peter has edited many Shakespeare plays, including A Midsumer Night’s Dream (Oxford) and Coriolanus (Arden 3rd Series), and is Chair of the International Shakespeare Association. Current projects include a monograph on Shakespeare and Forgetting and editing King Lear for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. Matt Kozusko is Associate Professor of English at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama. His principal research interest is in Shakespeare and questions of performance, theatre history and appropriation. Matt is editor of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (co-editor, 2010) and has published articles in Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Borrowers and Lenders and numerous other collections. He is general editor for Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and series editor for Shakespeare and the Stage. Douglas M. Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He has written extensively about contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare. His book Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture appeared in 2002 and he has recently published The Merchant of Venice: Language and Writing in the Arden Language and Writing series (2019). Douglas is a past trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Association of

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Adaptation Studies. He is currently at work on two projects: a survey of Othello on screen, and a study of ‘reparative’ Shakespeare, productions of Shakespeare addressed to the traumas of socially marginalized groups. Emily Leverett is a Professor of English at Methodist University in North Carolina. Trained as a medievalist, her primary area of scholarship is English Romance and her current project focuses on the ways that Terry Pratchett uses tropes of medieval English Romance in his Discworld novels. Emily co-edited the collection of essays, Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds, with Kristen Noone. She is also an editor and writer of speculative fiction, including the novella series The Wolf and the Nun, a historical romance based on the life and lais of Marie de France. James D. Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, sometime dramaturg for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, Coordinating Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) and the editor of the ISE Henry V. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and John Taylor, and a monograph on Jonson’s London. James is now at work on various critical editions of early modern drama and a book on Calvinism and metatheatre in early modern drama. Ann M. Martinez is an Associate Professor of English at Kent State University at Stark. Her work on NT Live’s digital relay performances of Shakespeare was part of the collection Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (2018). Ann has also published on representations of environmental guardianship in medieval and post-medieval literature, with her work appearing in Arthuriana and Studies in Medievalism. Her study of insects in medieval and renaissance literature is forthcoming in Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Insects in the Renaissance: 1300–1600 and in Insects in the Age of Enlightenment: 1600–1820. Jessica McCall is an Associate Professor of English at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She focuses on intersections of myth and gender in warrior women from Spenser’s Radigund through to DC Comic’s Wonder Woman. Jessica is the author of several articles focusing on both Shakespeare and modern popular culture, on topics such as Lois Lane, V for Vendetta as a version of Macbeth, close reading and No Fear Shakespeare, using

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fandom in the Shakespeare classroom, publishing her own Shakespeare fanfic and an introduction to Feminist Studies in the Arden Research Handbook to Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism. Stephen O’Neill is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Maynooth University. His main research interests are in Shakespeare and adaptation, especially in digital cultures. He is editor of Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media (Arden Shakespeare, 2018) and the author of two books: Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (Arden Shakespeare, 2014) and Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007). Stephen is also the author of several articles and book chapters on a range of topics from Hip-Hop Shakespeare and Shakespeare and quotation to Shakespeare in Europe. He is currently co-editing the Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation. Kyle Pivetti is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University. His first book is titled Of Memory and Literary Form: The Making of Nationhood in Early Modern England (2015) and he is also the co-author, alongside John S. Garrison, of Shakespeare at Peace (2018), a study of Shakespeare’s pacifism that includes an extended analysis of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Kyle’s research in memory and the formation of political identity has been featured in the journals Shakespeare, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Modern Philology and Explorations in Renaissance Culture. In the debate on geeks vs. nerds, he reluctantly concedes to being a Shakespeare nerd while wishing he were only a geek. Johnathan H. Pope is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Grenfell Campus (Canada). He is the author of Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom, and has published on Shakespeare and film as well as on early modern devotional poetry. Johnathan has recently published a new critical edition of Phineas Fletcher’s allegorical epic The Purple Island (1633). M. Tyler Sasser’s research focuses on depictions of boys, boyhood and masculinity in Shakespeare, as well as in adaptations of Shakespeare in contemporary children’s literature. His work appears in Medieval and Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare

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Newsletter, the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature in Education, as well as in the recent edited collections Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture (2018), Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (2018) and The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films (2018). As an Instructor at the University of Alabama, Tyler teaches courses on Shakespeare, early British literature, children’s literature, composition and film. Andrew Tumminia is an Associate Professor of English at Spring Hill College. His research focuses on Shakespeare and early modern English literature. His teaching has long challenged students’ received notions of text by incorporating staples of Geek culture – from Blade Runner to Watchmen (the book, never the movie, of course). One of Andrew’s first memories is of seeing Star Wars in a cinema when he was two and a half years old, and so began his lifelong journey through geekdom, which has taken him through Adventure Time, a series so dear to him that he married the woman who introduced him to it.

Introduction Andrew James Hartley with Peter Holland

This volume’s title links two apparently separate entities. Let us begin with the latter and with a subtly different but strongly related term as defined by the OED : Geek, n., 1.b An overly diligent, unsociable student; any unsociable person obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit (usually specified in a preceding attrib. noun). Cf. NERD  n. Nerd, n., An insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious. Now also:  spec.  a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication. Both of these are acceptable but inordinately narrow and pejorative definitions of what it means to be a geek or a nerd, and in that ‘now also’ we glimpse the speed with which the terms are evolving in everyday usage. While some people see the two words as interchangeable others insist upon a (useful) distinction. The first definition of ‘nerd’ to come up on urbandictionary.com, for example, describes an individual who:  1. Enjoys learning 2. Does not adhere to social norms 1

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A nerd is *not*: 1. A geek. The circles overlap, but they are not the same. The same site defines geek as: One who passionately engages in one or more things to extreme levels. A commonly ascribed term to people in the field of computer programming, but one does not have to be in a technical field to be a geek. The only criteria is an intense level of interest in something, often to a highly specialized degree. The term currently seems to be most used when referring to various fandoms. Notably, urbandictionary.com strips the terms of their negative and dismissive associations, perhaps because their crowd-sourced model means that the people defining the terms are the ones to whom they apply. When applied to others, at least in certain communities, both terms may be affectionate, and when applied to the speaker themselves (‘I am such a theatre geek’) they might already constitute what is sometimes called a ‘humble brag’: a self-critique which hints at success or expertise. The rapidity of this evolution since the turn of the millennium is striking, particularly in the case of geek, which seems to be steadily separating from the quieter, more bookish and introverted associations of nerd. Consider, for instance, Leo McGarry in the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing (air date 22 September 1999), when asked for an explanation for President Bartlett riding his bicycle into a tree: ‘He’s a klutz, Mrs Landringham. Your president’s a geek.’ Bartlett, a cerebral Nobel laureate with a penchant for old books is characterized here1 as clumsily uncoordinated, unathletically nerdy. Shifts in the associations of geek over the last two decades have rendered the show’s use of the term geek jarring, at odds with the present day sense of focused and informed enthusiasm over physical (and other kinds of) awkwardness. GGID, as the T-shirts and internet memes say: ‘geeks get it done’. Nerds are reflective, bookish, introverted or otherwise socializingaverse, but geeks are enthusiasts – often publicly so – and while some say they needn’t be as intelligent as their nerdy counterparts, their passion burns hotter. They may even be sexy. In many ways, both definitions can define the Shakespeare scholar. We may baulk at intimations of unsociability, but popular

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culture still tends to represent academics as nerds. They may have escaped a certain tweedy fussiness, but they remain marginal figures, out of place in mainstream activities with ‘regular folks’. Think of David Schwimmer’s paleontologist, Ross Geller, on Friends, William Jackson Harper’s moral philosopher, Chidi Anagonye, on The Good Place and pretty much the entire cast of physicists in The Big Bang Theory: all are smart, knowledgeable, bad at relationships and excessively – if endearingly – invested in their respective subjects. Comic stereotypes though these are, it is surely true that much of what scholarship does has precisely that geek/nerd quality of obsessive devotion to an unfashionable pursuit, shared fully only with like-minded obsessives. When one thinks of the great monuments of Shakespeare scholarship, this geekiness is strongly apparent. Listen, for example, to Shakespeareans with an interest in performance discussing who played Apemantus in the RSC’s 1999 Timon of Athens2 and you will hear our particular version of the obsessive knowledge of what may be deemed popular culture, something we share with the sports geek/nerd who can tell you who was the starting pitcher for the Atlanta Braves in game one of the 1999 World Series.3 Think also of our delight in the academic footnote, a pathologically digressive informational strategy classically symptomatic of geek/nerd communication’s penchant for excess, an inability to stay on track because of details which are just too fascinating not to share. One aspect of this collection’s work is therefore with the geekiness of Shakespeare scholarship itself, a moment of self-reflection such as we rarely allow ourselves. But that dictionary association of geeks with fandom reminds us that geek culture is not just a locus for the sharing of obsessional knowledge but also for a celebratory engagement with areas of popular culture, whose nature, as those shifting definitions suggest, has altered considerably. In the last twenty years, perhaps even more drastically in the last ten, what was once dismissed as the freakish and marginal reaches of nerd culture has moved steadily into the mainstream, claiming a portion of that most coveted form of twenty-first-century cultural capital: cool. Understanding how and why this has happened is tricky because it requires competing notions of what geek culture is, but let us begin with some obvious instances. The single greatest contributing factor in the rise of geek status is surely the parallel rise of the internet as a source of information and

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micro-cultures, much of which is driven by social media platforms which simply did not exist in the last century. Inevitably, the web has brought the margins to the foreground, altering the cultural landscape as the power to dictate what we like and what we think is important has moved geekwards. Changes in personal technology – tablets, iphones and the like – have made us all nerds, so that a Wall Street Journal article from 2010 laid the rise in geek cool squarely at the feet of Steve Jobs in ways transcending the strictly technical achievements of, say, a Bill Gates.4 As Jane Hu remarks, ‘Geeks specialize, and obscurity is often an indicator of their success. They know more. They know earlier. Hence they are cool.’5 Geeks aren’t the put-upon techno-drudges who merely facilitate what their cooler bosses require anymore. They are innovators and leaders whose success can make them extremely wealthy, and in a capitalist culture, few things are cooler than money. The rise in the importance of geeks makes obvious sense in terms of technology and commerce, but their subcultural interests, especially in those subjects falling under the umbrella of science fiction and fantasy, need further clarification. In popular culture, fantasy and science fiction have always been considered the realm of the nerd whose stereotypical evocation conjures unathletic adolescents poring over comic book collections and playing Dungeons and Dragons in dingy basements. The first Star Wars movie (A New Hope, 1977) was huge, and so were the sequels and other blockbuster sci-fi movies like E.T. (1983), but they didn’t make geeks cool, and those who retained an abiding fascination with such films became a kind of standing joke. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, this began to change and a handful of cultural events can be cited as being instrumental in that change as well as evidence of it. We might begin with the unprecedented success of The Lord of the Rings movies, a project which had been caught in development hell for years because the studios involved just didn’t believe enough people would care about the films to justify the massive expense of putting a fantasy epic of the scale of the books on film. The results, released not in one film as planned but in three between 2001 and 2003, shattered box office records. Tellingly, the trailer for the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, posted online on 27 April 2000, got 1.7 million hits in the first twenty-four hours.6 On release that film made $47 million in its opening US weekend. The series grossed

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$2.9 billion worldwide and won seventeen Academy Awards despite having no bankable stars in its cast, defying all conventional industry wisdom. Likewise, another massive cultural phenomenon was J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the first of which was published in the UK in 1997 but did not top the bestseller lists in the US until two years later. The first film was not released until late 2001, just over a month before The Fellowship of the Rings, becoming the highest grossing film of the year and beginning a decade of box office domination by the eight films of the series, as the novels became an extraordinary cultural phenomenon the like of which had not been seen before. They altered the literary landscape, effectively creating young adult fiction as it currently exists while also making readers out of millions of children (and adults) in ways the publishing industry had not believed possible. To these we should add the resurgence of both the Star Wars franchise7 and the superhero movies made by both DC Comics and Marvel, all of which have seemed bound to the specifics of the new millennium. Think of how Spider-Man (2002), the first film of its title character for thirty years, grabbed the post 9/11 ethos with its flag-waving New York defiance and determination to save ordinary people caught up in disaster. It was so successful that it spawned another seven films, not including those crossovers into the world of the Avengers. Taken together, these films (and the countless lookalikes and spin-offs elsewhere in film and TV over the same period) show how fantasy and science fiction, formerly dismissed as the stuff of a small number of geek fans, has elbowed its way into the forefront of popular culture, maintaining a solid dominance over mainstream cinema for twenty years. While romantic comedies were the staple of Hollywood’s income in the 1990s, its twentyfirst-century heroes have largely come with figurative, if not literal, capes. Meanwhile on television, the mid-1990s saw the ending of the first Star Trek revival (the Patrick Stewart8 fronted Next Generation) on such a populist high that it spawned multiple successful spin-offs (Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise), plus a series of movies reaching to 2002, far outshining in terms of viewership the original 1960s incarnation which survived only three seasons. At the same time, upstart networks WB and UPN scored unexpected hits with Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), a show with

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a massive cultural footprint, generating legions of fans and propelling both a successful spin-off in Angel (1999–2004) and a brace of other Whedon fan favourites in Dollhouse and Firefly. In the UK, the world’s longest running sci-fi show, Doctor Who, was rebooted in 2005 to popular and critical acclaim, which has kept it alive into the present, viewing figures for the twenty-first-century episodes generally exceeding those of the original, despite a considerably more competitive entertainment landscape. That competitive market is worth further consideration, since science fiction and fantasy has traditionally been opposed to more ‘mainstream’ passions like organized sport. But the rise of geekier interests has been paralleled by a decline in the centrality of some formerly reliable standbys: the World Series of baseball, for instance, has shown declining ratings since the mid-1980s. This is not to say that geek culture has somehow usurped the mainstream, but the rise in its status has been part of a cultural fragmentation commencing in the late twentieth century and hastened by the diversity of internet offerings catering to niche markets. We might go so far as to say that the very idea of mainstream culture is an essentially twentieth-century concept. The music industry didn’t merely lose sales due to the technological innovations which brought file sharing and digital downloads to the 1990s. It also saw that same technology facilitate the making of low cost music in ways generating significantly more ‘successful’ artists than had existed before, leading to the kinds of subcategorization catering to more and more precise tastes. It is unsurprising that the bestselling album of 1999, the Back Street Boys’ Millenium, sold twice as many albums in any form than the bestselling album of 2018, Drake’s Scorpion. When critics ask if such and such a band might be the next Beatles, the answer is always no, because the global culture which might catapult an artist to the kind of visibility enjoyed by John, Paul, George and Ringo simply does not exist anymore. Meanwhile, what used to be considered cultural marginalia – video gaming, for instance – now rivals the movie industry in terms of popularity and income generated. The same is true of literature: bestselling numbers for individual titles have fallen sharply as even the Stephen Kings and James Pattersons of the world find themselves competing for readers in an increasingly crowded market where small presses and selfpublishing now add literally millions of new books to platforms

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like Amazon.com every year. Geek culture thrives in such an environment since it is no longer the awkward cousin of more ubiquitous or obviously acceptable behemoths. Fantasy offerings used to be limited to what a handful of publishing houses thought they could sell in the largest numbers: now the market is flooded with specific subgenres with devout followings,9 many of them coming from non-traditional presses. Mainstream entertainment is no longer a monolith but, like much postmodern culture, is a collage of disparate parts, some of which do not connect at all, while others – such as all things geek/nerd – have seen their marginality transformed as their population has expanded and their once fringe interests have drifted toward the centre. San Diego’s Comic-Con is a good indicator of the larger cultural shift, a convention which attracted a few hundred people when it began in the 1970s swelling to tens of thousands in the 1990s, but which got exponentially larger after the new millennium (the convention population jumping by 20,000 in 2006 alone). Comicon now draws 130,000 people and approximately $180 million in business to San Diego annually. The Con has become one of the primary roll-out locations for the TV and film industry, and has multiple related conventions in other cities, as well as modelling format and content for other regional conventions run by other organizations. Most US residents could find a fantasy/sci-fi convention within driving distance about half the weekends of the year, essentially local gatherings ranging in size from conventions in a single hotel which hold a little over a thousand people to something like DragonCon in Atlanta, which draws upwards of 80,000 people every Labor Day weekend. What was a fringe activity for hard-core fans has become something much larger and more common, and indicates the extent to which geek culture has moved into – or been co-opted by – something more widespread and generally popular. It should also be said that consequent from geek culture’s marginality is an inclusivity at least in principle which better suits the evolving social mores of the twenty-first century; this is not to say that geek culture was not predominately straight, white and male – it was – (and there’s more about its culture war struggles over power and membership in the Hartley and McCall chapters of this book), but being defined by their separateness has generally made the geek community more welcoming to others with shared interests regardless of race, ethnicity, ability or sexual orientation.

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But another way of defining geeks is less about what they like and more about how they like. That how is exuberant, allencompassing, gloriously, unreasonably detail-oriented, ungoverned in its pursuit of what seems interesting; it’s about love, and it reminds us of the fanatical roots of fandom. A retrospective review of the 1980s song ‘Birdhouse in your Soul’ by They Might Be Giants on Slate.com, by Philip Sandifer and S. Alexander Reed, is illustrative not just of the historical shift we have been discussing but its intimations of enthusiasm as well as knowledge. The song is a nerd anthem, obscure, digressive, constantly self-correcting, a word-feast love song in which the central metaphor is a night light (or rather, as the lyric is careful to spell out, night LITE), which ruminates on famous lighthouses, the Longines Symphonette and Jason and the Argonauts: Both literary and exuberantly naive, the song epitomizes a particular everything-at-once way of thinking and being. In the ’80s, it was easy to disparage hyperassociation like this as awkwardly geekish. It belied an ignorance of when to shut up – think Rick Moranis as the factoid-spouting Louis Tully in Ghostbusters. (Or for that matter, Rick Moranis in anything.) But something funny happened on the way to the millennium: the geeks won. Seemingly everyone ‘geeks out’ about something in this, an age characterized by its overabundance of information. Enthusiasm became cool: we crave to connect our obsessions to the world around us in haphazard polyphony. In short, everything that once seemed weird about ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ has become, well, normal.10 Which brings us back to Shakespeare and the mutual obsession shared, we assume, by anyone reading this book, and the fact that we need ten pages to argue why geek culture matters and none at all for the centrality of a playwright who has been dead for four centuries is itself a marker of how much we academics are geeks/ nerds. Of course, one thing that makes many of us a little different from other geeks/nerds is that we are professionals (don’t try this at home, kids!) while geek enthusiasm is usually pointedly amateur. The exuberance driving the aforementioned fantasy conventions derives from fans coming together to share their love for a subject, not (usually) to advance their careers, and it’s one of the areas in

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which we might draw a line between DragonCon and the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, say, which is where this collection was originally conceived. But though we don’t arrive at an academic conference dressed as Shakespeare characters, those gatherings – like their fantasy and sci-fi equivalents – enact a coming together of like-minded people to critique – but also to revel in – a form of culture which, for all its influence on the mainstream, is also assumed to be outside it. The chapters which follow enact various forms of cultural studies, mapping the interplay between Shakespeare and geek culture in its disparate forms. We have grouped them broadly, beginning with essays which engage with Shakespeare and his work in fantasy and science fiction, where they are able to use the playful philosophical reach of their forms to engage the plays in terms not generally covered by the political and character-oriented preoccupations of more conventionally realist fiction: temporality (Pivetti and Tumminia), for instance; meta narrative and the creative process (Leverett, Martinez); and fan control/ownership (Hartley). The second group explores Shakespeare as an ongoing field of creative endeavour, be that ‘choose your own adventure’ books based on the plays (Pope); the supremely geeky world of fan fiction, rooted not just in particular plays but in particular productions (O’Neill); reader/audience association with geeky characters (Fazel/ Geddes); questions of adaptation and creative authority (Lanier); and the place of the liberal academic in educational culture (Kozusko). The third grouping presents essays on Shakespeare’s place in other forms of popular culture, tracking the way his work has been used, exploited and interrogated in such diverse worlds as scouting (Sasser), board games (Dickson) and computer gaming (Bushnell), while also considering gendered formulations of geek culture and the battlegrounds on which Shakespeare is weaponized (McCall). The final section deals with geek issues in Shakespearean film and theatre and ranges from representing masculinity (Botelho) or the way a familiar cast inflects production (Flaherty), to notions of canon formation (Mardock) and the fusion of academic, theatre goer and fan which is the special realm of the Shakespeare geek (Holland). Taken together we hope that this represents the first unified salvo of what will be a new sub-movement within Shakespeare studies. Geek culture, far from being a passing fad, is

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here to stay, and its increasing centrality to the internet-driven culture of the twenty-first century merits serious consideration. It is time for Shakespeare studies to acknowledge its manifold and complex connections to a wave of cultural formations and fascinations which have stepped out of the margins to shape the present. We do not fear the geeks, particularly when they bring gifts. We know them, and they know us by our habits and by every other appointment to be ourselves.11

Notes 1 This characterization shifts in the course of the show, and while the President retains his intellectualism (translating from Latin extempore, fascinated by historical artefacts and documents, nowhere more at home than browsing in an antiquarian book store), he is later shown, for instance, taking interest in and even playing sport. This shift may be partly explained by the expanded presence Bartlett was given in subsequent episodes. The original plan for the show was to feature him only occasionally, focusing instead on his staff, but audience response to his scene-stealing appearance in the pilot episode made Sorkin rethink the show and create a more three-dimensional character. This endnote is evidence of geekhood. 2 Answer: Richard MacCabe. 3 Answer: Greg Maddux. 4 http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/01/apple-announcement-howsteve-jobs-made-geek-culture-cool/. 5 Writing for the awl: https://www.theawl.com/page/1465/?gi=e1e73608 35b1. 6 Most of the figures cited in this section are taken from that most nerdy of achievements, the online crowd-sourcing informational treasure trove, Wikipedia. Sources for those numbers are cited in the respective pages. 7 The first attempts to revive the saga, though critically panned, occurred at this same juncture, The Phantom Menace releasing in 1999, though this and the two films which followed, in 2002 and 2005, divided fans. It was not until the sci-fi/fantasy movie wave was well established that the more recent films, beginning with The Force Awakens in 2015, reignited enthusiasm for the franchise beyond its dedicated following. 8 Stewart’s rise to stardom might be considered one of the barometers of the success of nerd culture: a bald, English Shakespearean whose alter

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ego commanded a star ship and who TV Guide dubbed the ‘sexiest man on television’ in 1992, a title which has clung to him in one form or another ever since. 9 While fantasy literature in the 1980s was characterized largely by Tolkien-derivative epic fantasy, the genre now includes (to name but a few) urban fantasy, paranormal romance, steampunk, cyberpunk, diesel punk, alternative history, grimdark, magical realism, space opera, swords and sorcery, horror fantasy, portal fiction, gothic fantasy, comic fantasy, dystopian fantasy and so forth. Similar subsets exist in science fiction, and both also include books expressly targeting formerly marginalized groups, ethnicities and sexual orientations. 10 https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/a-history-of-the-they-might-begiants-song-birdhouse-in-your-soul.html. 11 After Henry IV Part I, 1.2.170–1.

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PART ONE

Geek Culture and Fiction

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1 Shakespeare, Tolkien and Geeking Out Andrew James Hartley

‘Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,’ Christopher Tolkien observes sadly in a recent interview (Rérolle 2012). ‘The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.’ I’ve heard similar remarks from disappointed Shakespeareans leaving theatres, though at least for us we know that Macbeths on stage and screen are like buses: there’ll be another along in a few minutes. Tolkien films, not so much, so they take on the de facto effect of being somehow definitive. The Lord Of The Rings (LOTR ) films were a massive financial gamble and it will be a long time before their shadow has receded so far that another company might consider a remake worth the risk.1 But beyond the fiscal concerns, the agonizing over the extent to which Peter Jackson’s films get the books (including the far less critically successful Hobbit film) ‘right’ (whatever that means), Christopher Tolkien’s faintly elvish turn away from the world and toward the undying lands beyond the sundering sea raises questions about adaptation, authority, the construction of meaning and the limits of cultural ownership which have been playing out in Shakespeare studies for some time. 15

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Not so very long ago – in my own lifetime, certainly – the pairing of Shakespeare and Tolkien would have seemed slightly outrageous, an attempt, perhaps, to dignify the literary fringe by association with a canonical genius, but those days have gone, with both authors shifting toward the cultural centre, the chasm between them collapsing like the bridge at Khazad Dûm. As Janet Brennan Croft argues in the preface to her collection dedicated to the two writers, there is much which connects them: Both have been condemned as superficial or hack writers with a shaky or undeserved spot in the canon, and both have also been nearly deified as among the greatest who ever wrote. Both also appeal equally strongly to a general audience and to amateur and professional scholars, and inspire creative works in other fields. (Croft 2007: 1) The essays which follow her preface are reflective, scholarly and expressly textual in their preoccupations (the subtitle describes the book as ‘essays on shared themes and language’) – more nerd than geek, if you will – the fan’s delight, though visible beneath the surface, necessarily occluded in the interests of academic respectability. What I want to do here, by contrast, is explore some of the things which make the two authors similar and different, not through literary analysis so much as through placement in culture in general and geek culture in particular. Along the way I want to explore ideas of adaptation and ownership which might help us counter Christopher Tolkien’s despairing retreat.

Tolkien, Shakespeare and the battle for fantasy The Lord of the Rings is dotted with conscious echoes from Shakespeare, particularly from Macbeth, some obvious instances of which are the prophesy that no man can kill the witch king of Angmar (aka Lord of the Nazgûl), a man who, like Macbeth, has sold his soul for power. The witch king dies at the hands of the shield maiden, Eowyn, rather than falling to a hero who was from

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his mother’s womb untimely ripped, but the comparison is clear, Eowyn taking the role of virtuous female warrior in pointed opposition to the villainy of Lady Macbeth, who has no parallel in LOTR . Then there’s the ents, the walking trees who overthrow Isengard, and who grow out of Birnam Wood.2 But Tolkien famously ‘rather enjoyed voicing the ultimate Englishman’s heresy of hating Shakespeare altogether’ according to David Day (Tolkien’s Ring, 2011).3 At first blush, this seems odd since Shakespeare was one of the few literary giants to incorporate fantastic elements in his plays: plays like Macbeth make conspicuous use of witchcraft, the Tempest uses magic and elemental spirits, A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses elves and fairies – albeit in forms Tolkien thought debased. Plenty of Shakespeare’s less obviously fantastic plays feature ghosts, others use prophesies, omens, the appearance of gods like Hymen or Jupiter and numerous other supernatural elements such as those which saturate the late romances. Shakespeare never presents an entirely fantastic world as Tolkien does (Dream and Tempest are probably the closest), but his work is shot through with fantastic elements, and it could be that Tolkien saw his use of those elements to tell essentially realist stories as a failure to commit to the genre, even a denigration of it, though fantasy as a theatrical genre did not exist for Shakespeare. While some of Tolkien’s scepticism about Shakespeare came from the way he eclipsed the ancient and medieval texts Tolkien thought should get more attention, his pointed resentment, even hostility, came from the notion that ‘Drama is naturally hostile to fantasy.’ The quotation goes on, ‘Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy’ (Tolkien 2001: 49–50). Some of this speaks to the technology of his day, which we might question in the light of current movie capacity, and I’ll leave alone for now that loaded ‘as it should be’, but the issue runs deeper. What Tolkien is defending here is the fantasy of the private reader, the fantasy of imagination led simply by words, and while I respect the value of that I’m wary of that bookish binary in which enacted fantasy is not fantasy. Tolkien wants to reserve the act of fantastic creation not simply for the author but for the author in collaboration with the reader, and in such fantasy there can be no completion.

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What we have there is a process which is limitless, the Balrog remains the merest fleeting impression conjured by words – it never becomes measurably material. When a play or film gives that Balrog – or Shakespeare’s weird sisters – physical form, it closes off possibilities, rendering concrete what was amorphous, and making singular what was potentially infinite. But this is the nature of all theatre and it is why we have multiple Macbeths on stage and film, because – contrary to popular notions of rightness and authenticity – the purpose of such productions is not to get the play right but to make it new, all performance being by definition adaptation. It is this adaptive process that Tolkien’s notion of fantasy resists, and it is therefore telling that he finds the witches of Macbeth intolerable on stage, but suggestive on the page, concluding in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ that they would have been better realized in a story (a novel or narrative poem) than in a play (Tolkien 2001: 50). This despite discussions elsewhere celebrating the human and realist aspects of the plays as more successful on stage.4 In insisting on fantasy’s non-dramatic nature, Tolkien claims the natural flux of the thing as something which stays both plural and unspecific in the reader’s head rather than allowing that flux to take infinite forms in subsequent material afterlives, an argument familiar to Shakespeare scholars in Harry Berger Jr.’s (1989) preference for the infinite possibilities of ‘imaginary audition’ over the limited theatrical fixities of ‘the new histrionicism’. In the process, Tolkien denies not merely the value of adaptation, but claims – unsurprisingly, I think – fantasy for the cerebral processes of the mind in which visceral response to sensation is minimized: In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. (Tolkien 2001: 50) This is, he does not need to explain, a bad thing. To my mind, it smacks of what Jonas Barish (1981) calls the antitheatrical prejudice which has various origins, not least of which is the anxiety of being swayed by one’s senses. Tolkien’s fantasy world is curiously acorporeal, beauty and ugliness operating partly at the level of abstract romanticism rather than being sensual or – god forbid – sexual, but

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functioning primarily as moral signposting. This is notably and problematically conspicuous in matters of gender (all the book’s women – Arwen, Galadriel, Eowyn and Luthien – exemplify broadly the same characteristics of beauty), and it models one of the ways high fantasy retreats from reality, as the problematic racial profiling of his warring factions offer a pretty safe rule of thumb (in spite of his stand against Nazi anti-Semitism):5 slim and fair = good; swarthy and misshapen (by the standards of the slim and fair) = evil. Tolkien’s resistance to Shakespeare and drama, I would argue, is a resistance to the incursion of reality into his hermetically sealed version of fantasy, and as such it is in accord with a problematic conservatism which leans to the essentialist.

The inevitability and uncertainty of adaptation Rather than sparring over the politics of fantasy, however, I want to discuss ideas of adaptation, the taking of original literary material and changing it, transforming it in terms of genre, form or content. Old discussions of the subject tended to get hung up on questions of fidelity to the original, particularly on what was lost when changes were made (Christopher Tolkien’s position). More recently, Linda Hutcheon has moved the debate into more productive territory (Whittington 2008: 405). She says that part of the pleasure of adaptation ‘comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2012: 4). In the current market in which familiar material takes new form on different platforms (video game, book, movie, etc.), the key is moving away from a hierarchical notion of original and recreation, seeing instead related works which are in dialogue. That said, Tolkien is crucially right about the way imagination is complicated or overpowered by the visual, and in this he suffers in ways Shakespeare does not, at least in part because he is a novelist, not a playwright. Novels offer – or seem to offer – semantically complete art, the semiotic system of their communicative form bound between the pages of the book. This is arguable, of course, and I will return to why, but it certainly seems that the novel is a

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more totalized and finite immersion in the art object than is a play which is necessarily partial, only achieving completeness when the words are mediated through the voice and bodies of actors (at very least) in ways not precisely scripted by the dramatic text. Shakespeare is, in various ways, already fluid. Everything we know about how his plays came together, how they were performed and published, suggests process rather than simply the generation of a stable and completed product, and every theatrical incarnation is necessarily an extension of that process into a hypothetical, the addition of actors, costumes and a million other factors not dictated by the play as text. Such theatrical incarnations model overtly what is always true even of reading, that the text is transformed through interaction with a spectator, its meanings generated by that process rather than somehow residing in the printed words. Yes, all performance is adaptation, but adaptation remakes the original as an entity in continual flux. As David Fischlin and Mark Fortier phrase it, ‘Adaptation implies a process rather than a beginning or an end, and as ongoing objects of adaptation all Shakespeare’s plays remain in process’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 3). That process can, however, be violent, generating contradictions as adaptation becomes its near neighbour, appropriation. In embracing the latter, Graham Holderness frames the resultant paradox thus: Appropriation studies of Shakespeare thus begin with a contradiction. We can only know the work by reinventing it, by appropriation. But such reinvention is conceived as a violent assault on the work’s original identity, expropriation. Yet the work has no original identity. Or rather this ‘identity’ is alternately denied and assumed, erased and recuperated. Writing has no meaning other than what we make of it. Yet we believe that the meanings ascribed by our appropriations are different from other meanings of the work. ‘Different from’ predicates a comparator; there can be no difference without another. But we find ourselves no longer able, with any confidence, to relocate that elusive and inscrutable stranger. (Holderness 2014: 4–5) Tolkien’s meanings are less contested, partly by virtue of genre, partly because they have not been under the kind of sustained scrutiny that Shakespeare’s plays have, but the theoretical point

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(‘writing has no meaning other than what we make of it’) applies to LOTR as much as it does to Hamlet. If meaning is not bound by the text after all, is in fact constructed through interaction with a reader, then the meaning necessarily changes as the reader changes, evolving as culture shifts or as the individual re-reader develops as a person. As we move further from LOTR ’s origin point, it becomes – in terms of its gender and racial politics, for instance – more obviously a product of its formative moment, and, as new adaptive iterations of the story appear in other media, our sense of the book inevitably shifts. My sense of The Lord of the Rings has been inevitably shaped by my experience of the films (as it was by the BBC radio adaptation in the 1980s) and I cannot get back to a sense of the books as genuinely new. I cannot return to the way I first experienced the novel as a child, and perhaps it is this loss of innocence – a pervasive theme throughout LOTR itself – which is the core of Tolkien’s resistance to the enaction of fantasy. If it stays in the head, you can always go back to it. But this isn’t true either. All Shakespeare stagings are different, not merely because they involve different actors making different choices in different costumes and so forth, but because the audiences are plural, and a single staging acts differently on the consciousness of those in attendance. What happens on stage is mediated by our own background, experience, political persuasion, the kind of day we’ve just had, what’s on our minds, how attracted we are to a key actor and so forth. What we experience as an audience is both the same and different, and the same is true of reading. When I return to LOTR now, I am a very different person from the one I was when I first read it, and it would signify to me differently as a result even had I never seen the movies or listened to the radio adaptation. My reading of the book has altered simply because I am older now than I was, not least because ruminations on what is past, what is lost, resonate differently for me in my fifties than they did in my teens. Shakespeare went through the kinds of cultural growing pains Christopher Tolkien laments for his father long ago, so long in fact, and so continuously, that identifying what Shakespeare is has moved beyond being merely a vexed question. Gary Taylor draws on an appropriately geeky metaphor thus: If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter – all pour ceaselessly

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into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light from other stars – other poets, other dramatists – is wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us. He warps cultural space-time; he distorts our view of the universe around him . . . But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. (Taylor 1989: 410–11) Derrida speculates that ‘the desire to write is the desire to launch things that come back to you as much as possible in as many forms as possible’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 5). Knowing as many authors as I do, this seems at best generous in its assessment of writerly motivation, but the phrase does capture the teleological end result: as Graham Holderness says, ‘Shakespeare is, here, now, always what is currently being made of him’ (2014: 5). Fischlin and Fortier counter what theoretically is, however, by positing audience resistance to such acceptance of adaptive evolution: ‘The problem is that cultural forces stand in the way of such a desire. Foremost are notions attached to the author and authorship; proprietary, moral, and restrictive legal rights over texts, intentions, and interpretations’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 5). We are used to this idea with Shakespeare, but, while it is comparatively new in application to Tolkien, it is how texts evolve and multiply when they leave the controlling environment of their authors. It is an unavoidable consequence of publication. We may want to keep the text static, but this is largely a nostalgia which can only be maintained through separation from the text, from allowing our sense of it to calcify in our memories in ways it cannot when we reread it. Reading text is an act of engagement, of exchange, and the resultant meanings must consequently always be in flux. That we might want it to be otherwise is understandable, but to say that it is is – ironically – to embrace a fantasy. It is, like Christopher Tolkien, to turn sadly away from the emanation of the revered textual object in culture as a whole and retreat into oneself, or a prior limited version thereof. But what is culture as a whole if it’s not the place we live and think and feel? For many Tolkien fans it’s not the culture of American Idol, The Bachelor or Monday Night Football. It’s geek

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culture, something to which Tolkien is central. Curiously, and in less self-evident terms, however, so is Shakespeare.

Beyond the Klingon Hamlet The subsection title refers to a Klingon-language Hamlet, written as a kind of in-joke response to a line from Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country (1991), when Klingon Chancellor Gorkon stated, ‘You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.’ This remark was, in turn, a joke spin on other fictional comments such as those parodying German attempts at Shakespearean appropriation such as the line in the 1941 British film ‘Pimpernel’ Smith in which a German general says ‘ “To be or not to be”, as our great German poet said.’ Vladimir Nabokov has the hero of his novel Pnin tell the class he is teaching that Shakespeare was much more moving ‘in the original Russian’.6 Both wisecracks grow out of the real-life history of nations other than Britain seeking ownership of Shakespeare’s genius, as was the case during the First World War when German essayist Ludwig Fulda asserted that a condition of the British surrender would be the formal handover of their national poet to Germany, whose ‘natural’ ownership of the Bard had been obscured by the inconvenience of his actual birth. The joke of the original Klingon Hamlet, as with many things in hardcore geekdom, goes on just a bit too long, and what was an amusing conceit about the desire of cultures to appropriate something of value as a claim to ethnic supremacy took actual, ponderous form, the play being fully translated and published by the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) in a limited edition hardback in 1996, entitled Hamlet Prince of Denmark: The Restored Klingon Version and was reprinted by Pocket Books as a trade paperback in 2000. A related analogy might be the recent, highly successful and surprisingly well-reviewed William Shakespeare’s Star Wars by Ian Doescher, which ABC News radio called ‘the ultimate fan fic’. But is this Star Wars fan fic utilizing iambic pentameter and some strategically positioned verilies, or Shakespeare fan fic utilizing space opera iconography? Well, both. My favourite part of the jacket blurbs (from David Bevington) goes thus:

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I’m delighted to have William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, and have read it with great pleasure. What a fine idea, to set this in the world of Luke Skywalker and R2-D2, C-3PO and Darth Vader! A period of civil war, rebels, the Galactic Empire, the death star. A star-crossed galaxy! But what does it mean to set ‘this’ in the world of Darth Vader. What is the ‘this’ if it’s not Star Wars that is being set in a parodic version of ‘Shakespeareness’? What is being appropriated by what? In each case the reviewer’s sense of what is primary somehow legitimizes the other element as ‘fun’, but the logic is clearly circular, showing the way two different forms of geek culture bolster each other, not simply appropriating a cultural monolith to a particular language or ethnicity, but creating a more discrete, more purely geeky claim to cultural ownership. As Star Wars novelist Timothy Zahn’s blurb says, ‘For those who wish to read the Star Wars legend in the original Elizabethan, this is the book for you.’ And of course, Zahn is right. Star Wars, like the Lion King and other archetype driven movies of late 1970s Hollywood and after, does consciously re-enact Shakespearean borrowings and retellings, but there’s another point being made by this joking pointer to the Elizabethan origins of Star Wars, and that is that Shakespeare belongs to the true nerd, those who know their Hamlet as well as their Star Trek and their Star Wars. It is – however ironically and paradoxically – not a testament to the value of mainstream culture, but a claim to a different brand of cultural ownership rooted in the formerly ridiculed margins of fandom.

Would the real geeks please stand up? As that ‘formerly ridiculed’ remark implies and as we have already claimed in the Introduction, geek interests have moved toward the centre of popular culture, but that has created its own resultant battle for power and authenticity. Simon Brew, writing for Den of Geek, expresses a familiar unease with the announcement that Collins online dictionary declared ‘geek’ the word of 2013, an unease deriving from a sense that some of what is now perceived as geek culture is not, somehow, real, and that some of the people who profess themselves to be geeks aren’t.7 Geeks used to be shunned, so

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they became – for the most part – welcoming and tolerant of anyone who identified with them, something I have often observed at conventions. If you self-identified as a geek, you were received into the fold regardless of race, religion, gender and so on, and a lot of geek material is fundamentally about the value of the shunned and mistreated (think of the appeal of the X-Men premise in the gay community, as articulated by Ian McKellen, about whom more shortly). But that welcoming attitude has been challenged of late by geeks (not Brew) who see the mainstreaming of geek culture as a dilution, something that draws people who aren’t real geeks at all and are in it simply to look cool. Predictably, this backlash has been channelled along gender lines, with cosplay girls coming in for particularly sceptical scrutiny. The power dynamics of this are selfevident: socially awkward male geeks who found a safe and empowering place in geek culture now find themselves confronting there the same sense of inadequacy that they wrestle with in ordinary reality. Standards of authority and authenticity are invoked which, paradoxically, ironically and unselfconsciously, replicate the old models of alienation which led to the bad old days of the geek ghetto: attractive women, for instance, can’t be real gamers or fans of comic books, because as all ‘true’ (awkward white male adolescent) nerds know, it’s being unattractive that drives you to hole up with comic books and video games in the first place. Clearly the argument is self-defeating in its underlying logic, as well as simply inaccurate in its assessment of the diverse crowds at Dragon Con, Comic-Con and the like, many of whom have been self-identifying geeks since before it was cool to be so. Equally predictably, the backlash against the backlash has been omnipresent in social media, and one now calls the authenticity of someone else’s geek interests into question at one’s peril. Brew’s concluding position is the dominant one now: if you think you are a geek, you probably are one, and you’re welcome to celebrate that fact with your peers whatever form your geek interests take. There are always subgroups with whom to connect in geekdom, and those groups are driven by fandom content, not by other social, racial or cultural factors.8 But the anxiety remains. For those who were drawn to geek culture because of its marginal status, what happens to your sense of self when you find yourself in the mainstream? Some celebrate the overturning of those old high school hierarchies, others respond

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according to a particular geek logic, by burrowing deeper into their particular geek interest, affirming once more status – if not actual power – through expertise and encyclopedic knowledge. You’ve watched the Fellowship of the Ring extended director’s edition twenty-five times and named your cat Eowyn? Good for you. How well do you know the Silmarillion or Farmer Giles of Ham? Can you say ‘your ethereal beauty makes me uncomfortable’ in fluent elvish? No? Well, then. Fortunately, there is no parallel to such cheap one-upmanship in academia ☺. But then academia manifests different forms of geekery, and, Shakespeare fandom outside academia is a tricky thing to track. Shakespeare fan sites and social media groups are in short supply, and, where they are not populated by scholars, they lack the excited buzz, impassioned debate and obsessive attention to detail which characterizes the cyber meeting places of, say, the Marvel superhero movies. Unlike Tolkien, Shakespeare in public discourse has been co-opted by academia and – to a lesser extent – by theatre/ film practitioners, so that other (non-professional) fans have been reduced to generally silent audience members. One exception to this is in the so-called ‘authorship question’, an area in which nonprofessionals get a disproportionate amount of media attention, to such an extent that the general public seems to think that there is a real issue worth debating there, one in which academics and scholars – in keeping with the current cultural moment’s war on expertise and faith in Google – are regularly shouted down as elitists with a vested interest in the scholarly status quo. It is unsurprising that the aspect of Shakespeare which generates the most ferociously amateur interest is finally about the cultural authority to claim who the author is and therefore what he (or she)9 means. Like the fans battling not to interpret but to control Game of Thrones and Star Wars who are finally in pursuit of their own cultural authority, Shakespeare is a prize whose status vindicates the fan. Academics may ‘geek out’ about Shakespeare, but our enthusiasm is complicated by our professionalism: we have a vested interest in the subject, one which gives us status in the world as well as (hopefully) paying our mortgages. Perhaps the true mark of geekery is that it is amateur, proceeding, as Michael Dobson says of the nonprofessional theatre companies who regularly stage Shakespeare, from the etymological root of all amateurism: love. If so, I would differentiate those who love Shakespeare (or, for that matter, Harry

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Potter) as an end in itself rather than as a tool to enhance their own reputation and cultural power referenced above. But even this fairly simple metric is unhelpful within academia, where love for our subject is complicated by our professional standing within the field, the universities which pay our salaries. Moreover, academic love for Shakespeare is often qualified, vexed or nuanced, too steeped in knowledge of the period, in political scepticism, in clear-eyed scientific assessment to manage the simpler, purer joy of the enthusiast. Like Tolkien, our insight, and the studious labour which brought us to it, make us more nerds than geeks, quieter, more diligent, more serious, perhaps, but also more cautious. We are, in every sense of the word, qualified.

Ownership and adaptation The complex place of Shakespeare and Tolkien in geekdom has less to do with the authors themselves or their works in isolation than it does with the way they have come to inhabit similar spaces in culture. Both come from a past we find increasingly distant, even alien, and both invoke versions of the world which were in many ways archaic even when they were first written. Tolkien is, of course, the newcomer, but in keeping with the trends outlined above, his former nerdy status (one he embraced wholeheartedly) seems to have given way to a swelling literary respectability which is in part facilitated by the popular films, not because they somehow are his works, but because they have brought a wider audience to those works while simultaneously conveying the greater richness, complexity and difficulty of the originals. Difficulty is important to both literary standing and geekdom, implying as it does a mystical hierarchy of quality of which the casual (or mainstream) reader is insufficiently knowledgeable or sophisticated to appreciate. Difficulty, sententiousness, a wayward tendency to the nonnaturalistic, the elevated, the digressive, the quasi-spiritual, the moral, the over-stuffed, over-lyrical, over-informative, lends the whole an otherworldly gravitas which the crowd-pleasing films indicate but fall short of, in ways reminiscent of the manner in which films and stagings of Shakespeare somehow confirm the worth of the plays through their manifest failures. This is a particular form of that cheap logocentric antitheatricalism, ‘The book was

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better’, a glib and dismissive phrase designed to convey the sophistication of the reader and therefore the speaker. Adaptive appropriation is, in short, a battle for cultural authority fought on the fastness of Helm’s Deep against the tidal hordes of orcish populism, the prize being ownership of the author. Shakespeareans are familiar with this debate and are understandably wary of its implications. It is not just the struggle over what Shakespeare means and to whom, but a struggle over what should be valued, not just in the plays, but in society and culture more generally. The power dynamics of such things rarely remain abstract and we do well to remember that the heart of the struggle is often centred on people and their experiences: which ones we value, which ones we dismiss or ignore. Sci-fi and fantasy fandom is currently wrestling with these very issues as geek enthusiasts battle over how the Harry Potter universe should evolve or how the Game of Thrones series should have ended. At the core of these feuds is a power struggle over who finally owns the content of stories, the authors who produce them or the fans whose love for them transitions into a desire to control and shape them, whether that be through fanfiction or through letter-writing campaigns demanding that a network remake the end of a favourite series.10 As commercial success seems to strip the author of semiotic control of their work, we might find ourselves more sympathetic to Christopher Tolkien’s sense of his father’s work becoming ‘a monster, devoured by its own popularity’. The twitterverse pushback against such things may be terse (Neil Gaiman famously posted in response to fan demands that the author of the Game of Thrones books get the final volume completed already, ‘George RR Martin is not your bitch’), but the ferocity of the debate resembles internal family feuding, where the stakes are highest because everyone knows the terms of the debate so intimately and are all claiming the authority of their form of love. The furious squabbles over race and gender, for example, which we see in Shakespeare studies, are now playing out in fandom, as people rage across the internet about the canonicity of female Jedi Knights, whitewashing in the Marvel universe, or the implications of a black Hermione Granger on Broadway. However misguided the passion, however deluded and stoked by the kind of nostalgia which is really prejudice, privilege and narcissism in ComiCon fancy dress, the battle over authority, as in Shakespeare studies, is a battle over ownership, over who gets to

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speak ex cathedra and who is allowed in the club. Performance engenders such things because they take the private experience of reading – with all those infinite interpretive possibilities selected in silence according to the reader’s taste and predilections – and make them singular, visual and public. In Tolkien’s restrictive sense, they leave the realm of the cerebral and become material in ways which are, he says, antithetical to fantasy. Where Shakespeare and Tolkien come together, they are more than a double threat. They are a crystallizing of things we value and, when they are somehow presented in the body of a single person, Ian McKellen, for instance, a famous Macbeth early in his career and a famous Lear late, with Gandalf and Magneto in between, they enact a unique nexus of cultural power. I was struck by the review of a fund-raising one-man show McKellen performed in New Zealand for the Isaac Theatre Royal in Palmerston entitled ‘Shakespeare, Tolkien and You’.11 The writer, Tim Saunders, is rhapsodic, entranced by this curious intersection of celebrity, talent and literary greatness, the review itself becoming a spiralling panegyric of religious intensity, crucial to which is McKellen’s easy, conversational normalcy while still a kind of giant. To be praised for being ordinary while people fawn on you is the prerogative of royalty, a hankering after older values and the myth of intrinsic greatness made manifest in quasi spiritual terms: ‘Sir Ian took the time to meet everyone in the audience as they left, exchanging autographs and photos for donations, and revealing his own humility and reminding us that even a wizard is human when he’s not wearing his hat’ (Saunders 2012). It’s easy to poke fun at such provincial hagiography, something we more urbane and distanced scholars would not permit ourselves, but there is something to be said for high cultural geeking out, particularly when it’s not shackled to the use of the beloved object to advance your own cultural position or your dubious prejudices. There is, after all, nothing wrong with enthusiasm, with celebrating the things you love, and doing so does not necessarily imply a lack of critical faculty, even if critical distance is momentarily shelved. There is also something to be said for acknowledging the way the person of an actor embodies not just his or her past performances, but seminal moments in our own lives, points at which the things we love took shape, moved us and have lived within us since in ways that shape who we are. When we bask in the glow of a

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McKellen moving easily from Gandalf to Lear, to after-dinner speaker and gay rights advocate, we celebrate ourselves and all we value even if we look a little silly in the process. Because that is the heart of geekery, the intersection between informed investment, enthusiasm and a resultant – or possibly causal – social awkwardness, the recognition that what we most value is not for all markets.

Notes 1 There is talk of a TV series, though the parameters and logistics remain extremely tentative. 2 That the ents literalize what Shakespeare makes into a bleak joke at Macbeth’s expense – the idea of an army of trees assaulting a castle – is indicative of the way the play draws a line between the play’s fantasy elements and its mundane conclusions which Tolkien found frustrating. More overlap between Tolkien and Macbeth (in the healing hands of kings, for instance) can be found in Janet Brennan Croft’s essay in her compelling essay collection on the two authors (2007: 215–26). 3 Chapter One, ‘Tolkien’s mind’ (viewed as an e-book). 4 One such instance is a 1944 letter to his son Christopher on a production of Hamlet (Tolkien 2000: 88). 5 Tolkien’s response to a potential German publisher who inquired as to whether his heritage was Aryan is both heartening and endearingly nerdy, first schooling the publisher on the Indo-Iranian roots of Aryan peoples, then saying that he ‘regrets’ that he has no Jewish ancestors, ‘that gifted people’ (letter of 25 July 1938). Elsewhere his response to Hitler himself balances outrage with scholarly contempt for the Fuhrer as a ‘ruddy little ignoramus’ (letter to his son, Michael, 1941). 6 Star Trek was fond of such playful appropriations. One fan site adds the following: ‘This same trope – people claiming certain things originated in the speaker’s own culture rather than wherever they truly came from – appears a LOT in Star Trek as a whole. In TOS [The Original Series], Pavel Chekov often claims that various sayings, and even the Garden of Eden, originated in Russia, and Spock attributes quotes from Sherlock Holmes and Richard Nixon to ancient Vulcans. Quark claims that “discretion is the better part of valor” is a Ferengi proverb, and Khan that “revenge is a dish best served cold” is a Klingon saying.’ https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/55614/ why-does-chancellor-gorkon-think-shakespeare-was-klingon.

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7 https://www.denofgeek.com/other/geek/28644/when-did-geekdombecome-cool. As if to demonstrate the point, Den of Geek receives approximately 15 million visits per month. 8 At least in principle. As a straight, white male, my sense of geekdom’s inclusivity is perhaps overly positive because it squares with my experience, but the bickering over the ‘fake geek’ cosplayers is the tip of a darker and more insidious iceberg. On reading this chapter, fellow contributor Emily Leverett reminded me of several instances I knew of but had not been directly affected by: feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian whose work on video games drew death and rape threats from conservative fans who promised to plant bombs at venues hosting her in 2014; game designers Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn, who were similarly targeted over the so-called Gamergate controversy, in which right wing activists used every insidious internet troll tactic to attack proponents of gender and race equality in the industry; the ‘Sad Puppy’ attempt to hijack the Hugo awards of 2015 and 2016 as a show of displeasure at the diversity of the nominees. These were the headline getters, but there were similar culture wars ripples at local events such as ConCarolinas in 2018 boycotted by many writers (myself included) when the organization announced a special award for an author many viewed as pandering to a sexist and racist community within geek culture. I would like to say that the trajectory has been largely away from such things, and most of the instances cited above were high water marks, but it’s clear that the larger cultural divisions we are seeing in society as a whole continue to play out in fan culture as well. 9 As posited by a June 2019 piece by Elizabeth Winkler, at once poorly researched and depressingly simple-minded in its argument, in The Atlantic. 10 This is currently happening as outraged Game of Thrones fans petition HBO to refashion the series finale. 11 See Saunders 2012..

Works cited Barish, Jonas (1981), The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, Harry, Jr (1989), Imaginary Auditions: Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley: University of California Press. Croft, Janet Brennan (2007), Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

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Day, David (2011), Tolkien’s Ring. London: Pavilion Books. Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier, eds. (2000), Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London and New York: Routledge. Holderness, Graham (2014), Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (2012), A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. ‘Pimpernel’ Smith (1941), producer Leslie Howard, screenplay Anatole de Grunwald, British National Films. Rérolle, Raphaëlle (2012), ‘Tolkien, l’anneau de la discorde’, Le Monde, 5 July, https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/07/05/tolkien-lanneau-de-la-discorde_1729858_3246.html. Translation posted via Worldcrunch.com. Saunders, Tim (2012), ‘Exclusive: Ian McKellen: On Stage with Shakespeare, Tolkien and You’, Look to the Stars, 6 May, https://www.looktothestars.org/news/8317-exclusive-ian-mckellen-onstage-with-shakespeare-tolkien-and-you. Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country (1991), producers Ralph Winter and Steven-Charles Jaffe, screenplay Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn, Paramount Pictures. Taylor, Gary (1989), Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Tolkien, J. R. R. (2000) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Selection, ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton. Tolkien, J. R. R. (2001/1964), ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in Tree and Leaf, New York: HarperCollins. Whittington, William (2008), ‘Review of A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon’, Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 3: 404–6. Winkler, Elizabeth (2019), ‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’, The Atlantic, June, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-isshakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/

2 ‘I Opened a Door; That Is All’ Neil Gaiman’s Decidedly Human Shakespeare in The Sandman Emily Leverett

Aside from his place of privilege in the academic canon, William Shakespeare frequently appears and is referenced in geek culture, specifically science fiction and fantasy (SFF). Annalisa Castaldo notes, ‘Shakespeare’s works continue to be available for use by popular culture and especially popular media. But . . . Shakespeare himself also circulates as in popular and popularized form’ (2004: 94–5). Furthermore, Shakespeare in the SFF community has been used by both authors and audiences to prove that a work or genre has literary or cultural value. Neil Gaiman became a central figure in this debate when The Sandman1 issue ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, causing a flurry of conversation about the literary merit of comic books. Castaldo reads Gaiman’s Shakespeare as an artistic genius who ‘discovers through his life and the course of the series the necessary loss tied to a life of bringing dreams to light. He becomes, in essence, a human Dream losing his freedom because humanity 33

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has need of his gifts’ (2004: 99). This chapter challenges this notion, arguing that Shakespeare’s regrets are commonplace, and his parallel to Dream, rather than mythologizing Shakespeare, humanizes Dream. Gaiman’s Shakespeare and Dream are geeks themselves, and Shakespeare especially fits the profile that Hartley and Holland offer in their Introduction to this volume: his focus on his writing becomes ‘exuberant, all-encompassing, [and] gloriously . . . detail-oriented’ (8). Furthermore, both characters predicted the current climate across some parts of SFF fandom. Neil Gaiman describes the central conflict of the 2,000-pluspage tale as ‘The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision’ (Jahlmar 2015: 267). Less cryptically, it is the tragic story of Dream, ‘a being who is the personification of dreams’ and one of the seven siblings known as the endless, ‘anthropomorphic personifications . . . of universal forces’, the others being Destiny, Destruction, Death, Desire, Despair and Delirium (Bender 1999: 2, xii). Throughout the course of the series, the supremely confident Dream questions his past choices and their consequences, eventually sacrificing his own life for a new Dream, better able to function in the world. Shakespeare meets Dream in a bar in London in 1589 (‘Men of Good Fortune’ in A Doll’s House) where Dream overhears Marlowe’s devastating critique of Shakespeare’s first play: ‘it should be your last’ (Gaiman 1990: 125). Shakespeare proclaims, ‘I would give anything to have your gifts, or more than anything to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead’ (126). Dream approaches Shakespeare, saying, ‘I heard your talk, Will. Would you write great plays? Create new dreams to spur the minds of men? Is that your Will? Then let us talk’ (127). So begins the bargain between Shakespeare and Dream. Has Shakespeare made a deal with the devil? The mention of Faustus could foreshadow such a deal, and much has been made by critics of this moment. Julia Round suggests that Shakespeare makes ‘a Faustian bargain that practically makes Shakespeare into a Marlowe character. In this sense, The Sandman can also be read as a part of the long history of doubt surrounding Shakespeare’s work’ (2010: 103). However, with Lucifer as a character, it’s clear that Dream is not a demon. As far as the implication that Shakespeare isn’t the man who wrote the plays, Gaiman himself comments:

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There’s a school of thought that contends someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays – the earl of Oxford, or the Earl of Essex, or someone else famous and of the nobility. I think it’s rubbish, but what pisses me off most is the underlying assumption that the plays had to be written by someone with a title, that they couldn’t be the work of a ‘normal’ person. The people who cling to this strange little snobbery ignore ten thousand years of recorded human history on who our writers are. (Bender 1999: 224–5) Still, what exactly is Will giving up? The pun on ‘Will’, which Shakespeare used frequently, is more than a passing in-joke – his drive to write is a part of why Dream makes his offer. Shakespeare’s choice sets a series of events in motion, but the bargain is not the source of estrangement. The bar is in London, meaning Shakespeare had already left his family behind to be a playwright and actor. Even before Dream’s offer, Shakespeare followed his desire to London, alienating himself from his family. Dream and Shakespeare next meet on 23 June 1593 (‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Dream Country). Shakespeare, his son Hamnet and his acting company are touring with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first of his two plays for Dream. On the Sussex Downs, near the Long Man of Wilmington, they perform for the faeries, including Auberon,2 Titania and Puck. Away from prying ears, Shakespeare assures Dream that he ‘wrote [the play] as you told me, [and that] it is the best that I have written to date’ (Gaiman 1991: 64). The plot came from Dream, but Shakespeare’s need to assert his own compliance and competence proves that he is the creator. Shakespeare’s consistent collaboration emphasizes his talents as separate from Dream. Though Shakespeare refuses to allow Jack Kemp, the actor playing Puck, to sit on a pork pie to make the audience laugh, both men are clearly used to collaborating, as Shakespeare notes in the last volume of the series, The Wake:3 I cannot even read [my plays] with pleasure . . . This speech means nothing, I wrote it but to cover while Burbage sank a beer offstage and changed his gown. This lady’s speech is pretty but pointless – young Cordell that week sulked until I gave him something [to] make the pit cheer. (Gaiman 2012)

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While the collaboration wasn’t always positive, the mere fact of it makes Shakespeare much more than a vessel unable to interact meaningfully with others. His melancholy rejection of his work seems unlikely if he was merely a conduit for Dream, especially given that he is complaining to Dream, in Dream’s castle. Shakespeare and Dream’s final meeting appears as a flashback after Dream’s death, funeral and wake in the final issue, ‘The Tempest’. Shakespeare describes how the world around him is his inspiration for the Tempest, the final play in their bargain. When his daughter Judith warns him of the storm outside, he adds not only the storm, but also a version of Judith, complete with a ‘fairy tale’ of a pretty girl, a prince and an escape from an island. When Judith repeats her mother’s warning that masques are popular at court, Shakespeare says he’ll add a masque. Later that evening at the inn, Shakespeare encounters two men and a woman who bring in the body of an ‘Indian from the distant Bermudas: a noble savage’. Later that night, Shakespeare is woken from sleep by the two men drunkenly singing a bawdy song like Stephano and Trinculo in Tempest. A day later in a conversation with Ben Jonson, Shakespeare acknowledges his historical and literary sources. When Jonson mockingly asks whether he has been raiding Holinshed or Plutarch, Shakespeare dryly notes ‘it’s mostly mine, for once’. Gaiman reinforces the author’s multiplicity of sources in his description of Shakespeare’s writing life: The story [‘the Tempest’] reveals details about Shakespeare’s life, and it then proceeds to show that some of his writing is a reflection of that life; some of it is wish fulfillment, echoing things he’d like to take control of in his life; some of it stems from little observations he makes that bounce around in his brain in strange angles and produce completely unexpected results; and some of it originates from places that are a total mystery. (Bender 1999: 224) Shakespeare’s writing comes from everywhere and nowhere. He draws from some things deliberately, and others seem to have no distinct origin outside of his imagination. None of these sources are supernatural.

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Shakespeare himself asserts that art is fundamentally human. Jonson insists that Shakespeare must take stories from sources, rather than his own life, because in Jonson’s view, Shakespeare’s life was boring: tanning, owning horses, and a bit of writing and acting. On the other hand, Jonson insists, he himself has been ‘me[eting] all sorts of people . . . from the lowest to the high’, and so understands humanity. Shakespeare flatly rejects his conclusion: ‘I’ve lived as much life as you, Ben . . . I would have thought that all one needs to understand people is to be a person.’ The ability to write people comes from understanding people, and that comes from empathy – from being human. Shakespeare’s humanity – not his bargain with Dream – is the centre of his art. Furthermore, Shakespeare acknowledges himself in his art. He is Prospero and tells Dream, ‘I would be a fool if I denied it. I am Prosper, certainly.’ However, he doesn’t stop there: But I am also Ariel – a flaming firing spirit, cracking like lightening in the sky. And I am dull Caliban. I am dark Antonio, brooding and planning, and Old Gonzalo, counseling silly wisdom. And I am Trinculo, the jester, and Stephano the butler, for they are clowns and fools, and I am also a clown and a fool. And on occasion, drunkards. All the characters are pieces of himself reflecting his experiences. Even though the final play is a request from Dream, and Dream specifies the subject matter (dreams), it is born of Shakespeare’s own experience. Gaiman’s focus on Shakespeare’s responsibility is double-edged. Asserting that humanity is the source of art is also asserting that humanity is responsible for that art. Shakespeare made his choices, and those choices have inescapable consequences. The biggest consequence is regret, and in his regret Shakespeare is most human. Nowhere are the consequences more dire than with Hamnet. In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare’s focus leads him to disregard his son, which may result in the boy’s death. In the interval called by Dream, Titania is charmed by the boy, like her character in the play. She promises him wonderful things like obedient dragons and forever summer twilight (78). When Hamnet tries to explain his experience to his father, Shakespeare dismisses him, saying that he ‘must see this [performance]’ (79). Both Hamnet and Shakespeare are enchanted by the fairies:

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Shakespeare’s character, Puck, amazes him more than his son – which is the danger of the fey – luring mortals to pursue desires that they would normally fear. And as Shakespeare looks at the events unfolding on stage, we see Hamnet, sad of face, talk quietly to his father who ignores him . . . Shakespeare doesn’t realize the danger, and his ignorance furthers the subtle horror, when we discover Hamnet’s early death linked to Titania’s seductive promise. (Lancaster 2000: 73) Though fairy enchantment at least partially causes Shakespeare’s dismissal of Hamnet, it doesn’t spare him guilt. Hamnet’s death in 1596, Gaiman implies, is the result of a fairy abduction (86). Multiple critics have blamed Dream’s bargain for Hamnet’s death: Gaiman presents Shakespeare as a man who gives up all true connections to everyday life for eternal glory and comes to regret the bargain [. . . and that] to become that Will, the one who writes great plays, Shakespeare must give up his will and become a conduit for stories that exist outside of him and outside of time. (Castaldo 2004: 101, 102) Hy Bender, author of The Sandman Companion, argues that ‘[Shakespeare is] imprisoned by his obsession with words and stories, which builds a wall between him and his son’ (1999: 66). The lingering question of whether Shakespeare could have saved his son haunts him. But does Shakespeare really find his own will replaced with supernatural artistic inspiration? No. The source of Shakespeare’s neglect is far more banal and more poignant. While there is no question that Shakespeare is driven by a desire to create stories that will last forever, and that this focus results in his being (somewhat) estranged from his family, the cause is not supernatural. Regret links Shakespeare and Dream. Dream wonders if he made a mistake in the agreement with Shakespeare: ‘I wonder if I have done right. And I wonder why I wonder. Will is a willing vehicle for the great stories. Through him they will live for an age of man; and his words will echo down through time’ (81). Dream makes clear that Shakespeare is a willing participant, again punning on the name. However, this

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moment is also about Dream’s crisis of conscience – a very human experience, and one that foreshadows the humanizing changes that will lead to his death. Humanity fails to understand consequences: ‘But [Shakespeare] did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream . . . But the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted’ (81). Shakespeare makes choices he does not fully understand, and the results are not extraordinary. Shakespeare and Hamnet could be switched for John Lennon and Julian or Courtney Love and Frances, and Hamnet’s words – ‘it’s like [his father is] somewhere else’ – would still apply (75). In fact, the story of a person choosing a career over family, and regretting that choice, is common. Shakespeare’s relationship with Hamnet parallels Dream’s relationship with his own son Orpheus, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play wherein the ghost of the main character’s emotionally distant father spurs Hamlet’s actions. In all three instances, incredibly successful people neglect other aspects of their lives. It’s not some mystic thing called ‘story’ or some divine drive to make art that separates Shakespeare and Hamnet; it is Shakespeare’s choice to become an expert at his job, to become, in pop culture terms, a theater geek. Shakespeare confesses his own potential regret to Dream. Right after acknowledging that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his best and most successful work, he learns of Marlowe’s death. When Dream notes that ‘I did not realize [the news] would hurt you so,’ Shakespeare begins to understand him: ‘No, your kind care not for human lives’ (78). While Shakespeare is speaking of Dream, and possibly of gods in general, he might also be speaking of art and inspiration. Art cares nothing for the suffering of the artist, and choosing art over people leads to regret. However, Shakespeare is not willing to give it up: ‘Dark stranger, I half-regret our bargain. But come, our night’s comedy [Midsummer] begins once more’ (78). Is it possible that Shakespeare could have ended the bargain? Chosen an ordinary life in Stratford? Perhaps. But he only half regrets it. The ability to write plays that even Marlowe would call great is worth more, in that moment, than potential consequences. Shakespeare disregards his own concerns. That he doesn’t understand the consequences makes him the epitome of a human. All humans ‘never do’ understand consequences, and what Dream predicts here – that Shakespeare getting what he wants doesn’t work out the way he expects – comes to pass.

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Regret appears mostly clearly in ‘The Tempest’, when Shakespeare has retired from London to Stratford and is living with his wife Anne and his daughter Judith. While Shakespeare’s regrets are laid bare, they are not the tragic losses of a Dream-touched suffering genius. Instead, they bear the markings of a typical marriage and life. If, as critics suggest, Dream’s gift has walled off Shakespeare from everyone, he should be miserable, alone even in the presence of others, and struggling through bad relationships with Anne and Judith. That is not the case. Shakespeare seems to be living a normal, if boring, and mostly contented life. He and Anne have fallen into a comfortable relationship: he teases her that Judith can get a husband the same way Anne got him – by getting pregnant. Anne’s response is to smile, look affectionately at him, stroke his cheek and say ‘aye’. Even as she scolds him for his drinking when he goes to the inn, she nonetheless seems concerned that he’ll catch a cold from the storm. Though their relationship is cantankerous, it is also loving and affectionate, what Gaiman describes as ‘strangely comfortable’ (Bender 1999: 227). Shakespeare’s relationship with Judith is much like his with Hamnet. Judith desperately wishes her father had been home, especially when Hamnet died. When she asks him if Hamnet’s death affected him, he responds by saying, ‘I . . . followed a dream. I did as I saw best at the time.’ This conversation could occur between any grown child and absentee parent. Shakespeare takes responsibility for his absence – he chose to be in London, not Stratford. He is experiencing exactly what Dream predicted. Even knowing that he made the choice, Shakespeare, like all people who regret, wonders what might have been. Though Dream insists that no one, not even himself, can know, he ‘hazard[s] an educated guess’ (Gaiman 2012). Shakespeare would have had minor success, eventually returned home to Stratford, taken a normal job and bored his children with his stories of his years in London. Though Shakespeare asks whether Hamnet’s fate would have changed, he immediately retracts the question. He can’t bear the thought that his son might not have died. Shakespeare got what he wanted, but now ‘he no longer has any idea if those are the things he wants, because he’s no longer the boy who wanted them’ (Bender 1999: 229). He has regrets, certainly, but they emerge from human foibles and choices. In his final conversation with Dream, Shakespeare asserts that Dream’s bargain was unwanted: ‘Why did you give [the plays] to me? The words. I did not ask for them.’ However, Dream rejects

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Shakespeare’s wishful thinking, in a single-panel flashback to their exchange in the bar: ‘[I gave you] the power to give men dreams that would live on after you were gone. And you gave me two plays.’ Julie Myers Saxton reads Dream here as removing Shakespeare’s agency: ‘More than simply giving Shakespeare a commission, Dream has given him the words to write’ (2007: 24). However, Dream refutes this, saying that he gave Shakespeare the ability to create, not the creations: ‘I opened a door, that is all.’ Shakespeare was worthy: ‘Because you had a gift, and the talent. Because you were no worse a man than many another. Because you had a good heart. And because you wanted it . . . so much . . .’4 Shakespeare wishes that he could deny his responsibility, but Dream sweeps that away. Shakespeare’s humanity is crystal clear in his paradoxical behaviour of both wanting something so deeply and then forgetting that desire in the aftermath of the choice. Seemingly aware of the regrets he will have later – regrets the audience has already seen come to pass – Dream echoes Shakespeare’s melancholy. When asked why he would want a happy ending, rather than a grand tragedy, Dream answers: I wanted a tale of graceful ends. I wanted a play about a king who drowns his books, and breaks his staff, and leaves his kingdom, about a magician who becomes a man. About a man who turns his back on his magic. Dream believes he will get no such good end. When Shakespeare suggests that Dream does not have to remain an island but can change, that all men can change, Dream insists: I am not a man, and I do not change. I asked you earlier if you saw yourself reflected in your tale. I do not. I MAY not. I am Prince of stories, Will; but I have no story of my own, nor shall I ever. This statement is the very last made by Dream in the series. It is also, as Gaiman himself says, ‘simply not true, and becomes more untrue as he goes along. I think he knows it even then’ (Bender 1999: 229). The nearly 2,000 pages that come before this statement suggest that he very much does have a story of his own. Dream has changed and can change – though the choices he makes lead to his

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death. Still, Dream’s desire for a good end is understandable, and deeply human. Now I want to turn to geek culture and a few of the ways Gaiman predicts some of fan culture today. If a geek is someone dedicated, obsessed, with a subject, and one who devotes a huge amount of time and energy to it, then Shakespeare and Dream both qualify. First, the character of Shakespeare in The Sandman is in many ways a geek. Hamnet first describes him as such in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: He’s very distant. He doesn’t seem like he’s really there anymore. Not really. It’s like he’s somewhere else. Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays. Mother says he’s changed in the last five years, but I don’t remember him any other way. Judith – she’s my twin sister – she once joked that if I died he’d just write a play about it. ‘Hamnet.’ (75) The hyper-focus Shakespeare gives to his plays is mirrored in the same behaviour in many devotees to hobbies, particularly in the SFF fan communities. Tales of obsessive collectors, cosplayers who spend every last dime on their creations, gamers who pour hundreds of hours into their favourite games, LARPers who roam the countryside in full costume, fanfic writers who detail canon and non-canon adventures in other authors’ worlds, and fans whose spare time revolves as much as possible around their favourite words are so common as to be the norm. Like many geek fans, Shakespeare himself acknowledges his own level of involvement. In ‘The Tempest’, Shakespeare launches into a multi-panel rant that echoes Hamnet’s words in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. By being an artist, Shakespeare was an observer of life, more than he lived it: Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I’d fall in love, or fall in lust, and at the height of my passion, I would think ‘so this is how it feels.’ And I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died, and I was hurt; but I watched my hurt and even relished it a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I

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wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of the Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own. Furthermore, Gaiman confirms that Shakespeare’s experience mirrors his own: I’m basing a lot of [my take on Shakespeare] on what I personally find scary about being a storyteller. When something terrible is happening, 99 percent of you is feeling terrible, but 1 percent is standing off to the side – like a little cartoon devil on your shoulder – and saying, ‘I can use this. Let’s see, I’m so upset that I’m actually crying. Are my eyes just tearing, or are they stinging? Yes, they’re stinging, and I can feel the tears rolling down my cheeks. How do they feel? Hot. Good, what else?’ That’s the kind of disconnectedness I wanted to explore. (Bender 1999: 77) Experiencing while simultaneously evaluating describes the relationship to art of many artists and self-proclaimed geeks. Fantasy is more real than reality, as Shakespeare points out: ‘Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Gonzalo, aethereal Ariel and silent Antonio, all of THEM are more real to me than silly, wise Ben Jonson; Susanna and Judith; the good citizens of Stratford; the whores and oyster-women on London town . . .’5 The feeling that fictional places and characters are more real than the real world is common in geek culture, where both online and in-real-life geek communities are the true and real families, and the rest of the world, including co-workers and blood relatives, have less substance. Gaiman’s fantasy is not only about escaping reality; it also offers a blueprint for ethical identity. In discussing Gaiman’s work, Derek Lee argues that ‘fantasy, then, is not a genre of escapism completely divorced from material reality but rather the ethical foundation by which to operate within it . . . [T]he reader of fantasy draws from an infinite well of marvels and creates an ethical self to share with the world’ (2016: 552, 562). While fantasy aids the creation of self, the audience is a part of the creation of the art as well. As Gaiman notes about The Sandman, ‘The book is a collaborative experience between a reader and a writer’ (Elder 2007: 57). Chris Dowd suggests that Gaiman goes even further in his work:

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[Gaiman] downplays and undermines the authority of authors and suggests we should be more careful about trusting our storytellers. Instead, Gaiman’s stories consistently point to the audience as being responsible for a story’s success or failure. The audience is shown to be the real source of energy and capable of the greatest imaginative work. (2007: 104) Such interaction puts responsibility on the audience, but also initiates audience investment. Working with the author, the sense of being a part of the story itself is a one of the greatest appeals of SFF and is a large part of fan culture. However, what happens when the author is ready to move on from a story? Gaiman reflects this experience through Shakespeare’s assertion of writing as work. A priest tells Shakespeare that he wishes he had Shakespeare’s divine inspiration, but Shakespeare is quick to correct him: ‘Does a carpenter rely on inspiration? . . . words are my tools’. This is a kind of demystification of art, pushing back against the idea of writing as an unlearnable gift, not a honed craft. Gaiman ‘interrogates much of the mythology which surrounds Shakespeare and the artistic impulse in general when he reveals the work or labor of writing plays’ (Pendergast 2008: 187). Gaiman goes one step further when he depicts Shakespeare as weary from his great writing. Nick Katsiadas reads Dream and Shakespeare as artists and Romantic heroes, both (semi-)autobiographical figures of Gaiman himself: ‘Morpheus wanted to end his narrative; Gaiman wanted to end his d/Dream-weaving’ (2015: 79). Shakespeare himself says, ‘It is over . . . All of it, the burden of words. I can lay it down, now. Let it rest.’ The desire to stop the words doesn’t only belong to Shakespeare. ‘This comment also speaks to Morpheus-asGaiman: he has released himself from Morpheus’ narrative. He can finally put it to rest’ (Katsiadas 2015: 81). The graceful end for Morpheus and Shakespeare allowed Gaiman to move on to dozens of other successful and meaningful projects, no matter how sad the audience might have been to see Dream go. Gaiman did, in the future, create more Sandman material, and right now there are rumours of The Sandman coming to Netflix, so perhaps no great figure in geek culture is really gone for good. The demands for more Sandman, and the weariness with projects, seem to prefigure the recent demands of authors by fans. The creation of

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a petition for the makers of the television show Game of Thrones to remake the unsatisfying (to some) series finale and the death threats fielded by The Southern Vampire Mysteries (Sookie Sackhouse) creator Charlene Harris for the end of her series are two examples of some fans’ recent sense of proprietary over not only the stories, but also the lives of the authors.6 Like Shakespeare at the end of his plays, Gaiman turns to his (geeky) audience for approval. On the last page of The Wake, Shakespeare pens Prospero’s final lines: ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.’ The layers of creators and creations asking for audience approval is deep: ‘Thus the voices of four men, two magic users and two writers, seem to unite in this valedictory moment: Prospero, his creator Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s “creator” Morpheus, and Morpheus’ creator Gaiman all plead for our indulgence simultaneously’ (Brown 2009: 174). At the end of The Sandman, Gaiman presents a very human Shakespeare begging the indulgence of his audience, an indulgence Gaiman may also be seeking, to fulfil perhaps one of the most human of writers’ needs: the audience’s approval.

Notes 1 This chapter focuses on the initial comic-book run of the Sandman from DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, published from 1988 to 1996. Shakespeare appears in three issues: ‘Men of Good Fortune’ in the collection The Doll’s House, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Dream Country, and ‘The Tempest’ in The Wake. 2 Gaiman’s spelling. 3 This volume has no page numbers. 4 Ellipses in original. 5 Ellipses in original. 6 Gaiman directly addresses this issue in his 12 May 2009 blog ‘Entitlement Issues’.

Works cited Bender, H. (1999), The Sandman Companion: A Dreamer’s Guide to the Award-Winning Comic Series. New York: Vertigo DC Comics.

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Brown, S. A. (2009), ‘ “Shaping Fantasies”: Responses to Shakespeare’s Magic in Popular Culture’, Shakespeare 5, no. 2: 162–76. Castaldo, A. (2004), ‘ “No More Yielding than a Dream”: The Construction of Shakespeare in the Sandman’, College Literature 31, no. 4: 94–110. Dowd, C. (2007), ‘An Autopsy of Storytelling: Metafiction and Neil Gaiman’, in Darrell Schweitzer (ed.), The Neil Gaiman Reader, 103–14. Cabin John, MD: Wildside Press. Elder, R. K. (2007), ‘Gods and Other Monsters: A Sandman Exit Interview and Philosophical Omnibus’, in Darrell Schweitzer (ed.), The Neil Gaiman Reader, 55–78. Cabin John, MD: Wildside Press. Gaiman, N. (1990), The Sandman: The Doll’s House. New York: Vertigo DC Comics. Gaiman, N. (1991), The Sandman: Dream Country. New York: Vertigo DC Comics. Gaiman, N. (2009), ‘Entitlement Issues’. Neil Gaiman: Journal, 12 May, http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html. Gaiman, N. (2012), The Wake. New York: DC Comics. Jahlmar, J. (2015), ‘ “Give the Devil his Due”: Freedom, Damnation, and Milton’s Paradise Lost in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of Mists’, Partial Answers 13, no. 2: 267–86. Katsiadas, N. (2015), ‘Mytho-auto-bio: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the Romantics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Studies in Comics 6, no. 1: 61–84. Lancaster, K. (2000), ‘Neil Gaiman’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Shakespeare Integrated into Popular Culture’, Journal of American and Comparative Literature 23, no. 3: 69–77. Lee, D. (2016), ‘The Politics of Fairyland: Neil Gaiman and the Enchantments of the Anti-Bildungsroman’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 5: 552–64. Pendergast, J. (2008), ‘Six Characters in Search of Shakespeare: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Shakespearean Mythos’, Mythlore 26, no. 3/4: 185–97. Round, J. (2010), ‘Transforming Shakespeare: Neil Gaiman and The Sandman’, in Phyllis Furs and Christy Williams (eds), Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformation of Original Works, 95–110. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Saxton, J. M. (2007), ‘Dreams and Fairy Tales: Themes of Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Sandman’, in Darrell Schweitzer (ed.), The Neil Gaiman Reader, 22–9. Cabin John, MD: Wildside Press.

3 Shakespeare Unfocused in Time Problems of Memory and Anachronism in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters Kyle Pivetti

The real geeks know that Shakespeare plagiarized – and not just in the sense of stealing his plots. His theft even went beyond cribbing passages from contemporary writers like Montaigne; Shakespeare also stole his famous lines from other playwrights named Shakespeare. Take the episode of Doctor Who titled ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (2007). When the Doctor travels back to early modern London and runs across Shakespeare, the time-traveller cannot help himself. ‘The play’s the thing,’ he tells Shakespeare, ‘And yes, you can have that.’1 The savvy audience member understands that Shakespeare somehow plagiarizes from himself, and a paradox follows. Shakespeare becomes both a mercenary hack stealing from others around him and the literary genius who created the stolen lines in the first place. 47

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A similar dynamic unfolds in Susan Cooper’s young adult (YA) novel King of Shadows (1999). Here, a young actor named Nat Field is working on modern-day productions of Shakespeare when he mysteriously awakes in 1599, having swapped into the place of a boy actor at the Globe. To the surprise of everyone in the early modern theatre company, Nat has a knack for memorizing the lines of the theatre’s resident playwright. Of course, he cheats; he had been playing these parts already in the twentieth century. Nat can step into the part of the boy in Henry V because he had already performed it, despite the fact that Shakespeare was still writing the play in 1599. By the end of the novel, Nat returns to the present and leaves Shakespeare behind, but this twentieth-century boy goes on to inspire The Tempest. Nat learns that ‘Ariel was written for Will Shakespeare’s vanished Nat, the boy in his memory.’2 Anachronisms abound. In 1599, Shakespeare remembers a child who is not yet technically alive, and that same child knows lines not yet written. Because time travel distorts history and narrative alike, memory anticipates the future, somehow looking backward at what’s to come. And in both The Shakespeare Code and King of Shadows, the Shakespeare geeks live out a particular fantasy. To get the jokes, the audience must know their Shakespeare well enough from the beginning, without stalling to brush up on references to Ariel or Hamlet. But more than clever in-jokes, the geeks who have memorized lines, who might keep track of which part was played by whom, get to imagine themselves creating the very object of their fandom. This is not the stuff of nerdery; to teach Shakespeare his own lines delights in breaking scholarly convention. Historicism, the careful review of primary documents or the careful pursuit of Shakespeare’s sources, has no place here. What’s needed is some magic, or at least some speculative time-travel technologies. This chapter examines what has become a trope in speculative fiction – this anachronistic recollection of Shakespeare – through a source that flaunts its self-aware play with time and memory: Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters (1998). As the title suggests, Pratchett’s novel loosely follows the plot of Macbeth. The villainous Duke Felmet, under the influence of his even more villainous wife, murders King Verence of Lancre, a tiny realm in Pratchett’s fictional universe of Discworld. When the kingdom suffers under the new reign of Duke Felmet, three witches struggle to correct history by removing this Macbeth and restoring true royalty to the throne. Throughout

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the book, Pratchett drops in snippets of Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, but the resonances go further. Pratchett also fashions a Shakespeare surrogate in the dwarf Hwel, who writes plays for a travelling company of actors. Hwel, a garbled version of Will, operates as the creative force bringing literature and theatre to the kingdom. He also controls almost no aspect of his art; instead, he is subject to the whims of magic and memory that dictate his eventual literary output. From that curious device emerges Pratchett’s insight into the problems of cultural memory, an insight that is deeply nonsensical, frustratingly circular and entirely logical. In the genre of Pratchett’s magical fantasy, the anachronisms resolve and the machinations of cultural appropriation become clear. Shakespeare, it turns out, existed because we need to remember him. To put it in geekier terms, cultural memory works as a magical time-traveller, with the ability to reshape the past so that it fits the present. Critics have been quick to examine how Wyrd Sisters – as well as Pratchett’s loose adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream called Lords and Ladies (1992) – tackles intertwined issues of cultural authority, literary prestige and the fantasy genre. Jennifer Clement, for instance, suggests that ‘Pratchett re-contextualizes Shakespeare as part of a pop culture tradition, not a high culture one in which he stands alone’ (Clement 2013: 4). Wyrd Sisters, then, challenges the limiting sanctity of an ‘authoritative’ text by making revisions of Shakespeare meaningful in their own right. For Kristin Noone, both Wyrd Sisters and Lords and Ladies find in their magical tropes metaphors for desire; in turn, the Shakespearean source material ‘gives Pratchett cultural authority, and allows him to explore the ambivalent relationships between desire, enchantment, and human free will’ (Noone 2010: 29). Between the two critical readings, Shakespeare is either a pop culture entertainer or a serious artist who lends cultural authority. It is no wonder that Noone invokes ‘ambivalence’, for Pratchett enters into a pop culture tradition of decidedly mixed attitude. As Douglas Lanier recognizes, even the playful subversion of Shakespeare necessarily reinforces the playwright’s superiority. ‘The popular grotesque’ of Shakespeare, Lanier writes, ‘offers a private fantasy of rebelliousness for those who have already submitted themselves to the institutional regimes and authority of high culture Shakespeare’ (2002: 46). Turning Shakespeare into pop culture implies that Shakespeare can indeed

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appeal to the masses, but to transgress similarly means fortifying the cultural authority against which the parody operates. In his novels, Pratchett makes clear this dilemma, and he does so with relish. He brings to the foreground the role of memory in navigating such ambiguity, for memory reshapes Shakespeare while simultaneously insisting upon the stable truth of Shakespeare’s canon. What was sometime a paradox is proved in fantasy. Curiously, the writers of the fantasy genre are not alone in their revisions of chronology, and the literary critics seem to be catching up. Similar anachronistic strains motivate queer readings of early modern literature – and Shakespeare in particular – by discovering the present within historical epochs. Madhavi Menon offers a telling example with a title that boasts its anachronism, Unhistorical Shakespeare. Her project resists the historicist impulse of early modern studies, the impulse that foregrounds differences between past and present. Rather than reinforcing this ‘heterohistory’, Menon advances ‘homohistory’, a temporality in which ‘neither past nor present is capable of a full and mutually exclusive definition’ (2008: 3). One might easily understand that the present is informed by the past simply because the modern age necessarily follows from what came before. More compelling, at least for the geek, is the other side of this formulation: that past is defined by the present. Menon arrives at the unhistorical, in which she embraces the perceived ‘flaws’ of presentist narcissism by identifying with the past rather than assuming difference. In doing so, Menon encounters ‘incoherence that resists final legibility’, meaning that her relationship to the past will inevitably shift and alter (2008: 4). Thus, Menon queers history. She collapses the past and the present, whether one thinks of them as sequential or not. That is the unhistorical Shakespeare, capable of revelations that rigid historicity obscures. In another essay, Menon joins Jonathan Goldberg in ‘expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism’ (Goldberg and Menon 2005: 1609). In another genre, it all starts to sound like time travel. Like Menon, a range of critics disrupt temporalities in the study of sexuality. In How Soon is Now?, for instance, Carolyn Dinshaw willingly unsettles chronology, not only in studying ‘asynchrony stories’ of the medieval period but by happily mixing reference to the Smiths into her historical analysis. The characters of her

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‘asynchrony stories’ travel to different time periods or wake to find years have passed, but Dinshaw turns this narrative into something of a mission statement. ‘My broadest goal,’ she proclaims, is ‘to claim the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that all sorts of theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp. This means fostering temporalities other than the narrowly sequential. This means taking seriously lives lived in other kinds of time’ (Dinshaw 2012: 4). In Pratchett’s universe, this notion will sound suspiciously like living ‘unfocused in time’, or the experience of magical temporalities. For Dinshaw and Menon, though, it is instead the temporality of queerness, and when it comes to memory or nostalgia, these unhistorical readers will not ‘[shy] away from paradox or conceptual incoherence’, for those confusions come to mean sophisticated analysis (Dinshaw 2012: 35).3 It is paramount for Menon that she begins with Shakespeare. This playwright, she writes, is uniquely positioned to invite temporal play. In her words, Shakespeare ‘provides the basis for the exploration of homohistory by straddling chronological periods – he is the past-in-the-present, an old author generating new jobs. Shakespearean multiplicity – mirrored by the multiple candidates for Shakespeare – militates against fixity, and exemplifies what it means to cross time and chronology and history’ (Menon 2008: 5). So Shakespeare already lives ‘unfocused in time’, an object of nostalgia and history just as much as he is contemporary provocateur and modern-day artist. Menon embraces this ‘Shakespearean multiplicity’, and we might assume that she would be just as welcoming of Hwel, Pratchett’s Shakespearean dwarf. Anachronism thus seems built into the conceit of Shakespeare, but what Pratchett and the queer historian both discover is the truth of that anachronism. They will both make peace with a historical figure that is made, and remade, in the present, while also remaining in his original history. To these temporal confusions, I introduce the anachronisms of memory, or that faculty that just as willingly blends past and present – or even remakes figures of the past – to shape narrative. Steven Brown makes the connections apparent when he surveys the inchoate field of memory studies, tracing the similarities between Foucault’s work and the first articles published in the journal Memory Studies. As in the study of sexuality, to analyse memory necessitates a series of difficult questions: ‘What is memory?’ or

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‘How does memory matter?’ (Brown 2008: 264). The work of queer historiography makes the similarities more apparent and even more meaningful. Like the unhistorical, memory constantly constructs new and different temporalities, casting present day identities back into the past just as much as using the events of yesterday to inform behaviour and belief today. When it comes to Shakespeare, though, I foreground explicitly what Maurice Halbwachs called ‘collective memory’ in 1925 (Halbwachs 1980), a version of shared remembrance that also transforms as the social or political contexts around groups transform. As Pascal Boyer recognizes, ‘shared memories’ cannot ‘sustain a distinctive identity’ of a social group, for the means of recollection vary across individuals, across media and across time (Boyer 2009: 9). Still, memories of Shakespeare have long sought to sustain exactly such cultural identities, with troubled results.4 Peter Holland points out that issues of remembrance appear prominently in the space of the theatre, ‘for the experience of performance is also a structuring of memory’ (Holland 2006: 211).5 The problems in that setting extend to the other venues in which fragile performances are again reiterated and reinterpreted. In their study of Shakespearean commemoration, Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo seize on the problematic: ‘Commemoration, it seems, is a paradoxical operation that remembers Shakespeare best when it makes him new’ (Kahn and Calvo 2015: 14).6 Remembrance thus involves appropriation and transformation, which in turn means that the anchor for cultural authority – Shakespeare – is also not the same Shakespeare at the moment of his invocation. As Menon puts it, he ‘militates against fixity’ (2008: 5). To find Shakespeare in the past, then, might also mean anachronistically placing ourselves in the past, and creating the memory that context demands. Far from being insincere or illogical, this practice will become entirely sensible in the hands of Pratchett. In an analysis of war memorials, Ann Rigney offers a line that echoes Holland’s on the performance of Shakespeare. ‘Collective memory,’ she writes, ‘is not a matter of collecting, but of continuously performing. It is constantly in process, involving both recollection and forgetting in light of changing patterns of relevance and shifting social frameworks’ (Rigney 2008: 93). Performing is memory just as much as memory is performance. Speculative fiction allows this thought to reach an inevitable conclusion: anachronism is not a

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mistake, but the means of shared remembrance. The young protagonist of The King of Shadows knows Shakespeare lines before Shakespeare because that is how shared pasts come to be. In Wyrd Sisters, Pratchett introduces the subject of memory when the three witches that serve as his main characters find themselves tossed into the plot of Macbeth. After King Verence (the book’s Duncan figure) is murdered, a servant escapes with his young infant prince and entrusts the child to the apprehensive coven of witches. In turn, the three women decide to give this version of Malcom to a travelling group of actors, a group that includes the writer Hwel. As the women leave the baby, each imparts a gift, and the witch Nanny Ogg offers a particularly useful reward to a future actor: ‘A bloody good memory is what he ought to have . . . He’ll always remember the words’ (Pratchett 1998: 54). The talent works to obvious advantage. As the infant grows into star actor Tomjon, he exhibits a knack for memorizing Hwel’s dialogue. In fact, Tomjon’s memory works almost too well. When the baby first speaks, he skips the usual fumbling for self-expression and mutters six lines of verse written by Hwel, beginning ‘They say this fruit be like unto the world / So sweet’ (Pratchett 1998: 111). The dwarf runs to the troupe leader and exclaims, ‘You’ve got to come at once! He’s talking! . . . He’s quoting!’ (Pratchett 1998: 111–12). Such is the effect of his magically enhanced memory. Tomjon recites before recognizing that recitation involves the learned rehearsal of another’s words. He lacks language, but he already remembers what others have said. Comparable anachronisms motivate the novel’s climax, a scene of serious import for the subject of cultural memory. Years after Tomjon is left to the care of the actors, the three witches catch up with the troupe and gather to watch a new play. This play-withinthe-novel tells the story of King Verence’s murder, except it tells the story from the perspective of the villain Duke Felmet, such that the play disguises the murder and puts the blame on the witches. Although Hwel has written his Macbeth, it is not the ‘correct’ version, so the witches get to work. Through their spells, they make every actor forget the lines – even the mnemonically gifted Tomjon. ‘For the first time in his life his awesome memory let him down’, writes Pratchett (1998: 320). But at the same moment the witches’ magic substitutes new information: ‘Up from out of the depths of [the actors’] blank minds new words rushed, words red with blood

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and revenge . . . words that would have themselves heard, words that gripped their mouths so tightly that an attempt not to say them would result in a broken jaw’ (Pratchett 1998: 320). The performers suddenly recite a new work, a play that retells the plot of the novel in ‘truthful’ ways. Tomjon, then, once again remembers what he should not. He remembers words that Hwel has yet to write. The time travel’s paradox returns, and the dwarven Shakespeare must compose a play that everyone already knows. The familiar Shakespearean lines begin to fall in place, both within the novel’s plot and our own collective memory. One actor recites his lines while ‘trying to look in astonishment at his own lips’ (Pratchett 1998: 321). He is surprised at what he remembers, an effect that expands when the actor Wimsloe says, ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ (Pratchett 1998: 321). Readers can recognize the line as Macbeth’s, but somehow Shakespeare did not come up with it. It was generated by the magic of the witches, who can manufacture memory that captures the ‘truth’ of Macbeth. The allusions build when the evil Duke Felmet stops the play-within-the-novel. At this moment, Pratchett invokes Hamlet in the figure of a villain who is shocked to see his crimes performed by a troupe of actors. ‘No!,’ screams Felmet, ‘I did not do it! It was not like that! . . . I was asleep at the time, you know. I remember it quite well’ (Pratchett 1998: 324). His obfuscations – does he remember being asleep or does he remember how the murder was not performed? – turn into another famous speech from Shakespeare. Felmet says of the original murder, ‘It was just a dream, and when I awoke, he’d be alive tomorrow. And tomorrow it wouldn’t have happened because it was not done. And tomorrow you can say I did not know. And tomorrow you can say I had no recollection’ (Pratchett 1998: 325). In that confusion, we can hear ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow’ as well as ‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ but Felmet also expresses a longing for the very oblivion that Tomjon just experienced. He imagines a future in which this past has been erased, just as easily as the lines of poetry were wiped from the minds of the stage actors. Later, our Shakespearean author Hwel struggles to record everything (that is, everything from the play he somehow just wrote). He asks Tomjon, ‘Can you remember what he said after all those tomorrows? I didn’t catch the bit after that . . .’ (Pratchett 1998: 337). Tomjon – the child of gifted memory – never gives Hwel the answer, even if we all suspect the Shakespearean verse that should follow. This is to

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say that Wyrd Sisters both reinforces and troubles notions of collective memory. At one point, the witches ‘correct’ memory to satisfy what we know of the Scottish play. At another, the Shakespeare surrogate cannot remember that same information. Pratchett – like his other Shakespop collaborators – remains ambivalent. If collective memory may right itself, it does so only temporarily, and with no help from the authoritative source. But in Pratchett’s world, the anachronisms involved in memory’s operation hardly register as problematic, so long as one experiences time with awareness and imagination. Early in the novel, we learn that the murdered king Verence ‘was one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time’ (Pratchett 1998: 55). He knows only the present. Witches, on the other hand, fit into a special category. Pratchett explains, ‘Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realize it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it’ (Pratchett 1998: 55). These figures work the unhistorical to their advantage, and so can use the future as a means of determining the past; they can shape the experience of the past to satisfy the demands of the future. By remaining ‘unfocused in time’, they capture the experiences of anachronism. In another novel, Lords and Ladies, Pratchett develops these notions of temporality and memory. This novel imagines a dangerous invasion of elves who travel from an alternate dimension into Discworld. But Lords and Ladies echoes A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a number of scenes, most especially in a group of ‘rude mechanicals’ who plan a performance of Hwel’s new play for ‘Midsummer Day’ (Pratchett 1992: 23–4). Within this narrative of alternate dimensions and Shakespeare allusion, Pratchett addresses once again the subject of memory: ‘People think that they live life as a moving dot traveling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary trail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It’s just that most humans aren’t good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches’ (Pratchett 1992: 83). Witches are the exception. They ‘are good at dealing with it’ (Pratchett 1992: 83) and their magic, in turn, seizes onto this conception of time and so brings time into accordance with a memory to come. That is not a logical fallacy, but the experience of

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an ‘unfocused’ recollection, free of the constraints of temporality. For a witch, it seems there is no other kind of memory. That multiplicity expands throughout Lords and Ladies, advancing the magical play of Wyrd Sisters in ways familiar to memory studies. In a recurrent plot point, the head witch Granny Weatherwax struggles with the collapsing alternate dimensions and begins to experience herself within multiple chronologies, even seeing herself dying in another timeline. Pratchett describes her experience: ‘Images swam in the forefront of her mind. Here it came again. She knew there were such things as alternative futures, after all, that’s what the future meant. But she’d never heard of alternative pasts’ (Pratchett 1992: 141). Granny seems to have become even more unfocused in time, experiencing memory’s operation in all of its permutations. Pratchett links these alternative pasts to Shakespeare, as when Nanny Ogg’s son attempts to inspire a group of makeshift troops to fight against the invading elves. After a preamble about the glory to come in the battle, this boy ends up (almost) performing Henry: ‘He said that in times to come people would look back on this day, whatever the date was, and proudly show their scars, at least those who’d survived would show their scars, and be very proud and probably have drinks bought for them. He advised people to imitate the action of the Lancre Reciprocating Fox and stiffen the sinews’ (Pratchett 1992: 322). This Ogg cannot help but qualify Henry’s swagger with ‘probably’. He also misses the particular associations with St Crispian’s Day, simply saying ‘whatever the date was’ would likely be remembered. Within Shakespeare’s original Henry V, it is a speech on prospective memory, that which will be recalled in the years after Agincourt. Within Lords and Ladies, it becomes a speech on alternate memories, each attached to a new future, with what one assumes is a new Hwel, Will or whatever he is called. While these fantastical conceits may prove empowering to the artist who appropriates Shakespeare, it does destabilize the Bard’s authority. Irena Makaryk cites Joseph Roach on the memorial power of the theatre, that it has ‘always provided society with the most tangible records of its attempt to understand its own operations’ (Roach 1996: 2).7 But ‘it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts’ (Roach 1996: 2). Tangible records under constant adjustment, always true but always modified – it is

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no wonder that in Wyrd Sisters the Macbeth surrogate gets confused in trying to remember the truth of what never happened. After all, he is no witch. Instead, Felmet realizes only the fragility of memory, its susceptibility to suggestion and reinterpretation. The key lies in the inherent powers of language and narrative. ‘Words can change the world’ (Pratchett 1998: 185), says the Fool to Felmet and his lady Macbeth. At first, the Fool only considers the euphemisms that allow a tyrant to commit his wrongs. For example, ‘Knocking over the houses of people one does not like’ becomes ‘Urban clearance’ (Pratchett 1998: 186). It is the duchess who asks whether such language can work retroactively, and the Fool guesses at the answer: ‘[T]he past is what people remember, and memories are words. Who knows how a king behaved a thousand years ago? There is only recollection, and stories. And plays, of course’ (Pratchett 1998: 187). That answer inspires the evil Duke and Duchess to commission Hwel for a new version of the past, the very play that the witches must then ‘correct’. But Pratchett here introduces the disturbing thought of the past as only ‘what people remember’. When the witches correct the false version of Macbeth, they would seem to counter that claim. Truth will out, the witches suggest. History is not only a fiction but a collection of facts, verifiable by material events. At some point, though, representation must play its part, introducing yet more words that foster narratives anew. When the witches first visit the theatre, Granny Weatherwax worries at its potential disruption. She learns – with great reluctance and dismay – that the actors, props and language all tell a fake story: ‘The theater worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was a magic that didn’t belong to magic people’ (Pratchett 1998: 299). In Discworld, magic most often involves very little magic. The spells do not in fact require bubbling cauldrons, eye of newt or toe of frog. When the young witch Magrat mentions the usual apparatus for a magical spell (this one summoning a Hecate-like demon from whom the witches hope to get information), Granny Weatherwax grumpily corrects her. She responds, ‘You don’t need none of that . . . You need headology’ (Pratchett 1998: 98). What she means is that magic most often involves altering appearances and offering the story one hopes to see. If someone

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comes to the witch complaining of a backache, she offers ‘magical’ spells that cure the pain – only the spell is simply a placebo. Theatre, then, offers an elaborate form of ‘headology’: it furnishes the narratives that change the shape of the world. Hester Lees-Jeffries phrases the same idea in terms of memory: ‘Plays themselves are mnemotechnic . . . Sometimes they perpetuate or promote particular memories, and even invent them’ (Lees-Jeffries 2013: 6). By that standard, magic is not limited to Discworld. It permeates our own, in the manipulations of narrative that Pratchett expands into an elaborate theoretical construct of causality and perception.8 Pratchett, in other words, uses magic as the metaphor for experiences of time, memory and narrative. All are subject to the manipulations of headology. At the midpoint of Wyrd Sisters, Pratchett faces a narrative crux that bears out this relationship. Although the novel begins with an infant prince Tomjon, it must conclude with that same prince grown up. Rather than simply leaping over the intervening years as Shakespeare does in The Winter’s Tale, Pratchett makes the narrative intervention magical. Just as Granny Weatherwax orchestrated the ‘spell’ – or revision – that generates a new Macbeth, she puts her abilities to work in getting past the troublesome fifteen years. With a nod and raised arms, she causes the kingdom to leap over the years, bringing Tomjon to an age appropriate for the novel’s conclusion. On the jump, Pratchett writes, ‘It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words’ (Pratchett 1998: 220). He lacks the film conventions – the ‘flickering skies’ and ‘highspeed photograph’ (Pratchett 1998: 221). Pratchett overcomplicates things here. He could follow the model of Shakespeare, who uses the choral figure of Time simply to pass over the gap of sixteen years in The Winter’s Tale. He could just write, ‘Fifteen years and two months later’, and take note that he acts conservatively in not asking for the whole sixteen. Instead, Pratchett transforms the moment into an elaborate case of ‘headology’. His time-travel conventions, like the elaborate memory devices that allow Tomjon to remember unwritten lines of verse, amount to constructions of narrative. Indeed, time travel always plays this role. It confronts its audiences with the manipulations of very human storytelling, that which depends upon gaps, reshuffling of causes, and the constructions of memory.9 In the end, headology is narrative, and narrative is headology. The fantasy novel, being a narrative in its own right, enacts its

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magic on the reader, treating Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the inevitable result of the present’s demands. Granny Weatherwax needs Macbeth to repair the kingdom of Lancre, and so the play is remembered by a group of actors, regardless of whether the playwright has yet to put pen to paper. Her moment in time generates the memory, and memory need not move just from the past to the present. On the magic of Wyrd Sisters, Daniel Luthi writes, ‘If we look beyond the jokes and parody, Pratchett’s continuing examination of narratology and fictionality on his secondary world is nothing less than an exploration of how stories shape and influence our thinking and behavior’ (Luthi 2014: 137).10 In the same vein, this novel explores the place of Shakespeare in those stories. And what it imagines in the end is a Shakespeare who only exists in the past because he needs to pronounce his artistic truth in the present. The people of today demand it. Pratchett’s fantastical world allows that vision in all of its circularity; the witches need merely to raise their hands and rearrange time as it should reasonably go. As Pratchett comments in a lecture on his own fiction-making, ‘For what Discworld is, more than anything else, is . . . logical. Relentlessly, solidly logical’ (Pratchett 2000: 160). We come to find out that memory, at least in its everyday experience, needs Pratchett’s logic, and it is a logic only the ridiculousness of the fantasy genre can give. Pratchett continues with an even more playful idea on how time works: ‘A theory that arose in my mind as a result of my reading, and later my writing, was that of narrative causality – the idea that there are “story shapes” into which human history, both large scale and at the personal level attempts to fit’ (Pratchett 2000: 166). Narratives, after all, obey at least some sort of logic, even if that is the logic of storytelling. Pratchett’s witches must grapple with the consequences fully in Witches Abroad (1991), published a few years after Wyrd Sisters. In the first pages, we learn of the lasting impacts of narrative causality, which becomes a central conflict of the novel: ‘Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper. This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape’ (Pratchett 1991: 3). The story takes on its own agency in this formulation, directing behaviours and dictating the courses of history, as the witches might have learned in

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their earlier adventures. On the subject of memory, Mark Freeman invokes the same terminology: ‘The process of remembering the personal past is always already permeated by narrative’ (Freeman 2010: 274). Freeman does not mean to use narrative dismissively. In a final comparison between literature and memory, he insists, ‘Both are thus potential vehicles of what might be termed recuperative disclosure; they are agents of insight and rescue, recollection and recovery, serving to counteract the forces of oblivion’ (Freeman 2010: 276). Events fit into a pattern, meaningful if not chronological, sensible if not rational. Memory thus works by narrative because otherwise it faces oblivion. And Shakespeare has to go somewhere. The time traveller knows Shakespeare before Shakespeare knows Shakespeare. The fantasy appeals because it is also, in a certain sense, logical. How else can Macbeth reflect the present, speak to the present, remain important to the present? Clearly, the present had to create him; narrative causality demands it. Pratchett does add a caveat for those less inclined to follow the conceits of the fantasy writer: ‘it’s probably more sensible to say that we ourselves for some reason have the story shapes in our mind, and attempt to fit the facts of history into them, like Cinderella’s slipper’ (Pratchett 2000: 166). The memory theorists might concur, but in so doing they lose the appeal of Pratchett’s fantastical paradox, that we do not remember Shakespeare because he existed, but rather Shakespeare existed because we remember him. In all of his mnemonic and unhistorical magic, Pratchett thus allows the geeks this truth: they make Shakespeare a plagiarist of those who loved Shakespeare first. Even Nanny Ogg cannot beat that gift.

Notes 1 Jones 2015: 243. In an extended reading of the episode, Jones analyses the masculine and feminine discourses of authorship. 2 Cooper 1999: 207. Lanier argues that this YA novel ‘reveals how in children’s literature Shakespeare’s cultural authority quickly becomes intertwined with fantasies of the father which serve as agents of socialization’ (Lanier 2002: 117). Shakespeare serves as a bedrock of emotional maturity that helps Nat overcome his adolescence. Nat also learns to preserve Shakespeare in future performances, but Lanier does not comment extensively upon the anachronistic cultural fantasies at work.

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3 See also Elizabeth Freeman (2010). 4 Shakespeare’s position as a cultural authority is too long to recount here, but Lanier does give a succinct history of Shakespeare’s canonization, especially chapter 2, ‘Unpopularizing Shakespeare: A Short History’ (Lanier 2002: 21–49). 5 Shakespeare’s theatre, as Holland writes, has long served as a site of memory, explicitly so in Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory (1966). For a more recent example of a similar analysis, see Wilder 2010. 6 See also Lees-Jeffries, especially the epilogue, ‘Remembering Shakespeare’. Lees-Jeffries similarly recognizes the memory work performed in the souvenirs that commemorate the playwright. Such objects have the ‘mnemonic power . . . to transcend the ambit (and, in an online age, the control) of the individual creator’ (Lees-Jeffries 2013: 196). 7 These lines serve as the epigraph to Makaryk (2012). 8 Manninen suggests that the people of Roundworld (i.e., our world) depend upon ‘headology’ to resolve paradox. Thus, magic exists outside of the fantastical realm (Manninen 2014: 75–102). 9 Wittenberg writes, ‘In short, physical time travel and metanarrative juxtaposition are, in narratological if not in generic terms, identical’ (Wittenberg 2012: 5). The result is a genre of stories that demonstrate the constructedness of history. Wittenberg continues, ‘In time travel fiction, the fundamental historiographical question – how is the past reconstructed by or within the present? – becomes a literal topos, is told as a tale, or is enacted by a real person seated in a vehicle or machine’ (Wittenberg 2012: 13–14). See also Gleick 2016. 10 South (2014) similarly claims that ‘In Wyrd Sisters, Pratchett has given us a story about stories and their power’ (41).

Works cited Boyer, Pascal (2009), ‘What are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture’, in Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (eds), Memory in Mind and Culture, 3–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Steven D. (2008), ‘The Quotation Marks have a Certain Meaning: Prospects for a “Memory Studies” ’, Memory Studies 1, no. 3: 261–71. Clement, Jennifer (2013), ‘Remaking Shakespeare in Discworld: Bardolatry, Fantasy and Elvish Glamour’, Extrapolation 54, no. 1: 1–19.

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Cooper, Susan (1999), King of Shadows. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Dinshaw, Carolyn (2012), How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth (2010), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities; Queer Historiographies. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Freeman, Mark (2010), ‘Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, 263–77. New York: Fordham University Press. Gleick, James (2016), Time Travel: A History. New York: Pantheon Books. Goldberg, Jonathan and Madhavi Menon (2005), ‘Queering History’, PMLA 120, no. 5: 1608–17. Halbwachs, Maurice (1980), The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper and Rowe. Holland, Peter (2006), ‘On the Gravy Train: Shakespeare, Memory and Forgetting’, in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Memory, and Performance, 207–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Kelly V. (2015), ‘ “It’s All a Bit Harry Potter”: The Bard, The Doctor and the Cultural TARDIS in Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code’, Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 2: 240–51. Kahn, Coppélia and Clara Calvo (2015) ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and commemoration’, in Clara Calvo and Coppéllia Kahn (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanier, Douglas M. (2002), Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lees-Jeffries, Hester (2013), Shakespeare and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luthi, Daniel (2014), ‘Toying with Fantasy: The Postmodern Playground of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels’, Mythlore 33, no. 1: 125–42. Makaryk, Irena R. (2012), ‘Introduction: Theatre, War, Memory and Culture’, in Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh (eds), Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture Identity, 3–21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Manninen, Tuomas W. (2014), ‘ “Knowing Things that Other People Don’t Know is a Form of Magic”: Lessons in Headology and Critical Thinking from the Lancre Witch’, in Jacob M. Held and James B. South (eds), Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, 75–102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Menon, Madhavi (2008), Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Noone, Kristin (2010), ‘Shakespeare in Discworld: Witches, Fantasy, and Desire’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21, no. 1: 26–40. Pratchett, Terry (1991), Witches Abroad. New York: Harper. Pratchett, Terry (1992), Lords and Ladies. New York: Harper. Pratchett, Terr (1998), Wyrd Sisters. New York: Harper. Pratchett, Terry (2000), ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’, Folklore 111: 159–68. Rigney, Ann (2008), ‘Divided Pasts: A Premature Memorial and the Dynamics of Collective Remembrance’, Memory Studies 1, no. 1: 89–97. Roach, Joseph (1996), Cities of the Dead. New York: Columbia University Press. South, James B. (2014), ‘ “Nothing Like a Bit of Destiny to Get the Old Plot Rolling”: A Philosophical Reading of Wyrd Sisters’, in Jacob M. Held and James B. South (eds), Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, 25–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilder, Lina Perkins (2010), Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittenberg, David (2012), Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham University Press. Yates, Frances (1966), The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 May the Bard Be with You Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital Investment in Sci-Fi/ Fantasy Adaptations Ann M. Martinez

As speculative fiction, both sci-fi and science-fantasy frequently deal with imaginative technological advances, space travel, the occasional parallel universe and, quite often, the future. Although originating centuries in the past, Shakespeare’s voice resounds loudly in these genres. Why is it that he, more than any other playwright, has found his way solidly into the world of geek culture? From simple allusions, to direct quotes, to full-on mash-ups, Shakespeare permeates a literary and cultural world vastly different from that of early modern England. This chapter explores the incorporation and appropriation of Shakespearean elements, from characters to plot to language, in two New York Times bestselling texts at opposite ends of the sci-fi/fantasy spectrum: Stan Lee’s sci-fi graphic novel Romeo and Juliet: The War (2011) and Ian Doescher’s ongoing William Shakespeare’s Star Wars science-fantasy series (2013–18). These texts – focused primarily on superhuman soldiers and intergalactic space feuds – heavily promote their self-proclaimed 64

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association with an author who lived over 400 years ago likely because of their target audience: the geek market. For many readers of Shakespeare-inspired sci-fi/fantasy, the blend is the allure. For the adaptive reimaginings, Shakespeare adds a degree of respectability through what can be described as his cultural capital, thus amplifying the new works’ promotability. In other words, Shakespeare still sells, and he strongly sells to geeks. Sci-fi/fantasy’s embrace of Shakespeare might have more than a single origin, true, but one should not forget that geekdoms overlap as people are interested in various storylines or worlds – geeks who love Shakespeare might also love space travel and futuristic robots. These are by no means exclusionary; in fact, in sci/fi-fantasy, Shakespeare’s words and ideas commonly spread with ease throughout space, the final frontier, carried about by humans bent on further exploring intergalactic worlds. This dissemination is reminiscent of pioneers on the American frontier who journeyed with their books, as an inscription found inside a copy of Shakespeare attests: ‘This Volume left for California March 15, 1849 via the Way of the plains and arrived here the 17th day May 1851. Boneta’ (Vaughan and Vaughan 2007: 138). Shakespeare becomes the author explorers, pioneers and survivors carry with them into new lands and worlds. Emily St. John Mandel’s sci-fi novel Station Eleven (2014) and Dan Simmons’s sci-fi novella Muse of Fire (2007) continue the literary trend by each depicting troupes of travelling actors who perform Shakespeare’s plays in a post-apocalyptic future or in an alien-controlled outer space, respectively. Famously, Star Trek is a sci-fi franchise that readily took up Shakespeare as a role model for the qualities that make humanity precisely human/ humane. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, we find that both direct and subtle references to the playwright, as well as his works and characters, permeate the series through plot devices, episode titles and verbatim quotations. In the Season Three episode of ‘The Defector’ (original air date 1 January 1990), during an argument between Captain Picard and Q, the omnipotent being from the Q Continuum, Picard quotes from Hamlet: ‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god’ (Ham 2.2.273–6). Picard subsequently admits that humanity is not quite there yet, but emphasizes that the attempt is continuously being made – and, in the

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meantime, Shakespeare’s words help people along the way. As David Reinheimer describes, this television show uses Shakespeare’s plays to ‘define human nature’ (1995: 47). The fact that in Next Gen Shakespeare still affects humans in the twenty-fourth century as well as other species (e.g., the Klingons, the Ferengi) is meant to speak directly to the fact that all sentient beings, ‘regardless of species, race, culture, gender, or century’ (Reinheimer 1995: 53), have a shared commonality that unifies and gives hope for the future. Thus, an author with a complicated history of depicting human divides within society (e.g., the treatment of Othello, Shylock and Caliban) becomes the unifying force for a future, and a television show, that has chosen to ignore some of his problematic characterizations. In the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), the shared commonality that Shakespeare is meant to bring out is highlighted through the Klingons. During an exchange with Spock, who cites Hamlet, Klingon Chancellor Gorkon states, ‘You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.’ Shakespeare, or ‘Wil’yam Sheq’spir’, the Klingons claim as one of their own. This cinematic moment leads to the actual translation of Hamlet into Klingon – because that is the type of challenge geeks take on sometimes – published in 1996. In her article on the Klingon Hamlet, Karolina Kazimierczak argues that ‘The Klingon translations give evidence of how the popular culture, with its re-enactments or reinterpretations of the official or high culture texts and practices, helps to uncover the mechanisms of cultural and linguistic alienation and re-appropriation, while posing the boldest challenges to its audience’s ability to suspend disbelief’ (Kazimierczak 2010: 51). In other words, the Klingon Hamlet creates many layers: from popular culture to highbrow, back to popular culture, and then back to the academy. There is something very Klingonesque about Hamlet. After all, Klingons do love intense drama, and the more doomed a story is the more they enjoy it. It is an adaptation that fits with what Star Trek fans expect of this alien race. However, a graphic novel that centres on the love story of a pair of star-crossed superhuman soldiers might seem like a stretch to most, but not to Stan Lee, the father of the Marvel Universe. In Romeo and Juliet: The War (2011), Lee, along with Terry Dougas, writer Max Work and artist Skan Srisuwan bring a classic of the Shakespearean canon into a futuristic world of robotic arms, genetic modifications and enormous battle

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scenes. From the very first page, Lee and his creative team state it clearly: ‘Respectfully based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.’ Their choice of respectfully is an interesting one, seeming to pay homage to Shakespeare on the one hand, while trying to exculpate themselves for what they may have done with the story on the other hand. From the inclusion of the full opening prologue on that first page, to the final images that show Juliet and Romeo embracing in death – thankfully, they did not get a happy ending – the attempt to Shakespeareanize the adaptation is an ongoing move toward gaining cultural capital. In her work on adaptation theory, Linda Hutcheon explains that in order to gain respectability an adaptation should be ‘upwardly mobile’ (2006: 91). During the birth of the film industry, cinematic adaptations relied heavily on Shakespeare and Dante, film historians claim, in an attempt to gain respectability for the new genre (Hutcheon 2006: 91). Things have not changed that much. The comic book world, while growing easily in popularity, continues to struggle with aspects of respectability within some segments of mainstream society. Depicting a classic Shakespearean story in comic book form might help add some cultural heft to the adaptive reimagining. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through the lens of 1821 Comics becomes a story that weaves together the past – the iconic starcrossed lovers – with a heavily technological future in a highly adaptive reimagining. Just as the double-decker title implies, the cover graphic accurately depicts both main elements of the story: the love story between Romeo and Juliet as they tenderly embrace, and the destructive war raging around them amidst airborne soldiers, laser guns and explosions. For sci-fi geeks, it is a perfectly believable futuristic world. For Shakespeare geeks, it elicits the question, ‘What have they done now with Shakespeare?’ Followed quickly by ‘I must purchase this potential wonder and find out!’ As Hutcheon notes, ‘the appeal of adaptations for audiences lies in their mixture of repetition and difference, of familiarity and novelty’ (2006: 114). The title and the couple depicted embracing on the cover are familiar, while the explosions around them are indeed new for the story but familiar in the sci-fi genre. Even the backstory is sprinkled with the familiar and the novel: while events take place on Earth, it is hundreds of years in the future. Doctor Montague, who is first introduced as aged and wheelchair-bound, is on a ‘quest to make himself whole again’.1 His discovery of sub-molecular

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particles that adapt and copy any genetic code is the answer: through the use of metallic DNA, he can create robotic organs. His scientific advances are, as is to be expected for the genre, appropriated by the government, and the Montagues become hybrid human/ robotic soldiers who can regrow any organ – except, that is, for the heart (the foreshadowing is strong with this one). Because some people find robotic body parts to be ‘distasteful’, another scientist, Doctor Capulet, decides to ‘isolate and separate traits along the human genome’. He goes on to create superhumans, with extraordinary physical and mental abilities. The Capulets are also hired as soldiers by the government to fight alongside the Montagues, and Verona becomes the most powerful territory due to its stellar military force. However, after ‘the wars’, which are referred to only generally, the Montagues (who are extremely strong and have visibly robotic body parts) and the Capulets (who have pale skin, black hair and electric blue eyes), as super-soldiers, have no one to fight but each other. And, so, the ancient grudge is set in place, and the story is thrust further into the future. Certain canonical works become part of ‘a generally circulated cultural memory’ even if readers lack the direct personal experience of reading them (Ellis 1982: 3). When these works are adapted, the concern might not focus on the minutiae but instead on the broader cultural associations (Hutcheon 2006: 122). As a culturally canonical text, the story of Romeo and Juliet is known even by those who have never read it. The 1821 Comics’ version of Romeo and Juliet becomes a reader’s hunt for what might be called creative adaptations. Where do we find the traces of Shakespeare’s plot that remain, both for those who are exposed to the ‘circulated cultural memory’ and for the Shakespeare geeks who know the play inside and out? We find a trace in Juliet’s father demanding that she marry Paris. But we lose the thread in the explanation that both Juliet and Paris are ‘first-generation Capulets’, which means that they were born superhuman and not created in a laboratory. Doctor Capulet’s argument for ‘keep[ing] the blood-lines pure’ in this case refers to passing on their own superhuman abilities to their offspring without the need for scientists. We find it in the balcony scene but lose it as Juliet challenges Romeo to catch her while she quickly scales to the top of the tall glass spire atop the Capulet Tower. We find it in church at their secret wedding but lose it when they both realize they have forgotten to bring rings and are left to improvise: Romeo

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removes a nut from his mechanical wrist and slips it on her finger. How robotically romantic. We find it in her ‘death’, but lose the thread when rather than drink a potion, Juliet has a device surgically implanted under her breast that reduces her heartbeats to one per minute, keeping her alive while appearing dead. We find it in his death, but lose it once more since he dies at the hands of Paris who, with a laser gun, shoots Romeo in the heart, the only organ that made the Montagues vulnerable due to its inability to regenerate. The characters, the stories, the language of Shakespeare – there is so much in his plays for Shakespeare geeks to love. In the adaptive reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, the main characters are present in name and general action, the outline of the story is identifiable, but the language is lost, barely referenced. The graphic novel is written in modern English – a move likely based on the intended audience that would include non-Shakespeare geeks, and, while not surprising, is lamentable. As Marion D. Perret explains in her work on Shakespearean comic book adaptations, ‘[a] less recognizable and more pervasive kind of interpretation comes during translation from play to comic book: though in most comics pictures of actions speak louder than words, what gives nuance and depth to Shakespeare’s characters is the words they speak, and most of these must be cut’ (2004: 75). Most of Shakespeare’s words are in fact cut out of Romeo and Juliet: The War. In total, there are only four lines/phrases, aside from the opening prologue set before the main text even begins, that are taken directly from the play. While looking over the city from her balcony, Juliet says, ‘Romeo, Romeo . . . wherefore art thou Romeo’ (Rom 2.2.33). During Juliet’s televised eulogy, the caption reads ‘Juliet is the sun . . . Which has set in the west,’ playing directly on Romeo’s ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!’ (Rom 2.2.3); poignantly, it is spoken toward the end of the love story rather than the beginning, so the contrast between east and west and a rising and setting sun is further enhanced. As Romeo lies down to die next to Juliet, he whispers ‘Thus with a kiss I die’ just as he does so in the play (Rom 5.3.120). And finally, after a peace agreement has been reached by both Doctors Montague and Capulet, and after Lawrence Friar (so named here) seemingly espies the miraculously preserved interlocked hand of the dead couple amidst the rubble from the blast, the caption reads, ‘For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (Rom 5.3.309–10). The chosen lines are meant as a dash of Shakespearean language that adds authenticity,

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since amidst the visually striking fight scenes in the graphic novel, embellished with the traditional comic book ‘Bam’, ‘Stomp!’, ‘Kraaaak’ and ‘Whhoooosshhh’, many thous and thines would have seemed out of place to some readers. But the absence of more fully developed Shakespearean language is a missed opportunity to offer a truly hybrid product that could have blended the past with the future in a striking way for the present development of the genre of adaptive reimaginings. As Perret notes, ‘This graphic medium, where words become visible rather than audible units, offers opportunity for the complex resonance of Shakespeare’s words to be savored along with whatever images the artist uses to stage the play for the reader’s mind . . . Words are a play’s bones, to be fleshed out in performance for the theater audience or the mind’s eye’ (2004: 88). In Romeo and Juliet: The War, images are the story’s bones and words become an occasional decoration. Shakespearean adaptations tend to be more respected in general when they move toward a high art, like ballet or opera, but not when they move toward a movie and especially an ‘updated’ one, as Hutcheon (2006: 3) notes of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Writing of Luhrmann and of Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), Hutcheon notes that ‘[r]esidual suspicion remains even in the admiration expressed . . . [where] [e]ven in our postmodern age of cultural recycling, something – perhaps the commercial success of adaptations – would appear to make us uneasy’ (2006: 3). For the producers of these adaptations, what likely makes them uneasy is the fear of failure. They shape their adaptive reimaginings to reflect contemporary cultural sensibilities and thus possibly circumvent rejection. Targeting a general audience in a different geekdom, in this case sci-fi, and sprinkling Shakespeare’s words here and there in the text serves to elevate the cultural capital of the adaptation within the sci-fi readership while trying to avoid possible critiques from Shakespeare geeks – it is just an homage to Shakespeare, a respectful one. But while Shakespeare geeks might criticize the barely-thereness of the Shakespearean language in Romeo and Juliet: The War, Lee and the others at 1821 Comics know their main audience – one need only glance at the enormous success of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to ascertain that they do. It is, in some ways, reminiscent of the Restoration adapters who, after the theatres reopened in 1660 from an eighteenyear hiatus, the stories and the characters in Shakespeare’s plays

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were a draw but the language was not. Shakespeare’s words were deleted, edited and rewritten because ‘Restoration audiences found [the ‘plays’] old-fashioned . . . fondness for wordplay distasteful, [even ‘barbaric’], and playwrights sought to modernize this aspect of Shakespeare’ (Marsden 1995: 13). Modern-day sci-fi/fantasy fans might not (necessarily) find Shakespeare’s language ‘distasteful’ or ‘barbaric’, but ‘old-fashioned’ quite possibly. Starting in the mid-1990s, a number of stage adaptations of classic cult films cropped up, all of which shared one common denominator: Elizabethan English. Dubbed ‘neo-Shakespearean adaptations’ by Paul Rogalus (2014: 65), the adaptive reimaginings of such films as Pulp Fiction and The Big Lebowski were meant for ‘specialized audiences’ and performed in small theatres. Because of the smaller venues, Rogalus does not see these adaptations as ‘money-making shells’ (2014: 65). However, they are the precursors to the moneymakers, like Adam Bertocci’s Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (2010), which was transferred from the stage to print by Simon & Schuster. Neo-Shakespearean adaptations for the stage, according to Rogalus, ‘have injected new excitement and life into the contemporary American theatre experience’ (2014: 66). The reason for the growing success of these productions Rogalus bases on the similarities between the writing calibre of Shakespeare and the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino, and the ‘tireless and universal’ (2014: 67) qualities of the characters they create. So, in the end, they are moneymakers after all because, as Peter Holland notes, the trend not only uses ‘a base in a cult film, [but] one with an enormous fan base’, allowing fans to participate in ‘public demonstrations of their fandom’ (2015: 201). A neo-Shakespearean stage performance allows audience members to attend an event related to their pop-culture fandom but one that is also drenched in cultural capital through the Shakespearean associations. For adapters, Shakespeare is ‘a monument to be toppled’ (Garber 1987: 93). In these adaptations he is also a monument to be climbed. Or maybe one to be toppled and then reassembled. The more recent trend of Pop-Shakespeare refers to adaptive reimaginings that use early modern English to retell the story of an iconic film with a solid fanbase, and which use Shakespeare’s name in the title to further market the product. It is highly probable that a series titled Star Wars in Elizabethan English would not be a bestseller. How about Thomas Dekker’s Star Wars? Probably not. Christopher Marlowe’s

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Star Wars? Definitely more readers than Dekker’s, but still not enough. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars? Well, that is definitely a bestseller and a series in the making (with eight books and a ninth on the way, after the final instalment of the long-awaited film series hit cinemas in 2019). Michael Witmore has called the series’ author, Ian Doescher, the ‘king of Pop-Shakespeare’ (Doescher 2019). William Shakespeare’s Star Wars is all about the Elizabethan language. The premise for Doescher’s series is precisely to retell the Star Wars saga as if it had been a series of plays written by Shakespeare. The choice seems very fitting. For one, just as using the name ‘Shakespeare’ is a huge draw for some readers, using ‘Star Wars’ has an even wider pool of fans. Also, Star Wars already is a bit Shakespearean. It is a saga of betrayal, love, rebellion, loyalty and the thirst for power – Shakespeare wrote that, many times over. It was the actual ‘in space’ part that he skipped. So, as this mash-up begins, rather than the now iconic floating text in space that opens all Star Wars films, readers find a prologue, presented by a chorus, in (mostly) smooth iambic pentameter: Prologue Outer Space Enter chorus chorus It is a period of civil war. The spaceships of the rebels, striking swift From base unseen, have gain’d a vict’ry o’er The cruel Galactic Empire, now adrift. Amidst the battle, rebel spies prevail’d And stole the plans to a space station vast, Whose pow’rful beams will later be unveil’d And crush a planet: ’tis the DEATH STAR blast. Pursu’d by agents sinister and cold, Now Princess Leia to her home doth flee, Deliv’ring plans and a new hope they hold: Of bringing freedom to the galaxy. In time so long ago begins our play, In star-crossed galaxy far, far away. [Exit.]

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The title of Doescher’s series is the first attention-grabber aimed at both Star Wars geeks and Shakespeare geeks. The opening chorus is an intriguing continuation of the attention-grabber and one that pulls many more readers into the world of Shakespeare-inspace. Shortly after the first volumes in the series were published, Doescher was interviewed on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited and asked about his choices – one question that stood out explored which took more ‘chutzpah’, labelling something as ‘Star Wars’ or as ‘Shakespeare’. Doescher picked the former. He explained: If only because Star Wars fans are so fervent in their love of the movies. And so, when you put the Star Wars name on something, what you’re doing really is putting it out there for the world to judge and they will judge it. . . . I mean, I think Shakespeare in some ways, putting that name on it certainly takes a certain amount of chutzpah in terms of the sort of intellectual claim you are making. But in the terms of people who might actually respond and throw tomatoes at you, I think putting the Star Wars name there is. (Doescher 2015) Either angry Shakespeare geeks are not as scary as angry Star Wars fans, or there are not as many around. It may be a bit of both. Doescher’s assumption likely coincides with most people’s. While anger leads to hate for many, for academics anger usually leads to conference papers and articles. But what Doescher and others might be unaware of is the ‘Aca-fan’. According to Convergence Culture proponent Henry Jenkins, an Aca-fan is ‘a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic’ (Holland 2015: 201). Shakespeare geeks tend to be Aca-fans, and as hybrids might be intrigued, amazed, shocked and disappointed all at once upon seeing Shakespeare’s name employed. Aca-fans might relish and enjoy an adaptive reimagining but still critically question its literary or cultural contribution. Doescher, who is adamant he is not a scholar but a ‘Shakespeare guy’, has expressed his concerns about the academic reception of his books. ‘Certainly, scholars would look at my work and say that there’s all kinds of words I was using, or the way I was using language, that Shakespeare never would have,’

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Doescher added during an interview (2015). While his concern is understandable, by deliberately using Shakespeare’s name and works in this way, he has flung the door wide open for Shakespeare geeks to enter and explore. In order to enjoy the amplified marketability of the text and the cultural capital that Shakespeare’s name carries, one has to be willing to receive feedback from the fans – all of them. When asked during a more recent interview about his target demographic for the series, Doescher identified the ‘Shakespeare geek’, quickly adding that it should be ‘the person who loves Shakespeare, but also loves pop culture’ (2019). Shakespeare geeks do love Shakespeare, but they also know Shakespeare. And that is where the relationship between a Shakespeare geek and William Shakespeare’s Star Wars gets complicated. Take, for example, Princess Leia’s hologram. When Leia’s hologram, projected by R2D2, utters this adaptation of her famous line, ‘O help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, help. / Thou art mine only hope’ (New Hope 1.6.73–4), Shakespeare geeks are left questioning the proper use of thou in the text. As David Crystal explains, ‘[t]he usual thing was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors – such as children to parents, or servants to masters; and thou to be used in return’ (2003: 73). Thou might also be used trying to underscore closeness, as when speaking to God: ‘and thou was also normal when the lower classes talked to each other’ (Crystal 2003: 73–4). However, for the upper classes, you was the invariable choice even for close relations (Crystal 2003: 74). It is difficult to believe that Leia would thou a famous, legendary Jedi Knight like Obi-Wan whom she has never met in person. Of course, thou instead of you sounds better, older, more Shakespearean. It seems much more appropriate when Darth Vader says to Luke, ‘I am thy father’ (Empire 5.3.138). But Doescher’s choice gives Shakespeare geeks a perfect opportunity to debate the proper early modern English pronoun usage in outer space between a rebel Princess and a hermit Jedi Knight. Buried throughout the books, amidst duelling lightsabres and hyper-drive propelled flights through space, are a bevy of nods to Shakespeare, or, better said, Easter Eggs about Shakespeare’s lines intended for Shakespeare geeks. Often, it is a few echoed lines, as can be seen in the opening of Verily, A New Hope, when we encounter C-3PO and R2-D2 as they attempt to flee their ship. C-3PO says, ‘Now is the summer of our happiness / Made winter

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by this sudden, fierce attack!’ (1.1.1–2). Or when Luke, scouting about on the frozen planet of Hoth, utters, ‘If flurries be the food of quests, snow on’ (Empire 1.1.1). Similarly, at the start of The Jedi Doth Return, Vader commands, ‘Cease to persuade, my grov’ling Jerjerrod, / Long-winded Moffs have ever sniv’ling wits’ (Jedi 1.1.1–2). There are no direct associations between C-3PO and Richard III, between Luke and Duke Orsino, or Vader and Valentine, necessarily. Even the sentiment behind the lines is different: when Richard, Duke of Gloucester speaks the play’s opening line the tension is palpable. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’ (R3 1.1.1–2) is soon followed by his underscoring the differences between him and the brother he despises – ‘But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks’ (R3 1.1.14). And when Duke Orsino utters ‘If music be the food of love, play on’ (TN 1.1.1), it comes from a lovesick heart, rather than a heart excited at the prospect of adventure. Valentine, preparing for a journey, begins to say goodbye to his best friend who wishes he would remain: ‘Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus; / Homekeeping youth have ever homely wits’ (TGV 1.1.1–2). His words are not a threat, as Vader’s are. Doescher’s lines are meant to elicit a positive reaction from a Shakespeare-knowing audience after recognizing the lines’ source, regardless of the situational context, and to ‘allude directly to the opening of a Shakespeare play’ (Holland 2015: 204). It is simply the practice of mirroring the opening words and nothing more. There are some instances when the association between a Shakespearean character and a Star Wars character is highlighted precisely through chosen words or through the delivery method, creating a meaningful connection of the characters’ respective backgrounds. For one, Doescher uses a soliloquy cleverly by giving voice to R2-D2. Typically, as seen in the films, when speaking with humans or other droids, R2 communicates via beeps. However, when alone, readers have the opportunity to hear directly from R2 without a translator. Early in Verily, A New Hope, R2 announces his role to the audience: This golden droid has been a friend, ’tis true, And yet I wish to still his prating tongue! An imp, he calleth me? I’ll be reveng’d, And merry pranks aplenty I shall play

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Upon this pompous droid C-3PO! Yet not in language shall my pranks be done: Around both humans and the droids I must Be seen to make such errant beeps and squeaks That they shall think me simple. Truly, though, Although with sounds oblique I speak to them, I clearly see how I shall play my part, And how a vast rebellion shall succeed By wit and wisdom of a simple droid. (New Hope 1.1.56–68) R2’s initial desire for revenge brings Richard III to mind, but only briefly, since the droid’s persona is anything but villainous. Doescher claims that he intended R2 to be ‘the fool of the trilogy’ in the sense of Feste or even Lear’s Fool (2014b: 159). However, R2’s actions and involvement with the rebellion paints him more like a trickster figure, one reminiscent of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This association is further strengthened when R2 takes centre stage at the very end of The Jedi Doth Return, and, by speaking in trochaic tetrameter, addresses the audience in the same meter Puck and the other fairies often use, while even echoing Puck’s final words by apologizing to the audience (MND 5.1.415–30): Even thus, our tale is finish’d. Pardon if your hope’s diminish’d – If you did not find the sequel Satisfying. If unequal Our keen play is unto others, Do not part in anger, brothers. (Jedi 5.4.62–67) I wish R2 had simply opened his soliloquy with ‘If we rebels have offended’. Doescher does it again when another alignment between characters and context holds up. Such is the case with the wampa that Luke Skywalker encounters on Hoth. The monstrous, flesheating creature turns to the audience to present its case: You viewers all, whose gentle hearts do fear The smallest womp rat creeping on the floor,

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May now perchance both quake and tremble here, When wampa rough in wildest rage doth roar. Pray know that I a wampa simple am, And take no pleasure in my angry mood. Though with great force this young one’s face I slam, I prithee know I strike but for my food. (Empire 1.1.40–7) Just as Snug the joiner, cast as the lion, speaks to his audience in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in hopes of calming their fears, so too does the wampa. And it works. The association with a Shakespearean comic figure lessens the threat from the wampa, as does his sensible argument in verse. The scene is further lightened by the stage direction that follows – Exit, pursued by wampa – rewarding those familiar with Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction. In the play, it is a humorous scene because it is so ridiculous – the lion is clearly not frightening. In the film, the wampa is clearly meant to be so. Fans might recall their first viewing of The Empire Strikes Back and the tension created by the wampa’s threat to Luke’s life. Seeing the wampa through the role of Snug’s lion pushes the reader to think about character representation and motivation. The wampa is, after all, just another creature looking for sustenance amidst a wintery wasteland. Of this is what I wish there were more. Beyond the infrastructure of Elizabethan English, I wish that the thoughtful associations ran deeper, allowing for a more critical engagement, and thus demanding more from the audience in the textual hunt – rather than superficial Easter Eggs, deeper ones. In any case, PopShakespeare moves ahead with an ever growing popularity, as Quirk Books begins a new series by Doescher, starting with William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future (2019), William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls (2019) and William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Clueless (forthcoming). And yes, this author plans to read them all. Maybe the problem is not the unwillingness of modern-day authors to push further into a Shakespearean world beyond superficial references to the language. Maybe the problem is with Shakespeare’s own status and with us, the readers and fans. The language of Shakespeare is as much a part of his reputation and recognition as a playwright as the stories themselves are. As Seth Lerer sums it up, ‘Shakespeare. The very name evokes the acme of

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the English language’ (2015: 129). Not only are most of Shakespeare’s works part of ‘a generally circulated cultural memory’ as Ellis would say, but so is the sound of his language. Through a ‘wide-spread process of indoctrination’ both educational and societal (Kahn and Nathans 2011: 15), a general population possesses a vast knowledge of ‘Shakespeare recalled in fragments’ (Burton 2011: 95). Fragmentary knowledge is all that is needed for a sci-fi/fantasy text to call itself Shakespearean. The inclusion of Shakespearean themes or language in a sci-fi/fantasy text cannot be taken lightly. It changes things. It changes the intended audience and the marketability of the final product. It changes the product’s author’s aspirations of the work’s cultural placement and prospects of upward mobility. The archaic terminology and wordplay that have irritated, perplexed and challenged many modern readers has been unceremoniously erased, and in its place the more recognizable lines appear. This change is due to the fact that authors like Lee and Doescher are writing for an audience different from Shakespeare’s contemporary audience. As Jonathan Hope notes, ‘[t]he Renaissance audience is involved in actively maintaining the double play of meaning, but the post-Enlightenment audience is a passive observer of what appear to be merely facile and arbitrary similarities of form’ (2010: 81). The allure, once more, is in the reward of finding the superficial Easter Eggs instead of having to dig for the deeper ones.

Note 1 There are no page numbers given in Romeo and Juliet: The War, so parenthetical citations are not possible.

Works cited Burton, J. (2011), ‘Lay on, McGuffey: Excerpting Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks’, in C. Kahn, H. S. Nathans and M. Godfrey (eds), Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, 95–111. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Crystal, David (2003), ‘The Language of Shakespeare’, in S. Wells and L. C. Orlin (eds), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, 67–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Doescher, Ian (2013), William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Doescher, Ian (2014), William Shakespeare’s Empire Striketh Back: Star Wars Part the Fifth. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Doescher, Ian (2014), William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return: Star Wars Part the Sixth. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Doescher, Ian (2015), Interviewed by B. Bogaev for Shakespeare Unlimited from the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1 December. Doescher, Ian (2019), Interviewed by B. Bogaev for Shakespeare Unlimited from the Folger Shakespeare Library, 23 July. Ellis, J. (1982), ‘The Literary Adaptation,’ Screen 23 (May–June): 3–5. Frey, C. (1984), ‘Teaching Shakespeare in America’, Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 5: 541–59. Garber, Marjorie (1987), Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. London: Methuen. Harbage, Alfred (1966), Conceptions of Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Holland, Peter (2015), ‘Spinach and Tobacco: Making Shakespearian Unoriginals’, in P. Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Survey: Shakespeare, Origins and Originality 68, 197–209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hope, Jonathan (2010), ‘Shakespeare and Language’, in M. de Grazia and S. Wells (eds), The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, 77–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kahn, Coppélia and H. S. Nathans (2011), ‘Introduction’, in C. Kahn, H. S. Nathans and M. Godfrey (eds), Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, 13–29. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Kazimierczak, K. (2010), ‘Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation’, Studies in Popular Culture 32, no. 2: 35–55. Lee, S., T. Dougas, M. Work and S. Srisuwan (2011), Romeo and Juliet: The War. Los Angeles: 1821 Comics. Lerer, Seth (2015), Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Marsden, Jean I. (1995), The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Perret, M. D. (2004), ‘Not Just Condensation: How Comic Books Interpret Shakespeare’, College Literature 31, no. 4: 72–93. Reinheimer, D. (1995), ‘Ontological and Ethical Allusion: Shakespeare in The Next Generation’, Extrapolation 36, no. 1: 46–54.

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Rogalus, P. (2014), ‘The Bard, the Knave and Sir Walter: Adapting a Modern Cult Movie into a Neo-Shakespearean Play’, in Z. Ingle (ed.), Fan Phenomena: The Big Lebowski, 64–71. Bristol: Intellect Books. Shakespeare, William (2002), The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. S. Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin. Vaughan, Virginia M. and Alden T. Vaughan, eds (2007), Shakespeare in American Life. Washington, DC : Folger Shakespeare Library.

5 Not Now The Present in Shakespeare’s Past and Ooo’s Future1 Andrew Tumminia

Jesuit polymath Michel de Certeau was a geek’s geek: brilliant, passionate and prone to making obscure references. Luce Giard, his friend and collaborator, refers to de Certeau’s ‘intellectual itineracy’ (1991: 218–19), and his mind’s wide roaming resulted in difficult, often poetic prose that challenges both readers and academic orthodoxy. For example, exorcism, superstition and the occult all unexpectedly figure into his examinations of historiography, but his favourite metaphor for the historian’s task is also perhaps his most evocative: haunting.2 ‘The dead haunt the living’, he writes in ‘Psychoanalysis and Its History’ (de Certeau 1986b: 3). In ‘History: Science and Fiction’, he calls historiography ‘undoubtedly the most ancient of all the disciplines and the most haunted by the past’ (1986a: 214). Later in the same essay, he discusses the ‘fiction that haunts the field of historiography’ (214). In The Writing of History, de Certeau speaks of ‘repressed religious elements’ as a ‘ “displaced” ghost haunt[ing] the new dwelling’ (1988: 345). Lurking yet elusive, the past is the spectral companion of the historian’s present, and de Certeau insists that historians need to know that their ghosts are 81

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real. Wim Weymans explains de Certeau’s understanding of the historian’s plight: ‘In the end, the past is by definition inaccessible, absent, and dead. It cannot return – it is definitively over. Writers of history find themselves permanently on a beach, washed by the remains of a past that has withdrawn forever and of which only a distant roar can still be heard’ (Weymans 2004: 174). I suggest that the inaccessibility of the past is actually an opportunity for the writer of history plays who wishes to treat the difficult-to-talk-about topics of the present. When what really happened lies beyond reach, inscribing what is currently happening in the terms of the past provides a safe means of addressing the now. I believe a corollary to de Certeau’s insight into historiography, applicable to science fiction, is true as well: the present haunts the future. Time, in each case, provides both opportunity and distance for topics that can be discussed anytime but now. Writers, whether historians or not, are inextricably tangled up in their present moments. Context influences text, but writers often displace the concerns of the moment onto a different time, opening what Michel Foucault once termed heterochronies.3 I maintain that whether the present is projected forward or backward makes all the difference. Sliding along the timeline is one of geek culture’s core activities, and this chapter moves back and forth across narratives covering more than 2,500 years. Over the next few pages, I explore the opposite ways in which Shakespeare and science fiction tend to displace the problems of the present. Move the present forward along the timeline, as science fiction often does, and the implications are decidedly negative; the problem – say, racism, misogyny, technophobia or some other form of hate or distrust – has never gone away, regardless of progress in other social arenas. Its future recurrence is more than an indictment of the present: it implicates humanity and the social structures people have created. Move the present backward, however, as historical literature does, and the effect can be the opposite. Associating a present rebellion, failed military campaign, or political intrigue with past precedent circumscribes the present threat by locking it in an unreachable past. Projecting the present into the past is fundamentally optimistic, though often very messy. Culture has overcome this challenge before; it will do so again. Pushing present dangers into the past fuels hope that they will not happen again.

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I will focus on two examples to investigate the opposite effects of moving in different directions along the timeline. The structure of the discussion will mirror my underlying interest in discovering what science fiction affords the study of Shakespeare. I contend that comparing science fiction’s dystopian futures to Shakespeare’s English histories highlights a peculiar quality of Shakespeare’s topical allusions in his history plays: their optimism. These allusions in stories from the past necessarily imply confidence that everything will work out in time. This optimism emerges outside of any political opinions or investment in Divine Providence4 that Shakespeare may have held. Rather, and quite simply, optimism necessarily results from addressing the present in terms of an irretrievable past. In the same way, science fiction that projects current social ills into the future is, just as necessarily, dystopian. To trace these contrasting dynamics, first, I will discuss the inherent pessimism of projecting the present forward by analysing an episode of Adventure Time, a recently concluded5 Emmy and Peabody award-winning animated children’s series with, very much in the Looney Tunes tradition, a sophistication that belies its stated audience. The show remains keenly aware that adults watch it, too. Then I will turn to Alexander Iden’s exchange with, and execution of, Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI to illustrate that the history play infuses a coherent sense of national identity with a fundamental optimism. The community’s struggle is part of the self, and that struggle has never been insurmountable. I do not claim that the science fiction context is absolutely necessary to attain this understanding of the history play – de Certeau’s writings on history are key to my argument, but he does not theorize the future. Nevertheless, the comparison, I find, certainly helps separate out the particular use of history advanced in these plays that feature violence, suffering and sacrifice.

Ooo’s future approaches A recent study noted ‘a dissociation between personal and collective future thinking in healthy cognition’ (Shrikanth et al. 2018: 1207). People expect the future to be kind to them personally, but not to their societies. The difference, the psychologists conducting the study surmise, depends on the source of the narrative. To account for their findings, the article cites research noting our twin tendencies

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to remember positive personal experiences and to consume narratives of collective hardship through the media. Our expectations, then, would reflect the diet that feeds them, whether memories of personal fortune or of collective misfortune. Though the psychologists concede that ‘more work is needed to determine the manner in which media exposure gives rise to collective cognition’ (1208), the evidence strongly suggests that present narratives, media and otherwise, shape future expectations. Subsequent research into personal and collective expectations would be wise to consider literary and pop cultural narratives. Hamlet famously calls actors the ‘the chronicles and brief abstract of the time’ (2.2.550–1), and they seem to presage the next time, as well. Our culture encounters many next times in popular dystopian future narratives. 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse Five and The Handmaid’s Tale; the Blade Runner, Terminator and Hunger Games franchises: they explore the writers’ contemporary anxieties in a future setting, extrapolating facts of the present into fears for the future. Even progressive and hopeful texts – pick a Star Trek, for example – are not immune. The writers’ anxieties never go away. The reason for the future setting may be hopeful – perhaps to encourage change for the better. However, regardless of tone or outcome for individual characters, science fiction’s futures are where our most acute societal fears are realized. Pessimism is an inevitable product of projecting the negative present into the future. Even audience does not appear to matter. Adventure Time, ostensibly a children’s show, developed an elaborate and surprisingly grim mythology during its ten-season run on Cartoon Network. The series does not lack for geek cred. Descended from the chivalric romance tradition (primarily via Dungeons & Dragons,6 it seems), Adventure Time dedicates the majority of its eleven-minute episodes to following a human adolescent, Finn Mertens, and his magical Falstaffian canine sidekick, Jake. Funny, gross and often poignant, Adventure Time promotes values of caring, tolerance and acceptance – of others and of self. For both its message and its silliness, Adventure Time is almost unwaveringly positive. Even reluctant heroes adhere to strict moral codes, true villains are rare, and people are fundamentally good, whether they are made of flesh, fur, candy or lumps.7 Adventure Time’s positivity has its limits, however: ghosts of past atrocities and shadows of future calamities haunt the show’s

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present, just as Shakespearean struggles for power and in-family squabbling drive its major story arcs. Adventure Time takes place in the Land of Ooo, a post-apocalyptic Earth, repopulated by a variety of sentient beings and substances, but, until a major revelation in a season-eight mini-series, few humans.8 The extinction event, which scarred the Earth with a crater larger than a continent, was a nuclear war, termed the Great Mushroom War, a reference, of course, to the mushroom cloud produced by a nuclear explosion. Spectres of the Earth’s previous life never recede far from view: ruins and artefacts dot the landscape, forming a key part of Adventure Time’s look and, according to series creator Pendleton Ward, its humour: ‘I think that contrast [between a playful present and a bleak past] is really funny. We do a lot of sad episodes and dark episodes, but yeah, it’s true that they’re always partying to electronic music with, like, skeletons buried in the ground right below them’ (Anders 2012). Characters are not oblivious to the history surrounding them. Finn, especially, is both aware and reflective, confiding, for example, to Princess Bubblegum during the second season, ‘I’ve never even met any other humans’, and confessing, ‘If I think about it too much, I get all soul-searchy and weird’ (‘Susan Strong’ 2011). Finn is neither Hamlet nor Fortinbras, but in his introspectiveness and thirst for action, he is somehow both. Strange combinations typify Adventure Time as a series, but Ward attributes much more than weird visual juxtapositions of whimsy and horror to the Great Mushroom War. The Land of Ooo, Ward maintains in an early online Q&A, exists because of it: Everything’s irradiated and mutated . . . that’s why magic exists and Princess Bubblegum’s made out of gum and Finn has little dots for eyes. They’re all mutants. That’s also why Finn and Jake find a lot of cool junk underground . . . or under the water like in the Business Men episode. (Ward 2013) Season One’s ‘Business Time’, the businessmen episode to which Ward refers, represents a key intrusion of the past (roughly our present) emerging into the show’s present. Finn and Jake are salvaging items encased in icebergs that are washing up onto the shores of Ooo to make a gauntlet-style obstacle course, when they encounter an iceberg containing four frozen zombie businessmen,

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who, reanimated, introduce Finn and Jake to principles of efficiency. Initially, the protagonists benefit from the businessmen’s reforms, and Finn and Jake give the zombies more responsibility while they, themselves, embrace lives of video-gaming and ice-cream-eating leisure. However, the businessmen go unchecked, and they end up imposing unwanted order on small, passive Ooo inhabitants, the aptly named Fuzzy Friends, whom they gather into a large transparent container the businessmen call a ‘safe sack’ in order to protect them better. Efficiency demands confinement, and that the Fuzzy Friends are miserable with this treatment is, according to one businessman, ‘irrelevant’. Thoughtless and uncaring – these efficiency experts are zombies, after all – the businessmen resist a now-out-of-shape Finn’s objections, only to be overcome eventually by the heroes, who task the zombies with efficiently reconfining themselves to the iceberg, which is cast adrift once more. The zombie businessmen represent a mild critique of business ideals, perhaps providing an eleven-minute span in which the audience can question the values promoted at their parents’ (or, for older audience members, their own) workplaces. However, the implications of the episode’s events are profound on the series. Indeed, Ward has identified this episode as a key turning-point in Adventure Time, when the apocalyptic history of Ooo becomes a pronounced feature of the show (Ward 2012). The businessmen’s insensitivity to the Fuzzy Friends’ desires strikes at the root of the values the series fosters; these remnants of a former age threaten the ludic spirit that defines Ooo. Even the episode’s title highlights the businessmen’s challenge to the prevailing Ooo world order, as business supplants the adventure of the show’s name, challenging the series’ telos. All of these events suit the scheme de Certeau sets out for the interaction between past other and present self: [A]ny autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a residue condemned to be forgotten. But what was excluded re-infiltrates the place of its origin – now the present’s ‘clean’ [propre] place. It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of being ‘at home’ into an illusion, it lurks . . . within the walls of the residence, and, behind the back of the owner (the ego), or over its objections, it inscribes the law of other. (de Certeau 1986b: 4)

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The businessmen erupt from the past into the present, and de Certeau’s passage captures the trouble, disobedience and ‘law of other’ they reintroduce in the form of their efficiency. However, what is past for Finn and Jake is in the viewer’s future. Thus, Finn and Jake are not, as Weymans stated, ‘washed by the remains of a past that has withdrawn forever’; the past confronts them face to face and interacts with them while they are on the beach. Though the businessmen are contained, that containment is as fragile as the ice encasing them. The past has become present in the episode, and the present yields to a possible future. Again and again, the businessmen can return to Ooo with the menace of their unreflective efficiency to order the world in ways that seem attractive at first only to become a horror. Their containment is not ensured. Adventure Time is haunted by the prospect of menacing returns. Though Ooo is a post-apocalyptic world, threats of a new apocalypse loom throughout the series. In a later-season episode, Princess Bubblegum, scientist and ruler of the Candy Kingdom, confides to another character that she has been attempting to seed uninhabited planets with Ooo life, not out of colonial ambition, but, as she colourfully states, ‘in case Ooo goes straight up dongbongles’, adding, ‘confidentially, there’s a lot of ways that could happen’ (‘High Strangeness’ 2017). Viewers of the show, who have seen Ooo teeter on the edge of doom for the series’ entire run, would not disagree. Actual villains are rare, but when they appear, they threaten all life. Periodic threats, such as the Catalyst Comet tracing its thousand-year ellipse, cause periodic concern. Yet most distressing are the threats rooted not in malice, but in unintended consequence. A well-intentioned but poorly phrased request to a powerful cosmic entity sets off an apocalyptic scenario in a parallel universe (‘Jake the Dog’ 2012). In ‘The Real You’ (2011), Finn, aided by the taped, chunky Glasses of Nerdicon, succeeds in opening a black hole during a science conference/outdoor barbeque. When he is able to prevent all of Ooo from collapsing into the singularity, the gathered scientists applaud, not because they are alive, but because they are impressed with Finn’s scientific demonstration. Ward has talked about his desire to populate the show with characters who act like regular people (Anders 2012), and regular people make mistakes. The scale of errors on the show is not normal, however. Princess Bubblegum is a gifted scientist, but her scientific hubris is evident from the first episode of the series, in

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which she tests a serum that revives buried Candy Kingdom subjects, resulting in an invasion by zombified candy (‘Slumber Party Panic’ 2010). So from its very beginning, Adventure Time’s present, our future, has been haunted by an uncontainable past.

The inaccessible Jack Cade Shakespeare’s histories are apocalyptic in the sense that they record change in social order, but they also court a delusion de Certeau describes at the conclusion of The Possession at Loudun: ‘the historian himself would be fooling himself if he believed he was rid of that strangeness internal to history by placing it somewhere on the outside, far from us, in a past closed with the last “aberrations” of yesteryear’ (de Certeau 2000: 227). History’s ghosts haunt the present, but ghosts in Shakespeare’s histories stay in their stories. Richard III ’s ghosts are interested in the resolution of that play, after all. Containment is built into the history play’s use of time, and therein lies the optimism inherent to the genre’s relation of present to past. Whatever has happened has led to the playwright’s present moment and the culture’s current order. The past is legible in terms of the present. The history play’s apocalypse is limited. For the English history play, England persists, along with an accompanying sense of Englishness. The historical conflicts the history plays record help to form that heritage. Plays put the ghosts of the past onto the stage, and when their concerns reverberate with those of the audience (or at least segments of the audience), a transitive property ameliorates present threats. Writing about Alexandre Dumas’s historical drama, de Certeau observes, ‘The world of yesteryear is summoned to recount our history: this is what ensures that it “cannot harm us,” that it “presents no danger” ’ (de Certeau 1986c: 151–2). There is much to that ‘our’, and Alexander Iden voices its notion of communal identity and shared story when he confronts and executes Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI : ‘Nay, it shall ne’er be said while England stands / That Alexander Iden, an esquire of Kent, / Took odds to combat a poor famished man’ (4.9.39–41). Henry VI may later knight Iden for killing Cade, but Iden does not say ‘while King Henry stands’; his fealty is to the sovereign’s office and to the larger realm. The depersonalization of Iden’s qualifier lowers the stakes in the play, an effect heightened by

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the off-putting slaughter of ‘a poor famished man’. Whatever the costs, all will be well ‘while England stands’, and the English theatre audience or reader need only look around to see whether, in fact, ‘England stands’. Stated in an English history play staged in England, these words, once uttered, indicate a confidence that the social structures organizing life in early modern England are as stable as the ground under the groundlings’ feet. Writing about the Cade Rebellion in 2 Henry VI , Chris Fitter notes that ‘Tudor accounts of riot and rebellion characteristically conflated rebels past and present, so that, in the official imagination at least . . . archdemons of 1381 and 1450 merged with contemporary firebrands of sedition’ (Fitter 2004: 174). On the one hand, this habit of creating rebel mash-ups suggests a recurring cycle, an ebb and flow of rebellion. What happened before will happen again. Like Adventure Time’s zombie businessmen, rebels may return, though their faces and names may be different. On the other hand, Jack Cade finds no iceberg for refuge in 2 Henry VI . His story is not open-ended; he is eliminated. Associating Elizabethan rebels with Cade suggests that their stories will be similarly closed. Cade, himself, is contained variously in this scene – by his hunger, by his aims, by Iden, by history, by the boundaries of the theatre and, later, the margins of the page. Despite the Cades of English history, England has continued to stand, and present uprisings are shown locked away in the past. Viewed this way, Shakespeare (and, at least for his part in 2 Henry VI , Marlowe) participates in a certain practical conservatism when it comes to current affairs. Shakespeare, in this light, looks very much like a playwright carefully navigating his commitments to company, to patron, to censors and to the theatrical culture he helps produce. Moving the present to the past is a safe manoeuvre. The playwright is public; de Certeau talks repeatedly of historians sequestered in the laboratory in ‘History: Science and Fiction’. De Certeau emphasizes what he believes historians have overlooked while in the laboratories, the means of production leading to the historian’s article or book: ‘the text substitutes a representation of a past for elucidation of present institutional operation that manufactures the historian’s text. It puts an appearance of the real (past) in place of the praxis (present) that produces it, thus developing an actual case of quid pro quo’ (de Certeau 1986a: 205). As a representation, and not in itself real, historical discourse exists

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in ‘an interspace (between science and fiction)’ (214–15). The writer of history plays occupies this interspace more comfortably than the historian, and one consequence of that may be that the playwright’s praxis is already external and texts that result are more openly fictive. By inscribing present tensions in the past, Shakespeare diminishes the threat posed to the status quo.

‘You’re just in time’ Adventure Time experiments with form. Some episodes flip the sex and gender presentation of the main characters, while others incorporate a different style of animation or toy with the idea of a multiverse. One type of episode even gestures toward the same sort of containment Shakespeare’s histories achieve; this containment is a product of mode more than of genre. These episodes jump ahead a thousand years to recount from the vantage point of the distant future more adventures of Finn, Jake and friends. The adventures are presented in didactic vignettes called graybles – that is, as the name suggests, they are fables. A creature named Cuber hosts four of these episodes from the safety of his spaceship, projecting stories contained in holo-pyramids (pyramids with holograms inside) by means of a special viewer. Cuber is a mysterious figure, but he seems very much a historian, who occasionally becomes a playwright when he links themes across graybles. In his final appearance, ‘Graybles 1000+’ (2015), Cuber’s ship is attacked, and he takes only his bag of graybles, his most precious possessions, with him in his escape pod. He crashes on Ooo/Earth, which over the centuries, to the viewing audience’s surprise, appears to have become a wasteland. There Cuber runs, chased by laser-firing pursuers across the once verdant, now seemingly desolate, fields of Ooo, carrying his little containers of the past and illustrating in one instant the pessimism of time projected into the future: there will always be hunters and hunted.9 Compare the image of the desperately fleeing Cuber with the profoundly optimistic view of England advanced in John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech in Richard II, which speaks of England as ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by nature for herself / Against the infection and the hand of war’ (2.1.42–4). At this moment in the play, the dying Gaunt is deeply unhappy with

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England’s condition under Richard. But that pessimism is contained within the play; Shakespeare’s histories end with eyes looking ahead, not behind. Gaunt’s view of England, not standing but ‘set in the silver sea’ (46), however, transcends the play. Richard II has been deposed for centuries, but the English patriot can still see Gaunt’s words in the landscape. Neither ineffective rule nor the deposition of a monarch could change that. De Certeau argues that ‘Historiography has always been lodged at the frontier between discourse and power’ (1986a: 215). The same can be said for the history play.

Notes 1 I thank Peter Holland and Andrew Hartley for organizing this volume and the Shakespeare Association Seminar that led to it. I extend my gratitude also to James Mardock and to Tyler Sasser for their feedback on my paper for that seminar. I thank April Livingston, too, for introducing me to Adventure Time. 2 For further explanation of de Certeau’s use of the haunting metaphor, see Buchanan (2000: 25ff.). 3 See Michel Foucault (1986: 26): ‘Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies’. Foucault’s use of heterotopy and heterochrony differ from their established meanings in evolutionary biology. 4 For a discussion of Shakespeare’s historiography and Providence, see Mayer (2019). 5 In October 2019, WarnerMedia announced plans to air four new hour-long specials of Adventure Time on HBO Max, a streaming service scheduled to debut during the spring of 2020: ‘HBO MAX Orders Four Adventure Time: Distant Lands Specials from Cartoon Network Studios’, Pressroom, 23 October 2019, pressroom. warnermediagroup.com/us/media-release/hbo-max-orders-fouradventure-time-distant-lands-specials-cartoon-network-studios. 6 In a 2012 interview with The Onion’s A.V. Club, Ward discusses the show’s roots in Dungeons & Dragons: ‘And at the beginning, when we didn’t have any time to play Dungeons & Dragons anymore because we were all working so hard on the show, we realized, “Well, we can still play sort of, just by writing the stories we’d want to be playing D&D with.” [Laughs.] I remember Pat McHale would write out a cool, dandy storyline, and it was fun because we were sort of living it

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out as we wrote it, which is a lot like playing D&D. So we did a lot of that.’ Pendleton Ward, interviewed by Noel Murray, A.V. Club, 21 March 2012, www.avclub.com/article/iadventure-time-icreatorpendleton-ward-71236. 7 Lumpy Space is a region in the Adventure Time universe with a solid-cloud terrain. Its inhabitants generally look like clouds, as well. A recurring character, Lumpy Space Princess, refers to her solid-yetcloudlike anatomy as her ‘lumps’. 8 It turns out that the end of the world led surviving humans to retreat to a set of remote islands. Two of these islands maintain significant human populations. On one, people have forsaken their reality to live in Better Reality pods with familiar-looking virtual reality headsets, which allow them to live in a virtual world. On the other island, Founders Island, people exist under an authoritarian regime, one that prioritizes protection and insularity (via robots, cyborgs and a digitized consciousness) over idiosyncrasy and adventure. Both islands reveal possible outcomes of humanity’s complicated dependence on technology. While technology has encouraged survival in some form, it has come at great cost. A seemingly optimistic axiom on Founders Island holds that ‘humans will find the best way’, but the lived reality depicted on the show reveals the consequences of the slogan’s definite article: having ‘the best way’ compromises autonomy to a dehumanizing level. Not everyone is happy with the safety of Founders Island, but the protections instituted also prevent escape by residents deemed ‘hiders’. That Finn rejects the life of these islands to return to his familiar world on Ooo reflects the show’s opinion of this postapocalyptic human world. 9 The series finale, ‘Come Along With Me’, returns to Cuber’s time (though not to Cuber) in order to recount the story, at a thousand years’ remove, of the Gum War, the series-culminating conflict and apocalyptic threat to Ooo. The finale treats the end of Finn and Jake’s adventures, remarkably, as a history play. The flash forward shows that Ooo has survived, more alive than Cuber’s sojourn had suggested, though less vibrant than during the period the series has chronicled. The finale reaffirms the ameliorating effects of the past by jumping into the future and locking the narrative’s present, with all its menacing uncertainty, in the past. The series concludes, then, optimistically: Ooo stands. The finale treats history, the time back then, as an intellectual and emotional comfort, a sentiment which a song written for the finale and key to its resolution emphasizes: ‘Time is an illusion that helps things make sense,’ repeating again and again in its refrain, ‘you and I will always be back then’. Adventure Time ends by looking back into optimism.

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Works cited Anders, Charlie Jane (2012), ‘Pendleton Ward explains how he is keeping Adventure Time weird’, io9.gizmodo.com, 2 March, https.io9.gizmodo. com.pendleton-ward-explains-how-hes-keeping-adventure-time-5890128. Buchanan, Ian (2000), Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. London: Sage. ‘Business Time’ (2010), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 26 April, 10.00. de Certeau, M. (1986a), ‘History: Science and Fiction’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, 199–224. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, M. (1986b), ‘Psychoanalysis and Its History’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, 3–34. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, M. (1986c), ‘The Theater of Quidproquo: Alexandre Dumas’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, 150–5. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, M. (1988), The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. de Certeau, M. (2000), The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fitter, C. (2004), ‘ “Your Captain is Brave and Vows Reformation”: Jack Cade, the Hacket Rising, and Shakespeare’s Vision of Popular Rebellion in 2 Henry VI ’, Shakespeare Studies 32: 173–219. Foucault, Michel (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, no. 1: 22–7. Giard, Luce (1991), ‘Epilogue: Michel De Certeau’s Heterology and the New World’, Representations 33, no. 1: 212–21. ‘Graybles 1000+’ (2015), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 7 May, 11.00. ‘High Strangeness’ (2017), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 25 January, 22.00. ‘Jake the Dog’ (2012), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 12 November, 11.00. Mayer, Jean-Christophe (2019), ‘Providence and Divine Right in the English Histories’, in Hannibal Hamlin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, 151–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William (2008), The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (The Second Part of Henry VI), in Stephen Greenblatt (gen. ed.), The Norton Shakespeare, Vol. 1: Early Plays, 2nd ed., 229–316. New York: Norton.

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Shakespeare, William (2008), Hamlet, in Stephen Greenblatt (gen. ed.), The Norton Shakespeare, Vol. 2: Later Plays, 2nd ed., 103–204. New York: Norton. Shakespeare, William (2008), Richard II , in Stephen Greenblatt (gen. ed.), The Norton Shakespeare, Vol. 1: Early Plays, 2nd ed., 973–1043. New York: Norton. Shrikanth, S., P. Szpunar and K. Szpunar (2018), ‘Staying Positive in a Dystopian Future: A Novel Dissociation Between Personal and Collective Cognition’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147, no. 8: 1200–10. ‘Slumber Party Panic’ (2010), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 5 April, 11.00. ‘Susan Strong’ (2011), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 7 March, 11.00. ‘The Real You’ (2011), Adventure Time [TV programme], Cartoon Network, 14 February, 11.00. Ward, P. (2012), ‘Adventure Time creator talks ’80s’, Pop Candy, USA Today, 1 November, www.usatoday.com/story/popcandy/2012/11/01/ adventure-time-creator-talks-80s/1672583/. Ward, P. (2013), ‘F.A.Q’, Buenothebear.com, 22 October, web.archive.org/ web/20131022001753/http://www.buenothebear.com/faq.html Weymans, W. (2004), ‘Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation’, History and Theory 43, no. 2: 161–78.

PART TWO

Geek Culture and the Shakespeare Sandbox

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6 ‘Let’s Kill Claudius in the Church!’ Fan Fiction and Wish Fulfilment in Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet Johnathan H. Pope

In seeking to discuss Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be (2013/2016) and Romeo and/or Juliet (2016) as objects of Shakespearean geek culture, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine exactly how to categorize these two texts. Are they novels, games or something else entirely? Are they adaptations or works of fan fiction? How do we categorize texts that explicitly insist on resisting categorization? In what follows, I work through how we should understand these two texts and what to call them, a discussion that illuminates the challenges in critically assessing something that employs numerous multimedia tropes and perhaps complicates traditional understandings of adaptation. North’s texts explicitly refuse to be 97

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defined as any one thing, which opens up a productive discussion of how we define and discuss those things that comprise their constituent parts. In particular, the field of fan studies helps establish the critical parameters of this discussion even as those parameters are complicated by North’s authorial status, the publication history of the project, the absence of copyright laws regarding Shakespeare, and the work–play dichotomy. As Andrew James Hartley notes in his essay in the present volume, notions of ‘fun’ and ‘play’ are key elements of geek culture, and part of the pleasure of that culture is the shared in-joke of fandom, even if the parameters for who is permitted to participate in that fun or share that joke can be contested by the fans themselves (see p. 24). Paradoxically, North’s texts are best understood as fan fiction – as geek play – even as their status as paid works seemingly removes them from the realm of fan fiction. In his two ‘choosable-path’ adventure texts, To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet, North rewrites two of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays – Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet – as interactive fiction. Each is offered with the conceit that it is the ‘earliest recorded example of the “books as game” genre’ (To Be, Introduction) that Shakespeare himself shamelessly plagiarized from in order to produce both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The format invokes two staples of 1980s geek culture: Choose Your Own Adventure books and text-based videogames. The reader chooses a character at the outset of the text (To Be allows you to choose from Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet Sr, while Romeo offers Romeo and Juliet) and progresses through the second-person narrative by choosing from a limited range of actions/responses laid out by the narrator. Each choice corresponds to a numbered ‘node’ (as North calls them) or lexia (Barthes 1974: 13; Wake 2016: 194; Landow 1997: 3), which the reader then turns to in order to continue the narrative until a final choice terminates in one of the dozens of possible endings, each of which is accompanied by an illustration. Should the reader wish to follow the plagiarizing playwright, the author has helpfully marked the path Shakespeare took through each book as the basis for the plays (a skull marks Shakespeare’s choices in To Be, a heart in Romeo). Each book is printed without pagination, with only the nodes themselves numbered (so ‘turn to 278’ means ‘turn to node 278’, not ‘turn to page 278’), and multiple nodes can appear on a single

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page. The individual nodes range in length from a few words to a few pages, occupying about a half of a page on average. The narrative options range from the conservative to the outlandish, characteristic of the ‘gleeful absurdism’ of the text (Harrison and Lutz 2017: 24). As Romeo, you can explain the benefits of unifying the Montagues and Capulets to Juliet’s parents who agree with your logic, allowing you to marry Juliet and live happily ever after (R/J 69). As Ophelia, you can become an enlightened queen under whom ‘every single citizen of Denmark becomes a philosopher scientist karate inventor with a really satisfying personal life’ (To Be 374). By allowing readers to choose the path of the narrative, North offers wish fulfilment to readers of Shakespeare, addressing the desires, frustrations and questions of readers that anyone who has taught Shakespeare will recognize.1 I wish Romeo had gotten the letter! Hamlet should have just killed Claudius at the first opportunity! I wish the men in the play treated Ophelia better! I wonder how the play would be different if Romeo met up with Rosaline at the party? By giving voice to these wishes (and others we did not know we had), North offers readers a fannish engagement with Shakespeare, and his texts are best understood as fan fiction (even as this distinction is problematized by Shakespeare’s copyright status). Useful here is Lesley Goodman’s discussion of fan culture and fan fiction, particularly in the connection she draws between fandom and anger. She notes that ‘fan interpretation privileges the coherence of the fictional universe while downplaying the authority of the text and insisting that the author is not dead, but a failure and a disappointment. The work of fans, intentional or otherwise, is to converge collectively to a unified fictional universe, despite the divergent tendencies of fan fiction and despite failures of the source text’ (2015: 663).2 Fan fiction serves as a kind of wish fulfilment: to fix the apparent deficiencies in a text (‘fix-it fic’) (664); to explore the ‘secret lives’ of minor or major characters without contradicting canonical narratives; to explore non-canonical alternative narratives (such as erotic – ‘slash’ – fan fiction). As Goodman notes, fan fiction prioritizes the fictional world created by the author over the narratives that the author has constructed within that world, recognizing the power/authority of authors but ‘contest[ing] the ways in which it is wielded’ (2015: 664). Or, as Henry Jenkins, the pioneer of fan studies, argues, ‘Fan writing is a

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literature of reform, not of revolt’ as it simultaneously balances conformity to aspects of the original text with the exploration of counter-narratives, such as through gendered or queer readings of Star Trek (2006b: 54). Working within Shakespeare’s worlds and with his characters, North offers to fix these texts for his readers in much the same way that fans sometimes read back against the objects of their fandom through fan fiction. Although we are offered numerous choices throughout each text and can pursue numerous outlandish paths in each narrative, the author also fixes – as he sees them – the apparent shortcomings of both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, particularly regarding Shakespeare’s approach to gender, agency and sexuality in the plays. North rewrites Ophelia and, especially, Juliet in ways that explicitly reject or denounce misogyny or the valorization of stereotypical female passivity. Regardless of the narrative choices available to Juliet, in North’s rendition of the character her age has been increased and the narrator describes her like this: She’s a 16-year-old teen who is a dainty flower, as fragile as a spider’s web in the morning dew. Naw, I’m just having a little fun . . . Juliet’s actually SUPER RIPPED, and her top six interests are: muscles, boys, getting muscles, getting boys, kissing boys, and kissing her own muscles . . . She’s an excellent choice if you want to solve your problems with muscles, and why wouldn’t you? R/J 36 Juliet finds herself persistently bored and stifled by familial and gender expectations, and bodybuilding becomes an outlet for these frustrations. In one iteration of the narrative, Juliet gets in numerous fights, culminating in her arrival at the masquerade ball where she punches Romeo ‘right in the eye’ and then kicks him while he is down before tossing out all of the party guests and taking the Capulet homestead for herself, telling her parents she is ‘done with your rules, done with you both and your stupid marriage ideas’ (R/J 70). Over the course of this node, Juliet meets Romeo again a few months later, they date for a while before Romeo dumps her, after which Juliet has ‘a series of really satisfying flings with some really satisfying people’ before meeting and falling in love with Cesario. In

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another ending, Juliet’s sexuality is determined by the reader rather than by the narrative voice: I forget if you ever do get married or not, so let’s say . . . MAYBE?? In fact, let’s say that your choice here depends on whether you, the reader, are or ever get married IN REAL LIFE . . . If you marry a woman I guess that means Juliet was into ladies all along; THAT’S COOL TOO . . . She might even be poly! Something to think about, huh?? (R/J 107) As a form of fix-it fan fiction, R/J rejects a strict gender binary and increases Juliet’s sense of agency, but leaves it up to readers to determine how that agency is employed. To characterize ourselves solely as ‘readers’ of To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet proves to be an insufficient description of how we engage with the text because – as North’s introduction indicates – we are also players of a ‘book as game.’ North heightens our sense of ourselves as players by frequently including elements of videogames, tabletop gaming, gamebooks and a host of other interactive media. Rosaline, for example, appears as a secret, unlockable character in R/J (a common videogame trope), whose special ability is self-narration, leading to nodes written in the first person as Rosaline plays the role of a private investigator (R/J 271, 287). At various points, the reader/player is awarded arbitrary experience points, and certain characters or actions earn bonuses expressed in terms familiar to players of role-playing games or Dungeons & Dragons: ‘Romeo’s got a +1 perk to composition and elocution (that’s, like, talking), but a -1 weakness against moderation and foresight’ (R/J 36). However, unlike in a videogame or tabletop game, these points and perks are utterly irrelevant and are purely a part of the narrative style of the text (Hamlet, for example, cannot actually ‘level up’ by accruing experience, and Romeo’s compositional perk cannot be used to make choices that would otherwise be unavailable). The overall conceit is that players are keeping track of their statistics and experience points, even though those numbers have no bearing on the text and are never used to determine which nodes can or cannot be chosen. North does not strive to create any sort of complex rules or a system of rewards/ punishments that we are encouraged to covet/avoid. But as in

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Dungeons & Dragons (or other second-person narrative games), North adopts the narrative persona of the ‘dungeon master’ or ‘game master’ whose job it is to organize and deliver the narrative of the game, establish and arbitrate the rules and award experience points, all the while maintaining a sense of fun and an appropriate level of challenge (Byers and Crocco 2016: 8). As games, then, the texts are best categorized as ‘storytelling games’ wherein ‘[t]he process is the point, not the output’ (Hindmarch 2007: 52) as opposed to ‘gamebooks’ such as the Fighting Fantasy series which are ergodic in that ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ (Aarseth 1997: 1; Wake 2016: 194). And yet both texts sporadically maintain the conceit that they are ergodic without actually being so. Indeed, the more one ‘plays’ North’s games, the quicker they end, with novelty prioritized above all else. In my experience with both To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet, the most successful (that is, longest) playthrough of each text involved minimal departure from the core narrative of Shakespeare’s plays. Efforts to depart from that path typically ended the game within a few turns unless a path was made available to return to or run parallel with the Shakespearean original, usually the result of a comical demise, a hasty happy ending that encapsulates many years in a few sentences, or (in the event that the player chooses options that are explicitly red-flagged as insensitive, oppressive or misogynistic by the narrative voice) chastisement.3 Borrowing from videogames, each of the many endings is accompanied by a relevant illustration depicting the conclusion of the path, analogous to the various cut scenes that await the player of, say, the Fallout videogames that change depending on the choices made by the player. And like role-playing videogames in particular, certain aspects of both texts remain hidden from all but the most diligent players. Since all of the potential endings are accompanied by an illustration, anyone flipping through can easily glimpse some of the enticing narrative threads. However, I was frequently unable to find my way to these endings no matter how many times I worked my way through the texts. One ending, for example, depicts – I assume – Hamlet riding a time machine with a dagger sticking out of his eye socket, but I was never able to reach that ending (To Be 166).4 Of course, trying to work toward a specific conclusion in a choosable-path text constitutes cheating, the ‘spoilsport’ approach

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to the game in which cheating is itself a hazy concept because, with no other players, solitary players can only cheat to gain an advantage over themselves (Bryant 2016: 81). Ultimately, the texts are more games than novels, even as they deny the more explicit gamerly form of engagement and interaction of the gamebook. In assessing the texts’ relationship to Shakespeare, we again find the available terminology lacking. We might think of them as adaptations, but their non-linear nature potentially problematizes such a description. How do we discuss a text as an adaptation when it has thousands of possible narrative iterations, the full range of which cannot be undertaken by any single reader? Can we engage with these texts in the same way that we can engage with Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (1957) as an adaptation of Macbeth or with Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016) as an adaptation of The Tempest? North’s texts engage in a critical and collaborative dialogue with the source texts, but the nature, parameters and tone of that dialogue is in persistent flux, depending on the path the reader chooses. As I have been suggesting, To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet might best be understood as works of fan fiction (fanfic), although that categorization has its limitations as well because fan fiction tends to favour more cohesive, linear narratives, written – technically – by amateurs, and frequently published online (partly because of copyright restrictions). As Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth note, fan fiction typically occupies a nebulous space between legitimacy and illegitimacy as a consequence of its legal status in relation to copyright (2014: 1092). Legally, then, fan fiction necessarily exists as a form of unpaid labour with remuneration reserved for the copyright holder. Since Shakespeare’s works do not fall under copyright restrictions and there is no ‘Shakespeare estate’ to request compensation or authorize narratives, North is free to explore Shakespeare’s worlds and characters in any way he sees fit and to be paid for his efforts, thus bypassing the issue of legitimacy that undergirds fan fiction communities. In this sense, the two texts might best be understood as literary mash-ups akin to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in which the author is free to draw liberally and explicitly from the original text without impediment, legal or otherwise. North’s work is thus legitimized and consumed – and published – in ways that fan fiction typically cannot be. Consider, for example, Star Wars erotic or slash fan fiction in the early 1980s which was

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quashed by George Lucas’ lawyers because its sexually explicit content contradicted the chaste, PG nature of the Star Wars universe (Jenkins 2006a: 150). Where copyright exists, its holders determine what forms of fan creativity are permissible, ignorable or legally unacceptable. With no such restrictions in place regarding Shakespeare, North transcends the amateur status of other fan fiction authors. He brings significant ‘geek cred’ to the project as the writer of Marvel Comics’ The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and the Adventure Time comic series, among others, authorizing his participation in – and even shaping of – geek culture. North’s authorial status, however, also complicates how we assess To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet as fan fiction in two important and related ways. First, success as a fan creator can attract positive attention that translates into professional work or opportunities, such as in the case of Star Wars fan filmmakers whose work has led to job offers in the entertainment industry (Jenkins 2006a: 132). As a professional writer already, North does not follow this trajectory, although it is not inconceivable that these two Shakespeare works could lead to other opportunities for the author. Second, North himself functions as an object of fan or geek attention, quite separate from Shakespeare. Fan fiction communities – and fan communities more generally – are typically organized around a specific object: I read Star Wars fan fiction primarily because I am a fan of Star Wars, for example. North’s association with Squirrel Girl and Adventure Time, however, means that some readers have found their way to this choosable-path adventure because they are already fans of North’s work, not because they are fans of Shakespeare, attracted by their own expectation of the author’s playful take on the literary canon. North’s texts represent the intersection of two distinct forms of ‘play’, in limited form. First, and as already discussed, as interactive fiction, the texts are both read and played. In each playthrough, I invariably ‘saved’ my progress by marking the node, exploring another path until it ended or I lost interest, and then returning to my original position to continue on from there. This type of interaction is akin to saving your progress in a role-playing videogame when the narrative appears to branch, exploring different options to see where they lead, and then reloading the original game (or, perhaps, saving over it if the new path proved to be unexpectedly fruitful or interesting). Nevertheless, such an

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approach proves challenging in these texts. In many cases, the narrative ends unexpectedly when making seemingly benign choices, so when I neglected to ‘save’, I could not find my way back to my last position and had to start over or somewhere earlier than I’d have liked. For example, in one playthrough of Romeo and/or Juliet, after having breakfast at The Merchant of Breakfast with Benvolio and losing a game of rock, paper, scissors, I snuck into Capulet Castle. I could choose to disguise myself as either a maid or a wall. Expecting allusions to Midsummer Night’s Dream to be thrown in, I chose the wall disguise. However, the Capulets saw the wall as a poor disguise and killed me because I was a Montague, while the narrator agreed that it was a stupid decision – THE END (R/J 55). As Tim Bryant notes, such unexpected and seemingly unhappy endings are central to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, ‘balancing arbitrary contingencies with sustainable reader agency’ and avoiding the ‘absolutist moralizing’ that would result from red-flagging the good and bad paths through the text, often to the extent that ‘bizarre and unfair negative conclusions’ outnumber the available happy endings (Bryant 2016: 80–1). North similarly heightens the sense of play – and, just as importantly, replayability – by largely refraining from signposting the paths to either success or failure. The paucity of happy endings is explicitly acknowledged in the aforementioned Cesario ending of R/J: ‘you ended up in one of the few happily-ever-after endings in this whole book! I award you . . . 32,767 points. Any more and you’d overflow our point counter!’ (R/J 70). Additionally, the author occasionally addresses ‘saving’ in both texts, but nowhere more explicitly than in To Be after, playing as Hamlet, you choose to be increasingly insensitive and enigmatic toward Ophelia by repeatedly sighing at her: Okay, you do the crazy things. Ophelia keeps staring at you in confusion. Finally, you sigh, as big as you can, three times in a row. What do these sighs mean? Ophelia doesn’t know, I don’t know, and neither do you. It’s like you think you’ve saved your game earlier so now you can just do stupid stuff without consequences, BUT YOU CAN’T SAVE A GAME IN REAL LIFE, SILLY, so now you’ve got to live with the consequences of these choices. And here’s one of those consequences: Ophelia’s love for you has taken 15 damage. (To Be 228)

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The node concludes with the narrative voice taking away your ability to choose the next node: ‘You know what? I think you’ve made enough choices for a while. Move over. I’m driving’ (228). ‘Play’, in the gaming sense, is thus central to both texts. Second, North evokes the sense of play central to fan fiction, distinct from gameplay. Fanfic communities are often organized around the notion of play and the gift economy. That is, one of the motivating factors in many fanfic writers’ attraction to such writing is to write texts that ‘play’ in a world and with characters that they do not own as intellectual property and cannot therefore receive remuneration for.5 Thus, regardless of the effort or skill put into it, fanfic falls on the ‘play’ side of the work–play dichotomy, receiving compensation within this gift economy through intangible (respect, praise, a request for more) rather than material (money, further paid employment) compensation. As Karen Hellekson notes, ‘Fans’ fear of cease-and-desist orders from producers or adverse attention from writers or actors has resulted in a fannish convention of making no money from their projects, thus relegating fans to amateur status’ (2015: 157). Likewise, Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth note the common perception that it is only through its delegation as ‘play’ or ‘hobby’ that fanfic can exist: ‘Once it enters into the world of commerce . . . [p]lay is now labor’ (2014: 1096). Whereas Flegel and Roth encourage us to reconsider the validity of the ‘amateur’ label as it is applied to fanfic authors, such assumptions of amateurism proliferate, especially outside the field of fan studies. In their recent work on Shakespeare fan fiction, Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes valorize such fanfic as windows that allow us ‘to see inside the head of a contemporary popular Shakespeare audience’ (2016: 283), but ‘amateur works’ (2016: 275) is tacitly accepted as synonymous with ‘fanfic’, a connection underscored by their focus on online fanfic texts (and ‘texts’ in the most traditional sense, as they exclude graphic or multimedia texts from their discussion) that remain unpublished (again, in the traditional sense of publication). Within this implied paradigm, a text cannot simultaneously be both published and fanfic, reinforcing the understanding of fanfic as belonging to a gift economy. However, North’s status as a professional writer who was/is granted financial compensation for these two texts complicates how we categorize both either as fan fiction or as something else,

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but I believe Hellekson, Flegel and Roth’s sense of play is certainly relevant to the discussion. Additionally, the publication history of To Be or Not to Be further muddies the professional–amateur division. Its initial publication was funded by a Kickstarter campaign and the text was published by Breadpig in 2013 before being picked up by Penguin and republished in 2016 to coincide with Penguin’s release of Romeo and/or Juliet the same year. Breadpig expounds the DIY ethos and creative freedom embraced by the fanfic community, describing itself as follows: Breadpig is a sidekick-for-hire, offering a variety of handholding services to creators who want to self-publish, make something nice, or take a risk on something crazy. We believe that creators shouldn’t need an MBA to make a living from their creativity, nor worry about an outside entity changing their core ideas. We’re here to help creative people avoid pitfalls, spot opportunities, and understand the reasons behind a successful project, and do for them what they don’t have the time or desire to. (‘About Us’ 2017) The publisher touts 15,352 backers for the project, which again complicates the economic distinction of the text. In the gift economy wherein fanfic authors are paid in positive comments, ‘likes’, ‘kudos’ or whatever reward system is employed by a particular website, such feedback encourages more work by the same author. Crowdfunding operates in much the same way, with the significant distinction that the over 15,000 ‘likes’ simultaneously function as real financial contributions to support the project. Crowdfunding is a form of participatory culture, defined by Henry Jenkins as a culture in which ‘members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connections with one another’ (Jenkins et al. 2009: 7; Booth 2015: 152). But as Paul Booth notes, crowdfunding is participatory but not transformative: North transforms Shakespeare, but his thousands of backers do not, even as their donations contribute to a sense of community and both emotional and financial investment (Booth 2015: 153, 155). North offered his backers a fan engagement with Shakespeare but through the medium of himself, a process that is mirrored in these choosablepath narratives wherein reader-players can engage with Shakespeare

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but only within the parameters – that is, via the choices – laid out by North. In attempting to assess To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet as objects of geek culture, then, I find that it is not just Shakespeare’s cultural status but his legal status that complicates how we might characterize fannish engagements with his works. Although fan fiction and fan studies provide the most salient terms of reference, many of the underlying assumptions about work versus play, professional versus amateur, and author versus fan tacitly exclude Shakespeare fandom and Shakespeare adaptations from the discussion. Regardless, there is nevertheless some considerable critical benefit to more actively drawing on fan studies in order to articulate how we consume Shakespeare as scholars, as students, as adapters and as fans. Similarly, the complications that Shakespeare offers to fan studies by challenging many of the expectations of what fan engagement looks like and how it is compensated indicate that Shakespeare also has a great deal to contribute to the field as well. Viewed in isolation, North’s two texts are clearly works of fan fiction, but Shakespeare’s presence alone reframes many of fan studies’ core debates about legitimacy, participation and authority.

Notes 1 Writing about To Be specifically, Brian J. Harries emphasizes that scholars should not dismiss North’s focus on choice as pure novelty, as he reads the text as an engagement with a central theme of Hamlet – Christian free will and anxieties of choice itself – such that North offers ‘a legitimately meaningful statement on Hamlet’s situation’, in no small part due to the narrator’s emphasis on consequences (2018: 169). 2 Although, the concept of a ‘unified fictional universe’ is somewhat problematic in Shakespeare’s case. Aside from those plays with an explicitly acknowledged shared world (such as the history plays or Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), we do not know how many of the plays exist within the same overarching narrative framework. Do the events of The Tempest, Othello and The Merchant of Venice take place in the same world in the same way that the numerous films that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe do? Do Shylock and Othello walk the streets of the same Venice? Would either conceivably

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be able to hear about the usurpation of Prospero a few hundred kilometres away, with the news passing through Capulets in Verona and Minolas in Padua before reaching Venice? Or do we think of the plays as we do the various versions of Earth that exist in DC Comics? Undoubtedly, this is a frivolous question that Shakespeare did not care to address, but it is the kind of question that fans often care deeply about when deciding how they can engage with a text and what is in or out of a narrative canon. North himself wryly addresses this issue when two versions of Hamlet interact with one another. Confused, Hamlet 2 posits that ‘all possible timelines coexist at once in one giant timey-wimey jumble’, to which Hamlet responds, ‘It doesn’t have to be a jumble . . . I’m sure you could also imagine a universe of alternate possibilities’ (To Be 218). 3 In limiting the duration of non-canonical narrative paths, North implicitly acknowledges a core tension or paradox within fan fiction: the closer one hews to the extant narrative, the less room there is for fan authors to explore alternatives, but the further one strays from the extant narrative, the more the object of fan engagement diminishes. 4 Although outside the parameters of the current chapter, the fact that certain paths/endings remain hidden to certain readers reflects how individuals read and what desires they impose on a text. In interactive fiction, these desires are reflected back at us, closing off some paths while repeatedly retreading others. Was the time machine ending closed to me because I unconsciously avoided explicitly romantic narrative paths, or because I unintentionally prioritized paths that seemed to foreground Juliet? 5 I leave aside here any question of whether fanfic authors should or should not receive such remuneration, in large part because if we align Shakespearean adaptations of any kind with fanfic then some fanfic texts are, in fact, remunerated.

Works cited Aarseth, Espen J. (1997), Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press. ‘About Us’ (2017), Breadpig.com, http://breadpig.myshopify.com/pages/ about-us. Barthes, Roland (1974), S/Z, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Booth, Paul (2015), ‘Crowdfunding: A Spimatic Application of Digital Fandom’, New Media and Society 17, no. 1: 149–66.

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Bryant, Tim (2016), ‘Building the Culture of Contingency: Adaptive Choice in Ludic Literature from Role-Playing Games to Choose Your Own Adventure Books’, in Andrew Byers and Francesco Crocco (eds), The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs, 72–95. Jefferson, NC : McFarland. Byers, Andrew and Francesco Crocco, eds (2016), ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Byers and Francesco Crocco (eds), The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs, 1–19. Jefferson, NC : McFarland. Fazel, Valerie and Louise Geddes (2016), ‘ “Give me your hands if we be friends”: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction’, Shakespeare 12, no. 3: 274–86. Flegel, Monica and Jenny Roth (2014), ‘Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor’, Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 6: 1092–108. Goodman, Lesley (2015), ‘Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author’, Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4: 662–76. Harries, Brian J. (2018), ‘Christian Free Will and Reader Choice in Ryan North’s To Be or Not To Be’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 25, no. 2: 167–76. Harrison, Matthew and Michael Lutz (2017), ‘South of Elsinore: Actions that a Man Might Play’, in Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, 23–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hellekson, Karen (2015), ‘Fandom and Fan Culture’, in Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, 153–63. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hindmarch, Will (2007), ‘Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium’, in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds), Second Person: RolePlaying and Story in Games and Playable Media, 47–55. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Jenkins, Henry (2006a), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry (2006b), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry et al. (2009), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Landow, George P. (1997), Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press.

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North, Ryan (2016), Romeo and/or Juliet. New York: Riverhead Books. North, Ryan (2016), To Be or Not To Be. New York: Riverhead Books. Wake, Paul (2016), ‘Life and Death in the Second Person: Identification, Empathy, and Antipathy in the Adventure Gamebook’, Narrative 24, no. 2: 190–210.

7 Hiddleston–Shakespeare– Coriolanus, or Rhizomatic Crossings in Fanfic Stephen O’Neill

What if? Shakespeare’s Coriolanus speaks as if he desires an alternate universe. ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.134), he declares, defiantly, to the assembled citizens intent on banishing him from Rome. Later, having sought a new world in Antium with his enemy Aufidius, he finds himself confronted with his wife and mother and wonders if he can deny such familial bonds, to stand ‘as if a man were author of himself’ (5.3.36). Here too is a search for another world, for an alternate identity and story. The play already posits several ‘what ifs’. What if Coriolanus could author himself free of Volumnia’s valorization of Rome? What if desire could take multiple forms, or if masculinity was not bound up with virtus? What if Coriolanus could couple with Aufidius in ways that exceed enmity, or the bond between soldiers? Perhaps Shakespeare asked some of these questions as he adapted Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives into a tragedy for the early modern theatre. It will already be clear – especially to those readers familiar with fan practices – that these speculations are the stuff fan texts are 112

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made of. Fanfic ‘springs from a what if moment’ (Parrish 2013: 1) to imagine new stories out of plot turns in the original source material, or canon, as in the above extracts from fanfics. These writers ‘who ask what-if do not intend to replace the original text; rather, the story that follows expands the canon, changes the space, and offers us new versions of familiar characters’ (Parrish 2013: 1). In this way, fanfic is world-building, as the phrase alternate universe, commonly abbreviated to AU, makes manifest. It denotes a fan genre and practice that ‘on the surface, radically alters the source text, but is in fact intended to illustrate the flexibility and adaptability of the source text to different contexts’ (Mudan Finn and McCall 2016: 30). AU may also retain the original plot and characters but relocate the action so much so that ‘the setting becomes the text’ (Mudan Finn and McCall 2016: 31). Bodies too motivate fanfic and, along with location, function as ‘a storytelling medium’ (Coppa 2014: 229). A notable body in Coriolanus fanfic is that of the celebrity actor Tom Hiddleston, at once the subject of fan stories and their object of desire. This chapter explores Hiddleston fanfic, or ‘real person fiction’ (RPF), especially that inspired by his performance as Coriolanus in the Donmar Warehouse production, broadcast worldwide as part of National Theatre Live (Coriolanus 2014). Josie Rourke’s staging made much of Hiddleston’s body, especially his bare torso, as did production promotional material, which seemed keenly attuned to Hiddleston’s fanbase (Abbott 2015). The image of a stripped-to-the-waist Hiddleston as a battleworn Coriolanus even featured on the cover of Shakespeare Survey, an acknowledgement of the centrality of the actor’s body, and the celebrity actor at that, to Shakespeare’s contemporary formations. But fan texts available on the fan site Archive of Our Own such as ‘A Change of Honors’ (winterlive 2014) and ‘Endure’ (Hermaline75 2014) go a step further, creating stories out of Hiddleston’s persona, sexuality and life in ways that body forth or make present a simulacrum of the actor to produce a fanon, that is the supplementary information that fans bring to canon or source text.1 Fan authors define their work as transformative because it ‘takes something extant and turns it into something with a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression’ (Organization for Transformative Works n.d). The Hiddleston that emerges in these works is not simply the celebrity actor or the self-identifying Shakespearean ‘geek’, but a combination of these, a hybrid signifier that facilitates meanings

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and desires that exceed any individual role he plays. Tom as Coriolanus, Tom in a sexual relationship with Hadley Fraser (who played Aufidius in the Donmar production), or Tom as a Shakespeare teacher, are among just some of the potential storylines imagined in transformative fan works. It is these texts as contemporary sites of adaptation and the Shakespeare text itself that set this chapter’s interpretative agenda, in the spirit of Douglas Lanier’s field-defining concept of Shakespearean rhizomatics as a methodological approach to how our contemporary Shakespeare(s) are formed, as well as fan studies scholarship. Analysing Shakespeare media fandom might previously have required an explanation or even an apology: does Hiddleston/ Coriolanus fic constitute a legitimate area of critical inquiry? Is it still the business of Shakespeare criticism? Is it Shakespearean and, if so, to what ends? However, such questions are distractions from both the value of fan cultural practices and the opportunities they represent for the field of Shakespeare studies. These extend from licensing Shakespeare studies scholars to repose a question, ‘What constitutes Shakespeare(s)?’, from our own personal and scholarly relationship with the work and its uncanny temporalities, to the status of our field and discipline as it goes in search – perhaps in an appropriative vein – of new iterations, new texts and new spaces of Shakespearean cultural production. Shakespeare fandom, as Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes argue, ‘matters as a vibrant, bawdy, robust opportunity to see inside the head of a contemporary popular Shakespeare audience, and experience the adaptive transition that occurs when active participants in digital communities claim Shakespeare for themselves’ (2015: 283). But Shakespeare fandom also matters because of the range of actors and interests involved, with Shakespeare operating not necessarily as some centralizing catalyst of fan production, but rather as one among a variety of stimuli and points of interest for individual fanfic writers.

Rhizomes, not roots Fan texts and practices exemplify Shakespearean rhizomatics in their creative refusal to regard Shakespeare as a fulcrum or stable property. Lanier draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to advance a theoretical approach to Shakespeare’s diverse

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and multiple iterations, which are understood as a web-like network of mutually dynamic and illuminating relations. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, ‘The rhizome is anti-genealogy’ (1987: 11); without a fixed beginning or definitive end point, its state is the middle, or between things. ‘Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!’, they declare, ‘Don’t sow, grow offshoots’ (1987: 24). The rhizome’s fabric is the ‘conjunction’, ‘and . . . and . . . and’, a structure that resonates with additions to Shakespeares – Shakespeare and digital fandom, Shakespeare and popular culture – but also invites us to rehear the ampersand as a transversal figure that marks a deterritorializing and reterritorializing of each entity. This means interpreting Shakespeare as a process rather than a stable product, its existence a state of becoming rather than being. Lanier writes that ‘To posit a still point of structure, form, value or meaning, to assert identity, is perceptually to arrest the flux of becomingdifferent, to misperceive stability within what is in fact the fluidity of ceaseless change, or to attempt to impose structure (typically a binary one) upon non-unitary multiplicity’ (2014: 27). In this way, reading rhizomatically challenges Shakespeare-centrism and the sense of propriety, disciplinary boundaries and temporal markers that continue to ghost Shakespeare criticism’s interventions into vernacular texts and spaces. Committed to what Lanier calls a ‘principle of difference’ (2014: 33), a rhizomatic approach is less interested in asking whether an adaptation is or is not ‘really’ Shakespeare than in exploring ‘how does this adaptation reshape or extend a collective conception of what constitutes’ Shakespeare (Lanier 2014: 33). Through a rhizomatic approach, then, we can argue that Shakespeare(s) becomes through the interaction of a range of agential actors – the fan, the text, the media platform – and that Coriolanus itself becomes a type of fanfic, with Coriolanus and Aufidius as the original ‘slash’ pairing. Reading fan texts shifts the collective consciousness about Coriolanus, which is put into a process of change as a consequence of fan works. These become part of or ‘entangled’, as Margaret Jane Kidnie describes the adaptational process more generally (2009: 69), with the text’s hermeneutics. In turn, too, fanfic becomes Shakespearean, as its online practitioners spin new narratives from the openly available and the already culturally layered Shakespearean text. A rhizomatic approach frees up the critical enterprise in significant ways. First, the object of focus, Shakespeare, can be

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regarded as a fanfic writer, a suggestion that may be anachronistic, but that nonetheless proves a liberating metaphor that allows us to imagine Shakespeare ‘writing himself into beloved texts’ (Teague 2011: 81). Second, it offers the critic new subjective entry points into Shakespeare’s worlds that might otherwise be too readily dismissed as academically unrespectable. In short, the critic can come to regard themselves as a fan, to come out as a ShakesFan, or a ‘geek’, or a Hiddleston fan, or crucially all of these, in ways the Shakespeare Survey cover recognized; these positions do not have to settle or hierarchize. However, occupying these between or transversal spaces requires self-reflection, as fan studies scholar Matt Hills notes when he cautions that the aca-fan must be careful not to fall into moral dualisms, in which fic is regarded as the inconsequential fluff to the rationality, professionalism and detachment of critical writing or argument: like the object of its scrutiny, academic cultural studies is itself a discourse community. Hills undertakes an autoethnography, detailing how his fan status intersects with his academic one, and his approach is useful in thinking about the relation of the critic as observer to the fan texts one is accessing. Hills acknowledges his reticence in admitting his fan interest in Gillian Anderson is motivated by sexual desire for the celebrity actor in the context of his current perception as a broadly feminist academic who disagrees with the objectification of women. He further considers the potential for self-silencing ‘an aspect of my cultural identity which begins to problematize my unified self, threatening to fragment the self into a series of contradictory investments and attachments’ (Hills 2002: 87). This formulation, recognizing as it does a shift from putative stable self to fragmentation, resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on becoming rather than stable being. It prompts me to reflect on this present critical undertaking from a variety of perspectives.

Searching for Tom In an observer role as a Shakespeare academic, I come to fanfics with a set of interests in adapted Shakespeare across different media forms and digital cultures. There is perhaps a certain geekiness to the search or the broader project that motivates me to look for Shakespeare/Coriolanus/Hiddleston works, so that the experience

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of fan cultures in turn reveals the fannish nature of one’s own professional interests or of critical discourse itself. But the search and interest might be motivated by Hiddleston’s image, or his body, as displayed in the Donmar production, and subsequently used on the cover of Shakespeare Survey, itself an instance of a combination of subject positions rather than an opposition as the viewer is invited to be both a Hiddles-fan or ‘Hiddlestoner’ and a Shakespearean. However, as a non-participant observer, I also come to fan work from outside fan cultures and practices: admittedly, there is a sense of looking in on this culture and community to select its texts. Selection takes the form of what I noticed as an individual research visitor to the fan-generated site Archive of Our Own, as well as the hidden operations of the computational search function and the site’s algorithm that sorts and returns relevant and related content. Using the search function on this open access repository of fan writing, one can identify and select fan works that focus on Hiddleston and Coriolanus. As such, the following discussion is informed by (my) human search as well as the nonhuman or technological. There may, however, be a risk of generating a potential set of assumptions about the invisible producers who post their work on the site, with the inclusion of works for critical analysis in the present volume implying that the producers are ‘Shakespeare geeks’. But, as the case of Hiddleston shows, fandom and fan texts operate against such broad labels. Hiddleston himself answers to and complicates the label ‘geek’. He is the quintessential Shakespeare geek, as in the popular fan internet GIF and meme featuring Hiddleston with a pained expression on his face, with the caption reading ‘Somewhere in the world . . . Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it’ (Mutilated by Roses 2014). As Anna Blackwell argues, this memetic text iterates and sustains what she calls Hiddleston’s ‘Shakespeareanism’, a performer identity bound up with the actor’s perceived quintessential Englishness (2018: 231) and, one might add, whiteness too. Shakespeare, in turn, is implicitly posited as textually sovereign; to misquote him, is to upset Tom, the superego in this exchange, but anyone else with a similar, or one might say ‘proper’, appreciation of Shakespeare’s language. Hiddleston thus functions as synecdoche for ‘the potential social, cultural and national exclusivity of Shakespearean interpretation’ (Blackwell 2018: 245). The fanfic ‘It all began with Shakespeare’ (Matleena 2016) similarly capitalizes

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on Hiddleston’s cultural cachet as a famous Shakespearean actor – despite the fact that he has played only a handful of Shakespearean roles – and uses Shakespeare as a narrative jumping-off point. Hiddleston is the visiting teacher in a university with whom the reader-as-character falls in love; their mutual attraction is conveyed through a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet. Hiddleston is figured as the object of female sexual desire, with the reader gendered as cis female and the fanfic tagged as F/M and mature content. While the Shakespearean intertext of Romeo and Juliet underlines the heterosexual coupling, this fan text is as, if not more, interested in Hiddleston’s other character portrayals, such as Loki in The Avengers from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as it is in a Shakespearean universe. Playing with these roles, fan authors merge the persona of the actor with the character he/she/they play, as in fics tagged ‘Tomki’, with this type of crossover constituting a common practice within fan cultures. In ‘It all began with Shakespeare’, the reader is invited to imagine a different Tom: ‘you wanted to see the side of him that took charge, the inner Loki, mischievously playful, deceivingly charming villain that was up to no good’ (Matleena 2016). In this way, fanfics do not amount to a specifically Shakespeare fandom or geekdom but instead use Shakespeare as a mediating text or, to frame this another way, fan interest in Hiddleston’s Marvel work is extended to his Shakespeare performances and fans themselves play with and across these different interests. In keeping with that sense of play, fanfics imagine Hiddleston in a range of scenarios, commonly exploring homosexual and queer pairings in which the actor as Coriolanus or the character of Coriolanus finds himself in a relationship, consensual or otherwise, with Aufidius. Wishing characters into relationships, romantic or otherwise, is known in fan cultures as ‘shipping’, as in the fic ‘Two Letters’, which imagines intimate proximity between the two men: ‘So alike were these two brave, star-crossed warriors. The fates could not have joined such two compatible souls’ (roryheadmav 2014). These stories generally post-date the 2014 Donmar production directed by Josie Rourke, with Hiddleston as Coriolanus and Hadley Fraser as Aufidius, and its broadcast by NT Live on 30 January 2014, with an encore screening in September 2015. Along with fan-generated GIFs and memes featuring Hiddleston alone and with Fraser, these fanfics provide valuable insight into the production’s reception context as a live theatre as well as a broadcast

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performance. As Daisy Abbott argues, the NT Live Coriolanus can be regarded as ‘fractured, transmedia narrative’ (2015: 29) that encompasses a range of agential actors, from the official cast itself to a lively Hiddleston fandom. Those fans were quick to identify its potential to fandom, especially its ready-made slash pairing of Coriolanus/Aufidius. In some instances, media coverage dismissed these fans of the production as superficial, as captured in the reported remark by one fan: ‘I don’t care for Coriolanus as a play so I spent my time admiring the curve of Tom Hiddleston’s arse again’ (quoted in Abbott 2015: 27), with the ‘again’ suggesting the fan desire to repeat the pleasure of the performance experience. However, Rachael Nicholas draws attention to the way NT Live actively appealed to Hiddleston’s fanbase, with the release of a digital programme to coincide with the encore broadcast including several adaptive strategies such as mid-show interviews and audiocommentary featuring Hiddleston himself (2018: 84). In a blog, one fan included screencaps from the NT Live broadcast of Fraser’s Aufidius embracing and then kissing Hiddleston’s Coriolanus, and noted, ‘The relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is the sort of thing slash pairings were made for. There’s enough tension between them to cut with a knife and even when they find themselves on the same side, that never really goes away’ (So Currently Captivated 2014). Other fans responded similarly, but also made reference to the production’s dual emphasis on Hiddleston’s physique and proximate male–male relations: I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do after seeing the recent Donmar production of Coriolanus if not to write fanfic where these two bang. (Winterlive 2014) People need to understand that Coriolanus isn’t just two guys kissing. Get over it. If you are / have been lucky enough to get tickets and you go / went just to see the kiss I don’t even want to talk to you. (quoted in Abbott 2015) In the first example, an Author Note (or A/N) to ‘A Change of Honors’, one encounters slash, a defining trope within and even

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subgenre of fanfic that imagines a proximate relationship between two male characters, as in the now iconic pairing of Star Trek’s Kirk/Spock (K/S), but here Coriolanus/Aufidius. The second example suggests several possibilities: a desire to broaden popular understandings of the play or production; a resistance to sensationalizing homoerotic desire; or a resistance to the overt articulation of that desire through Shakespeare or Hiddleston. At work in both fan responses is a wider debate about the meaning of slash pairings in fanfic. Imagining deep bonds of friendship aboard the starship Enterprise, slash seeks out, and then amplifies, that which is only available on a subtextual level in the series proper or source material. ‘A Change of Honors’ imagines Hiddleston nervously expressing desire for his co-star Hadley Fraser – ‘The first time they meet, Tom holds his gaze for too long’ (winterlive 2014) – who in turn struggles to reconcile himself to his attraction for Tom: ‘He feels different with Tom, the ghosts of Aufidius and Martius hovering over them, making them fiercer than they might otherwise be’ (winterlive 2014). Through these RPF stories focused on self-identifying straight actors, fan writers may be exploring and contesting the limited visibility of openly gay actors in the entertainment industry.

More of and more from Coriolanus While one must be careful not to regard slash as the predominant marker of fan work (Hills 2002: 70), it has been historically important to the community as a means to explore and emphasize an emotional connectedness between the characters, one that may or may not lead to a sexually consummated relationship; in this emphasis, as Henry Jenkins argues, slash ‘is not so much a genre about sex as it is a genre about the limitations of traditional masculinity and about reconfiguring male identity’ (1992: 85). This can be understood more broadly in terms of the culture of fandom itself, which, as Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall note, is ‘a community overwhelmingly driven by marginalized readers: women, members of the LBGTQIA+ community, and readers of colour who are actively agitating against white patriarchal epistemologies that have historically defined which texts have cultural value and how these texts should be interpreted’ (2016:

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32). Fans’ creative and transformative works amount to a collective ‘act of revisionist myth-making, or remythologizing [that] shifts interpretations and conversations from what once seemed impossible to a space that is not only feasible but also carries revolutionary possibilities’ (Mudan Finn and McCall 2016: 32). While there is a risk within fan studies of overdetermining fan work as a nexus of resistance, not least because the source text itself with which fans work so closely may itself come to represent a kind of tradition or canon, it is important to recognize how fan writers carve out new possibilities through counter-narratives. For the predominantly women writers of slash, then, there is through the characters’ homosocial and homosexual desire a negotiation of inherited iterations of masculinity as handed down by a dominant culture predicated on compulsory heterosexuality. But, where the character’s desires are not an automatic match for the fan author’s identity, the point might be the possibility of that misalignment, that is of imagining through writing and reading fanfic things outside of one’s own experiences or bodies (Russo 2018: 157). Formative to this revision and reimagining, to redrawing what is deemed intelligible, is a sense of both pleasure and play, of desiring ‘more of’ and ‘more from’ the source material, as a fan author noted in an interview with Sheenagh Pugh (quoted in Mudan Finn and McCall 2016: 36), with that play taking queer forms. As P. J. Falzone argues, through slash, the ‘final frontier really is queer’ in that the pairings are not some ‘variation on traditional, androcentric heterosexist normativity, but a break with these traditions’ (2005: 249). One way fan authors quite overtly break with tradition is, paradoxically, in the return to the source material, which is regarded as a site of provisional primacy. Shakespeare’s play text is not a stable assemblage of characters and plot, but rather a friable space that ‘tells several different kinds of stories at once, depending upon which set of characters and issues is placed in the foreground’ (Garber 2004: 777). Fan authors explore a character’s psychology and inner motivations (Mudan Finn and McCall 2016: 36) using Act 4, Scene 5 of the play, when Coriolanus, in disguise, enters Antium and the home of his old enemy, Aufidius. The scene is already ripe with possibility and invites a series of ‘What if?’ questions. Aufidius’ serving man will describe the outcome of the encounter between the two soldiers as a ‘strange alteration’, a phrase that at once suggests the surprise of this new bond as well as what

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one might describe as the queerness of the encounter, as Coriolanus and Aufidius become other, each regarding the other man from a new perspective. Aufidius makes an extraordinary claim, at least by heteronormative standards, when he compares the man before him to his wife: ‘that I see thee here, / Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart / Than when I first my wedded mistress saw / Bestride my threshold’ (4.5.117–20). One editor describes it as the ‘confusion of the martial and marital’ (quoted in Holland 2013: 341), but this does not quite capture the strangeness of the scene, as Aufidius reveals to Coriolanus that ‘nightly’ since their first battle he has Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me – We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat – And waked half dead with nothing. (4.5.125–8) Shakespeare’s characters often find themselves in such in-between states of waking and dreaming, but Aufidius’ half-dead state is suggestive of a little death, or la petite mort, only with sexual jouissance ending in nothing, a word that elsewhere in Shakespeare carries sexual connotations, most notably Iago’s recollection of Cassio’s dream. Aufidius imagines physical contact and even union with Coriolanus that ends in nothing – a lack of orgasm – or, in fact, the pleasure of non-reproductive intercourse, that is of sex between two men that will produce no offspring. The play registers the possibility of some ‘strange alteration’ in Aufidius and Coriolanus, only to then ‘muster all’ into war: through their combined energies, ‘pouring war / Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome’ they will ‘Like a bold flood o’erbear’t’ (4.5.31–3). As Peter Holland notes, ‘War becomes a kind of violent purgative or enema poured into the Roman body politic’ (2013: 342), but this reading can be pressed further: war as sodomy, with this new act at once repurposing and displacing Aufidius’ dream-acts, his own subconscious sodomitical desires for Coriolanus and the ‘nothing’ of their bodily union. Where Shakespeare’s play leaves us with little sense of what Coriolanus makes of Aufidius’ revelations – he simply replies ‘You bless me, gods’ at the promise of vengeance on Rome – fanfics delve into the character’s psyche, pause on the imagined aftermath of this scene and ponder the erotics of the encounter. In ‘Endure’, Coriolanus

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narrates his horror at the realization that Aufidius desires him, and his surrendering to that desire: ‘The memory of your hands upon my naked flesh still brings me shudders. It was not the act itself, but what I realised you were tracing. Your fingers ran along my scars but only certain ones, the ones that you had left on me. The marks that claimed me as yours’ (Hermaline75 2014). The erotics of conquest in the bedroom maps on to earlier memories of combat on the battlefield. In this amplification of Aufidius’ dream narrative, Coriolanus will ‘endure’ his enemy’s advances: ‘It was not a kiss, it was an act of war.’ In ‘City of Kites and Crows’ (djarum99 2014), which in its title quotes from Coriolanus’ description of Antium (4.5.43), the two men seem on the cusp of a new bond: ‘Their sweat mingles, their breath, and skin to skin recognition flares hot – they have grappled so before, and this clash is not so different. Perhaps, in this, they can seal the terms of alliance’ (djarum99 2014). The possibility of sexual contact between the men is, however, sublimated through Aufidius’ slave girl Chara, with whom Coriolanus has sex.

Shakespearean slash, or becoming fannish While adding and imagining new possibilities and characters out of Shakespeare’s play, fanfics also identify meanings latent within it. To suggest so is not to collapse historical difference or to read anachronistically without awareness, but instead to foreground the ways fanfic alters and becomes part of the consciousness about the text Coriolanus; in fact, my reading of the scene above is already infused with the perspective of fan stories. Moreover, I would argue that texts like ‘Endure’ and ‘A Change of Honors’ are doing similar work to criticism on Coriolanus or, that having read fanfic, one finds loop effects or echoes of critical interest in and close readings of the play. Consider Ralph Berry’s attention to the play’s sexual imagery, where he not only notes how sex and war are closely interlinked, with victory in battle figured as ‘heterosexual triumph’ (1973: 309) but also ‘the possibility of a homosexual attachment between Aufidius and Coriolanus’ (1973: 309). Berry poses his own ‘What if?’ question when he wonders whether ‘it is even possible to read an additional latent insult in Aufidius’s final “boy”: that is, the

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word bears the implication not only of servant, but of pathic, the passive sexual partner of the dominant Aufidius’ (1973: 312). In fandom terms, this is an example of headcanon, where a fan reader of a writer’s speculation about the canon or source material takes on its own authority such that it seems already part of the canon. Jonathan Goldberg undertakes similar forays into the play’s sexual and for him distinctly queer subtexts in his essay ‘The Anus in Coriolanus’, a title that quite deliberately pushes at the boundaries of propriety in Shakespeare criticism (2003: 176–88). In a sophisticated reading, Goldberg notes how the play draws parallels between the love of Aufidius, or Coriolanus’ ‘fuck buddy’ (2003: 183), and that of Volumnia in ways that become deeply transgressive of heteronormativity. Reading fanfic, Berry, and Goldberg, it becomes difficult not to hear in Coriolanus’ ‘I’ll not to Rome, I’ll be back to you’ (5.3.18), or in Aufidius’s ‘embrace’ of his Roman enemy and now visitor, or in the claim that ‘Our generall himself makes a mistress of’ Coriolanus (4.5.197), or indeed in Aufidius’ extraordinary dream, which as Goldberg suggests ‘may be Shakespeare’s too’ (2003: 185), a deeply queer aesthetic to Shakespeare’s play. Madhavi Menon has claimed the play as ‘an early proponent of queer theory’ as it ‘insistently gives us desires that do not cohere into identities’ (2011: 160, 167). Menon herself moves into fanfic territory when she speaks of Aufidius ‘ “fisting” another man’ although, as she recognizes, there are ‘a multiplicity of positions mouthed by a man whose desires never rest exclusively on or in one body’ (2011: 163). The play is, she argues, already destabilizing the relation between desire, bodies and identities, a move that is characteristic of queer theory. Coriolanus begins to look like, or, in the language of Shakespearean rhizomatics, it becomes, a transformative work, as it variously amplifies, extends and plays with its own source material. Claudia Corti has noted how extensive Shakespeare’s adaptation of North’s Plutarch is, especially the homoerotics of Coriolanus’ movement toward Aufidius, and in the latter’s feelings and gestures. His dream, with its ‘energetic body language’, is, Corti writes, ‘absolutely untraceable to Plutarch’s narration’ (2007: 194). Another way of putting this is to say Shakespeare writes slash. Like slash, the play explores the possibility of a ‘world elsewhere’, a sense of safety away from Rome, a meaning the Donmar production itself sought to underscore. As Carol Rutter noted in her review of Rourke’s

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production, ‘Only in the arms of Aufidius . . . a welcome that began as a stranglehold, knife pressed against throat, and ended in an embrace, did Coriolanus seem fully alive. These were bodies that understood each other’ (2015: 401). Rutter’s observation invites us to interpret the production as, in its own way, a form of fandom, as it (re)imagines Shakespeare’s text for the stage. Informed by and responding to the staging, fanfics unfold an aspect of the production that one might not otherwise apprehend – they function as intertexts and paratexts that disclose their own fannish characteristics. This is evident when one considers Rutter’s description alongside the fanfic ‘With None But Thee’, where Coriolanus and Aufidius recognize and accede to their mutual dependency and belonging: There’s none who knows me quite the way you do, Nor puts that knowledge to such keen a test. At times I wonder what the Gods could mean To set us both on earth, and yet at odds For all of our days. It seems to me a waste. (The Librarina 2014) Replying, Aufidius urges Coriolanus, ‘Come thou to bed, my nemesis, and rest.’ Like ‘A Change of Honors’, this fanfic dwells on both the play’s and the production’s suggestion of safety in proximity. The story slows the pace of Shakespeare’s play to create an imagined moment in time where the two men are at one. Time and pleasure emerge as linked tropes in the texts, with ‘Eagle in the Dove-cote’ similarly imagining Aufidius and Coriolanus together in a fleeting moment: ‘Oh, it is sweet to know that he, Aufidius, has brought this hard man to release and quenched the fiery rage that burns so brightly, at least for a moment. Sweeter still to feel sheltered beneath him, lost in a haze of pleasure greater than he’s ever felt before’ (Lizardbeth 2014). In selecting and then extending Act 4, Scene 5, fanfics draw the reader into the bedroom to imagine the primal scene of Aufidius and Coriolanus’ coupling that become Coriolanus’ story. The emphasis is quite obviously and unapologetically on sexual pleasure – ‘Aufidius imagines the moment; imagines he won’t give that mercy, that he’ll tease and torment until Martius is utterly undone’ (Lizardbeth 2014) – but evident too is the fans’ own valuing of their creative or textual pleasure and play, of their capacity to generate new worlds out of the canonical text.

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In Shakespeare’s iteration of what we would now call slash, however, the non-normative pairing is subsumed by the ‘expectations of the hegemonic culture’ because ‘[w]hatever the circumstances, the ending of subversive sexuality . . . must be death’ (Corti 2007: 195), although that ending might itself be regarded as distinctly queer, or a going against heterosexual reproduction and futurity. Fan iterations, which select and narratively pause on the moment of Aufidius and Coriolanus’ coupling, also entail resistance to, and even rescue from, the master narrative: as Falzone argues, ‘the queer aberrant reading outlives its parent narrative’ (2005: 256). However, I would argue that fanfic also invites us to read the relation of source and fan text in less antagonistic or Oedipal terms. The characters and their latent queer lives breathe again, and together – ‘Coriolanus and Aufidius do it. In verse’, as the fanfic ‘Never man sigh’d truer breath’ (jibrailis 2010) puts it – and coexist with, rather than replace, the source text. If the play is queer less because of proximity between the two men than for its deferral of identity and resistance to stability, to knowing oneself completely or recognizing oneself as exceptional, then Coriolanus is not just an early instance of slash, it is also rhizomatic. Caius Martius becomes Coriolanus becomes Aufidius’ ‘boy’ (5.6.104) becomes, through fic, Hiddleston and Fraser becoming intimate. Fanfic reframes the play’s move toward the hero’s death, translating it into the non-reproductive coupling of Aufidius and Coriolanus. Fanfic is already rhizomatic in its attitude to Shakespeare, which is treated as one of many generators of adaptational energies. For example, the author of ‘Two Letters’ explains that ‘While this fic draws inspiration from the Donmar Warehouse version of Coriolanus, I’ve taken more information about Coriolanus’ life during his exile from Plutarch’s Lives’ (roryheadmav 2014). Fics on Hiddleston and Coriolanus do not merely inherit a dynamic textual entity but work with the play as a culturally constructed, continually evolving assemblage of texts of which the fic becomes a part. They become, that is, part of the Coriolanus/Shakespeare rhizome. It is in this way that one can understand fanfic as an example of archontic literature, or ‘a vast archive that accrues meaning in the new relationships and associations that are created in an ongoing process’ (Parrish 2013: 5). Integral to that process is the sense of a community of fans who as fellow writers and readers respond to and engage with one another’s work. In fact, as viewing fanfic on

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web platforms such as AOO makes clear, fans operate in and through what Fazel and Geddes describe as ‘two distinct dialogical modes’ (2015: 280) that include the diegesis, or the world-withinthe story on the one hand and post-performance talkback on the other. AOO encourages such talkback through its comment feature, which is presented as an invitation at the end of each story – ‘Please drop by the archive and comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work’ – as well as through rankings in the form of giving a story kudos, the equivalent of Facebook likes (Fazel and Geddes 2015: 280). It is through these distinctive features and affordances that fandom constitutes a gift economy based on textual exchange. The author of ‘It all began with Shakespeare’ (Mataleena 2016), for instance, dedicates chapters of the story to another reader. But fans prompt each other to write indirectly too, with the prior existence of Hiddleston fanfic encouraging others to follow suit and to engage in shipping: that is, imagining different relationships between a set of characters. ‘I know I’m late to the party,’ comments an author, ‘but I only finally watched the Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus and tbh I’ve become a lil bit obsessed with this ship lately’ (Matleena 2016). Fans give back to each other, while also ensuring that the fic has an extra-diegetic afterlife, one that sustains the fan community.

Deterritorializations In mapping relations between Shakespeare and Hiddleston fandom, this chapter has sought to play with the transversal movement associated with rhizomatic thinking that, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, is ‘nomadic’, that is non-sedentary and that occupies the inbetween: as they write, ‘a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing’ (1987: 25, 33). This approach, which, to recall Lanier’s emphasis, begins from a ‘principle of difference’ (2014: 33), has implications for the kind of Shakespeare criticism we do and for how the field approaches fan or other pop culture adaptations. It may be necessary to forego traditional valorizations of Shakespearean authority based on textual fidelity – while recognizing that these can ghost pop culture productions – and to desacralize, disrupt and disturb inherited notions in the discipline about the primacy of the Shakespearean

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text or source, so that we can arrive at a more dynamic understanding of contemporary Shakespeares. This disturbance might allow for a more dynamic understanding of the different formations within ‘Shakespeares’, a non-binary approach that sees both Shakespeare and Hiddleston fanfics as mutually enabling, equal collaborators in the cultural phenomenon we call Shakespeare. This in turn means moving beyond tradition and custom to which, like Coriolanus himself, we are habituated and that we too might resist by finding new possibilities and stories in and through Coriolanus and his desire to free himself, to become, that is, the author of himself. Shakespeare’s play allegorizes a relation to primacy and to singularity, as these variously apply to a text or to identity. But it also allegorizes the process of becoming that, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and Lanier establishes, are key to our contemporary Shakespeares. This chapter has illustrated this process through brief analyses of Hiddleston fic and attended to the uncanny loop effects that occur when texts are put into contact with each other. Several things emerge. For one, a less anthropocentric Shakespeare; rather, Shakespeare happens in and through dynamic sites of adaptation. Hiddleston too emerges as a cipher, or a simulacrum, with Hiddlestoners engaging in a preservation of Hiddleston as a Shakespearean actor, as upper-class English, as hot or desirable, all features that get entangled with Shakespeare/Coriolanus. Even as the focus on Hiddleston suggests wider structures of viewing in fandom predicated on white cultural privilege (see Woo 2018; De Kosnik and Carrington 2019), fan texts can be culturally progressive in their collective interpretation, rescripting and expansion of inherited texts. Fanfics emerge as centres of desire, pleasure and play. And, while the emphasis on bodies and sex, sometimes graphic and non-consensual in nature, might move some critics to dismiss fan writing as smut, it is important to recognize how sexuality is understood as fertile ground (Falzone 2005: 249) and that a writer’s pursuit of pleasure through a textual encounter with the source can become the reader’s too. Fanfics change us. They construct and invite a variety of identity positions in and through the canon, so that as in the case of Hiddleston–Coriolanus fic it is not simply a new or ever pliable Shakespeare that emerges or becomes, but also the human subject in the equation – the reader, viewer, critic or whatever other label we might adopt and find in our proper and also curious encounters

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with Shakespearean texts. Recognizing that sites of adaptation not only change the Shakespearean text, but change us, slipping into our and the collective consciousness about the field, allows us to break the binary of either/or, of weighing fic against the ‘proper’ business of Shakespeare, of acknowledging, rather than having to defend or license as legitimate, a response to or memory of Coriolanus that is about admiration for the curve of Tom Hiddleston’s arse.

Note 1 As AOO is open access and informs those submitting work that it is in the public domain, in what follows I cite both fan usernames and the titles of texts. On the issues and debates about research ethics in online fandom, see Busse (2018: 7–17).

Works cited Abbott, Daisy (2015), ‘ “Cut me to pieces”: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Fractured Narrative’, Proceedings of the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference, http://radar.gsa.ac.uk/3827/. Berry, R. (1973), ‘Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus’, Studies in English Literature 13, no. 2: 301–16. Blackwell, A. (2018), ‘“Somewhere in the World . . . Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it”: Tom Hiddleston Performing the Shakespearean Online’, in S. O’Neill (ed.), Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media, 227–46. London: Bloomsbury. Busse, K. (2018), ‘The Ethics of Studying Online Fandom’, in M. Click and S. Scott (eds), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, 7–17. New York: Routledge. Coppa, F. (2014), ‘Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fanfiction as Theatrical Performance’, in K. Hellekson and K. Busse (eds), Fanfiction Studies Reader, 218–37. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Coriolanus (2014), directed Tim Van Someren, National Theatre Live, 30 January. Corti, C. (2007), ‘ “As if a man were author of himself”: The (Re-) Fashioning of the Oedipal Hero from Plutarch’s Martius to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, in M. Marrapodi (ed.), Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 187–95. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

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De Kosnik, A. and A. Carrington (2019), ‘Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color’, Transformative Works and Cultures 29, https://doi. org/10.3983/twc.2019.1783. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. djarum99 (2014), ‘City of Kites and Crows’, Archive of Our Own, 20 April, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1211542. Falzone, P. J. (2005), ‘The Final Frontier is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction’, Western Folklore 64, no. 3/4: 243–61. Fazel, V. and L. Geddes (2015), ‘ “Give me your hands if we be friends”: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fanfiction’, Shakespeare 12, no. 3: 274–86. Finn, Kavita Mudan and J. McCall (2016), ‘ “Exit, Pursued by a fan”: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternative Universe’, Critical Survey 28, no. 2: 27–38. Garber, M. (2004), Shakespeare After All. New York: Anchor. Goldberg, J. (2003), Shakespeare’s Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hermaline75 (2014), ‘Endure’, Archive of Our Own, 6 February, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172040. Hills, M. (2002), Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Holland, P. (2013). Coriolanus. Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Jenkins, H. (1992), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Jibrailis (2010), ‘Never man sigh’d truer breath’, Archive of Our Own, 30 June, https://archiveofourown.org/works/97571. Kidnie, M. J. (2009), Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Lanier, D. (2014), ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in A. Huang and E. Rivlin (eds), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 21–40. New York: Palgrave. The Librarina (2014), ‘With None But Thee’, Archive of Our Own, 2 October, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177242?view_ adult=true. Lizardbeth (2014), ‘Eagle in the Dove-Cote’, Archive of Our Own, 6 February, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172040. Matleena, V. (2016), ‘It all began with Shakespeare’, Archive of Our Own, 23 May, https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/15853072. Menon, M. (2011), ‘Coriolanus and I’, Shakespeare 7, no. 2: 156–69. Mutilated by Roses (2014), ‘Somewhere in the world . . . Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it’, Tumblr, 25 February,

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https://mutilated-by-roses.tumblr.com/post/77804646273/hisshakespeare-senses-are-tingling-tom. Nicholas, R. (2018), ‘Understanding “New” Encounters with Shakespeare: Hybrid Media and Emerging Audience Behaviours’, in P. Aebischer, S. Greenhalgh and L. Osborne (eds), Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast, 77–94. London: Bloomsbury. Organization for Transformative Works (n.d.), ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, http://www.transformativeworks.org/faq/. Parrish, J. J. (2013), ‘Metaphors We Read By: People, Process, and Fanfiction’, Transformative Works and Cultures 14, https://doi.org/ 10.3983/twc.2013.0486. roryheadmav (2014), ‘Two Letters’, Archive of Our Own, 22 February, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1507817/chapters/3185093. Russo, J. (2018), ‘The Queer Politics of Femslash’, in M. Click and S. Scott (eds), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, 155–64. New York: Routledge. Rutter, C. (2015), ‘Shakespeare Performances in England’, Shakespeare Survey 68: 368–407. So Currently Captivated (2014), ‘Hadley Fraser/Tom Hiddleston (Note: The Slash Is Important)’, Blog, 10 February, https://currentlycaptivated. wordpress.com/2014/02/10/hadley-frasertom-hiddleston-note-theslash-is-important/. Teague, F. (2011), ‘Using Shakespeare with Memes, Remixes and Fanfic’, Shakespeare Survey 64: 74–82. Winterlive (2014), ‘A Change of Honors’, Archive of Our Own, 9 February, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1175528. Woo, B. (2018), ‘The Invisible Bag of Holding: Whiteness and Media Fandom’, in M. Click and S. Scott (eds), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, 245–52. New York: Routledge.

8 The Bard is Dead, Long Live the Bard Kill Shakespeare and the Popular Death of the Author Douglas M. Lanier

Toward the end of ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes envisions the effects of a shift from a writerly to a readerly conception of literature: In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. (Barthes 1977: 147) For Barthes his reconceptualization of writing as a realm no longer ruled by the author engages not merely the nature of literature and authority of criticism. It promises nothing less than a general hermeneutic liberation and with it social revolution, freedom from 132

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those principles of authority – author, father, ‘king’, God – which legitimize traditional social institutions. Barthes returns to this theme in the essay’s final sentence, in a clause not often quoted: We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys . . . (Barthes 1977: 148) The sneer at ‘good society’ underlines how Barthes’s call for ‘authorless’ writing sprang from a faith that deposing the author might loosen the grip of interpretive decorum and bourgeois traditionalism. The essay’s most famous dictum – ‘we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977: 148) – resembles a call for a second révolution française, one that requires the slaying of the mythic figure who underwrites the ancien regime’s power. The ‘death of the author’ is old news, though the return to literary biography, a recent trend in Shakespeare studies, suggests that, like Hamlet’s ghost, the figure of the author continues to haunt scholarship with the injunction ‘remember me’. Since Barthes called for the death of the author in 1967, popular appropriations and spin-offs of Shakespeare in various genres have proliferated and, in the 1990s and after, gone global. Since such adaptations often regard Shakespeare’s works as material freely to be reread, reworked, revised and repurposed without regard for Shakespearethe-author’s intentions, it seems an apropos moment to examine how popular culture has engaged the concept of the death of the author, particularly in the case of Shakespeare, who so often stands as a still-potent icon for the idea of authorship. Geek culture involves investing extraordinary emotional energy and intellectual authority in some artistic canon or figure while at the same time insisting on the right to extend, recast, appropriate or repurpose that canon or figure’s productions. It involves, that is, a claim to adaptational privilege based upon one’s canonization of some body of material, detailed knowledge of that canon, and commitment to some principle of fidelity (however loose) in one’s after-creations. Where then does the author, that long-standing principle for managing and legitimating discourse, fit into this unstable mix of

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geek reverence and revisionism? The problem is particularly acute in the case of Shakespeare, given Shakespeare’s still iconic status as the quintessential author, one whose cultural authority precedes and exceeds any geek investment in the Shakespearean canon. If geeking out on Shakespeare is a form of authorial hero-worship, insofar as geeking out also leads to adapting Shakespeare, it involves removing his regulative authority over his works. Geek love of Shakespeare often includes, in other words, an implicit impulse to kill the author. One might resolve this issue by reconceiving of Shakespeare in the form Michel Foucault proposes, as the initiator of a ‘transdiscursive’ discourse that quickly comes to exceed the words of its creator (Foucault’s central examples are Freud, Marx and Ann Radcliffe; see Foucault 1977: 131–3). Dissolving the author in this fashion into a mere rhetorical figure, a spectral ‘author-function’, has its theoretical satisfactions, but it doesn’t address the special affective attachment to the author as a particular person, that personal affiliation with a culture hero or icon so central to being a geek and upon which the cultural authority of an artistic canon often depends. It also fails to engage with the peculiar dynamic of pleasure geek appropriation affords, the pleasure of creating something genuinely new that simultaneously pays respect – or, better, represents itself as paying respect – to a canon and its author. These issues are in play in Kill Shakespeare, a postmodern graphic novel series written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, the first storyline of which ran from April 2010 to August 2011, and three sequels of which, The Tide of Blood, The Mask of Night and Past is Prologue: Juliet, appeared in 2013, 2014 and 2017, respectively. The complexities and unresolved tensions of Kill Shakespeare, I will argue, are symptomatic of geek culture’s struggle to make Shakespeare fully available for playful, irreverent (and profitable) appropriation while still retaining some notion of Shakespeare’s traditional power and presence as author. Kill Shakespeare exemplifies a well-established comic book genre, the ‘literary meta-text’. Other examples include the series Fables and The Unwritten, and its roots can be traced to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. These fantasy series take otherwise discrete narratives and characters from literature and treat them as if they occupy the same intertextual universe. This technique extends a generation-old trend in superhero comics, in which

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writers bring together characters from different series and smooth over the differences between their various timelines and backstories, creating a single, shared, self-consistent fictional space, a ‘metatext’, a Marvel or DC ‘universe’.1 It is a small leap to apply this approach to traditional literary characters, as, for example, Fables does to fairy-tale characters or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does to Victorian adventure heroes. Both contemporary superhero ‘universes’ and postmodern literary meta-texts thrive on bodies of allusion and ingenious revisionism, rewarding those readers who already know the established storylines and characters of their respective canons. Appreciating the cross-references and stitched-together continuities of these little intertextual empires allows readers to rehearse their prior familiarity with a textual network. That is, the allusive density of these postmodern ‘universes’ turns a particular kind of knowledge into a form of cultural (more properly, subcultural) capital.2 Kill Shakespeare extends the ‘literary meta-text’ to the Shakespeare spin-off genre, imagining characters, narrative motifs and even phrases floating free of their authorially assigned plays and functioning instead as elements in a larger, self-consistent intertextual Shakespearean ‘universe’ where Juliet can interact with Hamlet, Falstaff with Othello, Richard III with Lady Macbeth. This treatment of Shakespeare’s characters (and their interactions with the author himself) has been around for many years in fantasy novels and plays. Sarah A. Hoyt’s fantasy series, Ill Met by Moonlight (2001), All Night Awake (2002) and Any Man So Daring (2003), to take one example, situates episodes in Shakespeare’s biography amidst a conflict within the fairy kingdom that includes Puck and Oberon. This sort of Shakespearean spin-off has been a particular favourite of playwrights.3 The spectacle of Shakespeare’s characters gathering in some common intertextual space to pay respect to the bard’s skill and authority has a long stage pedigree, starting as early as the procession of Shakespearean characters that was part of Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee and peaking during the early twentieth century with plays like George Henry Trader’s Shakespeare’s Daughters (1910) and Julia Hall Bartholomew’s The Women of Shakespeare (1916).4 This subgenre persists to this day in spin-off plays for children, as in Di Coleman and Chris Tingley’s musical for children, Quill Power: A Musical Biography of William Shakespeare (1990). More recently, however, the trend in spin-off plays for older

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viewers has been to imagine a far edgier relationship between Shakespeare and his characters, with the characters typically asserting some measure of authority over or independence from their creator. In Naomi Claire Wallace’s Madman William (2000), for instance, Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists confront their author about killing them off in their tragedies; Frank Bramwell’s Time After Time (2003) depicts a dream in which Shakespeare confronts his characters, people on which they are based, and characters for plays he never got to write; in Jory Levine’s 2006 farce, A Bard’s Day’s Night(’s Dream), characters from Shakespeare’s plays confound each other’s plotlines; and John Morrison’s BBC 4 radio play MacMorris (2006) pictures minor Shakespearean characters lobbying for better parts and in the process threatening the Globe Theatre. This approach to spinning off Shakespeare registers rather directly strong postmodern discomfort with conventional bardolatry and reverence for the Shakespearean text while still making playful use of Shakespeare’s familiar characters, plots, motifs and themes and preserving just enough of his cultural authority to tap into it, albeit ambivalently. Kill Shakespeare reshapes the ‘bard sous rature’ subgenre in terms of the comic book ‘literary meta-text’ and superhero narrative conventions. In the realm of this graphic novel, all the characters are taken from Shakespeare’s plays, though some have different motivations than those in their sources. Shakespearean lines like ‘men should be what they seem’ or ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’ surface regularly in conversation, but those lines are placed in novel situations or the mouths of different characters; signature Shakespearean motifs like cross-dressing, plays-withinplays, the balcony scene or the father’s ghost pepper the plot, but their significance is changed in their new narrative contexts. To paraphrase one reviewer of the series (Thill 2010), Kill Shakespeare puts the Shakespearean canon through a postmodern blender, reconceiving it as a repository of characters, events and phrases occupying a common mythic space, elements that can be freely recombined and reconceptualized in relationship to one another, bringing Shakespeare in line with the practices of contemporary comic book meta-textuality. That is to say, Kill Shakespeare conceives of the Shakespearean canon in terms of Barthes’ notion of ‘text’. This adaptational approach kills off Shakespeare as a governing principle for determining the ‘correct’ meaning of the

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Shakespearean materials it cites; eliminating fidelity to the author is necessarily central to the project, even as the project depends upon everything remaining Shakespearean. In the realm of comic books, ‘literary meta-texts’ have tended to dwell on texts with no authors (fairy tales) or texts with little readerly reverence for the authors (Victorian pulp fiction), so Kill Shakespeare, working with a canon strongly identified with its author, adds a new dynamic to the genre. As one might expect, Shakespeare-the-author haunts Kill Shakespeare in various forms. He is literally an absent presence throughout much of the series, a mythic writer-god who has retreated from his creation into the Globe Wood. In this, the series deploys the topos of the absent godauthor from Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a key text for the characters-confront-their-author plotline, except that Pirandello’s characters suffer an existential crisis in the absence of the author, whereas the characters of Kill Shakespeare are concerned primarily with the cultural politics of their realm. Those politics spring from the characters’ attitudes toward him and his magical quill, where his writerly powers reside. On one side are Richard III, ruler of the realm, and those allied with him – Lady Macbeth, Iago, Don John and others. When Hamlet, the series’ protagonist, washes up on the realm’s shores, Richard at first appears kindhearted, a builder of libraries in addition to other civic institutions. It soon becomes clear that he is a tyrant – he seeks Shakespeare’s quill (and his death) not out of interest in literary culture but a desire for political domination. Ironically, for all his talk of self-determination (one is reminded of his line in Richard III 1.1.30, ‘I am determined to be a villain’), his allies never move beyond the ultimately self-annihilating ambitions of their Shakespearean counterparts; he shows contempt for prophecies that predict his fall and the ascent of a rival, triumphant ‘shadow king’. On the other hand are the Prodigals and the commons. The Prodigals are populists driven by a religious conviction that Shakespeare will return and use his power to free the people from Richard’s tyranny. Chief among them is Juliet, the unlikely leader of an underdog, underground army that includes Falstaff, Othello and Lysander, among others. Having been saved from poisoning, this Juliet turns to the Prodigals’ cause as atonement for her empty, privileged upbringing and Romeo’s death, for which she blames

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herself. Her allies Othello and Hamlet also harbour guilt for past murders; Juliet frames the Prodigal cause as a means for them ‘to drive out the ghosts that haunt us all’ (KS 6).5 The Prodigals revere Shakespeare as a deity promising redemption, punctuating their dialogue with phrases like ‘by Will’s grace’ and ‘may Will bless thee’, and they hold fast to the eschatological prophecies Richard and Lady Macbeth blithely ignore. The Prodigals do not seek Shakespeare’s quill for themselves so much as to protect it from Richard’s misappropriation. They believe that a ‘shadow king’ (in this case a reluctant Hamlet) will appear to protect Shakespeare and defeat Richard’s forces, liberating the masses and expiating their past sins. Even so, though Juliet reveres Shakespeare as a maker-god, she concedes that he is no source or guarantor of moral perfection. In reply to Othello’s self-doubts, she replies, ‘Will did not make any of us to have complete trust in ourselves. How else can we learn, but through our errors?’ (KS 8). This capacity for change is highlighted by the extent to which the Prodigals show independence from their Shakespearean counterparts. Juliet is more Joan of Arc than lovelorn daughter; Falstaff has little of his Shakespearean counterpart’s penchant for lying or comic selfishness, and he even dies valiantly in battle. There is thus a disjunction between Kill Shakespeare’s appropriation of its Shakespearean sources and its demonization of Richard’s efforts to kill Shakespeare and steal his quill.6 Even as Kill Shakespeare eliminates Shakespeare’s authorial control over his characters and inserts them into a pop narrative – a superhero battle over the fate of the world – the series remystifies Shakespeare’s cultural authority, elevating him to the status of a god, albeit a problematic one. To put this in Barthesian terms, Kill Shakespeare reinstates the ‘theological activity’ of revering the bardic author that it otherwise gleefully violates in its own adaptational practices. Moreover, the division into good and evil, a stock feature of comic books, is here aligned with the registers of elite and popular in a way that talks back to Barthes. For Barthes, the author’s death promised to release the reader from traditional interpretive strictures, and with them bourgeois political structures. In Kill Shakespeare, however, the plot to kill the author seeks only to consolidate Richard’s oppression of the masses, a project consistent with his building of libraries. Richard, it would seem, is a popular re-presentation of the Barthesian reader, allied not with freedom

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but with an appropriative ‘will to power’ seeking its own supremacy. In the world of Kill Shakespeare it is preservation of Shakespeare’s quasi-divine authority, not the author’s death, that provides the path to freedom. For the Prodigals, Will-the-author is not so much a theological guarantor of meaning (they forge their own characterological lives independent of Shakespeare’s narratives) so much as a reserve of political power allied with ‘the people’ but in danger of misappropriation. To be sure, one might read this deification of Will as tongue-in-cheek, but the series offers few of the usual signals of irony. Rather, this is bardolatry for the postmodern popular reader, one that registers some anxiety about Shakespeare’s fading status as a figure of authority over his muchappropriated canon. This is not to say that Kill Shakespeare’s remythologization of Shakespeare-the-author is without complexity. That complexity emerges with Hamlet’s relation to fathers, an issue linked to Shakespeare’s status as author. No doubt Hamlet was chosen as Kill Shakespeare’s protagonist because of his fraught relationship with father-figures in Shakespeare’s play. An expositional sequence establishes Hamlet’s attachment to his father and his sense of guilt at having murdered Polonius. Leaving Helsingør, Hamlet pauses before his father’s statue to say goodbye and confronts an apparition that makes clear the Oedipal path governing succession to the throne: ‘Hamlet . . . Son of Hamlet . . . Blood of royal blood. Noble blood who spills noble blood’ (KS 1). ‘Thou canst be a king if thou are willing,’ it continues, ‘simply slip the blade betwixt Claudius’s shoulders.’ Hamlet’s reply, ‘I am no killer!’ (KS 1), encapsulates his predicament. He is duty-bound to kill his father’s surrogate Claudius, but to do so is to implicate himself in a system of legitimation by parricide, a system with unpredictable consequences, as the murder of Polonius (another father) makes clear. Though this apparition echoes Hamlet’s father’s ghost from Shakespeare’s play, in fact it is a female ghoul conjured by the three witches under Richard’s control, a prompting of guilt and cowardice that Richard will manipulate. As he sails away, we see Hamlet’s troubled interior landscape: pictured is a hallucinatory sea where swords and a statue of his dead father sink into the water, along with the letter of execution Claudius intends for Hamlet. This opening sequence establishes Hamlet’s mix of feelings regarding father-figures – idealization, shame, subjection, revulsion. Though that mix would

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seem to have an Oedipal quality, in Kill Shakespeare Gertrude hardly figures at all in Hamlet’s psychology. To be sure, Kill Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth plays out in extreme form what Shakespeare’s Hamlet thinks of his mother – she is duplicitous, sexually rapacious and hops freely from partner to partner – but Kill Shakespeare’s Hamlet doesn’t learn of her existence until the final battle. The Oedipal crisis of Kill Shakespeare, in short, has a Bloomian quality, a conflict between son and father over position of priority, rather than a classic Freudian erotic triangle. In Richard’s kingdom, Hamlet encounters several father surrogates. First is Richard, who at first appears benevolently paternal. He tells Hamlet that as ‘shadow king’ Hamlet is destined to kill Shakespeare, steal his quill and rule the realm alongside Richard. As added incentive, Richard offers to resurrect Hamlet’s dead father, demonstrating his ability to do so with a drowned sailor. It is this second promise that convinces Hamlet to accept this version of his father’s command: kill the usurping, false father and take up his power. Richard, however, is himself a false father; even his ability to resurrect the sailor is, we learn, a sham. When Hamlet is abducted by the Prodigals, Richard is replaced by a second fatherfigure, Falstaff. Again, first impressions deceive. At first, Falstaff seems the vainglorious knight of Shakespeare’s plays, addicted to pleasure, a corrupting surrogate father for his young compatriot. But in Kill Shakespeare Falstaff doesn’t engage in the selfaggrandizing puncturing of authority so characteristic of Shakespeare’s character. Rather, he tutors Hamlet in the Prodigals’ reverence for Will, reveals Richard’s treachery toward him and gives him a new mission, based, like Richard’s, on an interpretation of prophecy about ‘the shadow king’: ‘Hamlet, we see thee as the one to return Shakespeare to his people, to save our father, our protector’ (KS 3). Nonetheless, Hamlet finds it difficult to embrace his role as ‘shadow king’ because of his fixation on his father and his guilt at killing Polonius. Once again Hamlet’s father appears to his son, this time as a rotting corpse, emerging from a stream along with swords (viz the earlier ocean scene). This father accuses Hamlet of neglecting his mission and leaving him undead: ‘Why hath thou left Richard? Why do ye not search to kill the wizard Shakespeare and free me from my torment?’ (KS 5). Though it seems likely that this is the doing of the three witches (the writers leave this detail unclear), this

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returning spectre brings into focus Hamlet’s deeply conflicted attitude toward paternal authority: he is at once respectful of it, even desirous for his father’s resurrection, and yet horrified by the duty it commands, a duty which inevitably includes the dreaded obligation to kill (father) Shakespeare. Hamlet’s issues with fatherly authority come to a head in issue 7, in which Feste stages a play-within-the-comic for the Prodigals. The play is The Murder of Gonzago, and Hamlet is cast as the king’s murderous brother. In this version, the evil brother woos the queen as a means to a political end – ‘the lady whom the rogue was truly courting was power’ (KS 7). Oedipal rivalry over the position of father-king leads to murder because in this play the absence of an author-god allows brotherly rivalry to go unexplained and thus unchallenged: Feste (as narrator): The evil man asked both his heart and the stars to tell him where his love for his brother had gone. But his heart could tell the man nothing . . . and the stars were too far away for their answer to be heard. And so nothing was left for the evil man but to kill the king. (KS 7) When Feste reveals that the father-king is killed by poison in his ear, Hamlet (playing the king-killer) senses he has been implicated: ‘how can ye know this?’ (KS 7). Feste replies with the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – ‘play is the thing, shadow king!’ (KS 7). Three meanings of the title ‘shadow king’ are now simultaneously in play – Hamlet as the prophesied saviour of Shakespeare the father-god; Hamlet as the cowardly revenger-prince, the ‘shadow’ of a man who allows his father’s murderer to remain king; and Hamlet as Oedipal rival of his father, the one who like Claudius uncomfortably dwells in his shadow. Exposed as all three by Feste, Hamlet rushes offstage into a hall of mirrors where he stands before multiple, distorted images of himself. In soliloquy he finally engages directly the tension between his identification with and antagonism toward his father. Filled with self-loathing for not completing the cycle of noble blood spilling noble blood, he declares himself ‘worthless, barren, forsaken’ (KS 7). Juliet soon joins him in the hall of mirrors and tries to comfort Hamlet with the thought that ‘Will did not make

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any of us to be perfect’ (KS 7). Her attempt to justify the prince’s imperfection through Shakespeare as father doesn’t at first convince him, but when she insists that Hamlet is ‘not forsaken’, he suddenly offers a new account of his father Hamlet: Lady, I told you a falsehood before. My father was not a wise king. He was rash, suspicious and like the miser, he grew to believe that all sought to steal what he felt was his. And so he waged war on all our neighbours to destroy them. He feared they wanted his throne, but none did. And so he turned to threats internal. And this is how he taught himself to fear his blameless brother . . . and eventually his son. Everyday [sic] I grew older, I could see that I became less and less his boy, his son, and more and more a usurper. Perhaps my father was not worthy of it, but I loved him, and because of my miscast love, I killed for him. I spilled blood for a father, who saw me not as a child to love and cherish, but as a rival to defeat. (KS 7) Here Hamlet’s perspective on fathers decisively shifts. He admits that his father has been an idealized mythic construction, and with that admission comes recognition of the father’s oppressive power and a measure of release. Hamlet speaks with Juliet of the haunting of ghosts who ‘pull us with them – to a place better left forgotten’, but he goes on to stress that, in lines that articulate a liberatory conception of appropriation, those fatherly ghosts need not exert a debilitating power over him: ‘But why could it not be another way? Could we not choose to hear these spirits’ message differently?’ (KS 7). In the case of the father-god Shakespeare, Hamlet’s conflicted perspective on paternal authority sits uneasily with the Prodigals’ devotion to Shakespeare as beneficent father-god who will save them. Hamlet and Shakespeare’s meeting in issue 9 plays on the ambivalence regarding fathers building throughout the series. When the two finally come face to face, what Hamlet sees hardly corresponds to the image of an author-god. Shakespeare is a grizzled, volatile drunk living in a shack festooned with pages, a shabby version of Prospero with Caliban’s foul mouth and temper. When Hamlet speaks of Shakespeare’s duty to save his children from Richard’s despotism, Shakespeare refuses to help and taunts

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Hamlet with his own abandoned project of revenge. This Shakespeare utterly demystifies the father-god Will in whom the Prodigals have invested such hope. Within the context of Kill Shakespeare, this vision of Shakespeare would seem to justify the series’ adaptational techniques: without a godlike author willing to take responsibility for or exert power over his creations, Shakespearean characters are free to become what their adaptors will. Shakespeare is yet one more version of the oppressive father, cruel and paranoid because he believes Hamlet intends to betray him in order to bring back his own father. As the scene develops, the power of Shakespeare’s quill seems increasingly divorced from the character of Shakespeare himself, as if it were simply the mobile, authorially decentred power of writing itself. The impulse to kill Shakespeare seems equally autonomous, for, in a witty version of Macbeth’s spectral dagger, the dagger that Richard gave Hamlet for killing Shakespeare comes alive and magically pursues both bard and prince. The spell that propels the dagger is Richard’s doing, but it expresses a more general drive that has been operating throughout the narrative, one articulated in the series’ title. At this point Hamlet is both bearer of the drive to kill Shakespeare and his defender from it. This episode epitomizes the increasingly ‘both-and’ attitude of the narrative toward the author-father-god Shakespeare. Kill Shakespeare evinces a deeply conflicted attitude toward postmodern appropriation of Shakespeare – the desire to kill the author – even as it exuberantly engages in that appropriation, and Hamlet reflects that ambivalence. Fidelity to the author-father is on the one hand represented as a self-defeating desire to bring the father back from the dead (with an act of killing) and continually re-place him on the throne. But Kill Shakespeare also seems uneasy with the prospect of opening up Shakespeare’s writing – his quill – to free appropriation in the author’s absence, because, so the series suggests, Shakespeare’s power can be misappropriated by tyrannical elitists like Richard. From that perspective devotion to Shakespeare the author, love of the father, provides a means of resistance to misuse; bardolatry becomes a mode of populist rebellion, not a capitulation to tradition. What Kill Shakespeare speaks to, then, is a more general anxiety about popular postmodern appropriation of Shakespeare, the suspicion that the death of the author, however enabling it might initially seem, is actually a ruse of elitist powers that be.

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As the magical dagger targets Shakespeare, Hamlet pleads with him to relinquish his quill and reminds him of his duty toward his ‘children’, but Shakespeare refuses, conflating dagger with quill: ‘I will curse no others with its point’ (KS 10). Once again, the narrative comes up against the dilemma of authorship and appropriation: Shakespeare will not lend his hand because he wants to retreat from responsibility for his creations (the world he has created ‘mocks our best intentions’, KS 9), yet he will not lend his quill to others lest he give over his writerly power to the reinscription of tyrants. The only way out of the impasse is for Shakespeare to commit suicide or have Hamlet declare him dead: ‘Perhaps it is best to say that Shakespeare is dead . . . that he never existed’ (KS 10). In one of the tale’s greatest ironies, here Shakespeare gives Shakespearean warrant to his own death as an author-god. And with this, Hamlet can take the argument no further – he simply leaves Shakespeare to be killed by Richard’s magical knife and returns downtrodden to the Prodigals as they prepare, outnumbered, for battle with Richard’s forces. However, Hamlet cannot leave well enough alone; for, moved by Falstaff’s willingness to die for the cause of Will, he returns to Shakespeare’s hovel to find him wounded but alive. Once again he urges the bard to join the battle. This time Shakespeare’s reasons for resisting are tellingly Oedipal: ‘All I created are children, who now wish me dead . . . Children only seek to murder the most monstrous of fathers’ (KS 11). Now it is Hamlet who stresses the devotion of Shakespeare’s ‘true children’ to him and his patriarchal duty to fight for the Prodigals. The obligation of a proper father-author is too much for Shakespeare to resist, and so he joins the Prodigals. In his speech before the battle, Shakespeare pleads for forgiveness, suggesting that it was his refusal to predetermine their moral natures that allowed villainy to thrive. But Shakespeare also acknowledges that he cannot alter what his writing set in motion and so he vows to fight with the Prodigals ‘not as your father but rather your brother-in-arms’ (KS 11). In this address Shakespeare recognizes that he cannot exert fatherly authority over his works, yet in the mêlée that follows, Shakespeare’s wielding of his magical quill proves to be the decisive force in the battle. Indeed, there with the help of Hamlet and his own magical quill he fells Richard, and in a divine vision he orders the combatants to lay down their arms. And yet even after this, the narrative’s ambivalence toward Shakespeare’s authorial status persists. Like a gunfighter after a showdown,

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Shakespeare exits the realm to become once again an absent authorial presence, walking unseen among his own characters and learning from them rather than dictating their fates. With Hamlet he leaves a sonnet which presents itself as the words of Hamlet himself and which exhorts the Prodigals to ‘no longer mourn for me when I am dead . . . Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, / But let your love even with my life decay’ (KS 12). Ironically, the sonnet leads only to an argument among the Prodigals about the nature of Shakespeare-the-author that remains unresolved to the end. Juliet and Hamlet (not Romeo as we are led to expect) join the Prodigals’ communal jig, framed by two gazes that catch the reader’s eye: the green eyes of Lady Macbeth, the powerful witch who escapes the battlefield and, like Richard, sought to appropriate Shakespeare’s quill; and Feste, the knowing playwright-surrogate within the narrative who engineered Hamlet’s self-revelation, peeking at us from behind the curtain. These two figures suggest the persistence of the two irreconcilable impulses of the series – the will to appropriate and the will to authorial control. In the series’ first sequel, Tide of Blood (2013), McCreery and Del Col return to the question of the author, this time compounded by the problem of living in a post-authorial, post-textual-fidelity world, an issue both for Shakespearean characters and for latterday authors, that is to say, new would-be Shakespeares. The challenge for Shakespeare’s characters is played out by Romeo, who in the first series was displaced by Hamlet in Juliet’s affections, robbed of the narrative trajectory and raison d’être given him by Shakespeare. As Tide of Blood begins, Romeo is having a nightmare that articulates his plight. Pleading ‘where is my place?’ (KS: ToB 1),7 he is tormented by spectral visions of Shakespeare, Juliet and Hamlet; Juliet, cruelly echoing her balcony speech, says of him ‘Romeo? That name is a mask’, an empty signifier, or worse, cover for ‘weakness, villainy, and cowardice’ (KS: ToB 1). Though Miranda, bearing a book, releases him from this nightmare, in the waking world Romeo has become a self-pitying, directionless drunk (not unlike Shakespeare in the first series), robbed of the heroic, romantic purpose Shakespeare once imparted to him and has now abandoned. Even so, Romeo cannot bring himself to reject the bard entirely and go his own way. Worshipping before a statue of Shakespeare holding a book, he observes, ‘Shakespeare – our creator – abandons us yet I still find myself praying in his name’ (KS: ToB 1).

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This contradictory position – where Romeo keeps faith with an author-god even though that author-god has actively relinquished control over his characters – is the ideological space the Kill Shakespeare series seeks to occupy. The narrative world of the sequel, as proliferating images of books make clear, is a realm of the book, not a realm of the quill, which is to say, a realm in which Shakespeare now exists only in textual form, in the author’s absence, open to repurposing. This freedom Romeo finds unbearable, and so he spends much of the sequel trying to become Shakespeare’s old Romeo again, to recover his relationship with Juliet. His obsession, his inability to adapt, becomes literally and figuratively a death drive. When under the influence of intoxicating waters he and Juliet share a last sexual tryst, it is atop a tomb, and there Romeo declares he has recovered his once-lost identity and purpose, this time through his own will, not faith in Shakespeare. But Juliet rejects him once again for Hamlet, and Romeo, desperate to return to his romance with Juliet, makes a deal with the evil Lady Macbeth to kill Hamlet and regain Juliet’s hand. What Romeo does not know (or care) is that Hamlet, as ‘shadow king’ and heir to Shakespeare’s legacy, is crucial to the survival of the Prodigals; by killing Hamlet, Romeo would enable Lady Macbeth’s rise to tyrannous power and the decimation of the Shakespearean faithful, all simply in his relentless pursuit of narrative fidelity, that is, his original assigned entelechy. The other focus of Tide of Blood is that of authorship in a (post-) Shakespearean world, where Shakespeare’s towering example and the legacy of his creative choices remain in force even in the author’s absence. What space is left for the latter-day author and original creation in such a world? To address this question, McCreery and Del Col use Prospero, who, as magus-author-god over the island in The Tempest, is of course already widely regarded as Shakespeare’s own fictional alter-ego. In Tide of Blood, Prospero is presented as Shakespeare’s great student (as Lady Macbeth is Prospero’s former student), master of a vast magical library. Over time, Prospero has become restless. ‘For years I allowed written words and drawn pictures guide my existence, my path,’ he reveals, ‘but when I had consumed every ounce of knowledge in every single book I longed for more,’ and so he longs to wield the power of creation ex nihilo, ‘to enter the next realm of existence’ (KS: ToB 3). Because Prospero wields the power of the book – that is, like an adaptor he can

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manipulate the power of prior narratives but cannot make one of his own – he seeks Shakespeare’s magical quill, the instrument of his writerly power, and ultimately Shakespeare’s own mind where resides ‘the calculus of construction’ (KS: ToB 5). Prospero seeks to become an author in his own right, displacing Shakespeare and creating a new world in which Shakespeare’s ‘errors’, namely the death of Prospero’s wife, do not exist. In pursuit of this megalomaniacal project, Prospero has become (literally and figuratively) blind, in an effort to block out the influence of outside forces and see only with his mind’s eye. He has also become monstrous. Having blocked Ferdinand’s romance of Miranda, he then neglects her, leaving her to Caliban for whom she bears ‘dozens and dozens of babies . . . all long of claw and sharp of teeth’ (KS: ToB 3), precipitating her drift into madness from loneliness and shame. Given the series’ ongoing analogy between authorial creation and parenthood, the pathetic fate of Miranda, Prospero’s one original creation, plus the monstrous nature of her children and the act that gave rise to them, is an early indication of Prospero’s authorial failure to come. In the series’ climax, McCreery and Del Col use Lady Macbeth and Prospero to consider two different modes of ‘killing’ Shakespeare’s author-function – appropriation and displacement. Lady Macbeth seeks possession of Shakespeare’s quill in order to appropriate Shakespeare’s world for her own ends; her desire is not to create anything herself so much as to take over Shakespeare’s creation for her own political purposes, to instate herself as its ruler. With her we return to the question of appropriation considered with Richard III in the original series. Prospero’s plan is much more radical, of displacing Shakespeare as author-god: he seeks to destroy Shakespeare’s created world and replace it with one of his own original making. This, Lady Macbeth comes to realize, will mean her own obliteration and recreation as Prospero’s vassal, and she rebels, only quickly to be defeated by Prospero. It is the possibility of displacing Shakespeare as author-god, of writing outside the creative precedent he has set, that here most concerns McCreery and Del Col. To save his world from terrible agony, Shakespeare grants Prospero his authorial power. But things do not go as Prospero imagines: for several remarkable pages, the comic grid falls away to reveal the ‘ceaseless, hungry void’ (KS: ToB 5) of the white page beneath, the site of ex nihilo creation. Horrified

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and intimidated by this void, Prospero, urged on by Shakespeare, tries to recreate his dead wife, but he cannot bring her to his mind’s eye. ‘I thought to build a world where sickness could gain no purchase, where heartbreak could find no home,’ he confesses. ‘But I cannot rebuild this world of yours, I have not the art. Everything I would seek to build would be obscene’ (KS: ToB 5). He then hears Miranda’s voice and sees her form, a ghost made of Shakespeare’s words (phrases of hers, Ariel’s, Prospero’s and Caliban’s) that happily fades into ‘something rich and strange’, returning, so observes Shakespeare, ‘from where she once came to replenish the stuff that we are made of’ (KS: ToB 5). This realm, apparently the realm of myth or perhaps of Shakespeare’s imagination, pre-dates and underwrites the power of Shakespeare’s textual authority. Prospero, master of the magic of books but not of imagination, is powerless to create anything of his own; the death of a Shakespearean character will only end up ‘replenishing’ the mythic storehouse and thereby bolster Shakespeare’s authority as creator, a process which even Shakespeare himself cannot stop. This Prospero cannot bear, for it renders him impotent – he cannot supplant Shakespeare as author – and so, with the words ‘I’ll drown my book’ swirling about him, he commits suicide with Shakespeare’s quill. The irony is that even this act of self-destruction is somewhat scripted by Shakespeare, for The Tempest ends with Prospero sacrificing his magical powers and accepting death (‘every third thought shall be my grave’, The Tempest 5.1.312). What emerges from this extraordinary sequence is a vision of Shakespeare the author-god akin to the clockmaker god of Deism, a creator who sets in motion a world in which he cannot thereafter intervene. Such a conception of authorship serves the needs of contemporary adaptational practices of Shakespeare geeks, who demand the freedom to adapt Shakespeare’s text within what they construe as the basic rules of its canon, while at the same time seeking to retain some mystified notion of Shakespeare the author. (What Kill Shakespeare never considers – and Neil Gaiman’s Shakespeare stories in the Sandman series do – is Shakespeare’s own practice as an adaptor.) As the series ends, the question of who will rule this Shakespearean realm returns, for we learn that Romeo and Lady Macbeth have survived the demise of Prospero’s island and become allies, even as Juliet, Hamlet and Shakespeare escape. Lady Macbeth reveals a new complication: Juliet is pregnant with Romeo’s child, meaning that the next generation to rule

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Shakespeare’s realm, the heir to Hamlet the ‘shadow king’, will potentially do so as a bastard, without Shakespeare’s warrant and with uncertain political loyalties. This detail, not followed up in any of the two later series, suggests McCreery and Del Col’s desire to preserve an element of ambiguity regarding authority over the Shakespearean metaverse.8 Kill Shakespeare – and geek culture more generally – can’t live with Shakespeare the author and can’t live without him. The series obsessively returns to a geek cult of Will to try to imagine what postmodern bardolatry might look like, trying to conceptualize Shakespeare’s authority as a form of resistance to elitist domination. As the condition of treating the Shakespearean canon as material to be freely appropriated, Shakespeare cannot be allowed to keep his quill, and yet as a condition for the series to have cultural power he also cannot afford to be killed off entirely. Through its conflicted portrayal of fathers, the series tries to navigate a series of contradictions about authority and authorship it never succeeds in resolving. In one sense, Kill Shakespeare – and geek Shakespeare more generally – merely continues a very long process of displacing Shakespeare the author from his text. That process began as early as the First Folio when in their prefacing letter Heminge and Condell acknowledge that in the Folio they supervised, the author Shakespeare had not ‘overseen his owne writings’ as they migrated from quill to printed page: ‘he by death departed with that right’. Ben Jonson is even more adamant in separating author from text, for in his poem facing the Droeshout portrait, he pointedly directs the reader to ‘looke / Not on his picture, but on his Booke’ (ll. 9–10), and he goes on in his memorial tribute poem to speak of the Folio as ‘a Moniment, without a tombe’ (l. 22, that is, a cenotaph without Shakespeare’s body). Nevertheless, we might note, Jonson cannot resist reinstating Shakespeare-as-author as a kind of spectral after-effect of his text, insisting that Shakespeare’s ‘art alive still, while thy Booke doth live’ (l. 23), but only while we readers in the present ‘have wits to read, and praise to give’ (l. 24). The paratextual apparatus for the First Folio suggests that killing off Shakespearethe-author has been the long-standing condition of Shakespeare’s textuality, but that there is a felt need to return the authorial principle to the text, albeit in attenuated form. As new media have accelerated the processes of Shakespearean appropriation and expanded their ranges and registers, the tensions

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between author and text have only exponentially intensified. We’ve seen, for example, a renewed interest in scholarly Shakespearean biography but also in fictional biography in which a loserly or geeky Shakespeare exists within or draws from the universe of his own dramatic canon – the TV shows Will (2017) and Upstart Crow (2016–present), the films Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) and Bill (dir. Richard Bracewell, 2015) and the musical Something Rotten! (Karey and Wayne Fitzpatrick and John O’Farrell, 2015), to name just a few. Graham Holderness (2011) has even made a powerful case that the line between critical and fictional Shakespeare biography is necessarily and even fruitfully murky, since all biography involves an imaginative construction of the author’s life from available facts and elements of his works, and fiction can offer a space for self-acknowledged speculation about how historical and fictional detail might be coordinated. This general reinvigoration of interest in Shakespeare biography suggests that the allure of Shakespeare the author – as an object of affective attachment, as a figure tied, however ambiguously or ironically, to the works he seems to originate – remains still a potent force, even in a remix culture which feels particularly free to appropriate and revise his writing. Geek Shakespeare offers an especially illuminating example of what we might call homicidal idolatry of the author in remix culture, since both a reverence for Shakespeare and the prerogative to appropriate his works freely are especially intense in the geek community. What makes Kill Shakespeare so fascinating an example of geek Shakespeare is how directly and entertainingly it thematizes an escalating tension in popular conceptions of Shakespeare the author, and how it dramatizes a need to rethink Shakespeare’s inherited cultural authority as his work has become postmodern common property.

Notes 1 The comic book industry’s pursuit of continuity, its burden of fidelity to established characters, the impulse to revisionism and recent comic book narrative construction have fuelled lively theoretical discussions in comic book scholarship. See, for example, Reynolds (1992), Silvio (1995), Klock (2002), Wandtke (2007), Zeller-Jacques (2013) and Boni (2017). The preferred term of art for this kind of overarching

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continuity narrative is ‘meta-text’, though that term has significant problems. 2 For an incisive discussion of the series in relationship to comic book ‘meta-textuality’ and the philosophical questions it raises, see Tondro (2013). See also Ephraim (2013) and Albanese (2016). 3 For a useful overview of this form of theatrical Shakespearean spin-off, see Scott-Douglass (2006). 4 Even Bartholomew’s play betrays some tension in the terms of its tribute, for as part of its feminist message it portrays Shakespeare paying extravagant obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, ‘queen of all queens’ (Bartholomew 1916: 40), even as Shakespeare’s female characters pay homage to him. 5 All references to the Kill Shakespeare (KS ) series will be noted parenthetically by issue number. 6 In light of McCreery and Del Col’s playful self-consciousness in creating this disjunction, the objections of several Shakespeareans to the project seems rather misplaced. See, for example, Johnston (2010). 7 All references to Kill Shakespeare: Tide of Blood (KS: ToB) will be cited parenthetically by issue number. 8 Because this detail was not followed up in later series, it was apparently not introduced to enable a sequel.

Works cited Albanese, Denise (2016), ‘Feeling Shakespeare’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare and Embodiment, 738–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland (1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–8. New York: Hill and Wang. Bartholomew, Julia Hall (1916), Two Masques: America and The Women of Shakespeare. Boston: Gorham Press. Boni, Marta, ed. (2017), World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ephraim, Michelle (2013), ‘Screwing the Bardbody: Kill Shakespeare and North American Popular Culture’, Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, https://upstart.sites.clemson.edu/Essays/bardbody/ bardbody.xhtml. Foucault, Michel (1977), ‘What is an Author?’, in Language Countermemory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, 113–38. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Holderness, Graham (2011), Nine Lives of William Shakespeare. London: Continuum. Johnston, Rich (2010), ‘Shakespearean Scholar (and Frank Miller’s Girlfriend) Blasts Kill Shakespeare’, Bleeding Cool, 12 April, http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/04/12/shakespearan-scholar-andfrank-millers-girlfriend-blasts-kill-shakespeare/. Klock, Geoff (2002), How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. London: Continuum. McCreery, Conor and Anthony Del Col (2010), Kill Shakespeare, vols 1 and 2. San Diego: IDW. McCreery, Conor and Anthony Del Col (2013), Kill Shakespeare: The Tide of Blood. San Diego: IDW. McCreery, Conor and Anthony Del Col (2014), Kill Shakespeare: The Mask of Night. San Diego: IDW. McCreery, Conor and Anthony Del Col (2017), Kill Shakespeare: Past is Prologue: Juliet. San Diego: IDW. Reynolds, Richard (1992), ‘Costumed Continuity’, in Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, 26–52. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Scott-Douglass, Amy (2006), ‘Dramatic Shakespeare: Stars, Stages, Spinoffs’, in Richard Burt (ed.), Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, 733–42. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Silvio, Carl (1995), ‘Postmodern Narrative, the Marvel Universe, and the Reader’, Studies in Popular Culture 17, no. 1: 39–50. Thill, Scott (2010), ‘Kill Shakespeare Comic Puts the Bard in a Blender’, Wired, https://www.wired.com/2010/04/kill-shakespeare/. Tondro, Jason (2013), ‘ “These are not our Father’s words!”: Kill Shakespeare’s Defense of the Meta-Text’, Image-Text 6, no. 3, http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_3/tondro/. Wandtke, Terrence, ed. (2007), ‘Introduction’, in The Amazing Transforming Superhero!: Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television, 5–31. Jefferson, NC : McFarland. Zeller-Jacques, Martin (2013), ‘ “Everything Comes from Superman”: Infinite Crises in an Adapting Meta-Text’, in I. Q. Hunter and T. Van Parys (eds), Science Fiction across Genres: Adaptation/Novelisation, 293–308. Canterbury: Gylphi Press Ltd.

9 ‘There Lies the Substance’ Richard II and the Adorkable Paratext1 Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes

At the end of December 2011, director Michael Grandage chose Richard II for his final show at London’s Donmar Warehouse. The production starred emerging film actor Eddie Redmayne as Shakespeare’s king. Redmayne, who had recently won both the Olivier Award (2010) and the Tony Award (2011) for his role in Grandage’s Reds, was then on the threshold to becoming a recognized face, but was not yet the globally known celebrity that he is now. The marketing for the performance featured a poster that is eloquent in its stark colouring of black, white and red, and its focus on the actor’s naturally delicate face, covered with stark white make-up to stand in relief as if Redmayne is emerging from the shadows. The roughly painted red cross of St George, slashed across his eyes and down from forehead to chin, effectively turned Redmayne’s face into the English flag, evoking the nationalist discourse that drives the play.

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Not only does the colouring of the promotional image deviate from the aesthetic of the production itself, which evoked the Westminster Portrait through its gold-painted, wood-panelled set and sleek, white and gold, vaguely early modern costumes, but the eye-catching red cross is a complex visual element that does not necessarily point a casual observer directly to Shakespeare. It is, to be sure, a nationalist image, but the painted face is arguably more suggestive of the England football fan than a Shakespeare king.2 The football fan aesthetic is a curious choice, particularly for a play that pays attention to the constructions of masculinity (certainly the stigma of the hooligan football fan was still very much associated with England in 2011). This association of aggressive English hypermasculinity builds on the status of Redmayne as an emerging British ‘It’ boy,3 positioning him to represent a fetishization of class through his refined features, Etonian education and Shakespearean stage career, while simultaneously connecting him to the everyday laddishness of the manic football fan. Clearly, this juxtaposition represents a cultivated paratext designed to exploit both Redmayne’s and the play’s unmistakable Englishness. The image’s process of ‘creating textuality’ (Gray 2010: 30) through Redmayne’s own celebrity recognizes the extent to which the expectations placed on Richard fluctuate according to a person’s entry point to Richard II . That is to say, understanding Richard is dependent on whether one approaches Richard II as a fan of Redmayne, Grandage, football, Shakespeare or any combination of these fan objects. The Redmayne poster alerts us to a small but devoted Richard fandom informed by circulations of paratextual knowledge that for the fan are of equal importance to the text itself. The fandom’s paratexts imagine Richard as part of a larger media trope of white masculinity. Built from fragments – bits and pieces of cultural artefacts acquired and disseminated via both disenfranchised and enfranchised systems of knowledge – paratexts affirm a dialogic relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary media figures. For fans who participate in fan rituals that circulate around a specific form of white British celebrity, the ‘adorkable’ actor generates a wide array of paratexts that shape Richard’s ‘“external” contours’ (Stanitzek 2005: 30). Adorkability is a type of man or woman, whose ‘quirks give the character an endearing vulnerability’ according to the TVtropes taxonomy, although it is more used in reference to men. The word came into popular parlance in 2011, when the Fox

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network show New Girl leaned heavily on both the word and the cutesy aesthetic that it inspired. Vulture (Kurp 2012) traces the origin of the word to blogs in the early 2000s, but Pop Culture Detective (PCD) argues that the trope can be identified as far back as the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds and further proposes that it represents a way of managing masculinity. Since the 1980s, ‘adorkability’ has mutated in response to evolving representations of gender in mass media and is now common vernacular to describe someone whose geekiness is to be accepted as a part of their charm. Despite the term’s gender neutrality, adorkability is most commonly applied to men, as the online publication PCD reminds us, because it allows the geeky hero ‘to be framed as a better, more sensitive alternative’ to traditional models of American Hollywood masculinity. TVtropes takes the idea further, suggesting that adorkable ‘characters are enjoyable and relatable because they’re not absurd supermen’. Curiously, then, it is worth noting that in recent years, adorkability is commonly attached to the real-life men who play superheroes in big budget movies – arguably, it allows for enjoyment of the superhero characters but also draws attention to their unreachability. By recognizing the ordinariness and vulnerability of the actor playing the superhero role, adorkability facilitates a more accessible and, therefore, appealing conflation of character and role – Captain America star Chris Evans’ social media obsession with his dog, for example, evokes the kind of awkward sweetness that Tom Holland embodies in both his celebrity presence and his portrayal of Spiderman. Geeky adorkability is related to niceness, to vulnerability; it manifests through a celebrity’s own emotional attachments to endeavours such as comic book appreciation, theatre enjoyment and other activities that exist outside of traditional Hollywood depictions of masculinity. Under such reading conditions, Richard becomes a relatable figure – intelligent, but sensitive and awkward – who spurs distinguishably intertextual fan readings and appropriative practices that conflate the erstwhile king with the Real Person Fiction (RPF) constructed around a particular subset of actors who perform Shakespeare. Using a pre-established template of adorkability as a means of determining an affinity between the playful construction of the introvert fan, attractive British actors and Shakespeare’s text, fans sketch their worldview of Richard as embodying the traits of those who participate in geek culture. We argue that increased fan

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interest in Richard II is, therefore, directly correlated to the paratexts surrounding the adorkable celebrities whose recent performances of the play’s titular character have propelled one of Shakespeare’s unlikeliest (and also most unlikeable) characters into cultivating a geeky fandom of his own. Moreover, the actors’ bodies, and their projected aura of heart-of-gold geekiness, accentuate – in these instances – appropriation as ‘the act of recognizing Shakespeare in another . . . text’, locating the alternate text in an ideologically driven conflation of actors’ bodies, their celebrity and their chosen roles (Desmet 2014: 42). Fan revisionist geeky Richards are appropriations built on the recursive exchange that override questions of fidelity to ‘Shakespeare’s’ text (Desmet 2014: 43). Christy Desmet confounds prior notions of appropriation, both historical (‘theft and abduction’; Desmet 2014: 42) and recent (rhizomatic, nonhierarchical outgrowth of the 1623 Folio), championing instead a critical approach to appropriation that we firmly situate within our own perspective: fan appropriation is a dialogic commutation of paratexts. For Desmet, appropriation ought to be seen as a dialogical phenomenon – not simply a conversation or collaboration between appropriating and source texts, but an exchange that involves both sharing and contested ownership . . . not just as theft, but as a recursive process of give and take. From this perspective as well, rewritings with artistic and political motivations are no longer opposed to one another, but exist along a continuum governed by the contingencies of their reception. Fidelity and infidelity, whether on the level of form or intention, exist only in dialogic relation to each other, creating multiple permutations to faithfulness and unfaithfulness within appropriations. (Desmet 2014: 42–3) Desmet’s stance – that appropriation is better understood on a spectrum of fidelity – underlines the unsettledness of the Shakespeare text and the variable degrees to which Shakespeare may (or may not) be present in appropriations. Her concept draws attention to the ways users recontour a dramatic text, and how reshaping a text – whole or in parts – is subject to dialogical exchange richly evident of users’ affective or imperative drives. We suggest Desmet’s

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‘permutations’ are textual iterations that manifest as paratexts; these not only range along a spectrum of textual fidelity/infidelity, but also serve as new subjective interpretations of Shakespeare. For that matter, Shakespeare paratexts, when intersected by other paratexts, serve as entries to non-Shakespeare narratives such as Doctor Who, or the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU), J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts, other roles played by the ‘adorkable’ performers named in this chapter, and even celebrity itself.4 Desmet’s argument for recursivity as elementary in the acts of appropriation is equally true for performance as (un)authorized iterations of the text as it is for fan fiction, for various printed editions (Folger, Arden and Penguin) of the plays and for Shakespeare quotations that appear on T-shirts. What we argue here specifically, however, is that the dialogics between fans and their texts manifest the intertextual complexities of appropriation. This, perhaps, is made no more visible than in the ways fan-driven paratextual engagement in the adorkable British actor and Shakespeare contribute to the redefinition of the historically unsympathetic Richard as geeky hero. ‘Paratext’ is a term that fluctuates in meaning, adapted by various disciplines for their own particular approach. In literature, paratexts traditionally define text-adjacent materials, including titles, epistolary prefaces, reviews and advertising materials. Gérard Genette’s foundational inventory of paratexts offers us observations worth pursuing: paratexts are a process, which he defines as a ‘transaction’ (Genette 1997: 3), and his suggestion that paratexts may exist untethered to their source texts establishes a space for us to look past a definition of paratext as primarily producer-generated ancillary material and perhaps even challenge the way we understand the materiality of paratexts themselves. Media studies – and in particular, fan studies – recognizes that the increase of a text’s mutability as it traverses media requires a theoretical realignment of the text and paratext relationship. Gray’s explanation, that ‘we will always make sense of texts partly through the frames offered by other texts’ (Gray 2010: 31), expands the ‘welcoming perimeter’ (Gray 2010: 38) of paratexts to include not only fan work, as critics such as Kavita Mudan Finn (2017), and Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ (2013) have noted, but also larger, less tangible materials that, as Lincoln Geraghty suggests, emerge out of ‘rituals of fan paratextual production’ (Geraghty 2015: 2). In his study of Shakespeare use on Twitter, Romano Mullin argues that ‘paratexts become an intrinsic

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part of the meaning-making process generated by fans’ of The Hollow Crown series and that ‘paratexts circulate as signals of participation within the wider online community – they are generated by users in order to be viewed and shared by other users . . . forming a nexus of exchange’ (Mullin 2018: 214). Mullin’s commentary underlines paratextual knowledge both as dialogic and as a powerful force in the content creation of user-generated Shakespeares. Genette’s suggestion that a paratext is ‘in all its forms . . . a discourse that is fundamentally heterogenous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of something other than itself’ (Genette 1997: 12) recognizes the paratext’s mobility, but elides the question of what might activate a paratext in the first place. When we accept the premise that not all paratexts are generated as ancillary marketing or packaging of a source text by the original producers, Mullin’s nexus of exchange then becomes closely linked to generative fan rituals – such as shipping, a practice in which fans put preferred characters into sexualized relationships with one another – that confer the adorkable media trope onto chosen bodies. That fan-critical and creative activity is often fostered through paratextual objects centralizes a larger communal reading praxis that moves an idea from headcanon (an isolated idea captured in the networked logic of an individual fan) to fanon (a communal acceptance of a particular reading, trope or interpretation as valid, and therefore, ‘true’). Moreover, a consideration of paratexts suggests that this movement has the capacity to be generative on its own terms. Lincoln Geraghty advocates an audience-produced paratextual genesis when he proposes that ‘fans challenge the informational brand control of media producers by discovering and circulating unofficial news, gossip, rumors and photos of on-set filming’ (Geraghty 2015: 11). Geraghty’s observation invites us to think more carefully about the ways informal paratexts begin to assume an authority of their own, and to also include the self-organizations of fan communities themselves as paratexts. To consecrate some men with the label of ‘adorkable’ is a fan ritual that emerges when an actor’s appearance, accent and career choices permit him access to an already established network of celebrity and creates tiny ontologies whose existence generates new approaches to understanding Shakespeare. Moreover, to mark a British actor as ‘adorkable’ as a fan is to accentuate difference and participate in the appropriation of a homogenous group identity by

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assuming the gaze of the white American media consumer, regardless of one’s nationality. To accept fan rituals as paratextual engagement, it becomes necessary to first recognize that paratexts are composites of other, smaller – and perhaps disparate – paratexts, themselves combined with other ‘detached pieces from the source material’ (Gunnels and Cole 2011: par. 4). Fresh paratexts are formed by ‘each new generation of fans [who add] to the interpretation and reinterpretation of both the source material, by carrying off new fragments, and the fragments of prior generations, in [sic] how they reconstitute them’ (Gunnels and Cole 2011: par. 4). With each ‘reconstitution’, paratexts and their use lend themselves to future acts of appropriation. Paratexts, therefore, are constructed through fragments that align with Desmet’s ‘diverse “units” . . . that exist for themselves and as they relate to one another’ (Desmet 2017: 3). We propose a perspective of paratexts as built from tiny, mobile units using Ian Bogost’s concept ‘of objects or things . . . to explain phenomena as the emergent effects of the autonomous actions of interrelating parts of a system’ (Bogost 2012: 25) that he terms ‘tiny’ ontologies. Bogost’s theory encourages awareness of the unlimited breadth of resources for paratexts; moreover, his concepts enable us to effectively trace the paratextual fan networks that playfully adopt Richard as an awkward yet fabulous kindred spirit and bring him into the same pre-established media identity as that of the adorkable British actor. Furthermore, the assemblage of fragments as a means of creating paratexts generate what DeLanda terms a ‘downward causality’ (DeLanda 2016: 21), in that these ancillary things exist ‘as a source of limitations and opportunities for its components’ (DeLanda 2016: 21) – becoming an authoritative entryway to a text that shapes what a text can do for us (and itself) in this particular iteration. That is to say, tiny ontologies become paratexts that work affectively, encouraging us, as fans, to follow their downward logic to create new textual meaning and, by extension, new texts themselves. Assembled as paratexts, fragments position themselves above the text, drawing our attention as markers of meaning. Fragments of material and non-material being, such as RPF (Real Person Fiction), the male celebrity body, comic book heroes (and villains), production stills available online and bits of Shakespeare, can and do embody fan data. These shards of cultural material exist as heterogeneous components that assemble (and are assembled) around Richard II to

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create meaning for those who approach Shakespeare’s narrative and character through this paratextual network. Historically, Richard II has not been a popular play beyond academic fandom (which places a different kind of claim on the fetishization of dorkiness). The text is characterized by its lengthy, ornate speeches, performative set pieces, underwhelming female characters, and this, combined with a focus on English history, means that the play has long been more popular as a source for critical study than for contemporary culture. And yet, its current fandom identifies the play as a character study, as malvoliowithin5 of Tumblr demonstrates when he writes of King Richard as ‘nice, soft, holy, beautiful, kinda a bitch but genuinely a Good Soul Who Deserves Better’. Richard II’s association with queerness has engendered a particular performance history that recognizes the performativity of gender as much as it does kingship. As such, the play has a performance history that foregrounds non-traditional leading men – and women.6 Recent notable Richards include Redmayne, David Tennant, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw – the latter in the popular BBC 2012 Hollow Crown miniseries.7 Since the mid-1990s, the celebrity of a niche collection of young British Shakespeare stage and film actors has facilitated a fannish identification of Richard with a type of famous man. That these celebrities have become paratexts for understanding – and characterizing – Shakespeare’s king underlines fandoms’ conflation of performers and their RPF. A reimagined, more glorious Richard emerges in fandoms ‘where the names, likenesses, and biographies of public figures are attached to the character’ (Piper 2015: 2.2). The result is a singularly conflated celebrity and literary character who circulates as part of a larger, playful intertextual exchange. Arguably, The Hollow Crown has centralized Shakespeare as a contemporary fan object, presenting the history plays as a media franchise, a source text that engenders its own ‘meta-archive’ (De Kosnick 2016: 34). Conceptualizing the BBC production as metaarchive, like, say, the MCU, upholds De Kosnik’s observations on the archontic nature of media culture through fandom: a source text’s meta-archive encompasses ‘not only the source text, but all the variations and transformations of it produced by readers, viewers, listeners, scholars, critics, and fans’ (De Kosnik 2016: 34). Arguably, through the popularity of its performers, The Hollow Crown franchise draws in, for fans, other franchise networks such

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as Fantastic Beasts, Doctor Who, Jessica Jones and James Bond as texts to be deconstructed and put to paratextual use. These paratexts become and/or influence ways to read Richard II . Thimble’s fanfic, ‘This is not new’, for example, identifies the eroticized relationship between Tanner and Q of the James Bond film Skyfall as a direct reimagining of Richard and Bolingbroke. Thimble admits as much in their introduction: When I found out that Ben Whishaw and Rory Kinnear were going to be in the same movie again, after their fantastic portrayals of Richard II and Henry Bolingbrook [sic], respectively, in the BBC Hollow Crown series, I knew I had to write some kind of reincarnation deal with them. I had to.8 Thimble’s enthusiastic response to the crossover, ‘intertextual casting’ of Whishaw and Kinnear in the 2014 Bond film illustrates a cannot-be-unseen affiliation: a paratextual connection that can be, as Cochran argues, ‘very pleasurable for fans [who follow favoured actors] from role to role, series to series, medium to medium, and to detect actor and past character styles or traits in current and future characters’ (Cochran 2015: 159). Fans see what actors bring into the fold from their previous embodied character and use these ‘to explore and explain the workings of a fictive culture within a fictive universe’ (Gunnels and Cole 2011: par. 1). Fans draw on the paratexts amassed around actor, character and performance, and it is this collation of images and responses that spurs new paratexts. This realization of fan approaches to RPF and celebrity draws our gaze back to the Redmayne poster and illustrates the ease with which the intertextuality of actor, character and cultural situatedness potentially become paratexts to Shakespeare, and vice versa. Fans are not the only ones who exploit both cultural networks and performances of Richard; so, too, do the individual actors invested in their Shakespeare affiliation. Media tropes and performances allow for a conflation that occurs between the actors themselves and the role of Richard. Tennant, Redmayne and Whishaw are all unconventionally good-looking by Hollywood standards; what is additionally appealing about these men is their boy-next-door ordinariness in relation to the muscular, hypermasculinity of the big-budget action movie star. Compounded with a willingness to repeatedly perform Shakespeare characters,

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these traits suggest a geekiness that is commonly referred to as ‘adorkable’. The celebrity that Tennant, Hiddleston and, to a lesser degree, Redmayne and Cumberbatch cultivate though their media representation and the roles they select, as well as public perceptions of their Britishness (particularly as applicable to those who are UK public school boys), is one that feeds into a narrative of geeky pleasure in Shakespeare. In every way this geekiness is also implicated in the contrast between the ‘fantasy of white, male Englishness predicated on [the] qualities of eloquence, restraint, and social privilege’ (Blackwell 2018: 58) and the verbal and emotional expansiveness of the Shakespearean actor.9 This fantasy, the binary of British contrasting American masculine heroism, has arguably been a staple of popular culture since the 1960s with the global release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and transatlantic television shows like The Saint (featuring future James Bond actor Roger Moore) and The Avengers (starring Patrick Macnee), featuring the debonair, cool, handsome British man. Like Cumberbatch in the more contemporary BBC’s Sherlock, these characters embody an intellectual acuity for solving mystery and averting danger, rather than a display of aggression and the more physical response of violence. As is consistent with the fan community’s self-positioning as subversive and counter-cultural, the adorkable British trope then represents a gendered pushback against the normalization of aggressive masculinity in media production, subjecting, as it does, the male body to the female gaze. Nonetheless, some Richards embody adorkability better than others. Whishaw’s relative inscrutability, in comparison to Tennant or Hiddleston, for example, allows us to think more about how the idea of the geek is mediated through paratexts. Whishaw, in many ways, represents a playful idealization of the adorkable British fan object, and crystallizes the way celebrity operates as a threshold into Richard. Shy to the point of reticence, Whishaw appears to be sincerely reserved offstage, intensely private but emotionally available through his work. He is attractive, but not ostentatiously so, and lives quietly, yet openly, as a gay man. As Francesca Coppa has argued about Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, Whishaw represents the binaries of [i]ntellect and desire, public and private, nature and culture, primitive and civilized, sane and crazy, straight and gay – but not quite managing to put them together in a way that looks normal

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[and therefore] attracts a female and queer mediafannish audience that is looking to renegotiate and integrate these binaries in new ways for themselves. (Coppa 2012: 218) Whishaw, therefore, is the embodiment of the perfect adorkable fan object, and his low-key brand of geeky-cool becomes the catalyst for a rejuvenated interest in Richard spurred by an ability to read Richard through Whishaw. Moreover, Whishaw’s personal reticence taps into the playful self-definition of the fan as a real-life introvert that contains multitudes. There is a particular kind of logic that recognizes the adorkable man that, in turn, invites kinship from those of us who enter into a fandom. In other words, the adorkable British man often becomes the idealized, introvert, sexually ambiguous fan and falls into patterns of self-identification that fans playfully engage in when they participate in these fandoms and self-deprecatingly talk about themselves. Richard is that thing and, because Whishaw, Redmayne and company play Richard as a lavishly decorated, yet vulnerable, drama queen, he fits a fantasy of the fabulous introvert. As a result, he becomes a geek of our own. Gehayi’s fic, ‘Shadows of Desert Bird’, relocates the text to 1936 and describes Richard thus: Tall, aristocratic and lean, he has short blond hair that curls lightly, a swashbuckler’s pencil-thin blond moustache that Aumerle is certain Douglas Fairbanks copied from him, high cheekbones and wide blue eyes that seem oddly ingenuous. Add in a killer sense of style to go with his quintessentially English good looks and part of the reason that Richard attracts attention becomes all too clear. While fan art has a tendency to reflect Richard’s fabulousness, many of the fics that surround Richard are melancholy, tinged with violence and a sense of loss, drawing from Richard’s tendency to ‘talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs’ (2.2.145). Although Richard moves around in a variety of alternative universes (AUs), his character, his sense of loss and his bond to Henry Bolingbroke recur in fan renderings. In the fanfic ‘The Kindest Use a Knife’, author angevin2 uses Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ as a thematic influence to unify the fiction of Richard with the real-life persecution of Wilde.

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Like many fanfics, it pays careful attention to historical detail, drawing from the combination of celebrity and historicity that is manifest in the portrayal of adorkable, vaguely medieval, golden-auraed Richards. The tropes of adorkability, therefore, illustrate the ways paratexts work on us. As a result, Richard is received more sympathetically when situated in the adorkable British fandom. When read through recent contemporary performance, Richard has become a misunderstood celebrity in his own right, an awkward, sexually ambiguous character who is redeemed by the essential nobility/ value/goodness that, time and again, is evidenced in the idea of the good-hearted geek. Through this reading, Richard’s perceived weakness – his excesses of language, his public feeling – becomes a source of strength, but it also has the effect of partially exculpating him as a source of England’s unhappiness. As the play sustains a relentless continuation of Richard’s disempowerment, and transitions him from monarch to murder victim, the adorkable British paratext declines to meaningfully engage with Richard’s own culpability in his failures. While we can wholeheartedly support a claim that recognizes Shakespeare’s Richard as a drama queen, we suggest that, as adorkable and a geek, Richard becomes instantly more self-aware. His petulance throughout his abdication becomes an unambiguous statement of personal integrity in the face of a larger imposition of history. Fan insistence, manifest in some fanfics, on the empathetic relationship between Bolingbroke and Richard ameliorates his responsibility for the country’s woes. Rather than as indulged, spoiled ‘landlord of England’ (2.1.113), Richard is identified as a man dislocated from his true self by his forced interactions with an oppressive, heteronormative world that insists he perform kingship in the manner of a hero. In such a reading, there is greater emphasis on York’s pitiful assessment of a man who wears both tears and smiles ‘as the badges of his grief and patience’ (5.1.33). As such, this type of fan reading requires a significantly more selective reading of Richard, one that adopts fan rituals as a means of reading the text. By claiming the text in service of a larger cultural interest that strives to interrogate contemporary ideas of idealized masculinity, geeky Richard illustrates the limitations of downwards causality. Furthermore, what becomes apparent through close scrutiny of paratextual use is that the adorkable trope is problematic, both in

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itself and in its relation to Richard II . Because of its capacity to authorize and ameliorate problematic behaviour, the adorkable character’s ‘status as nerdy nice guy . . . lets them off the hook’ (PCD 2017) for toxic male behaviour such as latent misogyny and lack of racial inclusion. In mainstream American media production, adorkability is more commonly manifest in movies like Revenge of the Nerds and is structured to accommodate men who engage in malignant behaviour on the grounds that they have no social power. The Big Bang Theory is the most prolific example of this malignancy, in which the nerdy scientists’ routine dismissal and objectification of the sitcom’s female characters is frequently comedic fodder, therefore mitigating the latent hostility that underpins the show’s attitude toward gender. Richard’s status as monarch, then, and his abuses of his authority suggest the geek is part of a larger bricolage of misogyny in mainstream media. Furthermore, as PCD reminds us, ‘it is worth noting that this type [of geek] is nearly always white’,10 and this erasure of contemporary, multiracial Britishness is all too conspicuous in geek readings of Richard. According to the criteria commonly entrenched for hot British adorkability, the black British-born actor Chiwetel Ejiofor should appear as part of the geek network, but he is notably absent. Ejiofor, born in London and of Nigerian descent, is firmly middle class; he began his career at the National Youth Theatre and has demonstrated a career trajectory that is consistent with Redmayne, Tennant, Hiddleston and Cumberbatch. He has classical theatre credits, including Othello at the Donmar Warehouse (starring alongside Ewan McGregor and Tom Hiddleston) and Everyman at the National Theatre. He has also had a solid film career that includes Hollywood blockbusters and smaller independent films, and he participates in the geekfriendly MCU alongside Doctor Strange. Ejiofor’s absence from adorkable Britishness, then, illustrates a troubling fannish inclination to align inclusiveness and subversion with gender and sexuality over race. This erasure draws our attention to the bias inherent in the claim of subversion, and how it perpetuates a fandom of Richard that elides critical observation of its limitations. Rukmini Pande notes that the recognition of the fan (both as self-identification within the fan community and by scholars observing fan work) as subversive figure is a selective process. She contends that:

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These theorizations have usually coalesced around the concept of transgressive pleasure, especially with regard to erotic fan works in the context of media fandom. However, because these theorizations have generally only paid attention to how these transgressions operate around the axes of gender and sexuality, the effects of the racializations of these spaces have remained unexamined. (Pande 2018: 45) Pande’s observation is consistent with the popular readings of Richard that are interconnected via the adorkable network and the self-identifications of the fan communities that validate these bonds. Although racebending, in both stage and fan production, is now a constitutive part of the Richard fandom, it sits apart from adorkability. The subversion claimed on behalf of a larger reading practice is complicit in how fannish ‘culture more broadly talks about othering in a manner that valorizes people who have claimed otherness for themselves, as opposed to having otherness thrust upon them’ (Wanzo 2015: 2.3). Buried deep into this logic of adorkability is this whiteness – embedded in paratexts and fragments that represent whiteness – as ontological. In 2019, Richard II made headlines again, as Shakespeare’s Globe produced a version that was performed entirely by British women of colour, challenging the fandom of both Richard II and Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse to think more globally about the constructions of Britishness (‘What’s On: Richard II’). Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton’s production’s ‘post-Empire reflection on what it means to be British’ brings the limitations of adorkability into sharp relief as it identifies the management of race as processed through gender. That is to say, male black bodies are constructed as sexual, which contradicts the application of adorkability that presumes, particularly in fanfic and other fanworks, to contain the male body. The absence of adorkable Richards, or Chiwetel Ejiofor, in this discourse suggests a strategic erasure that occurs and that protects a white hegemony in fan communities from confronting its own anxiety about the black body. These limitations are tiny ontologies of their own – small fragments of essentialist knowledge – that become agential, for good and ill, as they mark out pathways through which Richard comes to be understood.

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Notes 1 This essay began at the 2019 PCAA conference. Our thanks to Katherine Larsen for organizing the panel. Special thanks to Carol Mejia Laperle for her thoughtful suggestions as the essay evolved. 2 Such an association is all the more ironic for the fact that, according to FIFA (‘History of Football’), Richard II was one of the kings who was, apparently, not a fan, and banned the sport. 3 In November of 2011, the Guardian ran a promotional article for Richard II sympathetically titled ‘Eddie Redmayne: The Loneliness of Being a Hot Young Actor’ (Babb 2011). 4 Patrick Stewart, Mark Rylance and Simon Russell Beale are examples of celebrities who have used their reputations as renowned Shakespearean actors as a paratextual entry point for drawing attention to the quality of their craft as they engage in more commercial entertainment projects. 5 https://malvoliowithin.tumblr.com/post/174979778246/i-love-thedichotomy-of-shakespeare-richards-one. 6 Following Fiona Shaw’s groundbreaking performance in Deborah Warner’s production in 1996, Cate Blanchett played the role in 2009. 7 Limited visual evidence for all of these performances exist online, and the images available are striking in their aesthetic similarity. Many suggest both purity and excess through the use of gold and white colour schemes, and this overlap contributes to the validation of performance as text for those coming to the play through fan cultures. 8 https://archiveofourown.org/works/556341?view_adult=true. 9 Even Tennant, who is an energetic and loquacious Scot, is folded into this trope by the popularity of his modern-dress performance of Hamlet, which becomes part of his celebrity. 10 Adorkability arguably also extends to accommodating Hamlet, who has been performed by other adorkable celebrities, most notably Irish actor Andrew Scott, who is famous for his roles in British television hits Sherlock and Fleabag. For a more in-depth discussion of Hamlet’s celebrity and its intersection with performers, see McHugh, (forthcoming)

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Works cited angevin2 (2014), ‘The Kindest Use a Knife’, Archive of Our Own, 2 March, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1256476. Babb, Fran (2011), ‘Eddie Redmayne: The Loneliness of Being a Hot Young Actor’, Guardian, 18 November, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2011/nov/19/eddie-redmayne-marilyn-monroe. Birke, Dorothee and Birte Christ (2013), ‘Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field’, Narrative 20, no. 1: 65–87. Blackwell, Anna (2018), Shakespeare Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogost, Ian (2012), Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cochran, Tanya R. (2015), ‘From Angel to Much Ado: Cross-Textual Catharsis, Kinesthetic Empathy and Whedonverse Fandom’, in Lincoln Geraghty (ed.), Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences, and Paratexts, 149–63. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coppa, Francesca (2012), ‘Sherlock as Cyborg: Bringing Mind and Body’, in Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse (eds), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, 210–23. Jefferson, NC : McFarland. De Kosnik, Abigail (2016), Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. DeLanda, Manuel (2016), Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Desmet, Christy (2014), ‘Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation’, in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 41–57. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Desmet, Christy (2017), ‘Alien Shakespeares 2.0’, in Anne-Valérie Dulac and Laetitia Sansonetti (eds.), Shakespeare après Shakespeare/ Shakespeare after Shakespeare, Société Française Shakespeare, https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3877. Finn, Kavita Mudan (2017), ‘History Play: Critical and Creative Engagement with Shakespeare’s Tetralogies in Transformative Fanworks’, Shakespeare 13, no. 3: 210–25. Gehayi (2010), ‘Shadows of Desert Bird’, Archive of Our Own, 16 December, https://archiveofourown.org/works/139559. Genette, Gerard (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geraghty, Lincoln (2015), Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences, and Paratexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, Jonathan (2010), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

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Gunnels, Jenn and Carrie Cole (2011), ‘Culturally Mapping Universes: Fan Production as Ethnographic Fragments’, Transformative Works and Cultures 7, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0241. ‘History of Football – Opposition to the Game’ (n.d.), FIFA.com, online: https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-game/opposition-tothe-game.html. Kurp, Joshua (2012), ‘Tracing the Origin of the Word “Adorkable” ’, Vulture, 10 February, https://www.vulture.com/2012/02/tracing-theorigin-of-the-word-adorkable.html. Malvoliowithin (2018), ‘All Fun and Dick Jokes Until Someone Loses an Eye’, Tumblr, 17 June, https://malvoliowithin.tumblr.com/ post/174979778246/i-love-the-dichotomy-of-shakespeare-richardsone. McHugh, Emer (forthcoming), ‘Hamlet’s Networks: Celebrity, Genre, and Platform’, in Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds), Variable Objects: Shakespeare’s Dispossessed Agency. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mullin, Romano (2018), ‘Tweeting Television/Broadcasting the Bard: @HollowCrownFans and Digital Shakespeares’, in Stephen O’Neill (ed.), Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media, 207–226. London: Bloomsbury. Pande, Rukmini (2018), Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Piper, Melanie (2015), ‘Real Body, Fake Person: Recontextualizing Celebrity Bodies in Fandom and Film’, Transformative Works and Cultures 20, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0664. Pop Culture Detective (2017), ‘The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory’, YouTube, 31 August, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs. Stanitzek, Georg (2005), ‘Texts and Paratexts in Media’, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1: 27–42. thimble (2012), ‘This is Not New’, Archive of Our Own, 6 November, https://archiveofourown.org/works/556341. TVTropes (n.d.), ‘Adorkable’, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ Main/Adorkable. Wanzo, Rebecca (2015), ‘African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies’, Transformative Works and Cultures 20, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0699. ‘What’s On: Richard II ’ (2019), ShakespearesGlobe.com, https://www. shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/richard-ii-2019/.

10 On Eating Paper and Drinking Ink Matt Kozusko

One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for otium at all. Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others. Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This chapter assumes a loose association between otium, a kind of leisurely idleness sketched by Nietzsche in the epigraph above, and geek culture, in order to offer an apology for the idle life of the humanities professor. In so doing, the chapter considers a particular strain of Shakespeare geek, looking first at the figure of the Shakespeare professor, the otiose academic who populates stories about the failures of higher education today, and then at one of Shakespeare’s most fantastic geeks, the comic pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Both instances are very much characters, as opposed to real people, though oddly the modern academic is the more grotesque caricature of the two: there may be something fundamentally ‘Shakespearean’ about Holofernes, in that the play manages to give him the effect of psychological depth, while the 170

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modern-day figure of idleness and leisure is very much a flat stereotype. The figure of the academic discussed in this chapter, then, is indeed a ‘figure’ in the Roland Barthes sense of characters who ‘display in advance, in their costumes and their postures, the future contents of their role’ (6). This figure is not as common in fiction as its heroic counterpart, say Indiana Jones or Minerva McGonagall, but it features regularly and prominently in the imaginary conception of campuses called up by the conservative critique of higher education, particularly in North America, where the liberal arts model struggles to survive. The leisure and idleness of otium are requisite conditions for geeks, without which – to quote from the definitions covered by the editors in their Introduction to this volume – the ‘obsessive or exclusive dedication’ to a particular interest or ‘devot[ion] to a particular pursuit’ are not possible. Geeks and nerds, particularly the strains associated with fandom, cultivate their defining obsessions only with the resource of idle time. And though it might seem reasonable to object that in the case of academics, the idle time necessary for cultivating an obsession is hardly idle – it is, rather, professional; it is negotiated time – this chapter focuses on the obvious and distressing fact that professional work in the humanities is not perceived to be ‘work’ in the proper sense of productive labour. The humanities and the obsessive, particular pursuit of geeks and nerds become, in this context, examples of each other. This is nowhere more evident than in the enduring perception that academics, and especially humanities professors, are idle, and that their pursuits and obsessions are frivolous and effete, wasteful and impractical. As a character type, Holofernes carries some of the more robust stereotypical markers of useless academics; he reflects, in the comic abstract, a public image challenge Shakespeare professors all face trying to justify what we do as humanists – or worse, as tenured humanists, permanently endowed with leisure and permanently licensed to practise uselessness. In the face of a critique of higher education that doubts the value of liberal arts and registers only waged labour as ‘work’, we have to account for this perception, and, frankly, for the fact that despite its grotesque distortions of reality, the stereotype is partly accurate. Nietzsche’s brief entry on ‘leisure and idleness’ in The Gay Science, from which the epigraph for this chapter is taken, is equal parts celebration of a lost, idyllic (imaginary) past and critique of a perceived turn in human affairs toward work

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as the only virtue. Recent academic studies, such as Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work (2011) or James Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community (2018) take up the question in great critical detail and suggest a fuller range of understandings of otium. It is not a fixed concept, and the history of the term does not necessarily equate or even associate leisure with idleness. But at the core of even the most tame defences of the liberal arts is some recognition of the link between education, on the one hand, and idleness-and-leisure on the other. Idleness and leisure are at once a precondition and a result of a liberal education. Nietzsche worries that ‘soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience’ (1974: 260). Is it possible openly to celebrate today those parts of a liberal arts degree that may in fact be useless in the sense that they do not correlate with – and may argue against – job skills? Is it possible to defend not only the various kinds of unwaged (and typically feminized) labour that our social organization requires but does not acknowledge as ‘work’, but also Nietzsche’s otium itself?

Critiques of higher education We have been hearing since the early twenty-first century that we need more practical skills in our trained graduates, more holders of STEM degrees, and that higher education should shed its liberal arts heritage and reformulate itself to work with the market and the economy.1 College is not for everyone, the argument goes, in part because it is so expensive and, given this, a humanities major is an effete indulgence. If in the 1980s Shakespeareans had to defend their work against the conservative charge that Shakespeare was not sufficiently central to university courses and curricula,2 today we find ourselves defending our work on another front as well, as budget-conscious governors and a public, angered by rising tuition fees, question the need for English majors. Pity for what is perceived to be a useless degree has begun to turn to ire at what is perceived to be a waste of public funds. The traditional Jeffersonian–Deweyan argument we might offer in response, about the value of the liberal arts, is still available – see Michael Roth’s excellent, concise 2014 book Beyond the University – but the need to articulate the

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argument, the very need for Roth’s book and others like it, is on the minds of all of us who teach at liberal arts campuses or in liberal arts programmes. The drive to measure the value of a liberal education in reductive, concrete terms, to locate it in datasets, is evident in the assessment initiatives that every year take up incrementally larger units of the ample free time English professors might otherwise use to do a better job of teaching our capricious, unmarketable subject matter. If what we teach has limited value, according to the critique, then what we write is both absolutely useless and unreadable, the perennial subject of gleeful lampooning. Some of this lampooning comes from inside the academy, as in the late Denis Dutton’s ‘Bad Writing Contest’. Several recent monographs, and of course Stephen Pinker, have explored the topic in detail.3 English professors are notable offenders. Add to all of this the enduring misperception that we work short weeks and have our summers off, and it is no wonder that the otiose academic is also often the odious academic: the accidental near homophones, otium and odium, suggest something about the public image problem sketched out here. But academic otium is a real thing, and a valuable thing, and as we go about defending it, we need to think through leisure and its attendant onus; we need to think through academic freedom and the extraordinary amount of work that goes into it. The word ‘negotiate’ defines business as the opposite of leisure. Etymologically, ‘business’ is the negation of otium. This makes sense. Academics and otium go together, because campuses are not businesses – at least, they shouldn’t be – and academics are not accustomed to thinking of pedagogy using a business model. Or shouldn’t be, anyway. Although teaching is a value-generating enterprise, it is not a for-profit enterprise, and when it is repurposed for use at for-profit institutions, its principal object cannot be education; it can only be profit. For-profit campuses in the US enrol a small portion of matriculating students – about 10 per cent – but account for almost 45 per cent of loan defaults (Bok 2013). Regardless of whether those numbers are exact, the situation they reflect is not good. What is a for-profit university but an exotic financial instrument for collecting federal loans? What is it but a form of capital, extracting from a system the value created by the worker? What is it, to borrow even more explicitly from Marx, but a means of turning individual property into bourgeois property, by

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turning a worker into a debt? Most of us recoil at the notion of student-as-consumer, and we should. If education must be understood in terms of capital, it is rather a charity than a business: the real cost of a typical college education exceeds what students pay in tuition. But the real value of education resides not in the capital necessary to acquire it, or even in the higher salaries with which it correlates. It lies in the super-metrical, largely unassessable metaphysics of otium. Roth’s Beyond the University sits in the middle of a run of university and academic press books assessing the merits and drawbacks of higher education in America: Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011); William Bennett and David Wilezol’s Is College Worth It? (2013); Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America (2013); Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015); Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit (2010, 2016); and Bryan Caplan’s The Case against Education (2018). Nussbaum and Roth offer traditional defences of the liberal arts, tracing the heritage of our educational model through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and linking it to such figures as Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore. Zakaria offers a defence by way of personal history, contrasting the critical-thinking focus of the US system with the master-of-facts focus of the Indian system. The critical books – I focus here on Bennett and Wilezol’s – tend to draw more attention, in part because they can be linked to ongoing legislative threats to higher education. All of them engage on some level with the notion that the humanities and fine arts have limited or no value for students, and all are driven by the assumption that the purpose of higher education is job training and return on investment: tuition, and the loans it typically requires, is understood strictly in relationship to a net difference in anticipated lifetime earnings. Of the critical accounts mentioned above, Bennett and Wilezol’s addresses the traditional value of the liberal education most directly, but even their treatment, which is characterized by small concessions followed by sweeping dismissals, finds no practical value in the model. Non-STEM fields – their favourite targets are anthropology and the fine arts – are suitable for extraordinary students and the independently wealthy, they argue repeatedly, but ordinary people should think hard about the price they’ll pay for four years contemplating ephemeral abstractions. ‘We would never

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discourage students from studying philosophy,’ they write in a book that discourages students from studying philosophy, ‘but advise them of the risk they’re undertaking’ (142). They point to Florida businessman-turned-governor Rick Scott and his 2012 plan to tie tuition to the profitability of different majors as an example of how to reform higher education via legislation, and they even invoke the Chinese Ministry of Education’s 2011 plan to phase out unprofitable majors altogether: ‘we do not advocate this sort of statist solution, which limits the mission of the university as a place for the free exchange of ideas,’ they clarify, ‘but the Chinese method is correctly operating on a principle that every major must be made to defend its existence partly on the grounds of pecuniary return on investment’ (140). We do not advocate this, they say, but it’s correct. The most depressing critical tropes in Bennett and Wilezol’s book are the most predictable: academic scholarship is both a distraction from teaching and useless in and of itself, since it rarely gets read. That is, ‘many, if not most, tenured professors spend their time engaged in their research, with teaching considered a chore’ (200). ‘In lieu of teaching,’ they continue, ‘many professors build up their professional identities in ever specialized and arcane areas of published scholarship’ without ‘making contributions to knowledge’, because ‘most academic work is ignored’ (201). The words ‘specialized’ and ‘arcane’ echo, perhaps with added derision, the diction we see in definitions of ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ – the interest in subject matters that are ‘particular’ or ‘highly technical’ or ‘unfashionable’. The first piece of supporting data for Bennett and Wilezol comes from Shakespeare studies: ‘From 1980 to 2006, 21,647 pieces of scholarship (books, articles, dissertations, and so on) were published on William Shakespeare’ (201). They wonder how much ever gets read, and then offer their own withering answer: ‘very little’ (201).4 Worst among these tropes, however, is the sinister figure of the otiose and odious academic who lurks at the heart of the book. Submerged or openly articulated, a fear of liberals and liberal thought attends the practical, ostensibly a-political plans for fixing higher education’s financial problems. Chapter four of Bennett and Wilezol’s book, for example, offers a robust dataset demonstrating how liberals outnumber conservatives in faculty ranks and invokes the bogeyman of the activist professor. Bennett surfaces for a passage to write in the singular first person about having witnessed,

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in the 1970s, an ethics professor and his seminar students ‘raid a broken soft-drink machine during a break and steal twenty cans of soda’ (235). Bennett scolded the group, he tells us, but ‘the professor of advanced ethics was unmoved, and he reconvened the seminar for further elaborations of ethical dilemmas’ (235). This instance of the odious academic, a hypocritical liberal bogeyman with no conscience, perfectly captures the figure described at the outset of this chapter. Is the ethics professor a lawless marauder who postures as an ethics expert in order to conduct a horde of pillagers who are posing as ethics students? Or are we supposed to see here an actual ethics professor whose craven and misguided pedagogy turns on gross opportunism and instances of petty crime? Either way, the story takes the form of a Manichean morality tale about good versus evil, and it assumes the corresponding limitations, in which moral clarity emerges in the stark distinction between righteousness (Bennett) and depravity (liberals on campus). In the anecdote, Bennett himself has to advocate for the victimized soda-company employee, whose own paycheck may be docked for the theft, because this eventuality never occurs to the thoughtless ethics seminarians or their leader. However extreme and asymptomatic this account is meant to be, the ethics professor is exactly the comic anathema at the heart of Bennett’s critique. Odious and otiose, out of touch with the real-world consequences of an imprudent inquiry into ethics, he is everything that is wrong with higher education today. The fear of the liberal bogeyman and of liberals generally suggests the (even) darker side to the conservative critique of the humanities. The fate of the Central European University – as of summer 2019, it was relocating from Budapest to Vienna, forced out of Hungary by the conservative autocrat Viktor Orbán – is a reminder that conservative pushback on higher education is not simply a benign, good-faith initiative to address student loan debt and restore a measure of practical training for students by advocating for more STEM majors.5 To slip for a moment into the Bennett and Wilezol mode of concession-followed-by-fearfulgeneralization, we might say that while it would be ungenerous to equate the absence of conservative outrage about Orbán’s attack on CEU with a willingness to tolerate such attacks, it is now prudent to begin worrying. Conservative critiques of higher education all question the value of the humanities, but none of them seriously

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acknowledges the growing threat of illiberalism, and none of them rehearses for us at any length the salutary liberal aims of the liberal arts. Such salutary liberal aims aside, how might we go about establishing the value of academic leisure? Jokes about leisure activities that can be written off as ‘work’ are not made only by academics, so what is it that makes academic otium different from a kind of low-level fraud tolerated in the name of civility? There are of course academics who commit this kind of fraud. We call them ‘dead wood’ – the abusers of tenure. But tenure is rarely abused in the fashion imagined by the public and fostered by politicians. Take, for example, Missouri Representative Rick Bratton, who wants professors to be accountable for students who don’t find jobs, and who thinks tenure a) is ‘un-American’; b) means you can’t be fired; and c) encourages faculty to teach useless classes (Zamudio-Suaréz 2017). Any humanities academic fortunate enough to have found tenure-track employment has likely found themselves explaining that tenure merely means you get to keep your job, provided you do it reasonably well and don’t break the law. Properly put, tenure is finally being hired, after a multi-year trial. And if tenure is the freedom at last to conduct your research and teaching as you see fit, it also constitutes the process of internalizing academic standards and expectations, a psychosis of sorts that is mild at best and crippling at worst. Typically, and too often, academic otium is merely the counterpart to anxiety and self-doubt born of a decade plus of extraordinary effort and work. When we are lucky, academic otium is the freedom to organize anxiety in a way we can experience as productive. And yet, who would lose this intellectual being? A few have given it up, certainly, but the tenure-track job is still the golden ring, and as the gradual defunding of higher education further reduces the ranks of the tenured and replaces them with contingent faculty, we are all filled with a mix of gratefulness, fury and despair. There is no need to rehearse the numbers here, but the gross undervaluing of contingent faculty is evident on every single campus in the US system, public and private. As we convert more and more higher education faculty into underpaid, unsupported, overburdened workers, we bring the number figure attached to exercising a humanities education closer and closer to its perceived public value. The situation is unsustainable. Where does the blame belong?

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Love’s Labour’s Lost A dispassionate take on the blunt indifference of popular opinion to contingent faculty and to the whole enterprise of humanities education, a take like the one available in former Harvard president Derek Bok’s latest book, Higher Education in America, refuses to localize blame (2013). But perhaps there is some futility in assigning blame to a critique that has circulated widely and as far back as we can see. The second half of this chapter turns to Love’s Labour’s Lost, in particular to Holofernes, the early modern dramatic predecessor to today’s otiose academic. There are many figures of comic excess in the play and most of them end up chastened and subdued, brought to an awareness of their faults, but Holofernes stands out. As he is humbled for his particular errors of excess, a pitiable, even loveable inner Holofernes becomes visible. In moving contrast to the comic stereotype we have seen in earlier acts, the play shows us a vulnerable person shut down by his superiors at the very moment he is set to debut his learning before the court. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a celebration of otium and geek-level obsession with rhetoric and verbal dexterity and poetry. It indulges Holofernes, and Nathaniel and Armado, and of course the ladies and lords whose exercises of wit and learning comprise the first four acts. The play works by frolicking in otium, inhabiting that space fully, in order to gesture toward a different space at the end that it never actually enters: a non-dramatic, artless world of reality, in which kings die, merry lords have actual work to do and the sombreness of a lifelong oath must be recognized. This is the world that cannot be staged, that will not fit into a comedy, that is too long and too dreary for a play. For all the time Love’s Labour’s spends joyfully exploiting the conventions of comedy, its ultimate project, oddly, is to submit those conventions to the judgement of an outside world that is too busy for leisure or idleness and that it knows comedy and drama cannot conquer. We see this most prominently in the final exchange between lords and ladies. The dialogue works assiduously to curb the comic spirit of indulgence and frivolity, subjecting that spirit to the rigours of emotional and social responsibility: in place of marriages to consummate the comedy, there is delay, deferral and mourning or penance. The shutting down has other components, such as the

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move to reframe Biron’s gracious, entertaining wit as a cutting, caustic ‘wormwood’ that he needs to ‘weed’ from his ‘fruitful brain’ (5.2.833–4).6 According to Rosaline’s initial description in 2.1, Biron has a reputation for ‘mirth-moving jest, / Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor, / Delivers in . . . apt and gracious words’ (2.1.71–3). In 5.2, however, she gives a contrasting account of his reputation as ‘a man replete with mocks’, and the jests of 2.1 have become ‘wounding flouts’. Cynthia Lewis offers a superb overview of these contradictory accounts and suggests some ways to reconcile or explain them.7 Both of Rosaline’s descriptions refer to Biron’s prior history, and not to what we witness in the course of the play, but it is worth noting that the phrase ‘wounding flouts’ captures very well what we have just watched in the treatment of the Nine Worthies performers. There is also a tantalizing parallel between Rosaline’s second description and the commentary the king offers on Biron’s joking: ‘too bitter is thy jest’, Navarre says in 4.2, responding to Biron’s mockery of his friends in the letter scene. Aside from whether the different accounts of Biron’s wit can be squared within the play text, or from what they show about the play’s drive to reframe mirth as something injurious, of interest here is a slightly more fanciful notion we can tease out of the play’s multiple Birons: he is, like Holofernes, a stock character, the witty lord turned lover (cf. Valentine or Benedick). But as is the case with so many stock characters in Shakespeare, the specific instance always exceeds the stereotype. The stock figure is overtaken by the effect of a person, as the braggart soldier is only barely visible beneath the forceful, energetic bulk of Falstaff. How Shakespeare manages to create these effects is a separate question, but the sense we get of a distinct personality suggests another way of understanding Biron as something more than the dramatic prototype on which he is based. The disjunction creates a discontinuity that has the effect not of preventing character, but of generating it.8 Love’s Labour’s Lost traffics in a number of comic conventions, from characters to tropes and topoi, that it reframes or transforms or supplants in Act 5 but, by making its characters respond to a shift in circumstances, it generates a sense of depth that makes it difficult to dismiss any of its dramatis personae as mere figures. The reframing of Biron’s wit as a tragic flaw, rather than a comic asset, connects complexly with another strain of critique in the play. The pageant of the Nine Worthies, a precursor to the mechanicals’

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Pyramus and Thisbe playlet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, carries a sense of the futility of performing high culture for the socio-political elite: like the mechanicals, Holofernes and his crew are relentlessly mocked by the smug cohort of powerful operators who have summoned their inferiors to court to provide entertainment, and who then abuse them for their ineptitude. As with the mechanicals, the abuse itself is a dramatic device that tends to shift audience sympathy from the nobles to the performers. ‘Sweet Lord Longueville, rein thy tongue’ and ‘Sweet royalty, bestow on me the sense of hearing’ implores Don Adriano de Armado, whose lines Longueville and Dumaine keep interrupting (5.2.647, 654). Armado, ridiculous though he is, tries in earnest to provide what Navarre has asked of him, and the dismissive commentary strikes us as ungenerous. Nathaniel and Holofernes meet with similar abuse at the hands of the nobles, and Holofernes offers a pointed rebuke: ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble,’ he says, after Biron, Boyet and Dumaine drown out his Judas Maccabeus with a series of ‘ass’ jokes. As Brett Gamboa has observed, Holofernes’ treatment by the sweet royalty can leave audiences ‘uneasy’: The self-evident truth of his parting line, ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble,’ often leaves audiences, both onstage and off, in stunned silence, as a fragile human voice emerges from within what had seemed a stock character in a patently artificial play. Such was the case in Dominic Dromgoole’s 2007 Globe production, when Holofernes’ exit left the audience distressingly conscious of their complicity in the condescension and arrogance of Biron and his fellows. Deepening the effect was the hypocrisy of the nobles, recently embarrassed by their own failed performance. The moment can rank among the most deeply moving in Shakespeare, largely because Holofernes’ emergence as a prospect for sympathy comes as such a surprise.9 The play allows these figures of scorn to become figures of sympathy by restoring to a flat comic character type some dimensionality, some sense of a fuller, and more vulnerable, person that spills over the top or through the joints of the commedia model we have been laughing at. Whether this is an original dramatic design or a latent potentiality or just an effect of the body of an actor in performance,

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it is striking. In a play whose project is to train the witty impulse out of Biron, to mock and stifle the linguistic excess of youth, of love, of learning, Holofernes might be read as an emblem of resistance. He is disciplined for his presumptions and his geeky verbal pretensions, but there is a kind of dignity in his exit line that both excuses and validates his enthusiasm for his craft. This brief sketch is intended to set up Holofernes as a resistor to the play’s drive to discipline comic excess, as an impediment to Act 5’s project of shutting down the laughter and replacing it with something more responsible and worthwhile. Holofernes essentially breaks character – both the Judas Maccabeus he is playing and the ridiculous pedant he has represented – in order to rebuke the lords for their rude treatment. His exit line not only draws us closer to him while putting (more) distance between us and them; it also gives the impression of depth. That gesture, of subtly validating a thing under critical attack, is repeated over and over in the play, which has the cumulative effect of conferring value on each component part of the comedy, from the idle entertainment that is the pageant of the Nine Worthies to the larger project, the whole richly imaginative – and deeply orthographically whimsical – world of Navarre, plot and subplot. If Love’s Labour’s Lost is an argument against the excesses of comedy, and if Holofernes is a figure whose critique of Armado serves equally well as a critique of his own pointless verbosity – the character trait in which the play distils the geek-level obsession with a useless subject – Holofernes is also the means of preserving the value of academic whimsy. Again, the more obvious or traditional reading of the moment sees the humiliation of Holofernes as a come-uppance that is overdue to a pretentious and insufferable pedant. But it is a moment of discipline that paradoxically validates as deeply worthwhile the very foolishness it proposes to correct, just as it validates the idleness required for the play’s characters and audiences to enjoy it. Is Holofernes’ extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer a piece of terrible, pun-studded doggerel? Yes, probably. Nathaniel calls it a ‘rare talent’, but the dimwitted Dull dismisses it comprehensively. And yet, Dull’s dismissal itself takes the form of a pun on ‘talent’ and talon: ‘if a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent!’ (4.2.57–9). This dynamic captures perfectly the play’s double standard, in which it mocks the delights of its own linguistic excess by means of that very linguistic excess. Its critique

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takes exactly the form of the material it attacks, compulsively undermining critique and validating excess. Here is Holofernes’ own account of his talent: This is a gift that I have, simple, simple: a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it. (4.2.60–6) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the gift is good in everyone, whether it is acute or not. Indeed, if it is possible for readers and audiences to distinguish the doggerel from the verse, the bad pun from the good, the characters in the play are no help. The pedant and the curate mock the unlearned, and vice versa. Dull scoffs at Holofernes’ poem, and Holofernes disdains Biron’s verses, which he calls ‘only numbers’ – mere metrics – and which he proposes to show over dinner to be ‘very unlearned, neither savoring of poetry, wit, nor invention’ (4.2.148–9). Certainly there is a range of quality in the play’s spectrum of linguistic excess, with base and bawdy jokes at one end and the lyric pentameter of the ladies and lords at the other, but it is the lords who are making ‘ass’ jokes just before Mercade arrives, and the play as a whole is an exercise in poetry, wit and invention. It is a representation of an ‘obsess[ive] devotion to a particular pursuit’. The academic learning that Holofernes draws on to power his ‘gift’ is, in Nathaniel’s metaphor from 4.2, a matter of the paper he has eaten and the ink he has drunk: holofernes Twice-sod simplicity, bis coctus! O thou monster, Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look! nathaniel Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink. His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts. And such barren plants are set before us that we thankful should be –

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Which we of taste and feeling are – for those parts that do fructify in us more than he. For as it would ill become me to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool, So were there a patch set on learning to see him in a school. (4.2.19–27) Nathaniel mocks Dull for his lack of learning and goes on to imply that it would be as unbecoming for Dull to take up learning as for Nathaniel himself to be ‘vain, indiscreet, or a fool’. Nathaniel is at points all three, however, and his metaphors, in which learning is likened first to nourishment and then to fruit-bearing plants, suggest the centrality to education of nourishment and cultivation: ignorance is not a permanent condition but a state to be transformed by the dainties contained in books. And of course ‘fructify’ here links the pedants substantively with Biron, whom Rosaline enjoins in 5.2 to ‘weed this wormwood [wit] from [his] fruitful brain’ (833). Learning and wit are associated with each other, and both with leisure and idleness. Paper and ink are thus important components of the swirl of metonymies that figure learning in the play. When Armado announces in 5.1 the commission for ‘some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework’ (97–8), Holofernes turns instantly to the idea of presenting the Nine Worthies, who in the pageant we see in 5.3 interweave academic learning and folk tradition, high and low, august and bawdy, in a combination that presents us at once with all of the facets of the play’s interest in excesses of all sorts. The play then silences those figures and their voices, but it does not defeat them or refute their value, which remains. A play about the disciplining of comic excess – itself rooted in a geek-level fascination with useless things – exceeds its own self-critique endlessly. For those of us who enjoy the work we do as academics, Holofernes’ delight in being an academic is validating: scholarship practised for scholarship’s sake, all external use value aside. Perhaps it is comforting that nearly 150 years after Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, we do not seem quite to have reached the point Nietzsche feared, ‘where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa’ (1974: 260). Scholarship is otium, partly because otium is the negation of business. Otium is the only successful tactic in the revolution, the only front that has not failed in the war against ‘Business’, or whatever it is we should call the sickness that

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organizes human bodies and human behaviour so that they produce and consume in excess. Scholarship should be practised as otium because scholarship is the value of living and thinking and not doing. In this sense, the productive Shakespeare geek reproduces Shakespeare and the students who will continue to reproduce more Shakespeare, with ‘Shakespeare’ here standing via metonymy for the whole enterprise of the humanities. That, in any case, is what we might hope for, since many of us teaching in the humanities now face exactly the prospects of Holofernes: rehearsing the value of a useless, effete discipline before a hostile audience of political elites whose withering critique aims to put us in our place.

Notes 1 Florida Governor Rick Scott’s 2012 plan to tie tuition at Florida’s public universities to the profitability of different majors is a convenient, representative instance of the evaluative and legislative initiatives discussed in this chapter. Dale A. Brill, chairman of the task force that explored the plan, was quoted in a New York Times article, saying ‘the higher education system needs to evolve with the economy’ (Alvarez 2012). 2 The National Alumni Forum (now the American Council of Trustees and Alumni) spearheaded this effort. For a full discussion, see Kozusko 2015. 3 See Pinker (2014). The article discusses Dutton and several related books. 4 Bennett and Wilezol cite an American Enterprise Institute paper by Mark Bauerlein, who himself cites the MLA International Bibliography. My own MLA Bibliography search for 1 January 1980 to 1 January 2006 returned 21,433 results for a subject search on the phrase ‘William Shakespeare’, and 10,134 with the ‘peer reviewed’ filter applied. 5 Franklin Foer’s June 2019 article in The Atlantic, titled ‘Liberalism’s Last Stand’ in the print edition, offers a detailed account. 6 I cite the Norton 3 Folio text of Love’s Labor’s Lost throughout (Shakespeare 2016). 7 See Lewis 2008.

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8 Alan Sinfield’s Faultlines (1992) explores this question in detail, but see also any of the more recent collections on Character Criticism, especially Yachnin and Slights (2009) and Ko and Shurgot (2012). 9 Lines are quoted from Norton 3 (Shakespeare 2016). Brett Gamboa’s comments come from the Norton 3’s Digital Edition, PC1, also cited in the text at 5.2.623n.

Works cited Alvarez, Lizette (2012), ‘Florida May Reduce Tuition for Select Majors’, New York Times, 10 December, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/ education/florida-may-reduce-tuition-for-select-majors.html. Arum, Richard and Josipa Roksa (2011), Academically Adrift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barthes, Roland (2012), Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Bennett, William J. and David Wilezol (2013), Is College Worth It? A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education, Kindle edition. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Bok, Derek (2013), Higher Education in America. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Caplan, Bryan (2018), The Case against Education. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Chamberlain, James A. (2018), Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foer, Franklin (2019), ‘Victor Orbán’s War on Intellect’, The Atlantic, June, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/georgesoros-viktor-orban-ceu/588070/. Gamboa, Brett (2016), ‘Performance Comment 1’, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare Digital Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, https://digital.wwnorton.com/3013/r/goto/cfi/342!/6. Ko, Yu Jin and Michael Shurgot, eds (2012), Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage. New York: Routledge. Kozusko, Matt (2015), ‘Shakespeare and Civic Health’, in Sujata Iyengar (ed.), Disability, Health and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, 109–24, New York: Routledge. Lewis, Cynthia (2008), ‘ “We know what we know”: Reckoning in Love’s Labor’s Lost’, Studies in Philology 105, no. 2 (Spring): 245–64. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974), ‘Leisure and Idleness’, in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 258–60, New York: Vintage Books.

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Nussbaum, Martha (2010), Not For Profit. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Pinker, Steven (2014), ‘Why Academics Stink at Writing’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 September, https://www.chronicle.com/article/ Why-Academics-Writing/148989. Roth, Michael (2014), Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shakespeare, William (2016), Love’s Labor’s Lost, in S. Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton. Sinfield, Alan (1992), Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weeks, Kathi (2011), The Problem with Work. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Yachnin, P. and J. Slights, eds (2009), Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance and Theatrical Persons. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Zakaria, Fareed (2015), In Defense of a Liberal Education. New York: W.W. Norton. Zamudio-Suaréz, Fernanda (2017), ‘Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s “Un-American” ’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 January, http://www.chronicle.com/article/MissouriLawmaker-Who-Wants-to/238886.

PART THREE

Pastimes, Gaming and Shakespeare

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11 Shakespeare and the Renaissance of Board Games Appropriation and Geek Culture Vernon Dickson1

There is a revolution growing, quietly, in kitchens and at dining room tables, spreading from Germany to most of the world. Don’t be alarmed, though. People are playing more and more board games – and new types of board games. Board game sales are up (way up), game conventions are growing, board game cafes and shops are opening up, more and more board games are appearing on screen in popular culture (particularly in geek culture, such as in shows like The Big Bang Theory), and thousands of new board games are designed and released each year.2 Some are calling this board game revolution ‘a renaissance’.3 The Renaissance period we study plays a significant role within this board game renaissance, but Shakespeare is a small figure. A quick search at the aptly named boardgamegeek.com (the largest and 189

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most complete online database and resource for all things boardgame-related) reveals that of the more than 100,000 game entries listed, over 7,000 are Renaissance-themed. However, only thirtyeight entries are Shakespeare-related. In this Renaissance of board games, where is Shakespeare? I should note that many other games make use of or references to Shakespeare. Trivia and party games, for example, quite frequently include some cards or references to Shakespeare (such as in Apples to Apples or Pictionary). It should also be noted that while there are few games specifically about him, one – Shakespeare – is ranked 447 out of the well over 17,000 ranked games at boardgamegeek.4 In this chapter, I will briefly discuss the significance of board games as part of our culture as well as the specific uses of Shakespeare in four of the modern board games themed around him: Kill Shakespeare (2014), Council of Verona (2013), Munchkin Shakespeare (2017) and Shakespeare (2015).5 In her book, Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal (2011) argues for the strong social value of games – not just board games, to be fair to all gamer geeks – claiming that they can, in the words of her subtitle, ‘make us better and . . . change the world’. She begins with an example I think will resonate for the history geeks among us: Herodotus in his Histories explaining how the Lydians survived an eighteen-year famine through game-play. They created a game that was distracting and deeply engaging and made a rule that they would eat one day and not play, and then play the next day but not eat. Herodotus claims they survived for eighteen years through this profound example of massive game-playing. McGonigal (2011: 389) drives home her point: ‘For the starving and suffering Lydians, games were a way to raise [the] real quality of life. This was their primary function: to provide real positive emotions, real positive experiences, and real social connections during a difficult time.’ She continues: This is still the primary function of games for us today. They serve to make our real lives better. And they serve this purpose beautifully, better than any other tool we have. No one is immune to boredom or anxiety, loneliness or depression. Games solve these problems, quickly, cheaply, and dramatically. (McGonigal 2011: 389) I will not be making the claim that board games are going to fix all the world’s problems in this chapter, but I will agree that games

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fulfil basic human needs – social connection, engagement, distraction, enjoyment – and assert that board games offer a particular style of these needs that other game-playing does not match. Board games offer a social and tactile approach to the functions of games that few other media can match. Dan Jolin (2016) reports a conversation with Matt Leacock (designer of Pandemic, one of the most significant and successful games of the new board game era): Direct interaction is important to Matt Leacock, too. ‘You connect with people across the table,’ he says. ‘It’s a very human thing.’ And it’s tactile: ‘You need to handle the physical components, to get the feel for the texture on the cards and see the wood grain on your components.’6 While it might make sense that the rise of video games and of other digital game-playing would end the need for the physical boards, cards, and dice that date to the Lydians and before, the reality is that board and card games are being played more than ever. Jolin (2016) adds that ‘Even the early 20th-century games explosion, which gave us such hardy perennials as Monopoly, Cluedo [Clue] and Scrabble, has nothing on the current surge.’ Geek culture is on the rise and is a driving part of this growth, but the social role (and growth) of games is bigger than any one niche within society.7 While the board game market is swelling, including the growth for well-known mass-market board games (such as Monopoly or Life), the new market of what are being called designer or hobby games lies hidden within this growth, generally considered to have begun with the German game Catan.8 The board game renaissance is driven by a rethinking and refreshing of game-play, rather than repeating stale game mechanisms, such as roll and move, generic trivia questions, player elimination, random game progress (whether though dice or card draws), non-choices (where the game gives the illusion of offering a choice, but in reality there is only one viable choice in any given circumstance) and other deterministic modes of game-play. There is no single manifestation of new games, but as a group they tend to focus on allowing for more choices (and more meaningful choices) and on keeping players actively involved until the end. The four Shakespeare-themed games I will discuss – Kill Shakespeare, Council of Verona, Munchkin Shakespeare and

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Shakespeare – each embrace aspects of these new games, though in quite distinct ways, offering a useful look into just how varied Shakespeare’s use is within the current board game culture. I will offer a brief analysis of each, including an overview of each game, how it uses new designer board game principles and how it uses or derives from Shakespeare (often from the geek popular culture surrounding Shakespeare). These board games represent what Christy Desmet (1999: 2) called, in her introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, ‘ “small-time Shakespeare,” individual acts of “re-vision” that arise from . . . a desire to play with Shakespeare’. Following Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ and the understanding of how Shakespeare becomes the author-function ‘Shakespeare’, Desmet (1999: 5) asserts, ‘If Shakespeare is really “Shakespeare,” then his name can be pried loose from the discourses he names and circulated through culture and time.’ Shakespeare’s ongoing cultural capital fuels a desire to use Shakespeare for acts of play. Each of these games’ decidedly different approaches to using Shakespeare exemplify both how much room for play Shakespeare (in the broadest cultural sense) allows and how distinctly we continue to imagine and use Shakespeare. I specifically say ‘use’ to hearken to Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes (2017: 4) and their sense of the word in The Shakespeare User, ‘use assumes the right of access to Shakespeare on behalf of the consumer’, which takes Shakespeare well outside of purely academic circles, opening up rich and distinctive uses and appropriations. As Fazel and Geddes (2017: 7) argue – quoting from Huang and Rivlin (2014) – ‘Shakespeare is not a source to be parsed, but a “signifier, with rich and unstable connotations” that finds itself at play within and without the academy.’ This is the kind of play that each of these games allows for, across a variety of board game consumers (but always embracing geek audiences).

Kill Shakespeare Kill Shakespeare (2014) is a heavily and overtly layered appropriative piece, following on and adding to Shakespeare’s own use of others’ work in the writing of his works. The game adapts into a board game the graphic novel series Kill Shakespeare, which is itself a significant revisiting of Shakespeare’s own work, though reimagined

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in a hybrid and accretive world, one where Hamlet, Juliet, Lady Macbeth and other characters coexist with William Shakespeare himself, a world that includes within one geography Cawdor, Messaline, Arden and many other Shakespearean locales.9 Beyond this, the game is part of a new design space that blends cooperative board game-play with competitive play. This is metadrama in game design – pure geek territory for those who know Shakespeare’s works, as well as those who enjoy the Kill Shakespeare graphic novels. The game represents a significant departure from Shakespeare’s own texts and his worlds, and yet it ably embraces the thoughtful revisiting of Shakespeare and his works that the graphic novel portrays, giving us a world of Shakespeare that is immersive and reflective of the worlds he created.10 Kill Shakespeare follows the recent increase in cooperative games, games in which the players work together to beat a series of obstacles or challenges derived through the rules and structure of the game design itself. In this case, the game’s rules and structure represent the machinations of Lady Macbeth and Richard III, who, turn by turn, advance their plan to subjugate the world to their will. The players must work together (as one of the heroes within the game: reimagined versions of Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, Viola and Falstaff), playing cards and moving cubes representing armies and influence to foil the villains’ plans and save the world. Cooperative play has been a successful feature of the renaissance of board games (games like Pandemic and Gloomhaven top boardgamegeek’s rankings), allowing players to work together to beat the game, thus reducing inter-player competition and fostering teamwork. However, Kill Shakespeare follows a subset of cooperative games – semi-cooperative games – which insist on a single winner amidst the team. Thus, even as the players work together to free the land from Richard III and Lady Macbeth, they are vying to be the greatest among the group and to win the overall game in the final point tally. This game style encourages critical moments of betrayal and selfish choice. If all players try simply to accrue the most points in order to win the game, the game itself (reflecting the actions of the villains) will defeat them all, resulting in a group loss. Thus, players must carefully choose critical moments in order to boost their own scores and still avoid losing the game outright. These choices, though, can lead to fissures within the group, a breakdown in the cooperative nature of the game-play and loss of the game as well.

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This design space nicely develops the world of Kill Shakespeare (a fairly dark graphic novel series, full of surprise twists and betrayals) and echoes the worlds of many of Shakespeare’s own plays. As an evocation of Shakespeare, this game is rich and – once allowance is given for the amalgamated new world – the tension, betrayals and effect of the game reflect popular connotations of Shakespearean drama. The feel of the game is thus quite appealing to graphic novel and gamer geeks interested in Shakespeare. In one way, however, the game captures the feel of Polonius’ response: ‘This is too long’ (Ham 2.2.436). The game, especially for new players, will take longer than Romeo and Juliet’s ‘two-hours’ traffic’ (Prol.12), often lasting upwards of three hours. For gamers with the resolve and interest, Kill Shakespeare delivers a distinct experience full of twists, sudden losses and, with the right strategies and teamwork, a final glorious victory reminiscent of Shakespeare’s history plays. Kill Shakespeare evokes an alternate Shakespearean experience that focuses on reflecting the graphic novel and variations on Shakespeare’s own play worlds. It uses Shakespeare as a tool to explore possibilities that go beyond him or his works in a deeply speculative, immersive and layered approach to Shakespeare and play, designed for those willing to explore, at length, new and alternative Shakespeares.

Council of Verona Council of Verona (2013) is radically different from Kill Shakespeare in playtime, game-play experience, and approach to Shakespeare and his works. Instead of the extended game-play of Kill Shakespeare, Council of Verona is fully competitive, highly interactive and quick, lasting about twenty minutes. Verona reflects a divergence from Shakespeare’s written works, but is clearly grounded in the world of Romeo and Juliet – though offering a unique chance to reconfigure the play, creating a unique, divergent experience. Within Council of Verona, players have cards that represent characters of the play (from Lord Montague to Juliet to Balthazar, with even Rosaline and Sampson included). Players play one card each turn, placing it into the Council of Verona or Exile and may secretly put an Influence Token (valued from 0 to 5) on any one card, if they wish. At the end of the game, each player will score

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points equal to their token values on cards that have completed their agendas, as the game calls them. Agendas, or goals, include obvious examples, such as Romeo and Juliet each wanting to end the game together or Lord Montague wanting more Montagues than Capulets on the Council, as well as creative ones, such as Rosaline completing her agenda if Romeo and Juliet do not end up together (either on the Council or in Exile). Put simply, players seek to play cards to accomplish goals within the game world and then score points based on their secret tokens placed on completed goals. Council of Verona creates a highly dynamic rewriting of Romeo and Juliet that pits each player against the others in an attempt to have the most influence on characters whose agendas are fulfilled at the end of the game, creating a tactical and competitive game experience. Certain cards can change the location of other cards, whether in the main play area (the Council of Verona) or off to the side in Exile. Since character agendas rely so much on who is in which location at the end of the game, it becomes important to use characters such as Friar Lawrence and the Nurse to move a character from Exile to the Council or Benvolio and Tybalt to move a character from the Council to Exile. Other characters can look at or move players’ Influence Tokens, allowing players to compete actively for influence on characters that look to be able to complete their agendas. Thus, Council of Verona will only sometimes end with Romeo and Juliet being together (though at least in this version they can, unlike the play), but the titular characters do not necessarily matter much in this game, which is more about the political intrigue and highly competitive state of Verona. Players in Council of Verona feel as though they are playing within the world of Romeo and Juliet, but also that they have a chance to rewrite the story to match their own competitive goals, based on which (and when) cards are played and where they place their Influence Tokens. Accordingly, while a player could attempt to rewrite Romeo and Juliet via Council of Verona, the game-play pulls players into the machinations of this iteration of Verona and leads them to recreate the tensions of the play’s world, to become participants (actors) within the drama and to work tactically to create a new version of the drama based on their and their opponents’ choices. The experience of the game is usually about taking advantage of opportunities of game-play, rather than purposefully rewriting the play.

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This difference is critical. Council of Verona promises a chance to rewrite this famous play, but quickly players realize that they are not doing so to match their own preconceived interests. The game world and logic quickly takes hold and players are challenged to find the best way to play the game, more than to enact an intentional revision of the story. Unlike Kill Shakespeare, where players enter the game world as a character intent on saving the world, here players are firmly outside of the game’s world, acting more like competing writers, though limited to a brief game-play experience. Unlike most games based on Shakespeare, which tend to be about historical details and famous lines, Council of Verona is deeply entwined within Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet world, even as it completely rewrites his text. While the concept of this game could have had many other themes – almost any storyline in which characters have different agendas – the particulars of the game are clearly and firmly grounded within Shakespeare’s play world. Character powers and agendas, as well as the use of Exile as a significant game state for a card, make Council of Verona quite specifically a Shakespearean game experience. This is not a thin veneer of Shakespearean theme, but an ongoing reimagining of the Romeo and Juliet world that pulls players into conflict over the characters and agendas within the setting, offering (and forcing) a revision of the drama with every play. Council of Verona allows players a chance, within the game’s mechanisms and rules, to revisit one of Shakespeare’s most famous settings (definite geek bait) and become absorbed in a quick and competitive rewriting of the play, one in which the play itself can never be recreated (no character dies in the game). Shakespeare – necessary for the game’s world and characters – fades into the background as the push and pull of the game draws players into the competitive world of this interactive revision of Romeo and Juliet.

Munchkin Shakespeare In sharp contrast to Council of Verona, which evokes an immersive revisiting of the Romeo and Juliet world, Munchkin Shakespeare (2017) offers a veneer of Shakespeare over another already popular game (Munchkin).11 Munchkin is a geeky competitive card-driven game that recreates the sillier side of Dungeons and Dragons

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(D&D), the role-playing game. Munchkin has been redesigned into dozens of settings, each time spoofing a genre or well-known material (such as Star Munchkin or Munchkin Impossible, which respectively revisit science fiction and spy thrillers). Munchkin Shakespeare thus plays almost exactly the same as Munchkin (players are fighting monsters to gain treasure and go up levels – all the while doing whatever they can to hinder or thwart the progress of their opponents), though in a way designed to be humorous or silly. Munchkin Shakespeare simply replaces the monsters that hearken back to D&D with cards playing off Shakespearean tropes: from obvious examples, such as Lady Macbeth, to creative examples, such as the Aides of March or Two Gentlemen of Bologna. Similarly, players can play cards including A Plague on Both Your Houses, Method in Your Madness, or Double, Double. Each card evokes (often in a silly way) their title, so that Much Ado About Nothing reads, ‘Play during any combat. Turns out the whole mess is . . . well, you know. The combat continues, but the monsters have no Treasure at all.’ Every attempt is made to infuse comedy into the Shakespearean theme of the game. Munchkin Shakespeare reflects its own originating game at its core. Mechanically, it is the same game. Characters still have cards that make them Elves or Halflings, Wizards or Warriors, derived from the original source of D&D for the game. Players are still adventurers seeking to level up in order to win the game. Shakespeare in this case is simply a thematic add-on, offering a new way to play a familiar game (like a version of Monopoly based on US National State Parks or The Simpsons). Shakespearean creativity, though, is certainly involved. Cards are often funny and Shakespeare geeks will repeatedly get a laugh out of them (at least the first time played), whether it is Fall Staff that helps a character run away from trouble or using The Quality of Mercy to save another character. In Munchkin Shakespeare, Shakespeare provides the humour and the text of the game, even while the game itself remains fixedly Munchkin in terms of game-play. Unlike the rich amalgamated world of Kill Shakespeare or the game-play that closely matches the tone and crossed agendas of Romeo and Juliet in Council of Verona, Munchkin Shakespeare is at the game level simply a thematic borrowing (though cleverly done). There is nothing about the core game-play that is necessarily Shakespearean; rather, Shakespeare is primarily being used to

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market the game and to attract either new players to Munchkin or Munchkin players looking for a new experience within a familiar game design. This is as directly a desire to use Shakespeare to attract players as any of the games I discuss here. I should add that the game can be quite mean, with players directly opposing, interfering with or hurting each other’s plans and characters, in decided contrast to the next game I will discuss, Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Among the Shakespeare-themed games currently available, Shakespeare (2015) best embodies the core values of the new game renaissance. Board game geeks would call Shakespeare a euro (derived from eurogame). This name comes from the historical origin in Europe (particularly Germany) of a style of game that emphasizes strategy over luck and chooses indirect conflict over direct conflict, quite different from games like Risk or Axis and Allies (or Munchkin). For reasons not hard to understand, these conflict-heavy, war-focused games were not as popular in nations such as post-war Germany. Euros specifically sought to upend direct and confrontational war-styled games and to avoid the reliance on dice and game mechanisms seen as luck-driven, to focus instead on what might be called healthy but indirect conflict. Many euros, like Shakespeare, focus on a limited assortment of resources that players compete to gain.12 Shakespeare is not a thin veneer of Shakespearean concepts and characters (Munchkin Shakespeare), a revisiting of a play world (Council of Verona) or a fictitious amalgamated world (Kill Shakespeare); rather, it is a game about the play industry in Shakespeare’s times. Players have their own stage set, one stagehand and starting actors. They compete to hire additional workers and actors, as well as to add costuming and stage sets, in order to put on the best play by the end of the game (or, in game terms, to collect the most points within six rounds of play). The setting works well within the tradition of eurogames, since it is very much about indirect conflict and competing over limited resources. Only so many set pieces, costumes, actors or workers will be available in each round of the game, forcing players to use their limited coins to purchase the resources that will best help them gain points and

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construct their own original play. The play constructed is completely abstract, just a series of hired actors and coloured resources representing costumes that earn points based on skilful play and allocation. Shakespeare focuses more on representing the challenging and competitive play industry in Elizabethan England than on Shakespeare or his works, except for one key factor: each actor within the game is actually a character within one of Shakespeare’s works. Thus, when a player hires an actor, that player is not hiring a leading man or a clown, but is specifically hiring Iago or Feste, Hamlet or Beatrice, each with an abstract in-game bonus, often only tenuously linked to their character. The result is a game that is mostly abstract, financially driven and highly (though indirectly) competitive, though full of tonal Shakespearean echoes. A player can enjoy the tight financial challenge of the game without really knowing who Viola or King Lear are (or why their actors have certain in-game bonuses). On the other hand, a true Shakespeare geek will enjoy noticing the subtle nods to Shakespeare’s works that some actors add to the game (and thus the player’s experience of Shakespeare via this game), but these are often quite subtle and abstract (Beatrice gaining green costumes or Lear blue set dressings). It is worth noting that each player begins with a Shakespeare actor and a Falstaff actor. The choice of having both Shakespeare and his characters available side by side and equally available to all players reflects this game’s centring of Shakespeare as well as its interesting choice to make him merely an actor within the game. He authorizes the game. Shakespeare is the game’s titular character, literally, and his popularity gives credence and cultural capital to the game. However, the game makes him only a character, alongside his own fictional characters, and not the true centre of the game, which is rather (and appropriately) the play of the game itself. Unlike Council of Verona or Kill Shakespeare, which feel deeply connected to their source material, Shakespeare borrows from Shakespeare in order to create a tight, financially driven eurogame. However, unlike Munchkin Shakespeare, this is not just a pasting of the name Shakespeare on a pre-existing game. Shakespeare is unique and clearly linked to Shakespeare, borrowing loosely from both his theatre industry and his characters, blurring history with fiction. The world is fictitious, but is reminiscent of his historic period – not a fantasy setting or one related to the worlds of his

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plays. Shakespeare geeks will enjoy seeing familiar characters, but this game is more about the game-play. Put simply, the game feels more like an attempt to come up with a unique theme for a eurogame than an attempt to truly recreate a thematic experience that hearkens deeply to Shakespeare and his works.

Conclusion Looking closely at these board games demonstrates how many uses Shakespeare can have within the new board game culture, as well as how distinctive those uses can be. These uses allow for Shakespeare, as Fazel and Geddes (2017: 4) suggest, to move beyond academic uses to ones that are popular, even consumer-focused, and unmoored from traditional uses or interpretations. From a simple thematic veneer to a creative and amalgamated world, Shakespeare – ‘pried loose from the discourses he names’ (Desmet 1999: 5) – can authorize a diverse variety of play, engaging a wide audience of players (from those interested in two to three hours of strategic play to those looking for a brief or silly experience to those wanting nuanced financially driven decisions). What Shakespeare means in each of these cases varies, showing just how distinctly he can be read and used to suit popular culture and new uses. Popular culture borrows heavily from a diverse range of media and sources, new and old. Shakespeare offers a rich resource to be used in new adaptations ‘as material freely to be reread, reworked, revised, and repurposed’ as Lanier (Chapter 8, p. 133) notes earlier in this book. Game designers clearly see Shakespeare as a rich resource, but they are also quite willing to adapt, rework and appropriate him in many ways earlier generations would never have considered (and likely would not have regarded as appropriate or valid). Many designers use Shakespeare largely for material – lines, characters, plot lines – while others try to evoke a sense of his worlds, offering players new ways to play with his materials, or even new ways of seeing his own world (even his theatre culture). Players can be brought into his worlds or placed outside of them, as writers and co-creators. Shakespeare can authorize games, opening them up to new audiences, but he is more than just cultural capital. He is a jumping-off point, a locus of creativity, a wealth of material to be rethought. He has proved flexible, easily used and adapted to

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match new media and new audiences. From these examples, we see that Shakespeare can be used quite effectively to help enable meaningful and enjoyable board game experiences, perhaps even ones that will change the world, to borrow from McGonigal (2011), or at least the social experiences and thinking of some gamers. In a time when board games are being revisited and rethought, when so many themes are being explored and it seems that any theme is welcome (from camel racing to sending monkeys to the moon to feeding an emperor’s panda), what ultimately makes a game stand out is the game-play, the unique experience offered. Success in this board game renaissance is based on how well executed the game is or, to appropriate a famous phrase, ‘The play’s the thing’ (Ham 2.2.539). Well-crafted game-play will capture audiences. However, what kinds of play we each want to experience allows for a variety of possible successes. An engaging or unique theme might just bring us into a game that we would otherwise not try. Shakespearean themes and approaches will reach audiences that other themes might not, drawing in geeks and gamers of different stripes. Shakespeare can be used to foster play, even in ways that would not have been dreamt of in years past. There is still much to be written about Shakespeare within the burgeoning board game culture – and certainly much more room for Shakespeare to find his place within and on the stage of the new ongoing board game renaissance.

Notes 1 My thanks to Melissa Texidor, who helped in the final research and revisions of this chapter through a research internship provided by FIU’s The Humanities Edge programme funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. 2 The board game hobby market has grown tremendously, recently reaching $1.5 billion in 2017 (Griepp 2018), while ‘Board Games Market’ (2018) projects continued growth and a $12 billion market by 2023, noting ‘in the US, 5,000 board game cafes were opened alone in 2016’. The largest board game event in the world, Essen Spiel, reports record attendance (again) with over 190,000 visitors and ‘1400 new games and world premieres’ (‘Spiel’18’ 2018). Shuey (2019) reports that Gen Con, the largest US-based convention, saw a record attendance in 2019.

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3 See ‘Board Game Renaissance’ (2015), Roeder (2015) and Neyfakh (2012). Owen (2014) uses a related analogy, calling this a golden age and reporting that ‘the past four years have seen board game purchases rise by between 25% and 40% annually. Thousands of new titles are released each year, and the top games sell millions of copies.’ 4 I will italicize board game names for clarity, so as to distinguish the person Shakespeare from the game Shakespeare. Rankings at boardgamegeek are in flux, as they are user-driven aggregates. Shakespeare (the highest ranked Shakespeare-themed game) moved from 414 to 406 to 447 in the time I have been writing this chapter. Whatever the exact number, though, Shakespeare stands as a well-regarded game. What has not changed is the lowest ranked game: Tic-Tac-Toe. 5 The page for Shakespeare-related games can be found here: https:// boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/5742/celebrities-shakespeare. 6 Jolin (2016) also cites Professor Fernand Gobet, who argues for the social function of games: ‘[P]laying a board game is part of the culture – such as mancala games in some African countries – and can be seen as a soft kind of initiation ritual. But in most countries, the benefit of board games is to offer the opportunity for families to play. In a sense what matters is having such a common activity, and not the detail of the game being played.’ 7 McGonigal is one of many scholars and theorists who study and argue for the value and significance of games. This chapter is too short to review this literature fully, but works as diverse as F. Gobet, A. de Voogt and J Retschitzki (2004), J. P. Gee (2003) and B. Sutton-Smith (1997) suggest the richness of studying games as social practice as well as popular culture – including as artefacts of geek culture and its place within our broader society. There is a small group of Shakespearean scholars looking into games, but most focus heavily on digital games, though some reference board games in their discussions, such as Bloom (2015) – who also wrote one of the most complete studies of board games in the period (Bloom 2018). 8 Neyfakh (2012). 9 Conor McCreery (2013), who co-wrote the Kill Shakespeare series with Anthony Del Col, revealed the origins of this series in his recognition that Shakespeare was for geeks and that Shakespeare was himself an active borrower of the works of others. Earlier in this book, Douglas Lanier (Chapter 8, p. 137) describes the Kill Shakespeare graphic novels as a ‘literary meta-text’, a ‘fantasy series that take[s] otherwise discrete narratives and characters from literature and treat[s] them as if they occupy the same intertextual universe’, not unlike a superhero universe.

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10 See Lanier’s chapter (Chapter 8), in this book, for a fuller study of how and why the Kill Shakespeare series revisits and adapts Shakespeare’s works in the way it does. 11 While I will discuss Munchkin Shakespeare in more depth here, it is worth noting that there are other popular games that also use Shakespeare primarily as a thematic veneer, such as Bards Dispense Profanity (based on Cards Against Humanity), or more traditional games, like Shakespeare Memory or Stratford-upon-Avon Monopoly. Munchkin Shakespeare is currently the newest of these and offers a useful example of this kind of game theming. 12 See Woods (2012) for more on the history, culture and study of eurogames.

Works cited Bloom, G. (2015), ‘Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games’, Shakespeare Studies 43: 114–27. Bloom, G. (2018), Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ‘Board Game Renaissance in Full Swing’ (2015), NBC Nightly News, 12 March, http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/board-gamerenaissance-in-full-swing-412520003928. ‘Board Games Market – Global Outlook and Forecast 2018–2023’ (2018), Research and Markets, August, https://www. researchandmarkets.com/research/nwkdpt/12_billion_board?w=12. Council of Verona (2013), [Game] M. Eskue, Crash Games. Desmet, C. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in C. Desmet and R. Sawyer (eds), Shakespeare and Appropriation, 1–12. London: Routledge. Fazel, V. M. and L. Geddes (2017), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. London: Palgrave. Gee, J. P. (2003), What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave. Gobet, F., A. de Voogt and J. Retschitzki (2004), Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games. New York: Psychology Press. Griepp, M. (2018), ‘Hobby Games Top 1.5 billion’, ICv2, 30 July, https:// icv2.com/articles/news/view/41016/hobby-games-top-1-5-billion. Huang, A. and E. Rivlin (2014), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. London: Palgrave. Jolin, D. (2016), ‘The Rise and Rise of Tabletop Gaming’, Guardian, 25 September, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/25/ board-games-back-tabletop-gaming-boom-pandemic-flash-point.

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Kill Shakespeare (2014), [Game] T. V. Ginste and W. Plancke, IDW Games. McCreery, C. (2013), ‘Shakespeare and Four-Colour Magic’, in S. Carson (ed.), Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, 444–65. New York: Vintage. McGonigal, J. (2011), Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin. Munchkin Shakespeare (2017), [Game] S. Jackson, Steve Jackson Games. Neyfakh, L. (2012), ‘Inside the Board Game Renaissance’, Boston Globe, 11 March, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/03/11/insideboard-game-renaissance/ XXRfS0Ble3X9BGgrZlA7wO/story.html. Owen, D. (2014), ‘Board Games’ Golden Age: Sociable, Brilliant and Driven by the Internet’, Guardian, 25 November, https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/25/board-games-internetplaystation-xbox. Roeder, O. (2015), ‘Crowdfunding is Driving a $196 Million Board Game Renaissance’, FiveThirtyEight, 18 August, https://fivethirtyeight.com/ features/crowdfunding-is-driving-a-196-million-board-gamerenaissance/. Shakespeare (2015), [Game] H. Rigal, Ystari Games. Shuey, M. (2019), ‘Gen Con Draws Nearly 70,000 to Indianapolis, Event Officials Say’, IBJ.com, 5 August, https://www.ibj.com/articles/ gen-con-draws-nearly-70000-convention-officials-say. ‘Spiel’18: Record attendance again’ (2018), EPPI Magazine, 6 November, https://www.eppi-online.com/2018/11/06/spiel-18-record-attendanceagain/. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997), The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Woods, S. (2012), Eurogames: The Design, Culture and Play of Modern European Board Games. Jefferson, NC : McFarland.

12 The Bard of Boys’ Life Shakespeare and the Construction of American Boyhood M. Tyler Sasser

According to Michael Neill, ‘through four hundred years of imperializing history our Anglophone cultures have become so saturated with Shakespeare that our ways of thinking about such basic issues as nationality, gender and racial difference are inescapably inflected by his writing’ (1998: 184). For more than 200 years of that history, Shakespeare has been used for the moral and national character-building of the young, geeks or otherwise.1 The landmark year for the introduction of Shakespeare to children is 1807, when Charles and Mary Lamb and Henrietta Bowdler published the first two major texts in this subgenre, respectively Tales from Shakespeare and Family Shakespeare, the latter of which gave English the word bowdlerize, as in to alter and especially censor a text.2 These texts initiated a series of publications which helped to establish Shakespeare, as Charles Frey explains, as ‘a primary . . . civilizing influence for children’ (2001: 147). More specifically, in Retelling Stories, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum 205

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identify three interrelated cultural functions of such Shakespeare adaptations: First, they have a role in making Shakespeare accessible and popular. Second, they are instrumental in the continued canonization of Shakespeare. And third, reversions of Shakespeare’s texts perform a key role in the transmission of the culture’s central values and assumptions to children. (1998: 255–6) Although versions of Shakespeare for children have existed since 1807, many of the earliest adaptations were explicitly written for young girl readers. Authors, such as Charles Lamb, believed that whereas boys could understand Shakespeare’s original texts, girls needed a simplified and reimagined version. For instance, in the preface to Tales, Lamb explains the primary reason behind the collection in this oft-quoted passage: For young ladies . . . it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand. (Lamb and Lamb 1807: 4) Undoubtedly, the Lambs, or at least Charles, would be surprised by today’s statistics confirming that girls routinely outperform boys in secondary and higher education. Equally surprising would be the number of adaptations of Shakespeare devoted to introducing boy audiences to reading and, as Abigail Rokison in Shakespeare for Young People finds, Shakespeare’s themes, characters and plays are frequently reworked ‘to create original pieces of work’, and these adaptations often appear in the unlikeliest of places, such as scouting culture (Rokison 2013: 2). In what follows, I consider the crossroads between Shakespeare and American boy culture, especially as it relates to the Boy Scouts

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of America (henceforth, BSA). After surveying references, discussions and adaptations of Shakespeare in Boys’ Life magazine, I demonstrate how authors and illustrators used Shakespeare during two critical moments in the history of American boyhood and American boy culture. The first of these was during the early 1900s when BSA used Shakespeare to further the tradition of the so-called feral boy, a term often used to describe boys who resemble fictional boys or men from classic American children’s literature, characters such as Tarzan, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. The second critical moment occurred at the turn of the millennium, and addressed the importance of reading and the arts during a time known by pop-psychologists and educators as the boy crisis. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, scouting culture – as part of a larger American geek culture – used Shakespeare to reinforce their own gender structures, often turning to the Bard to emphasize their ideal version of American boyhood.

Is scouting culture geek culture? As this volume demonstrates, defining geek culture in- or outside Shakespeare culture is slippery. On the surface, a boy scout – a young person who spends as much as six years earning and collecting colourful badges – certainly adheres to the OED definition of geek: ‘an overly diligent, unsociable student; any unsociable person obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit’. Likewise, events such as camporees and jamborees, where hundreds or even thousands of similarly costumed members come together to share in their obsession, do begin very much to resemble ComicCon. I certainly recall from my own youth in the mid-1990s being called a geek by my more mainstream (i.e., popular) peer groups whenever they saw me wearing green tube socks, khaki shorts, badge sashes and a red kerchief. Such experiences have remained at the forefront of scouting culture as leaders and/or parents seek to address and even resist labels of geekdom, particularly throughout the twenty-first century. For instance, in November 2005, an anonymous user on the online forum for www.scouter.org created the post, ‘Spouse thinks scout leaders are geeks’, and wrote:

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I was reading another topic that talked about the perceptions of the uniforms being geeky etc., and thought I’d start another related topic, because my problem is not so much the kids. My problem is that my wife and other adults think the uniforms (and patches, etc.) are geeky and so are a lot of the leaders. In fact, there is a perception among some of these parents that the ‘smarter and more athletic boys quit Scouting around 5th grade.’ Such anonymous remarks – and there are numerous replies to the post – speak to the difficulty of defining geek. One reply encourages the original poster to inform his wife that Hank Aaron (hall of fame baseball player), Bruce Jenner (Olympic gold medalist for the decathlon), Neil Armstrong (first human to walk on the moon) and Gerald Ford (college football player and American president) are all Eagle Scouts, while another contributor lists more than thirty famous athletes, politicians and businessmen, in turn unintentionally suggesting that one cannot be a geek and have such careers. In this case, though, the writer’s wife is embarrassed by his geeky uniform and believes, according to her husband, that scouting cannot coexist with athleticism. Ironically, demonstrated physical fitness is a requirement for scouting, and the Personal Fitness merit badge, which includes three months of documented improvement in athleticism and strength, is required for the rank of Eagle. Yet another post reads, ‘I’m a geek and proud of it! Who cares what others think? My brothers-in-law have no other life but sports. When there’s a football game or NASCAR race on TV, nothing else matters.’ These scout-related posts collectively reveal an inherent difficulty in defining anything geek, perhaps particularly in this case when what makes scouting geeky for so many people is the uniform. In his chapter on performance, Peter Holland reminds readers that the formal origins of geek are rooted in computer and technology enthusiasts (294). To include scouting in this discussion complicates this early definition. The organization’s geekiness is merely a matter of accoutrement, something that is temporary and can be removed. Yet the organization is aware of its undesirable geeky reputation and hotly debates how to respond, while simultaneously encouraging its members to learn outdoor activities such as backpacking, rock

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climbing, pioneering and shotgun shooting in addition to becoming strong, confident leaders, all of which might at first seem antithetical to geek culture. As Keith M. Botelho notes in this volume on Shakespeare’s geek ethos in recent films, ‘male geeks are often vulnerable and withdrawn, uncomfortable in the publics they inhabit’ (Chapter 15, p. 257). Ironically, despite BSA’s attempt to transform such male geeks into their more acceptable expressions of masculinity, the organization often is labelled as geek. In the proposal for their 2017 SAA seminar ‘Shakespeare and Geek Culture’, Peter Holland and Andrew Hartley remarked that Shakespeare studies and fantasy sci-fi conventions cause a ‘coming together of like-minded people to critique – but also to revel in – a form of culture which, for all its influence on the mainstream, is also assumed to be outside it’. Such analysis can likewise be applied to scouting in that the activities traditionally associated with scouting – fire-building, woodcarving, wilderness survival, etcetera – seem like traditional, so-called American boy activities while simultaneously existing outside mainstream late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century youth culture. After all, what young person frequently carves wood today, if ever? Finally, should digital technology play an unspoken but nevertheless necessary part of contemporary geek culture, then the evolution of merit badges reveals BSA’s embrace of the digital age amidst their own quirky pursuits. In addition to earning merit badges in archery (1911), athletics (1911) and small-boat sailing (1964), millennial- and Gen Z-aged scouts also might earn badges on subjects such as graphic arts (1987), robotics (2011), moviemaking (2013), programming (2013), game design (2013), digital technology (2014) and animation (2015).3 These post-millennial alternatives to archery and athletics suggest that BSA aims to keep up with the changing hobbies, interests and needs of its young members.

Boys’ Life magazine, Shakespeare and feral boyhood Much of the work on Shakespeare in children’s culture has focused on prose retellings or film, but the crossroads between Shakespeare

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and constructions of American boyhood extend far beyond those media. For example, Boys’ Life magazine began in 1911, a year after the establishment of BSA, an organization that described itself as being ‘a value-based program for young people that builds character, trains them in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and develops personal fitness’ (see Figure 12.1).4 This magazine, like BSA more broadly, reflects what Kenneth Kidd calls the ‘feral tale’ in American boyhood, ‘a narrative form derived from

FIGURE 12.1 Cover image for the first issue of Boys’ Life magazine (1911).

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mythology and folklore that dramatizes but also manages the “wildness” of boys’ (2005: 1). The earliest issues of Boys’ Life were almost entirely comprised of fiction, and it is here that Shakespeare makes his/its first appearance. In the June 1911 issue, the editors include a copy of a play performed by Troop 2 in Connecticut entitled For a Scout’s Honor, which includes the witches’ cauldron scene from Macbeth (see Figures 12.2 and 12.3). The play generally follows a simple story concerning the insensitive attempt by three scouts to invite a neighbour from a lower social class to a camporee, only to regret their actions once they discover he snores. The drama is played entirely for laughs, including its offensive treatment of class and race (the skit includes a brief minstrel show). Yet the inclusion of Macbeth makes the tragedy seem as light-hearted and superficial as the scouts’ own play, while also revealing the popularity of Macbeth and its humorous presence at camporee campfires in 1911. After all, the gags and references only work if young audience members are familiar with the play. Similarly, the magazine at times relies on Shakespeare to teach proper behaviour, physical and emotional. In a published letter to the September 1924 issue discussing his summer experiences at the International Jamboree in Copenhagen, Denmark, Charles E. MacBeth from Fort Wayne, Indiana deliberates on his trip to Elsinore, beginning with a joke about his last name: Since Shakespeare made his play ‘Macbeth’ famous by naming it after me, I have looked into his works. This place, Elsinore, is where Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane, made a mess of things. I think we Scouts could have done a lot for Hamlet. For instance, in his duel with Laertes, his mother thought Hamlet was ‘fat and scant of breath.’ Believe me, if he had gone through the course of sprouts to qualify for this Jamboree, he’d be hard as nails and could have given Albin Stenroos, the Finn champion, a good race in the Olympic Marathon. Then, too, if he had won a merit badge in Civics, he probably would have cleaned up Denmark, married Ophelia, and lived happily ever after. Anything rotten in Denmark? We’ll say there’s not!5 MacBeth first insists on the importance of physical fitness, suggesting that Hamlet, unlike scouts, suffers in part because of his being out

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FIGURE 12.2 Opening scenes from For a Scout’s Honor: A Play in Four Acts, Boys’ Life magazine (June 1911).

of shape and that a ‘course of sprouts’ (i.e., a rigorous physical test often used as hazing) would have improved his athletic competition with Laertes. Further, MacBeth not only imagines Hamlet as being physically unfit but also lacking the proper training that comes with scouting. In this case, the power of a civics merit badge would

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FIGURE 12.3 Synopsis of the ‘Witch Scene’ from For a Scout’s Honor: A Play in Four Acts, Boys’ Life magazine (June 1911).

have altogether averted the tragedy of Hamlet. In this case, Hamlet is imagined as not being very scout-like, and the prince is set against what it would mean to be an ideal boy or man. In addition to this campfire Macbeth and Hamlet, Boys’ Life reaches into Shakespeare’s own biography to make unconventional connections between young Will from Stratford and its vision of American boyhood. In the April 1964 issue, between ‘Five Gimmicks of Successful Fishing’ and a summary of the ‘North American Junior Sailing Championship’, is the article ‘The Boy from Stratford’. This article (see Figure 12.4), in recognition of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, focuses on Will’s childhood, and the author constructs Shakespeare as an American Everyboy, the presumed quintessential reader of the magazine. The narrator imagines a conversation between a boy and his father, in which the father discusses the ‘good ol’ days’ of 1564, when boys worked hard, studied hard and obeyed grown-ups:

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Most of our ancestors . . . had their roots in England some 400 years ago; so you decide to look up some of the facts about those ‘good old days.’ . . . [I]f you were the eldest son of the house, you had to be up in the morning in time to wait on your parents’ breakfast table. You were not allowed to speak until spoken to . . . If, in your haste to school, you have forgotten to raise your cap when passing some older person on the street, you will be reported to your schoolmaster and soundly whipped for your lack of good manners. A similar whacking is administered if you come to school with a dirty face or uncombed hair . . . The only good thing about school was the lunch break – which gave [Will Shakespeare] time to make a detour through the Forest of Arden on his way home. The bird songs, the streams alive with fish, the wild flowers . . . these soon put all thoughts of grammar out of his mind. Sometimes a deer would cross [Will’s] path and go galloping into the deeper recesses of the forest. (‘The Boy from Stratford’ 1964: 31) In this Anglocentric passage, the anonymous writer maps his culture’s ideas about adult–child relationships and good manners onto young Will Shakespeare, presumably assuming that Will might be some sort of role model for readers. It positively depicts a wild, feral look of Will, who despite his ‘dirty face’ and ‘uncombed hair’ nevertheless understands the importance of hygiene and maintaining a clean-cut image of sorts. Likewise, it romanticizes the notion that young Will naturally spent his time in the forest with the deer, though he nonetheless was a strong student and constant reader, thus suggesting the importance of both outdoor activities and scholastic pursuits: ‘For all his youthful interest in the beauties of the English language, the boy Shakespeare must have heaved many a sigh as he sat in that Stratford classroom on a sunny spring day. Through the open windows the scents and sounds of the countryside close by played havoc with his concentration’ (‘The Boy from Stratford’ 1964: 21). The article continues making such connections between Will and their desired version of American boys and boyhood. In the end, an often dishevelled and bad-mannered Will who spends his days playing hooky from school, chasing deer in the woods and fishing is depicted as a role

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FIGURE 12.4 ‘Boy from Stratford’ article, Boys’ Life magazine (April 1964).

model, who despite these natural inclinations was nevertheless a strong reader and writer. In so many ways, all that is missing from the Boys’ Life author’s historical depiction of provincial life in sixteenth-century England is a whitewashed fence and Becky Thatcher.

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The boy crisis The cultural phenomenon effectively known as the boy crisis appears to have first entered the American psyche during the closing years of the twentieth century. Kenneth Kidd specifically identifies two key moments in 1998 as likely candidates for the first instances in which the phrase boy crisis was uttered, an NPR interview with Michael Gurian on The Merrow Report and the 11 May issue of Newsweek (Kidd 2005: 167). Barbara Kantrowitz and Claudia Kalb’s editorial in Newsweek entitled ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ was one of the first printed works to address what has come to be identified as the boy crisis, and numerous competing book-length studies followed soon after.6 All of these texts acknowledge that, at the turn of the twentieth century, boys were much more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders and learning disabilities, be placed in remedial courses, quit high school, fail to graduate from college and end up in a detention facility or incarcerated. Most relevant to my purposes in this chapter, however, are the studies citing declining levels of literacy for boys and the statistics suggesting that boys are reading far less than they have in the past. The statistics reported in texts such as Thomas Newkirk’s Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture (2002), Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm’s ‘Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys’: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men (2002) and Bruce Pirie’s Teenage Boys and High School English (2002) collectively suggest how less likely boys are than girls to read or be successful in their English classes.

Boys’ Life magazine, Shakespeare and geeky boyhood Earlier I listed new merit badges created for millennial-aged scouts and younger, and the change in content of Boys’ Life magazine likewise speaks to a growing concern for the declining literacy rate amongst American boys while also revealing other Shakespearethemed elements commonly associated with geek culture. For example, video games began to feature prominently in popular

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culture during the 1980s and, by the 1990s, the magazine featured monthly video game reviews, secret cheat codes for those video games and various other headlines with a focus on technology. In a similar attempt to keep up with the changing interests of American boys, perhaps specifically boys quickly falling behind in literacy, Boys’ Life began to include graphic novels, presumably hoping to encourage its scouts to read. The Boys’ Life graphic novel Macbeth is part of the magazine’s ‘Bank Street Classic Tale’ series, which started in February 1990 and appeared sporadically until it ended in November 2001, after a total of twenty-five adaptations, each sixteen pages long. The Urban Scouting Division of Boy Scouts started the series with the aim of ‘promoting the fun, excitement, and vigor of rereading’. The classic tales come from the Bank Street College of Education, an independent graduate school founded in 1916 by the famous librarian Lucy Sprague Mitchel, primarily known for her hugely important outreach programmes. Bank Street Classics were part of several new educational features added to Boys’ Life in the 1990s with the intention of ‘fostering new and renewed interests in reading for American boys in addition to the outdoor activities for which it is primarily known’. A major pioneer of this change was J. Warren Young, who spent thirty-two years as a publisher of Boys’ Life before his death in 2018. According to his obituary on blog. scoutingmagazine.org, he showed young people that reading can be empowering, engaging and exciting. Young saw books and magazines as doorways to a new world. He promoted literacy by providing material that young people actually want to read. In 1990, Young and Boys’ Life partnered with the Bank Street College of Education in New York to introduce the Bank Street Classic Tales. Four times a year, readers were taken around the world on thrilling adventures. (Wendell 2018) As if equating reading with fire-building, camping and first aid, this initiative was called ‘Reading: The New Boy Scout Survival Skill’. The Macbeth graphic novel, appearing in the May 2001 issue as part of the ninetieth anniversary of the magazine, accords with Erica Hateley’s assessment of Macbeth adaptations in which a

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masculine protagonist or reader is defined against the witches and Lady Macbeth, who are negative models of femininity which must be rejected (2009: 84).7 The first image depicts Macbeth front and centre in a cauldron surrounded ominously by the witches’ hands (see Figure 12.5). The five hands tightly frame Macbeth, signalling their controlling power over him. When Macbeth first returns to his castle after relating the initial prophesies from the witches to his wife, Lady Macbeth first mentions the idea of murdering Duncan, telling Macbeth simply to ‘put this out of your mind; people can see right through you. Just be a good host, and leave the rest to me’ (Macbeth 2001: n.p.). As Catherine Thomas writes of illustrated versions of Lady Macbeth, they often ‘fall back into old, cliched stereotypes, thus reinforcing traditional gendered expectations about who is authored to use power, express ambition, and pursue a range of desires’ (2012: 82). The Lady Macbeth of Boys’ Life fully exemplifies such clichéd stereotypes, seductively pressuring Macbeth to murder Duncan and challenging his manhood whenever he hesitates. Yet by the end of the comic, the authors are not at all ambiguous about Macbeth’s wickedness, and he is clearly to blame for what transpires. By contrast, the character with whom readers

FIGURE 12.5 Cover image and first page of Macbeth, Boys’ Life magazine (May 2001).

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are asked to identify is Macduff, who is constructed as a male hero fiercely loyal to his family who amidst great difficulties (i.e., confronting Macbeth) exemplifies the Scout Oath, being ‘physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight’ (‘Boy Scout Oath’ 2019). Indeed, BSA often turns to Boys’ Life and uses Shakespeare to inscribe their own system of values, though not always relating explicitly to gender. For instance, Shakespeare is depicted as important cultural capital, and he/it intersects with other parts of American culture assumed important to readers. Multiple geek cultures intersect in the monthly column ‘Book Zone’. As one example, Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope (2013) – the fourth episode from the Star Wars film series appropriated into blank verse – is marketed frequently in the magazine, suggesting a further subcultural crossroads of scouts, Shakespeare fans and Star Wars. Furthermore, the magazine at times even participates in (or at least mentions) scholarly debates. For instance, the May 2015 edition of ‘Book Zone’ contains an article entitled ‘The True Face of William Shakespeare’, which discusses the controversy surrounding the Sanders portrait. While obviously not all uses of Shakespeare speak to the organization’s gender values, more often than not the Bard is called upon for this specific purpose, as when reviews of Shakespeare films take the opportunity to use such adaptations to encourage or discourage certain gender-based behaviours deemed suitable or unsuitable. For example, one reviewer in the December 1935 issue says of the film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (directors Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle) that it will be great for a ‘boy movie fan’, before explaining why: But the real big surprise is the boy actor, by name, Mickey Rooney. He plays the part of Mischief, otherwise called Puck. Did the secret ambition ever possess you to run the world? . . . A boy (the aforesaid Mischief or Puck) is afforded to run the world as he pleases. Literally, he turns things upside down and gets a big laugh out of it. Does he? Only seeing the performance can fully answer that question. Never have I seen a boy act so well and, why shouldn’t he when he is privileged to act like a King for a day? Of course, in the end, he makes amends, as a good boy should. (Mathiews 1935: 24)

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Furthermore, whenever a celebrity or important male figure is interviewed or discussed in the magazine, any possible connection to Shakespeare from the man’s past is included, as is the case in issues with focuses ranging from comedian Jim Varney and actor James Cagney to attorney Joseph Quincy Jr. In all cases, the articles reference Shakespeare, collectively communicating the centrality of the Bard to these men’s success. As a result, BSA positions Shakespeare as important cultural capital for masculine success in America. Often that success is indebted more broadly to an appreciation for theatre life, and Boys’ Life magazine uses Shakespeare to instill excitement for the theatre in its readers. In ‘Let’s Go To The Theater’ from the October 1970 issue, for instance, Harold Levitt tells scouts of the importance of the dramatic arts for their lives: In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the actor must also show how learning the truth can gradually make a man miserable and change his life. Hamlet learns that his father was killed by his uncle, and by the end of the play he kills his uncle for revenge. But before he gets to the end he has to fight with Laertes, follow a ghost, stab Polonius to death, make an escape at sea, duel again with Laertes and kill him, and finally stab his uncle to death. (Levitt 1970: 40) Essentially, by focusing on the violent and exciting plot of Hamlet, Levitt hopes to inspire reluctant readers and theatre-goers to experience Shakespeare.

Conclusion By studying Shakespeare’s appearances in often the most unlikely of places, such as 1911 campfire skits, 2001 graphic novels in Boys’ Life magazine and how so many male role models know their Shakespeare, scholars can recognize the importance of taking seriously Stephens and McCallum’s claim that ‘literary and cultural formations re-presented in retold stories are often apparent bearers of clear attitudes to such things as power, hierarchy, gender, class, and race’ (1998: 21). As demonstrated, for more than a century, whenever BSA invokes Shakespeare it has more often than not been

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a loaded (mis)reading designed to present values originating from some place other than Shakespeare. As Stephens and McCallum explain, such use of Shakespeare raises issues of ‘power, hierarchy, gender, class, and race’, suggesting that a young Shakespeare would be at home reading Boys’ Life, encompassing the specific principles of BSA, and understanding, however superficially, that knowledge of the playwright brings with it great cultural capital for boys and men. Recognizing as much is important for adaptation studies, since the appearance of Shakespeare, even when those appearances are seemingly simple and innocuous, often brings with it the values of the greater organization and greater culture as a whole. For, while BSA on the one hand is a geeky organization often on the periphery of contemporary childhood, on the other hand it is a cultural mainstay in America. In recent years, BSA’s gender practices have been in the American spotlight, as its politics have shifted from the decidedly conservative and exclusive to the increasingly progressive and inclusive. The most controversial aspect of BSA, and the concern directly related to this topic, is its stance on non-heteronormative scouts and scout leaders. On 28 June 2000, the US Supreme Court decided in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that BSA (as a private organization) had the constitutional right of the freedom of association to exclude non-straight scouts from its organization since they supposedly did not fit into the organization’s ‘Declaration of Religious Principle (Greenhouse 2000). According to Reagan-appointed Chief Justice Rehnquist, ‘Dale’s presence in the Boy Scouts would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message, both to the youth members and the world that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior’ (qtd. in Greenhouse 2000). This decision received considerable attention during the subsequent two decades. As but one example, in 2012, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney stated during their presidential campaigns that they opposed this ban on gay scouts, a position Romney first stated publicly in 1994 (Lee 2012). That both politicians received questions and/or felt the need to address BSA’s stance on gay members demonstrates how much this organization’s gender-based values have been in the public eye, in turn signifying the importance of understanding what role Shakespeare has played in these values. It was not until 2013 that BSA significantly changed their policies to be more inclusive when the organization ended its ban on openly

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gay members. Then, in 2015, the organization ended its homophobic ban on openly gay adult leaders. Furthermore, in 2017, it completely removed its reliance on biological sex and individual birth certificates as its determining factor in eligibility for membership, and the organization posted their official statement on their website on 30 January 2017 (Chokshi 2017).8 Finally, in 2018, The Boy Scouts of America officially changed its name to ‘Scouts BSA’, presumably to emphasize Scouting over the word boy. The pictures on their homepage, at least at the time of writing, suggest a more inclusive position, as there appears to be a variety of genders and ethnicities represented. BSA is a part of American geek culture and in recent years has reflected contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. In the past, Boys’ Life called on Shakespeare to engage with such debates, as the playwright played an important role in the gender formation that was a core ideology of this organization and its major publication. As I have written elsewhere, authors of children’s and young adult literature since the 1990s have used Shakespeare to create and to reinforce as well as challenge heteronormativity. Sadly, this has not been the case with the BSA. Instead, Shakespeare was used to reinforce heteronormative ideas. Now that Boy Scouts of America has become Scouts BSA, although this new ‘BSA’ means the same as the original ‘BSA’, perhaps it will call upon Shakespeare once more to reflect these policy changes for membership and leadership. They have used Shakespeare in the past to inscribe their own values, so will they turn once again to Shakespeare to revise their century-old heteronormative stance? Other media aimed at America’s youth have adapted canonical literature to more accurately reflect the diversity of young Americans, such as Christian in Clueless, Mercutio in William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet, or Polly in Exit, Pursued by a Bear. At present, however, it is too early to tell. Yet instead of all-American traditional boyhoods being set against a Tom Sawyer-like Young Will from Stratford or a heteronormative Macduff avenging his family, hopefully Boys’ Life will continue its investment in literacy and reading by including a range of gender identities in its articles. Shakespeare, then, with his/its range of gender representations, will be available to address this cultural shift toward a more inclusive understanding of geeky American boyhood.

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Notes 1 I am grateful to Andrew James Hartley and Peter Holland for their feedback on this work during all its stages. 2 In 2006, Georgianna Ziegler published an essay entitled ‘Introducing Shakespeare: The Earliest Versions for Children’, which considers a number of pre-Lambs and pre-Bowdler texts that adapted Shakespeare for children, though none of them were as popular as these two texts. 3 I am including the year each merit badge was introduced. 4 All references to Boys Life magazine can be found in the magazine’s digital archive: https://boyslife.org/wayback/. 5 Stenroos (1889–1971) is a Finnish Olympic marathon runner who set several world records during the 1920s. 6 For example, Michael Gurian’s The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men (1996) and The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life (2007), William Pollack’s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), Peg Tyre’s The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do (2009), James Garbarino’s Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (1999) and Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (2009). 7 Mike Vosburg is famous for illustrating the Tales for the Crypt comics, and Suzette Haden Elgin is known for her feminist supernatural novels. 8 ‘As one of America’s largest youth-serving organizations, the Boy Scouts of America works to bring the benefits of our programs to as many children, families and communities as possible. While we offer a number of programs that serve all youth, Cub Scouting and Boy Scouting are specifically designed to meet the needs of boys. For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools, youth sports and other youth organizations, relied on biological sex – such as on an individual’s birth certificate – to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs. However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary from state to state. As a result, the Boy Scouts of America accepts and registers boys in the Cub and Boy Scout programs based on the gender identity indicated on the application.

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The Boy Scouts of America is committed to identifying program options that will help us truly serve the whole family, and this is an area that we will continue to thoughtfully evaluate to bring the benefits of Scouting to the greatest number of youth possible – all [the] while remaining true to our core values, outlined in the Scout Oath and Law’ (Chokshi 2017; ‘BSA Addresses’ 2017).

Works cited ‘The Boy from Stratford’ (1964), Boys’ Life, April. ‘Boy Scout Oath, Law, Motto and Slogan and the Outdoor Code’ (2019), ussoutrs.org. 1 January, http://www.usscouts.org/advance/boyscout/ bsoathlaw.asp. ‘BSA Addresses Gender Identity’ (2017), Scoutingnewsroom.org., 1 January. Chokshi, Niraj (2017), ‘Boy Scouts Reversing Century-Old Stance, Will Allow Transgender Boys’, New York Times, 30 January. Frey, Charles H. (2001), ‘A Brief History of Shakespeare as Children’s Literature’, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 7: 147–56. Greenhouse, Linda (2000), ‘The Supreme Court: The New Jersey Case; Supreme Court Backs Boy Scouts in Ban of Gays from Membership’, New York Times, 29 June. Hateley, Erica (2009), Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital. New York: Routledge. Kidd, Kenneth (2005), Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb (1807), Tales from Shakespeare: Designed for the Use of Young Persons, 2 vols, illus. William Mulready. London: Hodgkins. Lee, Kristen A. (2012), ‘President Obama Joins Mitt Romney in Opposing Boy Scouts Ban on Gay Members’, New York Daily News, 9 August, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/president-obama-joinsmitt-romney-opposing-boy-scouts-ban-gay-membersarticle-1.1132380. Levitt, Harold (1970), ‘Let’s Go To The Theater’, Boys’ Life, October. Macbeth (2001), Boys’ Life, May. Mathiews, Franklin K. (1935), ‘Movies of the Month’, Boys’ Life, December, 24, 57. Neil, Michael (1998), ‘Post-Colonial Shakespeare? Writing Away from the Centre’, in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares, 164–85. London: Routledge.

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Rokison, Abigail (2013), Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations. New York: Arden Bloomsbury. Sasser, M. Tyler (2016), ‘ “No one queens it like himself”: Performing Unconventional Boyhood in Historical Shakespearean Fiction’, Children’s Literature in Education 47, no. 1: 50–65. Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum (1998), Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York: Garland. Thomas, Catherine E. (2012), ‘(Un)Sexing Lady Macbeth: Gender, Poer, and Visual Rhetoric in Her Graphic Afterlives’, Graphic Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 31: 81–98. Wendell, Bryan (2018). ‘J. Warren Young, Who Served 32 years as Boys’ Life Publisher, Dies at 79’, Scouting Magazine, 23 March, https://blog. scoutingmagazine.org/2018/03/23/j-warren-young-who-served32-years-as-boys-life-publisher-dies-at-79/. Ziegler, Georgianna (2006), ‘Introducing Shakespeare: The Earliest Versions for Children’, Shakespeare 2, no. 2: 132–51.

13 Some Women Just Want to Watch the World Burn Gendered Villainy in Shakespeare and Geek Culture Jessica McCall

The internet has allowed for an exponential explosion of geek spaces bringing along with it a diversity of subjective experiences and interpretations, but the question of ‘geek culture’ is not a gender neutral one as is obvious through the response to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Ghostbusters (2016) and Captain Marvel (2019). Geek culture doesn’t require explicit feminism to ignite the trolls; stories where women are placed at the centre of the narrative and treated as complex characters are, apparently, all it takes. But while geeky stories recycle, remythologize and reimagine narratives from a variety of sources, geeky narratives nonetheless remain thematically dominated by a Western ideal of cis-masculine intellectualism. Women and girls, despite being ‘50 percent of video game players, and 40 to 50 percent of creators’ (Hurley 2016: 14) still face 226

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scathing sexism, and remakes of ‘classic’ geek texts inspire headlines like, ‘The World is Revolting Against Hollywood’s Awful Feminist Remake of Ghostbusters’ (Brown 2016). Recognizing the sexism, however, is the easy part and, despite the outcry on the internet, women-centred geek media are on the rise with better, more complex representation, but the philosophical explorations of geeky characters have not kept pace with this production of new media. One avenue for deconstructing sexism within geeky spaces is an analysis of how power is constructed, employed and embodied within geeky narratives. One commonly utilized avenue for analysis of power – and the heroism and villainy which portray it – is Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a common ingredient in geek culture used to elevate and complicate it and that relationship is reciprocal: Shakespeare gives geek culture gravitas and geek culture, in turn, makes Shakespeare relatable to a broader audience. Part of what makes this relationship between Shakespeare and geek culture so powerful is the positioning of both within mythic semiotics. Shakespeare dominates academic culture and remains ‘the most performed and read, the most written about, but also the most remembered’ (McKenzie and Papadopoulou 2012: viii) dramatist of the last millennium, while the twentieth century saw geek culture become the most dominant producer of the hero quest – the myth which drives the bestselling movies, books and video games of recent decades. Myths are the particles we build our cultural structures from (McCall 2017: 59) and it is myth which makes knowledge seem real. What a myth makes us feel decides not only what we believe, but what seems possible. Karen Armstrong states, ‘A myth is true because it is effective not because it gives us factual information’ (Armstrong 2005: 10) and as Barthes argues, ‘Myth can reach everything, corrupt everything’ and ‘myth essentially aims at causing an immediate impression – it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it’ (Barthes 1972: 131–2). The feelings caused by myth are so strong that they cannot be subverted by new knowledge without first recognizing how those feelings filtered our interpretation of data. Evidence and logic can be twisted and manipulated because reality is subjective; there is a chasm of emotion between seeing evidence for a thing and believing it. Pride, success, even our sense

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of self are emotional factors when assessing the validity of new information. Denying that or attempting to subvert emotion through arguments of ‘objectivity’ rather than critically considering and exploring the effect of subjectivity on meaning-making fails to understand what makes people refuse observational science. The rise of anti-intellectualism in the twenty-first century, debates over climate change, vaccines, even the necessity of the Humanities in educational curriculums are all rooted in, and perpetuated by, a cognitive dissonance that perverts the beautiful, problem-solving imagination of ‘what if?’ into something which renders evidence, logic and whole epistemologies as ‘brainwashing’. Myth ‘is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words’ and ‘all mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it’ (Armstrong 2005: 4). Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of knowledge production and sharing. People need myth – not because we need to lie to ourselves but because there are questions we cannot answer. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub’ (Ham 3.1.64). The vastness of the cosmos, the unknowability of infinity or other dimensions, a reconception of time as nonlinear: this work is done through conceptual metaphor and communicated through the semiotic system of language as much as numbers and that conceptual metaphor is accepted or rejected by the populace, in part, because of myth. Engagement with narratives is a metaphysical act – Shakespeare’s narratives fuel modern understandings of humanity and dominate geeky debates of personhood in popular texts like Star Trek, V for Vendetta and the Batman mythos.1 The telling of these stories, in conjunction with the Shakespeare they use, decides whose motives are worthy of exploration and writes the rules of modern morality through heroes, anti-heroes and the villains which reify those rules by breaking them. Eagleton states that ‘the hallmark of the “linguist revolution” of the twentieth century, from Saussure and Wittgenstein to contemporary literary theory, is the recognition that meaning is not simply something “expressed” or “reflected” in language: it is actually produced by it’ (Eagleton 2008: 52). Good and evil, hero and villain – there is a plethora of morally speckled male characters ranging from Shakespeare’s Iago to Batman’s Joker, but the ranks of female characters show far less diversity. A rise in heroism is evident

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through Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Captain Marvel and the increased presence of women within the Marvel cinematic universe; however, the female villains have failed to keep pace in terms of popularity and complexity. Dr. Poison from Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) fell back into the stereotype of ‘scarred’ woman equals evil compared to Wonder Woman’s morally pure ‘beauty’. The cast of Mad Max: Fury Road offered a wider range of physicality but their morality existed as the undeniable good under Immortan Joe’s fascistic reign. The semiotics of heroism have been undeniably broadened through these portrayals, rewriting the hero quest of female characters from what Pierrette Daly labels ‘the double quest for love and knowledge’ (Daly 1993: 13) into a quest about personal empowerment through self-discovery as opposed to heteronormative romance. But without villains to challenge this morality, female characters fail to escape the patriarchal duality that has inscribed them as saints or whores – there may be more ways to be a hero, but there remains only one way to be a villain. When an evil character is a woman, she is evil because she’s a woman. In Half Humankind, Katherine Henderson and Barbara McManus trace the historic association of ‘woman’ as inherently ‘evil’; by the time of the Renaissance, the layering of Pandora with Eve whose ‘fall and consequent subjection to man was the word of God’ had to be ‘taken into account’ (Henderson and McManus 1985: 7). There is a decided contrast in cultural responses to Milton’s Satan who ‘knows, or rather discovers during one marvelous speech, that is he is damned, like a good tragic hero’ and gets our ‘sympathy in many ways’ (Forsyth 2003: 4) versus Eve, Pandora, Jezebel or Delilah who prove only that women ‘all turn to monsters’ (KL 4.1.101). Men are not the cause, in multiple myths, of the doom of all humanity. Furthermore, narratives dominated or entirely about men are not too politically correct (Masood 2017) or too divisive (Trent 2018); they are thought-provoking, adventurous and universal. Thus, when an evil character is a man or masculine, as is the case with Milton’s Satan, his fall from grace is ‘actually necessary for salvation’ (Forsyth 2003: 13), and whole books treat that evil as nuanced. When an evil character is a woman, almost always, she’s just ‘crazy’.2 But the intersection between Shakespeare and geek culture could provide more torque to the ongoing cultural shift surrounding

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gender. If it is true that ‘more so than ever before academic literary criticism seems out of touch with the world beyond the university wall’ (McKenzie and Papadopoulou 2012: 2) then re-examining Shakespeare’s female villains through the lens of current, popular geeky media could ‘talk through the chink of a wall’ (MND 3.1.876). If, as Barthes claims, the only way to change a myth is to tell a better story (Barthes 1972: 135), then alternate readings and new connections between Shakespeare and geekery allow for a (re-)imagining of moral constructs built from myths of gender and power as portrayed through heroes and villains. Mike Alsford states that ‘the myth of the hero, and indeed the villain, represents our desire for a greater sense of confidence, personal identity and power to affect the world in which we find ourselves’ (Alsford 2006: 3). The masculine hero quest has become rooted, via geeky culture, in the binary of ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’ males which has been defined, in part, through the late twentieth-century genre of high school stories focused on the struggle between the jock and the geek. Jocks are physically imposing but generally a bit thick; unnecessarily mean and aggressive, the jock hunts the geek with all the merciless dedication of a predator, but the geek has the last laugh in the end. Inevitably, because the commodification of women’s bodies and their objectification has operated as one more marker of a successfully completed hero quest, ‘winning’ meant the geek ‘got the girl’. It is a plot line that permeates film, video games, novels and comic books and is the subject of Arthur Cho’s powerful essay in response to the Santa Barbara shootings, ‘Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds’ (Cho 2014). This trope removes the possibility of remythologization and squanders the popularity and power of geeky narratives to rewrite concepts of ‘mankind’ as synonymous with ‘humanity’. What of a Star Wars game where a young Sith apprentice, female this time, faces off against a Jedi quoting Macbeth? ‘I will not yield’ (Mac 5.8.27) is the battle cry of a villain who will fight to the end, a character remarkable in their stubbornness if also dangerously ambitious and violent. How might the language of Shakespeare’s characters, imbued with agency, explicitly reflecting on the world and their place in it, produce a meaning of gender where femininity is not inherently evil, but is allowed to be heroic, villainous and philosophically interesting with as much nuance, individuality and freedom as masculinity? If, as the saying goes, a hero is only as good

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as her villain, where are all the women who want to watch the world burn? The ranks of Shakespearean women are full of interesting villains, but Goneril and Regan have been dismissed too often as ‘unnatural hags, monsters of the deep’ (Bloom 1998: 485). Such a negative description is not atypical for villainous characters except that the monstrousness of Goneril and Regan has sparked none of the intellectual inquiry or sympathy shown to Edmund. Stephen Greenblatt sums both daughters up as having ‘vicious ingratitude’ (2004: 360) and, as Alex Thom points out, ‘many prominent works of criticism have been marked by this reductive perspective’ (Thom 2019: 1). Thom goes on to argue that Shakespeare finds ‘opportunities to open up points of difference between Goneril and Regan, while also nuancing their moral character’ (2019: 2) and this ‘critical poverty . . . speaks to a pervasive desire to still hold . . . to the fascistic and sexist ethical criterion that Lear applies to all three of his daughters’ (2019: 2). What’s more, this ‘pervasive desire’ is anything but new; the last forty years of feminist Shakespearean criticism has argued that ‘evil in Shakespearean women seems to grow from a sexuality so out of tune with its procreative potential that it breeds villainy rather than children’ (Berggren 1980: 24) and that, ‘It is only when they [Goneril and Regan] begin to speak and act in ways that don’t suit Lear, that he sees them as unnatural, devilish and unwomanly’ (Kelly 2001: 6). Goneril and Regan are evil ‘as a result of their gender transgression’ (Alfar 2003: 19). But Edmund, Iago, Richard II and non-Shakespearean characters like the Joker portray an evil that has complicated what it means to be a ‘man’. Their chaos, diabolical ambitions and unyielding pursuit of freedom have blurred moral and ethical lines – if a man is denied his liberty, his humanity, and asked to lessen himself because those around him refuse to better themselves, who is the real villain? Lear commits each of these acts against his daughters in the first scene of the play and each daughter responds uniquely – but it is Regan, I argue, who displays, with her own diabolical ambitions, not simply a desire for chaos but a desire to be free. And it is in pursuit of that goal, her own radical freedom, that she discovers her own twisted joy in setting the kingdom on fire. While the hero’s power is ultimately contained – though I would argue not restrained – by their community, it is the villain who raises some of the most enduring questions about freedom. ‘Better

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to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’ Satan declares (Milton, Paradise Lost 1.263), crafting a literary legacy that has persisted across centuries, moving from villains into anti-heroes and back again. Alan Moore’s V chides London, blaming them for their own dictatorial imprisonment, when he states, ‘You don’t seem to want to face up to any real responsibility, or to be your own boss’ (Moore 1982: 114). So terrified of Hell was London, they chose to serve instead and it is that sin which justifies V’s pursuit of anarchy. Freedom is messy and, in a community dependent upon mutually agreed upon limits it cannot be absolute, but without it we are puppets who have sacrificed power – and thus the self – for safety. ‘Free’ as Stephen Greenblatt points out, is a ‘word that with its variants Shakespeare uses hundreds of times’ and ‘means in his work the opposite of confined, imprisoned, subjected, constrained, and afraid to speak out. Those who are called free are unimpeded and untrammeled, generous and magnanimous, frank and openminded’ (2010: 1). And as Mike Alsford states, ‘Freedom is something that we tend to value very highly whether it be political freedom or freedom of expression’ and that the ‘person who operates according to their own rules, who refuses to conform or be limited by convention or taboo has a strength and presence that it is hard to ignore and in some ways is hard not to admire’ (Alsford 2006: 95). Freedom is the allure of Milton’s Satan. Freedom is the philosophical underpinnings of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And at the extremes of freedom, there is a chaos found in the Joker, a character linked frequently to Shakespeare’s Iago. Richmond Adams argues that, ‘The Joker and Iago are connected through their mutual transcendence of normal human boundaries and . . . Somehow, it seems that Iago and The Joker simply are’ (Adams 2016: 4). The two characters are so free they defy the very laws of nature constraining the rest of the world. Audiences and critics alike claim that these characters are an enigma; Adams latches onto Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reading of Iago as a character with ‘motiveless malignancy’ and argues that ‘it is both Alfred’s use of “good sport,” coupled with The Joker’s unclear motives that opens The Dark Knight onto the realm of Shakespearean moral complexity’ (Adams 2016: 1). Frank Miller, writer of The Dark Knight Returns, which is considered by many to be a classic within the Batman canon, describes his understanding of the Joker: ‘I believe that the Joker is

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not so much insane as satanic. He’s evil incarnate, and he’s so malicious that it goes beyond anything we could understand’ (cyberghostface 2016) (emphasis mine). I disagree with any reading of evil that paints a character – or person – as beyond understanding. After all, what does the Joker do in comic books that Columbus didn’t? Or European colonizers? Evil like the Joker’s or Iago’s is not ‘beyond anything we could understand’ but is, rather, exactly here with us, in us, all around us. It is something we’ve chosen not to understand. The Joker of The Dark Knight has obvious motives which he states and demonstrates throughout the film: ‘You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke . . . They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you . . . See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve’ (The Dark Knight 2008). Nor does Iago fail to provide motive when he states, ‘by the faith of a man / I know my price, I am worth no worse a place’ (Oth 1.1.11–12). Chaos and obsession, wanting to watch the world burn, is a motive. Jealousy and racism is a motive. It’s not that the Joker and Iago do not have reasons for their actions, but critics, geeks and fans alike have treated those reasons as philosophically complex when the characters are men, and deranged, irrational and unworthy of reflection when the characters are women. Male villains are philosophically interesting because the Western literary tradition has made ‘man’ synonymous with reason, logic and individual; thus a man’s villainy is a statement on Descartes’s conception of humanity. ‘I think therefore I am’, but it is only men who think – women feel. A woman’s villainy is because she’s failed at being a woman – she is ugly, she is sexually undesirable, she is unchaste or she is crazy. Men are villains because they pursue freedom. Women are villains because too much freedom made them evil.3 Geek culture has taken characters at the extremes of individualism, sprinkled a dash of good storytelling and iced the whole thing in witty dialogue; while this recipe often produces enduring texts with exciting nuance, it has also reified the category of the singular male genius. Iago, Hamlet, Prospero, the Joker, V, Ozymandias, Sherlock and Moriarty, even the Batman himself – the singular male genius is not always a villain, though he is often closer to anti-hero than hero. He is too free, after all, to live harmoniously within the community. The singular male genius sees something the rest of us cannot – he has achieved radical individuality and with it radical

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freedom. Greenblatt points out that, ‘Most of Shakespeare’s kings make at least a show of being bound by law and custom’ (2010: 105) but also that ‘there is evidence that autonomy as a concept interested Shakespeare’ (2010: 106). As Greenblatt elaborates, ‘There is a dream of physical autonomy, exemption from the mortal vulnerability of the flesh . . . There is a recurrent dream of social autonomy, independence from the dense network of friends, family, and alliances that ties the individual to a carefully ordered world. And there is the dream of mental autonomy’ (2010: 106). In geek culture, as in Shakespeare, freedom and autonomy – the power to choose and control the self – are consistently compelling explorations. Regan does not achieve radical freedom, poisoned by Goneril before her conquest is complete, but I propose a reading of her that does offer radical individuation. Regan is far more opaque than the Joker or Iago. She offers no motivation in her own words, and her only explicit glee appears during moments of physical cruelty like the blinding of Gloucester. While Regan does state, ‘I never shall endure her. Dear my lord, / Be not familiar with her’ (KL 5.1.15– 16), the closest she comes to a proclamation of love is ‘Edmund and I have talked, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s’ (KL 4.5.32–4). ‘Convenient’ is hardly the loaded language of emotion that Shakespeare’s other characters use, including villains. As Thom argues, ‘The daughters bring their father’s property and power to their husbands, but they are impeded from using them. They are the means and object of transmission, not a subject in their own right’ (2019: 8). Regan’s sexual interest in Edmund can be seen as a strategy – as an illegitimate child, Edmund is not of equal rank to her. By marrying Edmund she achieves the security only available to women through marriage while maintaining a power imbalance that favours her; however, the power Regan gains in marrying a man to be her puppet is lost if that same man sleeps with her sister. Foakes’s editorial notes from 5.1 gloss Regan’s question to Goneril, ‘Sister, you’ll go with us?’ (KL 5.1.35), stating, ‘Regan presumably wants to be with Edmund and keep Goneril in view’ (Shakespeare 2004: 360). A presumption is an interpretative choice, not a literary fact. Finally, it is Edmund’s statement, ‘To both these sisters have I sworn love, / Each jealous of the other as the stung / adder’ (KL 5.1.56–7), that is often presented as unequivocal proof of the sisters’ jealousy – a move that lessens

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the power and influence of Regan and Goneril, while simultaneously elevating Edmund as a master manipulator more in line with a villain like Moriarty. And yet, a villain himself, Edmund is hardly a reliable narrator. But it is Edmund, along with Shylock and Iago, not Regan or Goneril, that Stephen Greenblatt uses to explore ‘Shakespeare’s fascination with the way in which the dream of absolute freedom and the dream of absolute individuation fuse in intractable, murderous hatred’ (2010: 15). But it is Regan who first demands that Lear dismiss half his train (KL 2.2.393) and, in 3.7 during the blinding of Gloucester, it is Regan too who instigates violence when she plucks his beard at 3.7.34. Furthermore, it is Regan who kills the servant that attempts to stop the torture. While Cornwall fights and is fatally wounded, Regan stabs the man in the back, literally, at 3.7.79. Regan won’t be bartered with or stopped; even when awarded half the kingdom her movement against Goneril through Edmund shows a desire for total domination – total freedom. My reading of Regan is one which explicitly dismisses what has been ‘presumed’ of Regan and my point is not to argue for this version as superior to other interpretations; rather, I merely hope to illuminate the possibility of staging a Regan who wants to watch the world burn. Alsford states, ‘I think it is a fair observation to make that villains generally seek to be a law unto themselves. They usually have as their primary goal power over others, world domination, control of the entire universe or, in some really ambitious instances, godhood’ (2006: 96). Regan exists in a world where she must be ‘preoccupied by Lear’s ill-temper’ and ‘a fear of Lear’s “unconstant starts”’ (Thom 2019: 4). Her wealth, her possessions, her body are owned by her husband, and behaving – playing the game of the Love Auction – failed to secure her the largest piece of the kingdom. It’s a narrative not dissimilar to the Joker’s refrain in Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke, a philosophy so fascinating it has spilled an endless amount of ink: ‘All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy’ (Moore 1988: 38). The loss of autonomy, or, perhaps a better phrasing is the discovery that he never had real autonomy, drives the Joker to madness and the narrative of that descent is one millions of fans around the world have found thought-provoking and universal. Meanwhile, the narrative of Regan’s attempts to secure her own autonomy results in interpretations that she is ‘probably the most horrible figure Shakespeare ever created’ (Coe 1963: 314).

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The singular male genius lurks behind every conversation where horrendous deeds – Thanos destroying half of all life in the universe, for example – are agreed to be ‘terrible’ but also ‘make a sort of sense’. However, no woman can ever be so singular which, in turn, means her genius is never quite as impressive. A woman’s body, and thus her person, her spirit, her self, exists as part of the community regardless of her individual choice. Current debates about reproductive rights and hysterical fears expressed by men regarding #metoo consistently reveal an uncomfortable truth: women are a plurality not people and if they choose to be people it is not in pursuit of radical individuation but because they have failed to meet the demands of the community. To be a philosophically interesting villain, the character must be independent, rebellious and free. But women cannot be radically free without being ‘too political’ and, thus, their villainy can never be so fascinating or fun. We are never so vulnerable as when in thrall to our emotions; this is the argument and necessity for critical distance, but isn’t recognizing the power of stories to generate social structures (and in turn our perceived reality) an aspect of the Humanities that offers value to our discipline? Stories shape society and we fight and defend that society, in part, according to the stories we love. The question was never whether or not our ideologies were subjective; it was whether or not we were strong enough to admit and interrogate that subjectivity and the power and privilege some of us were afforded by pretending to be objective. Geek culture is an incredibly diverse and fractured landscape, but the sharing of community and imagination has turned science fiction into science fact and inspired greater, more nuanced ethical understandings of civil rights and the dignities that must be afforded every living being. Remythologizing what constitutes humanity is the revolution of the internet and the rise of the internet is the weapon of the geek. Shakespeare is ready made to do all the heavy lifting for us – we just need to apply him with a little more imagination.

Notes 1 Main characters in both Star Trek VI and V for Vendetta quote Shakespeare while delivering soliloquies explaining their motivations and revealing interiority.

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2 See Chandler 2019; Kapsalis 2017. 3 The amazon myth is the clearest representation of this phenomena and is immediately evident in Spenser’s Radigund. Wonder Woman avoids this fate only because she has literally dedicated herself to a ‘man’s world’. This does not mean, however, that some Wonder Woman narratives fail to subvert this trope even as others embody it.

Works cited Adams, Richmond (2016), ‘Cannibalized Chaos: Iago, The Joker and the “Good Sport” of Postmodernism’, Film International, 15 March, http://filmint.nu/?p=17822. Alfar, Cristina Leon (2003), Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Alsford, Mike (2006), Heroes & Villains. Waco, TX : Baylor University Press. Armstrong, Karen (2005), A Short History of Myth. New York: Canongate. Barthes, Roland (1972), Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Berggren, Paula (1980), ‘The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (eds), The Woman’s Part, 17–34. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Bloom, Harold (1998), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Brown, David (2016), ‘The World is Revolting Against Hollywood’s Awful Feminist Remake of Ghostbusters’, Return of Kings, 7 March, http:// www.returnofkings.com/82236/the-world-is-revolting-againsthollywoods-awful-feminist-remake-of-ghostbusters. Chandler, Abigail (2019), ‘Game of Thrones has Betrayed the Women who Made it Great’, Guardian, 8 May, https://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2019/may/08/game-of-thrones-has-betrayed-the-womenwho-made-it-great. Cho, Arthur (2014), ‘Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds’, Daily Beast, 27 May, https://arthur-chu.com/ your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds-thedaily-beast/. Coe, Charles Norton (1963), ‘Regan, Goneril, Edmund, and Claudius’, in Demi-Devils: The Character of Shakespeare’s Villains. New York: Bookman Associates.

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cyberghostface (2016), ‘The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade’, https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/6263411.html?thread=174568051 &style=light. Daly, Pierrette (1993), Heroic Tropes: Gender and Intertext. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. The Dark Knight (2008), [Film] dir. Christopher Nolan, Warner Brothers. Eagleton, Terry (2008), Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forsyth, Neil (2003), The Satanic Epic. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (2004), Will in the World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Greenblatt, Stephen (2010), Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, Katherine and Barbara McManus (1985), Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England, 1540–1640. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hurley, Kameron (2016), The Geek Feminist Revolution. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC . Kapsalis, Terri (2017), ‘Hysteria, Witches, and The Wandering Uterus: A Brief History’, Literary Hub, 5 April, https://lithub.com/hysteriawitches-and-the-wandering-uterus-a-brief-history/. Kelly, Philippa (2001), ‘King Lear: Kinder Casts for Goneril and Regan’, Sydney Studies in English 27: 3–18. Masood, Abdullah (2017), ‘How Over-Political Correctness is Ruining Nerdy Cinema’, Geeks, n.d., https://geeks.media/how-over-politicalcorrectness-is-ruining-nerdy-cinema. McCall, Jessica (2017), ‘Close Reading: The Theory Which is Not One’, Early Modern Culture 12, no. 7: 54–70. McKenzie, William and Theodora Papadopoulou (2012), Shakespeare and I. London: Continuum. Milton, John (1993), Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Moore, Alan (1982), V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics. Moore, Alan (1988), Batman: The Killing Joke. New York: DC Comics. Shakespeare, William (1999), A Midsummer Nights Dream, ed. Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin. Shakespeare, William (2004), King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes. New York: Arden Shakespeare. Thom, Alexander Douglas (2019), ‘ “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” – An Ethical Reappraisal of Lear’s Daughters’, Postgraduate Research Seminar, 7 May, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.

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Trent, John (2018), ‘Marvel Adopts Divisive Feminist Slogan to Promote Captain Marvel’, Bounding Into Comics, 7 September, https:// boundingintocomics.com/2018/09/07/marvel-adopts-divisive-feministslogan-to-promote-captain-marvel/. Yehl, Joshua (2016), ‘Frank Miller and John Romita Jr. Discuss the Death of Jason Todd in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – the Last Crusade’, IGN , 7 June, https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/06/07/ frank-miller-and-john-romita-jr-discuss-the-death-of-jason-todd-inbatman-the-dark-knight-returns-the-last-crusade.

14 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as Shakespearean Theatre Rebecca Bushnell

Dating back to the success of the table-top game Dungeons and Dragons, nerd culture has long been fascinated with the medieval world, and that fascination has seeped into the geeky regions of videogaming. Features of the Middle Ages are now everywhere in fantasy and historical videogaming: at the time of writing this chapter, Wikipedia listed eighty-one entries on digital games set in some version of that past time. As a time of incessant war, the Middle Ages naturally lend themselves to adaptation in a medium that thrives on conflict, but for the geek community, the period’s imagined culture of romance, mysticism and magic (largely shaped by Tolkien) has also been a fruitful source of extensive game plots and elaborate mechanics.1 The role play intrinsic to gaming locates players deeply in that world, performing and creating stories of their own in a digitally remastered past. Among the most influential of such neomedieval games2 of the last decade are CD Projekt Red’s three blockbuster Witcher videogames (2007–15), derived from a series of fantasy novels by Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski.3 These open-world, role-playing games (RPG) follow the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, a mutagenenhanced monster hunter who travels through a war-ravaged, halfreal medieval world called the Continent, a land resembling Northern Europe in the Middle Ages but inhabited by elves, 240

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dwarves, witches and monsters as well as humans.4 The games thus intermix a recognizable past human world of cities and villages with a fantasy land of supernatural and quasi-human creatures. The costumes, buildings and vehicles are medieval, while the dialogue is performed in mostly anachronistic modern English.5 When the story is taken up in the final game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, much of the Continent has been taken over by the Nilfgaard Empire, but the population is still suffering from war and political unrest. Geralt roams the Continent on a torturous quest to find his adopted daughter Ciri, a young woman of extraordinary powers being pursued by the supernatural ‘Wild Hunt’. Midway through Geralt’s quest in The Witcher 3 the game introduces an episode called ‘The Play’s the Thing’. To proceed on his quest, Geralt must take part in an improvised theatre performance designed to flush out a missing ally. The episode involves this otherwise stalwart monster hunter in the process of creating a short play loosely modelled on late medieval and early modern theatre (with some contemporary twists): Geralt helps to write the script and select the cast; he searches for ‘ushers’ to control a potentially unruly audience; and he then reluctantly becomes the lead actor. ‘The Play’s the Thing’ can be seen as merely an amusing interlude in Geralt’s otherwise serious and fraught journey. However, its Shakespearean title and its representation of early theatre practices point more broadly to suggestive analogies between this neomedieval role-playing game and Shakespearean theatre, and in particular, Shakespeare’s history plays that have their own complex relationship to a late medieval world. The Witcher 3 replicates the history plays’ tension between following the narrative that is chronicle history and making history through acting and improvisation. As it interpolates Shakespeare directly into a complex digital environment, ‘The Play’s the Thing’ reminds videogamers that they too are actors, play-making through present role-playing. In his journey, Geralt passes through impoverished villages and teeming cities, as well as forests, fields and seas, getting involved in countless encounters that come to define his character. The game might capture the dimensions of the Continent on a map, but, as Kirk Hamilton (2015) comments, ‘Every tiny road on that map is a road you can walk down, every little patch of green is a full forest you can explore.’ To provide the combat players expect, at every

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juncture Geralt must fight monsters and bandits to proceed, but as he does so he also meets a wide range of people and creatures, interacting with villagers who need defending as well as with emperors and scheming politicians.6 While the game begins with Geralt’s default character derived from the previous two Witcher games (as well as Sapkowski’s novels), the player further shapes his character through choices made in dialogue and action in these encounters. Geralt is constantly confronted with both affective and moral decisions that the player makes for him, and thus his character become intertwined with the player’s:7 as Shaun Prescott (2015) observes, ‘Geralt has his complexities, but he inherits them from you. He’s a malleable character.’ As is typical of RPG games, decisions the player makes for Geralt can also influence the game’s outcome. This kind of gameplay connects moral choice and narrative consequences, making the player at least partly responsible for the story, even though the overall sequence of the narrative remains the same and the player must follow the main plot.8 As Brenna Hillier (2017) has counted them, ‘The Witcher 3 is riddled with consequential choices, all of which add up to a whopping 36 possible endgame states. Luckily, most of these are small variations of each other; there are, in fact, just three major endings.’ The differences in those three major endings depend largely on how Geralt treats Ciri after they are reunited: she may die if Geralt does not act appropriately in supporting her but, if Geralt does treat her as an adoptive father should, she survives to become either a witcher or Empress of Nilfgaard. The player can also influence some of the political landscape of the play: for example, determining who rules the city of Novigrad or the territory of Skellige.9 The Witcher 3 thus makes players creators both in and of the game’s neomedieval world, constructing elements of character and narrative while they watch the action that unfolds before them. In that sense, while still constrained by the game’s overall plot and programme, they are both actors and collaborators in writing the story as well as the audience of their own performance. While in evoking medieval culture and landscape they never pretend to offer actual history, the Witcher games do echo the broad genre of videogames that play with history.10 In discussing the function of all such videogames that engage the past, Sun-ha Hong (2015) describes the ‘fundamental ambiguity of the “real enough” in games; rules-bound yet emergently creative, bounded yet open

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ended, transparently artificial, yet able to rememorialize and reimagine the past and the real’ (37–8).11 In representing a landscape of war and political change, the Witcher games may initially look like the sub-genre of history-based strategy or civilization-building and war games. There the godlike player aims to take over a known or reimagined world by creating settlements and cities and controlling the movement of people and armies. Such historical videogames may offer the player agency to effect changes in history, thus, according to Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew Elliot (2013), teaching ‘the complex discourse of contingency, conditions, and circumstances’ inherent to history itself (13). However, the Witcher games more closely resemble historical story-based videogames in which the player enters directly into a simulated historical time and place by controlling the actions of an avatar in episodes defined as missions, engaging with the environment and the non-player controlled characters: for example, Ubisoft’s extremely popular series of Assassin’s Creed games, all of which allow the player to experience a realistically detailed specific place and time in the past.12 Many scenes there are pre-scripted ‘cut scenes’, but others allow exploration and interaction in the historical environment. However, while story-based games may thus allow the players to invent in interacting with the characters, the plot always ends one way, without contradicting the overall facts of history.13 Strategy games tend to prioritize agency and winning, exploring more what is – or what was – possible in historical time. Story-based games like Assassin’s Creed are more explicitly performative, where the player guides an avatar, improvising in dialogue and combat to win in each episode and move on. But winning this way, episode by episode, still only amounts to conforming in the end with both the designed fiction and history itself. Videogames like this thus generate the pleasure and tensions of history-making as the player acts within a set story. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, games also resemble theatre itself, insofar as games are thus ‘stories enacted by virtual moving bodies responding to the player’s commands and interacting with the game environment in present time’, yet defined by a preconceived script (Bushnell 2016: 66). The Witcher 3’s ‘The Play’s the Thing’ episode invites us to compare this game with Shakespeare’s plays, while its epic range and neomedievalism evoke Shakespeare’s history plays in particular, as a form of late medieval history-making through theatre-making.

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Neomedievalism is not a new phenomenon, of course: Shakespeare reimagined late medieval history in a sixteenth-century context, especially in the second tetralogy, which juxtaposes scenes set in the court inhabited by known historical figures with the world of Eastcheap, recognizably ‘modern’ in Shakespeare’s time and populated with invented characters. Many scholars have noted that those two worlds represent different senses of time and freedom of action: in Matthew Wagner’s description, the world of the court is ‘characterized by an orderly time, a chartable history, as it were, whereas the world of Eastcheap is marked by an atemporality, a wildness of time, which is neither regular nor chartable’ (2012: 70). Within those two kinds of time and place, Shakespeare exercised different levels of freedom to improvise story and plot, constrained by the overall arc of history but liberated to invent in the interstices. In so doing, the history plays also create tension between a providential view of history and a more open-ended vision, characterized in J. K. Barret’s words by ‘uncertainty, flexibility, and possibility’ (2016: 3). Scholars such as David Kastan (1982), Phyllis Rackin (1990), Brian Walsh (2009), Simon Palfrey and Matthew Wagner, as well as J. K. Barret, have all explored how the history plays’ temporal complexity may counteract the authority of history. As Palfrey puts it, at every level ‘Shakespeare’s playworlds embody anachrony, spatial slipperiness, placial coincidence: they mix historical times, geographical places, political institutions, ideologies, technologies’ (2014: 157). Through that mixture, possibilities emerge, even if history intervenes in the end. The most startling examples of Shakespeare’s playing with history are found in the two parts of Henry IV . Even though the chronicles defined the overall plots, in those plays the performance of that history is staged through a series of episodes constructed as contests in which the characters compete for advantage, when it seems that one or the other might win. This strategy is most evident in the scenes in Eastcheap, where Hal sets up games and always bests his opponents, usually by humiliating them: for example, the adventure at Gads Hill and the game of ‘anon’ played with Francis in Part 1. The point in these scenes is Hal’s winning itself, since the outcome does not apparently matter in the overall narrative. But this sense of competition and gaming also spills over into the historical plot. Hotspur joins the rebellion in the spirit of a game: in his impatience to advance the rebellion, he declares to his uncle, ‘O,

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let the hours be short / Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport’ (1.3.296–7) (and the episode at Gads Hill follows immediately thereafter). An unstable separation between open-ended, competitive gameplay and the historical narrative of conflict surfaces most vividly in the final scenes of the Battle of Shrewsbury. There Eastcheap’s comic world of play and game would first seem to bow to historical necessity: thus, when Falstaff tricks Hal into thinking his bottle of sack is a pistol, the Prince retorts, ‘What, is it a time to jest and dally now?’ (5.3.5), and in the thick of the battle Falstaff declares that ‘you shall find no boy’s play here’ (5.4.74–5). But, in fact, right up to the end, Falstaff and Hal never stop improvising and competing for dominance, both with each other and with the rebels in the battle. Hal wins in the conflict with Hotspur, but he allows for Falstaff to do so as well, in effect providing an alternative version of the ending. Of course, in Shakespeare’s chronicle sources, Hal did not kill Hotspur (nor, indeed, does he free Douglas or save the King). In this and other aspects, the play’s performative ending thus warps history. Experimentation thus spills over into this ending, which more explicitly deviates from the chronicles, delivering not only a win for Hal but also a strategic win for the playwright himself against the constraints of the story as it had been written for him. While the spirit of game and jest sours in Henry IV, Part 2, what does not fade is bitter competition. There both the historical and comic episodes are structured around conflict over who owns truth in an uncertain world. The play itself begins with Rumour’s spreading ‘false reports’, which set the tone for the play’s reinvention of history at every level of its action (and where Henry’s apparent death and revival eerily echo Falstaff’s death and revival in Part 1).14 Just as in Part I the openness of ‘sport’ or improvisation infects the whole play, here, when few narratives of the past can be fixed definitively, uncertainty spreads across both the historical and the commoner scenes, where everyone plays in bad faith.15 The botched rebellion thus culminates in Prince John’s double-cross of the rebels at Gaultree, twisting the hand-to-hand combats of Shrewsbury into a battle of words. In parallel, in Part 2 the Eastcheap competitive games have largely evolved into disputes over the truth of a charge or story. Falstaff defeats the Lord Chief Justice twice, first in the conflict over his relationship with Hal and then in the argument

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with the Hostess, as Falstaff wrenches ‘the true cause the false way’ (2.1.109). When Hal and Poins then wait upon Falstaff in disguise, which one of the drawers calls an ‘excellent stratagem’ (2.4.20), we anticipate a revival of the game of ‘anon’ from Part 1, but the scene descends into a dispute as to whether Falstaff intended abuse or not. The closer he comes to possessing the crown, Hal seems to lose his taste for play; after this encounter with Falstaff he confesses his shame ‘so idly to profane the precious time’ (2.4.367). Part 2 ends by reversing how Part 1 begins with a jest, when Hal rejects Falstaff as a ‘fool and jester’ (5.5.47) and Falstaff is borne off to the Fleet. Hal thus falls back into the role defined for him in the line of succession, and in history: the story ends, then, as it must end. When in the Witcher games players encounter Geralt’s journey in the half-realistic, half-fantastic world of the Continent, they encounter an experience comparable to Shakespeare’s historical play-making, as they are plunged into a neomedieval world like that of the history plays, one riddled with anachronisms and engaging the player in present performance in the past. Through the protean character of Geralt, an outsider not limited to a particular place, class or home, they can move among environments and participate in simulated history-making, either on a small scale in the side missions or in the broader sweep of the narrative, where making choices for Geralt can influence the story’s outcome. At the same time, in order to move the narrative forward, and for Geralt to complete his quest, players must comply at critical moments with the actions the game demands they complete. They may shape different versions of the story and receive different sorts of rewards for their performance, but the game’s programme does ultimately drive everyone to the end. This kind of tension between improvisational performance and compliance with the plot is indeed the theme of ‘The Play’s the Thing’. Like Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’, this interlude stages a play to entrap another character: in this case, to flush out of hiding Geralt’s friend, the ‘doppler’ Dudu (a doppler is a quasi-human creature who can change bodies at will). The play features a brief plot of a queen’s hiring of a witcher to kill a monster disguised as a prince betrothed to the queen’s daughter; that ‘monster’ is revealed to be a doppler. The witcher (played by Geralt) pleads that he is not a monster at all, and the queen is convinced to accept the doppler’s marriage to the princess. When the queen then asks for a guard to

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take away the servant who has schemed to have the prince/doppler killed, Geralt recognizes Dudu in the audience and invites him up on stage, telling Dudu that everything will end happily ever after, effecting their reunion. The overall shape of ‘The Play’s the Thing’ involves Geralt in the process of play-making from beginning to end. It begins with Geralt’s attempts at conceiving and co-writing the script with Priscilla, another friend who is both actor and poet. He then visits the acting troupe and its leader, Irina Renard; she tells him that for the play to succeed he must recruit a group of ‘ushers’ or bouncers to control the potentially unruly crowd and then engage a group of ‘Puffins’, or minstrels, to spread publicity (this part is an optional activity but will help to produce more revenue for the production). After accomplishing those side missions (which involve a lot of fighting), Geralt returns to Irina, and with her chooses some cast members. When the play is then performed, Geralt is given a choice of various lines when he enacts the part of the witcher. At each juncture, the player must thus make decisions for Geralt that will influence aspects of the play’s performance, and whether the game will declare it a success at the end. That success is signalled in the relative amount of ‘crowns’ (as well as ‘experience points’) Geralt is awarded as his share of the revenue for the play’s production.16 In thus engaging Geralt as a writer, director, producer and actor in the play, the episode foregrounds both the power and the limits of the player’s own participation in plotting the overall game itself. At the episode’s beginning Priscilla represents their ‘co-writing’ as a collaborative process, but although she first offers Geralt input into choosing the plot, any suggestion he makes is ultimately deflected. Finally, Geralt is given to wonder whether he gets any choice at all. In fact, here Geralt is allowed only two consequential decisions: the title of the play and its genre, comedy or drama (see Figure 14.1). The player discovers later that if Geralt chooses comedy now, the audience will peacefully accept the play’s message at its conclusion; engaged by the positive message about a doppler, they will be persuaded that’s ‘it’s all in fun. It’s a comedy – a ghoul could play a prince. Lighten up for god’s sake.’ If he opts for a drama, the episode will end in a melee started by angry audience members who apparently did not get the message about tolerance for dopplers. After this conversation about title and genre, Priscilla gives Geralt

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FIGURE 14.1 Geralt is confronted with the decision to make ‘The Play’s the Thing’ a comedy or drama. CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

the script for the play, which is automatically stored in the player’s collection of quest items. Later in the episode Geralt is allowed to select whether Abelard Rizza, a more accomplished but dull actor, or Maxim Boliere, a charismatic but alcoholic performer, plays the prince/doppler actor. That decision also makes a difference in the relative success of the play, since the drunk Maxim makes a hash of it. Similarly, during the performance the player must choose several of Geralt’s lines; one line will end up being ‘right’ or appropriate and the other will end up being silly, provoking audience laughter. For example, when given a cue, ‘alas no monster do I see here’, the player is given a time-constrained choice between two prompts to continue the line: ‘Perhaps ’midst the guests’ or ‘Maybe he’s hid’ (see Figure 14.2). Opting for the first phrase generates the serious conclusion ‘he hides in fear’; the second, ‘Maybe he’s hid’, will be continued with the silly ‘in the cellar. . . or a barrel of beer’. Choosing the appropriate answer will be judged as contributing to a better play. If players take the trouble to consult the script stored among their quest items, they do have sufficient information to know which to choose as the ‘proper’ one; if they don’t, they are just guessing.

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FIGURE 14.2 The player must choose one dialogue line for Geralt, under time pressure (as indicated by ‘time left to decide’). CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

At the beginning of ‘The Play’s the Thing’, Priscilla insists to Geralt that ‘Naturally, you’ll play a part in shaping the play, contributing to the work as a whole.’ The line signals how the entire episode functions as a commentary on the negotiation of choice in the overall gameplay. The player is offered consequential decisions, and while these do not influence the overall outcome of the episode itself, that is, the reunion with Dudu, they do affect what the game judges as the quality of the performance itself in terms of acting style and its eventual impact on the audience. As in the overall scheme of the game, here players have differing degrees of control over that success, depending on whether they have taken the time to read the script that Priscilla has provided, or even consulted the numerous ‘walkthroughs’ or playing guides available online. Even though a comedy might be preferred in terms of the game’s audience’s reception of the play, players themselves might instead want to participate in the fight at the ‘drama’ ending. Further, the line choices complying with the script produce a better financial reward, but as one walkthrough notes, ‘if you say the right lines, then the crowd will be happier, but the wrong lines are often funnier’;17 the player-audience might thus judge the play differently from the game’s programme.

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While this episode thus offers a metacommentary on just how much Geralt – and thus the gamer – can be responsible for the making of his own story, it also foregrounds the concept of the gameplay as acting, where the player participates through the persona of an avatar. The figure of the doppler already stands in as the image of an actor: as Priscilla says, ‘it’s hard to imagine a better actor than a doppler’, who constantly shifts shapes. The joke on Geralt, of course, is that he must come to act ‘himself’ on stage. When Irina tells him that he must play the witcher in their production, Geralt protests that ‘I’m not an actor’, pointing to his own ‘lack of emotional expression’ (an ongoing theme in judgements of his character). Irina tells him just to ‘play himself’, but this raises the question of just who Geralt is at the intersection of player and avatar. In ‘The Play’s the Thing’, while not changing Geralt’s basic character, the player does influence whether he will be a competent or an inept actor. The incentive to comply with ideas about ‘good acting’ results in being awarded more crowns, but it also constrains the opportunity to explore another mode of Geralt’s performance. ‘The Play’s the Thing’ thus invites the videogame player to participate in a kind of pastiche of Shakespeare theatre, and through that to see an analogy between digital gameplay itself and that theatre, especially in the kind of tensions that are at stake in theatre that is involved in history-making. The world of the Witcher games is familiar geek territory in which players can immerse themselves obsessively in a fully imagined medieval past, engaging in combat, romance and political scheming. Through ‘The Play’s the Thing’ they are asked to see themselves as makers of a kind of late medieval or early modern theatre as well. As playmakers as well as players of the game overall, they can guide the shape of the plot and the character of Geralt himself within the constraints of the overall arc of the story. Through Geralt’s dialogue and interactions, they can also influence the tone and quality of the gameplay style. When they do so, the game’s reward system of coin and experience points will drive the players, as actors and playwrights, to ‘act well’ as more conventionally determined by the game’s programme. At the same time, in the end, players are free to produce a performance according to their own motivations and pleasure, producing humour or chaos for their own satisfaction, as the audience of their own gameplay.

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Notes 1 Kline (2014) describes how this sort of gaming remediates the medieval past as a form of ‘neomedivealism’ or ‘postmedievalism’. On games that draw on the Middle Ages, see not only the essays in Kline but also Alcázar (2011). 2 See Kline (2014), introduction, for a discussion of ‘neomedievalism’ as a recreation of pseudo-medieval worlds that does not attempt to reproduce historical facts (4). 3 Sapkowski’s Witcher novels have been adapted in many forms, including a film, television series and a graphic novel, but they are perhaps best known for their adaptation into these videogames, which have received international acclaim. Developed by the Polish CD Projekt Red, the first Witcher game was released in 2007; Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings followed in 2011, and Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015. The games also offer stories that are sequels to the novels. For valuable advice on the Witcher games in general, I am indebted to Ruth Toner. 4 There has been little formal scholarship on the Witcher games, but see Majkowski (2018), a reading of The Witcher 3 in relation to postcolonial approaches to Polish culture. I also consulted Lidén’s excellent BA thesis (2016). 5 Anachronisms are particularly evident in the game’s romantic scenes: for example, Geralt is tricked into thinking two of his inamorata want to have sex with him, but when they tie him down and abandon him, he exclaims, ‘This isn’t funny.’ 6 As many commentators on the game have noted, part of the extraordinary appeal of playing Witcher 3 is live, personal interaction with the non-player-controlled (NPC) characters: as Shaun Prescott comments, ‘For a game boasting all of the political treachery and turmoil common in the genre, The Witcher 3 succeeds because it puts people first. More compelling than Geralt’s lofty, heroic journey are the stories about the humdrum, circumstantial horrors of the helpless as they watch their world crumble’ (Prescott 2015). 7 See Mawhorter et al. (2014) on how players bring different motivations to choices in the game, including the need to achieve goals, express sympathy or perform for an audience. 8 On choice and consequence, see Bushnell (2016). 9 See https:www/ign.com/wikis/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt/Endings for a discussion of the thirty-six possible endings. For example, Geralt may not decide to help with the assassination of King Radovid, which influences who rules afterwards.

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10 If you consult Wikipedia about the number of extant videogames with a historical setting, it will show you multitudes, with thirty-three subcategories. 11 On the issue of the ‘real’ in games, see also Schwartz (2006). 12 See Kapell and Elliot (2013) on how the developers of the Assassin’s Creed games sought the ‘balance between playability and fun on the one hand and historical accuracy on the other, claiming that ‘the official tagline is “history is our playground”’ (8). The most recent Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, does incorporate some elements of moral and character choice, rather than just exploration and combat. 13 On counterfactual history, see Ferguson (1999). Ferguson cites R. G. Collingwood on history as drama: ‘Collingwood was dismissive of determinist models of causation: “The plan which is revealed in history is a plan which does not pre-exist in its own revelation; history is a drama, but an extemporized drama, cooperatively extemporized by its own performers” ’ (48). See also Kapell and Elliot (2013). 14 As Blinde (2008) has observed, ‘Through Rumor, Shakespeare emphasizes that the Shakespearean history play is history at play’ (43); ‘Rumor constructs alternate histories in which, for instance, “the King before the Douglas’ rage / Stoop’d his anointed head as low as death.” Although this event did not happen and is therefore not historically accurate, by including this image Shakespeare embraces alternative possibilities’ (38). 15 Bulman (2016) sees that ‘Shakespeare dramatizes the unreliability of historical narration in both the court and the country’ (109). 16 For a description of the reward structure for this episode, see http:// www.gamebanshee.com/thewitcher3/walkthrough/theplaysthething. php: ‘If you didn’t hire the Puffins and did everything wrong, then you’ll earn 10 crowns and 75 xp [experience points]. But if you hired the Puffins and did everything right, then you’ll earn 130 crowns and 360 xp. So you’ll get a much nicer reward the harder you try.’ 17 http://www.gamebanshee.com/thewitcher3/walkthrough/ theplaysthething.php.

Works cited Alcázar, J. F. J. (2011), ‘The Other Possible Past: Simulation of the Middle Ages in Videogames’, Imago Temporis: Medium Avum 5: 299–340. Barret, J. K. (2016), Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Blinde, L. M. (2008), ‘Rumored History in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV ’, English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 1: 34–54. Bulman, J. C. (2016), ‘Introduction’, King Henry IV Part 2. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Bushnell, R. (2016), Tragic Time in Drama, Film and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CD Projekt Red (2015), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Ferguson, N., ed. (1999), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books. Hamilton, K. (2015), ‘The Witcher 3 is Even Bigger than You Think’, 26 May, https://kotaku.com/the-witcher-3-is-even-bigger-than-youthink-1707004755. Hillier, B. (2017), ‘The Witcher 3: How to Get the Best Ending’, 19 December, https://www.vg247.com/2017/12/19/the-witcher-3-how-toget-the-best-ending/. Hong, S-H. (2015), ‘When Life Mattered: The Politics of the Real in Video Games’ Reappropriation of History, Myth, and Ritual’, Games and Culture 10, no. 1: 35–56. Kapell, M. W. and A. B. R. Elliot, eds (2013), Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Kastan, D. (1982), Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time. Hanover, NH : University of New England Press. Kline, D. (2014), Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge. Lidén, C. (2016), ‘The Quest for Medievalism in “The Witcher 3”: A Study of the Vita Gravis: The Apposition Between the Medieval and the Fantastical’, BA thesis, University of Stockholm, http://www. diva-portal.se/smash/get/diva2:1071564/FULLTEXT01.pdf. Majkowski, T. Z. (2018), ‘Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia’, Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 1, DOI: 10.16995/olh.216 https://doaj.org/article/9 555a35379d7403ba3db0287b622b5b5. Mawhorter, P., M. Mateas, N. Wardrip-Fruin and A. Jhala (2014), ‘Toward a Theory of Choice Poetics’, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 3–7, April, http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_19.pdf. Palfrey, S. (2014), Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prescott, S. (2015), ‘Review of The Witcher 3’, 21 May, https://www. pcgamer.com/the-witcher-3-review/. Rackin, P. (1990), Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Schwartz, L. (2006), ‘Fantasy, Realism, and the Other in Recent Videogames’, Space and Culture 9: 313–25. Shakespeare, W. (2009), King Henry IV Part 1, ed. D. S. Kastan. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, W. (2016), King Henry IV Part 2, ed. J. C. Bulman. New York and London: Bloomsbury. ‘Videogames set in the Middle Ages’ (2019), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Category:Video_games_set_in_the_Middle_Ages. ‘Videogames with historical settings’ (2019), https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Category:Video_games_with_historical_settings Wagner, M. (2012), Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York and London: Routledge. Walsh, B. (2009), Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘The Witcher 3 walkthrough’, http://www.gamebanshee.com/thewitcher3/ walkthrough/theplaysthething.php. ‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Wiki Guide: Endings’, https:www/ign.com/ wikis/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt/Endings.

PART FOUR

Film, Theatre and Geek Culture

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15 Liberating the Geek in Recent Shakespeare on Film Keith M. Botelho

Twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film has embraced a geek ethos, one where geek characters, often marginal artists, craftpersons or collectors, occupy the film’s centre, signalling how millennial geek culture is ultimately compatible with Shakespeare. However, we often see a dichotomy in the presentation of male and female geeks in these films: male geeks are often vulnerable and withdrawn, uncomfortable in the publics they inhabit (for instance, Romeo in the 2012 film Romeo and Juliet or Posthumus in the 2015 film Cymbeline), while female geeks showcase their geekiness to the world without fear (for instance, Mandella in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You or the Photographer in the 2012 film Much Ado About Nothing) and even point to ways to transcend vulnerability, as in the case of Ophelia in the 2000 film Hamlet or Imogen in the 2015 film Cymbeline. These filmic depictions often align with textual interpretations of the obsessively devoted (Romeo and Juliet) and aloof (Hamlet and Ophelia) protagonists in the plays. We might define these characterizations as hipster artists or (perhaps) obsessive fans, meant at once to be very Shakespearean and very contemporary. In particular, these characters are direct appeals to geeks, those people, according to Alex Pappademas, who are ‘collectors, enthusiasts, keepers of obscure flames’.1 Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy 257

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Freaks and Gaming Geeks, notes that ‘the term geek has recently come to mean anyone who pursues a skill or exhibits devotion to a subject matter that seems a bit extreme . . . Both geek and nerd might identify someone who expresses passion for a hobby in an uninhibited monologue.’2 The male and female geeks in recent Shakespeare films showcase both passion run amok and an attentiveness to an activity (both as creators and consumers), yet it is the male geek character that reveals a certain vulnerability in his failures to escape into a community of the like-minded. The films I take up in this chapter present a Shakesgeek masculinity that exhibits vulnerability in its lack of attachment or sense of belonging to a larger community. Instead of creating community, these geeks escape from the outside world, creating safe spaces of their own surrounded by their obsessions, vulnerable to the world around them. Not only do these male characters harbour a specialized knowledge or skill, but they also in turn hide in their art or passion, avoiding the type of participatory culture that often defines geekdom in this century. The male geek is divorced from those very communities that support geekiness in public, marking him as a double outsider. Perhaps we can think of the cinema itself as a safe space to posit this male Shakesgeek vulnerability. Instead of seeing unmotivated and entitled young men and women in twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film, maybe we are failing to see their passion, their geekiness. The films show figures pursuing their art or passion as a way to flee from the outside world, and they promote the life of the artist or collector; at the same time, they are examining the connections between art and masculinity. There seems to be a reimagining of the Shakespeare male on film, rewriting earlier versions of Shakespearean masculinity as exemplified by Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh. In particular, there is a shift from what Richard Burt traced as the figure of the loser that emerged in early 1990s mass culture.3 Late 1990s and twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film has accommodated emerging notions of the geek into its characterizations on the screen. These new audiences are shown identifiable geeks lost in their passions. A reason for the shift could be that popular culture has given rise to a new consideration of the geek on TV and in film, and the audiences are partially made up of [Shakespeare?] geeks, who can identify with the passionate, disconnected and aloof marginal artists, craftspeople and collectors,

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consumers and producers of culture. The geek is of course a discursively constructed figure, and we should consider whether these films showcase these geek practices or impulses as irrational or even emasculating, perhaps marking versions of masculinity in earlier films unstable. The vulnerability depicted in the adaptations and offshoots I examine offers a new lens by which we can view masculinity in Shakespeare on film in the twenty-first century, where the mastery of their passion or art reasserts their geek masculinity. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, in Spreadable Media, discuss engaged audiences and fans in our transmedia world, many of whom are frustrated by their very marginalization by the media industry. Speaking of how the TV industry attracts certain segments of the audience, they discuss ‘young geek males who have the disposable time and income to track a complex, unfolding serial and thus might even expect such engagement. This focus on young male audiences reflects a desire to recapture a valuable audience segment that television has lost in recent years to other media.’4 These same fans might see themselves in some of the male geeks in recent Shakespeare on film, as they exhibit characteristics of what Alvin Toffler called the ‘prosumer’, the fan who produces as well as consumes. Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers notes how ‘fan subjectivities may construct particular kinds of masculinities around mastery and expertise or struggle with the “taint” of “effeminacy” that still surrounds some aspects of geek culture’.5 Furthermore, Rebecca Williams notes that, ‘Despite cultural stereotyping, representations of the geek or nerd are not always associated with technology and computing, nor are they always linked to notions of failed masculinity.’ Rather, instances of indie and geek cool ‘offer an alternative articulation of masculinity’.6 Instead of seeing the geek male as a lesser form of traditional masculinity, such a notion of a non-traditional or alternative masculinity becomes a draw for twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film producers and consumers. While it might seem odd to begin with a film set in the 1970s, Scotland, PA (dir. Billy Morrissette, 2001), a reworking of Macbeth released at the turn of the new century, is a good place to start, as the film is clearly attempting to conflate the geek with male homosexuality. The brothers Malcolm and Donald, sons of diner owner Norm Duncan, are wildly different. Malcolm is a freespirited stoner devoted to rock and roll – we see him in his room, with Serpico and Led Zeppelin posters on his wall, blasting the

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band Boston on the radio; while Donald listens to soft pop staple ‘At Seventeen’ by Janis Ian on his headphones, with a shirtless Joe Namath, Mark Spitz and Cabaret posters on his bedroom wall. Donald reluctantly plays football to please his father, who asserts that ‘all young men like football’. Donald is depicted as despondent because he is repressing his desires, trying to live up to his father’s standards of masculinity. However, after his father’s murder, Donald no longer is in hiding: he watches, transfixed, as shirtless male swimmers prepare for a race on television; he and a boy, Tommy, come out of his bedroom in robes one morning; and he and six friends clap their hands and harmonize to ‘Day by Day’ from the musical Godspell. Malcolm, before leaving with his other longhaired friends to ‘rock’, gives Donald some advice: ‘If you’re gonna have a kegger, just keep it quiet. I know you drama geeks7 like to party.’ Malcolm equates his brother’s eccentricity, his devotion to show tunes and Broadway, as signifying geek – a somewhat different kind of masculinity than he himself embraces – but he also calls Donald a ‘freak’ because he can speak eloquently about Sammy Davis Jr. While the film aligns geek with homosexuality, it also shows how the geek label can be applied to other forms of masculinity as well – rock geeks occupy this space in the film just as much as drama geeks. The depictions of masculinity in film versions of Romeo and Juliet over the past twenty years offer an interesting take on how Shakespeare on film has made room for the geek, even making Romeo’s passionate consuming (collecting vinyl) and producing (as writer and sculptor) central to their characterizations. Speaking of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996), Peter Donaldson notes that Sycamore Grove/Verona Beach, where Romeo’s ‘early walking’ takes place, is the spot where Romeo is ‘first seen looking at the sea and writing lines of verse in a small notebook with a pen. Luhrmann takes Romeo’s poetic side seriously, restoring an aspect of the character often lost in productions that see only the empty imitation of the conventions of courtly love in the pre-Juliet Romeo.’8 And late in the film, after Romeo has missed his post-haste dispatches, we see him (and hear him in voice-over) once again immersed in verse at his desolate camp and trailer while in exile, writing in his book while smoking, pondering over words. This Romeo, continually alone with his passion, paves the way for other geek Romeos in the years to follow.9 For instance, in Romeo

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and Juliet (dir. Carlo Carlei, 2012), we see early in the film our first glimpse of Romeo, tools in hand, hammering and chiselling away at a white stone or marble sculpture. At least four sculptures are scattered about in the high-arched room in which he works, drop cloth on the ground, tools of his passion on an adjacent table. Mounted to boards behind a column and on viewing stands are drawings (presumably Romeo’s sketches) of male and female bodies, establishing this Romeo as yet another male figure devoting a life to producing art (seemingly prior to a life of love with Rosaline and then Juliet). Later in the film, when he is in exile, we again see Romeo sketching with charcoal at a table in another high-vaulted room. His table is full of such sketches, and this active artistry places him as a creator, his attention taken up by his art when he is not distracted by love.10 Not five minutes into Warm Bodies (dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013), the character known only as R, the undead slacker in a hoodie, reveals his geek bona fides as he climbs aboard his makeshift home, an aeroplane, and proceeds to his record player, where he carefully takes out a record and plays ‘Missing You’ by John Waite. R is a forager by nature, and his abode reveals his collecting prowess. We get our first glimpse of his sizeable record collection, which he has presumably gathered in the eight years since the zombie apocalypse. Later, he puts on Guns n’ Roses’ ‘Patience’ and closes his eyes, getting lost in the music, savouring the tune as he does a fine meal of brains. Julie, the girl of his affection, asks R, ‘What’s with all the vinyl?’ When R responds, ‘Better sound,’ Julie says, ‘Oh, you’re a purist, huh?’ R responds that vinyl is ‘more alive’. Julie asks where R got all his vinyl, and he says, ‘I collect things,’ to which she says, ‘You, my friend, are a hoarder.’ He does indeed hoard things he finds out on his rummaging trips, as we see a number of times when he pockets various knick-knacks (such as snow globes). But we should see him as more than a slacker (Julie at one point calls him a ‘shrugger’ because of his continued non-committal gesture in response to her questions) and more as a passionate collector or consumer, the very definition of a geek. Yet this collecting impulse helps R to establish a baseline for understanding the past, memory and love. His geek ethos is that which makes him become human (again), and through his collection he is able to establish real human connection. In discussing Hamlet (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2000), Russell Jackson observes that ‘Hamlet and the defiantly un-business-like

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clothing, pursuits, and attitudes of the younger people have a counter-cultural edge.’11 I would like to shift the general view of these characters as having a postmodern malaise or being countercultural slackers who have ‘lost all mirth’ to one that pays attention to the inherent geekiness in their pursuits. Almereyda’s Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) is a documentarian-in-training, a hipster who films not only the main event of the opening press conference, but also the photographers and spectators in attendance.12 Throughout the film, he is continually editing, rewinding, splicing and rewatching, engaged in postmodern sampling in his own short film, The Mousetrap. This Hamlet is a creator (who also writes poetry), and his obsessions on display are in recrafting, in making art. Even as he dies, he remembers by way of film, the assorted clips he had shot that he spent a lifetime devotedly producing, ordering and reordering. Ophelia (Julia Stiles) is also excessively devoted to images. Throughout Almereyda’s film, she is taking pictures, documenting events. She too is a hipster of the city, sneakers untied, living in a walk-up where she develops her photos in her makeshift darkroom. Her domain is the still image, unlike Hamlet, who obsesses over moving images. Both, however, crave escape into their passions. Ophelia’s parallel geeky pursuits give us ways of thinking about how female geeks in recent Shakespeare on film find community within and beyond these worlds of male geekdom. Ophelia remains an outsider to both Hamlet and the larger world, and she is left clinging to her passion, those very photographs she had developed, as she goes mad. Interestingly, she seems to align with the Photographer in Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Joss Whedon, 2012). Elsa Guillet-Chapuis, who plays the Photographer, was the actual on-set photographer for the film, and in the Special Feature on the DVD Much Ado About Making Nothing, she mused, ‘Am I going to take pictures for the movie or inside the movie?’ She appears approximately eight times throughout the course of the film, a presence in both background and foreground. As Whedon notes in the ‘Director’s Commentary’, he wanted to be blatant about the photograph as a motif; speaking of the Photographer’s presence at the wedding, he notes, ‘Is it extremely self-conscious to have the camerawoman look at the audience and point the lens at us? Maybe it is, but to me it speaks so well to what’s going on with this movie . . . She is shooting the worst things that happen.’13 The Photographer

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is thus, like Stiles’ Ophelia, a documentarian of people, her medium also the still image. The Photographer sets out to quietly capture all, and her omnipresence continually shows the audience her devotion to her craft, always with the camera in her hand. Her obsessiveness in getting the shot throughout the film aligns her with the geek. Kat’s friend Mandella in 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999) poses a rejoinder to negative depictions of female geeks. Mandella not only flaunts her love of Shakespeare in her cliquey high school, noting that she is not just a fangirl (a picture of Shakespeare hangs in her locker, after all), but also that she is ‘involved’ with him. The geekiness on display is that of an individual thoroughly ‘involved’ in her particular pursuit, love and passion. Male and female geekdom thus seems normalized in this film, positing Shakespeare (and the Shakespeare on film genre) as a safe space of escape. Mandella thus seduces Michael through her geeky ways (he even ends up dressing like Shakespeare for the prom). Perhaps through the example of the female geek, masculinity can emerge from its hidden spaces and embrace a public geek persona without fear. Such is the case in Cymbeline (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2015), where we are witness to a scene lasting approximately fifty seconds that focuses on the geekiness of a male engaged with his art. Posthumus (Penn Badgley) is marked early in the film as a geek slacker, constantly riding a skateboard, wearing a hoodie and carrying a notebook.14 After his wager with Iachimo (Ethan Hawke),15 we witness Posthumus sitting at a desk, alone and drawing, his tools and paper around him, before he carefully carves the design into a woodblock, rolling ink, laying paper over the block and transferring the image of a skeleton and woman. His skill set, his attention to detail, his careful use of the tools of his craft, is on display. In his commentary in the ‘Special Features’ of the DVD, Almereyda speaks of this Halloween-themed woodcut as being a ‘found object’, one that is not in the Shakespearean text but nevertheless serves as a recurring motif in the film. This creation – the woodcut print – reappears throughout the film (first as a love token delivered to Imogen by Iachimo that is later found in a quarry by Cloten), and it is the final image of the film before the credits roll. However, it is these final moments of the film that offer Posthumus and his geekiness a way forward by way of a newly liberated

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Imogen. As Douglas Lanier reminds us, Imogen and Posthumus do not integrate themselves into the community at the end of the film: They back away unseen, and then ride off on a motorcycle, with Imogen at the handlebar, giving a brief backward glance before roaring to destinations unknown. The two constitute a new altcult community of their own, wised-up about the failings of the cultural alternatives.16 Imogen, whom we might view in this moment as a cross-dressed biker geek, ultimately takes the lead. Posthumus will always be just a skateboarder, and here he is a passenger on the motorcycle, along for the ride. His artistic creation, the signifier of his geekiness, is left in the dust on the ground. It is Imogen who makes it possible for him to leave his vulnerable geek masculinity behind. She, like other female Shakesgeeks in recent Shakespeare on film, liberates the geek from the shadows, offering male geeks an example of how to navigate their worlds by eschewing vulnerability and instead embracing their geekiness without fear.

Notes 1 Pappademas 2011: 30. 2 Gilsdorf 2009: 51. See also columnist David Brooks (2008), who writes, ‘Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.’ 3 See, in particular, Burt 1998 and Burt 2002. 4 Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013: 149. 5 Jenkins 2012: xi. 6 Williams 2011: 173. 7 The teacher as drama geek also surfaces in twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film. In Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver, 2001), the eccentric Dr Desmond Forrest Oates (Martin Short) puts on ‘A Midsummer Night’s Rockin’ Eve’, what he calls ‘classical Shakespeare with a contemporary musical twist’, while in Hamlet 2 (dir. Andrew Fleming, 2008), drama teacher Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), a down

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and out commercial actor, launches a musical sequel to Hamlet at West Mesa High School. Both of these teachers are marked as eccentric masculine failures who find a modicum of success by adapting Shakespeare. 8 Donaldson 2002: 70. 9 We might even see Juliet (Claire Danes) as a precursor to other yet-to-come geek Juliets, as she seems to be a collector of Catholic kitsch, on full display in her bedroom. 10 Even in something as light as Gnomeo and Juliet (dir. Kelly Asbury, 2011), we get a hint of devotedness to a passion. In this animated film, it is Paris, not Romeo, who is depicted as a typical geeky gnome, glasses intact, wearing a smock with white flowers on it. He is passionately devoted to gardening, bringing Juliet flowers – and awkwardly pontificating on their origin – and unveiling a token of affection for her, his ‘own hybrid of foxglove and buttercup’, which he has called ‘foxbutt’. He consistently knows his flowers, even singing a ridiculous variation of Elton John’s hit ‘Your Song’ – ‘It’s a little bit runny, / This pesticide, / I used it all on / Some insects that died . . . / If I was a sculptor, / But then again no / A man selling stuff for plants, / It’s called Miracle-Gro.’ See also Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song (dir. Tim van Dammen, 2013), a rock opera set in a New Zealand trailer park, where Paris geeks out on his guitar, a creator of music vying to impress Juliet. 11 Jackson 2014: 114. 12 David Tennant’s RSC Hamlet (dir. Gregory Doran, 2010) seems to allude to Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet, but with a difference. Hawke’s Hamlet is a committed and passionate indie filmmaker, while Tennant’s Hamlet merely picks up his own video camera first to document his uncle’s reaction during the Mousetrap scene and then to capture his own thoughts when he turns the camera on himself (‘How all occasions do inform against me’ . . . ‘My thoughts be bloody’). He shows little interest in revisiting what he has shot. 13 Whedon goes on to say, ‘I wanted to call attention to it because the idea that these people are living that kind of life where they are constantly monitored and watched and . . . because the movie is so much about people’s perceptions of each other. There’s obviously looking through windows, spying on each other, seeing things through glass . . . sometimes to the point where you can hardly tell what you are seeing. Everybody’s perception is warped because everybody is being lied to at all times.’ 14 In his review of the film, Keith Uhlich calls Posthumus a ‘peasant skateboarder’, while Peter Sobczynski in his review says that ‘Badgley’s Posthumus comes across as more of a dweeb than anything else.’

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Dweeb here does not seem to align with geekiness. Uhlich 2015; Sobczynski 2015. 15 Hawke’s Hamlet and Iachimo are interestingly similar, both adept with technology: in Hamlet, of course, he is an indie filmmaker, and in Cymbeline he takes pictures of Imogen on his iPhone while she sleeps, which he later presents to Posthumus on an iPad, and he Photoshops images of Posthumus with a woman before presenting them to Imogen on the same iPad – unlike the earlier film, however, we do not get to see the process. 16 Lanier 2017: 244.

Works cited Brooks, David (2008), ‘The Alpha Geeks’, New York Times, 23 May, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23brooks.html?_r=0 Burt, Richard (1998), Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares. New York: St Martin’s. Burt, Richard (2002), ‘Afterword: T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High’, in Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks (eds), Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, 205–32. Madison, NJ : Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Donaldson, Ian (2002), ‘ “In Fair Verona”: Media, Spectacle, and Performance in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’, in Richard Burt (ed.), Shakespeare After Mass Media, 59–82. New York: Palgrave. Gilsdorf, Ethan (2009), Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press. Jackson, Russell (2014), Shakespeare & the English-Speaking Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Henry (2012), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green (2013), Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Lanier, Douglas M. (2017), ‘Almereyda’s Cymbeline: The End of Teen Shakespeare’, in Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (eds), Shakespeare on Screen: The Tempest and Late Romances, 232–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pappademas, Alex (2011), ‘Geek Love’, New York Times Magazine, 20 March, 30–3.

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Sobczynski, Peter (2015), ‘Cymbeline’, RogerEbert.com, https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/cymbeline-2015. Uhlich, Keith (2015), ‘The Thrilling Cymbeline Re-teams Ethan Hawke and William Shakespeare’, AV Club, https://film.avclub.com/thethrilling-cymbeline-re-teams-ethan-hawke-and-willia-1798183049. Williams, Rebecca (2011), ‘Desiring the Doctor: Identity, Gender, and Genre in Online Fandom’, in Tobias Hochscherf and James Leggott (eds), British Science Fiction Film and Television, 167–77. Jefferson, NC : McFarland.

16 Whedonesque Shakespeare and Hyperdiegetic Casting Jennifer Flaherty

In 2013, when researcher Burr Settles mined more than 2.5 million Tweets to create an infographic distinguishing between ‘geeky’ and ‘nerdy’ terms, ‘Whedon’ charted as one of the geekiest words on Twitter, beating ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Spiderman’ and ‘Jedi’. As Settles explains, ‘geeks are fans’, and his research demonstrates the geek power of Joss Whedon’s fanbase in 2012, the year that Whedon directed the first Avengers film (2013: conclusion). In the same year, Whedon also directed a film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, starring actors known from other Whedon projects, including the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Whedon’s Shakespeare film functions as a case study of Douglas Lanier’s rhizomatic Shakespeare (2014) and a celebration of the combined fandoms of Shakespeare and the Whedonverse. For fans who knew that Whedon regularly hosted home Shakespeare readings with the actors from his various television series, the film promised a glimpse not only of his house, which was repurposed as the set, but also of his Shakespeare fandom. As a writer and executive producer, Whedon used quotations and references to Shakespeare throughout his television series like a secret code,1 inviting fans to see Shakespeare as a means of reading his characters. By casting actors from his films and television series in key roles in Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon conversely uses his sci-fi 268

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characters as a means of reading Shakespeare. The dual geek culture of the film unites Whedon’s Shakespeare geekiness with the Whedon geekiness of some audience members to influence their understanding of the text and characters. Each Shakespeare character portrayed by a known Whedon actor is already coded with the history of that actor’s previous Whedon roles, and the casting decisions therefore become critical readings of Shakespeare. Even before the filming of Much Ado about Nothing, Whedon was known for reusing actors and characters across multiple projects, assembling a ‘formidable company of actors’ that Buzzfeed writer Adam Vary describes as ‘the most interesting club in Hollywood’ (2013). Because of their previous work with Whedon, the actors in the film bring additional layers of meaning to their performance through a process that Jeffrey Bussolini terms the ‘intertextuality of casting’ (2013: par. 3) and Casey McCormick calls ‘hyperdiegetic casting’, using a phrase coined by Alyson Buckman2 (2018: 371). Bussolini defines the intertextuality of casting as the ‘often intentional crossover of actors and actresses between and among different shows, and the way in which bringing along recognizable faces and styles serves to cross-pollinate televisual texts and create a larger televisual intertext’, and he argues that ‘the unconscious and conscious association of actors and styles across discrete texts creates a larger field well-recognized by viewers’ (2013: par. 3). Buckman’s term is more frequently used to refer to the deliberate reuse of actors across one writer/producer/ director’s works, whereas Bussolini’s term includes casting with an awareness of audience foreknowledge of an actor’s previous roles, even if those roles were not with the same writer/producer/director. While there is considerable overlap in the concepts, intertextual casting is not always hyperdiegetic. Whedon’s use of actor Jonathan Woodward (one of the few actors who achieved the Whedon ‘hat trick’ of appearing as different characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Angel) is hyperdiegetic. In his one-episode stints on Buffy (‘Conversations with Dead People’, 2002) and Firefly (‘The Message’, 2003), Woodward plays characters who initially seem charming, but are ultimately untrustworthy. Whedon then cast Woodward in Angel the following year as the recurring character Knox, a friendly and likeable scientist employed by the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart whose final betrayal leads to the death of Fred, played by Amy Acker. Such casting allows knowing

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viewers to use their knowledge of a Whedonverse actor’s previous roles to inform their readings of new characters played by the same actor, allowing fans to read a character differently than viewers who are unfamiliar with the actor’s history might. As McCormick explains, ‘the repetition of actors in the Whedonverse creates levels of meaning that can only be understood intertextually’ through the active audience labour of fandom (2018: 371). In the case of Woodward, the viewers’ knowledge that Whedon always uses the actor to portray a character who ‘initially seems somewhat sympathetic, but ultimately betrays even those individuals he seems to like and love and dies’ can be applied in a scholarly way, as in Elizabeth Rambo’s essay on Woodward’s Firefly episode, ‘The Message’ (2014: 191). The audience labour involved in hyperdiegetic casting can also be emotional, as one fan reveals when describing her feelings for Woodward’s character, Knox: ‘In all of his uses the actor is used brilliantly . . . In Angel . . . you hate him so much. He is such a smug SOB who has potentially brought on the destruction of the world’ (CompGeekHolly 2013: par. 4). Both terms originate in Whedon Studies (first published in the journal Slayage)3 because, as McCormick notes, the ‘Whedonverse is particularly incestuous in this sense’ (2018: 371). The practices of recycling actors and/or drawing upon their previous work is also familiar in Shakespeare films.4 The intertextuality of casting Mel Gibson is the first thing mentioned in the New York Times review of Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet: ‘The greatest disservice Franco Zeffirelli did Mel Gibson was to tell interviewers he was inspired to cast Hamlet after seeing Lethal Weapon . . . It leads to jokes about “Lethal Bodkin” or “Mad Hamlet, the Road Warrior.” The greatest service Mr. Zeffirelli did the actor, though, was to make that cockeyed connection’ (James 1990: par. 1). Zeffirelli uses audiences’ awareness of Gibson’s past performance as ‘as a grief-stricken cop’ who ‘puts a gun to his head and comes close to suicide’ to create ‘a visceral Hamlet . . . whose emotions are raw yet who retains the desperate wit to act mad’ (James 1990: pars 1–2). Zeffirelli’s casting forewarns viewers to expect action and emotion. In another film version of Hamlet, Michael Almereyda used the influence of Ethan Hawke’s previous roles as the quintessential angst-ridden Gen X-er in films such as Reality Bites and Before Sunrise to create a Hamlet who is more at home in the action aisle of a Blockbuster video than as the star of

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an action movie. Almereyda’s casting of the same actor as Iachimo in Cymbeline fifteen years later inherently references his work as Hamlet, hinting at an aspect of tortured thoughtfulness in Hawke’s portrayal of the villain. Julie Taymor similarly drew upon Alan Cumming’s previous work in stage productions of Cabaret to add to the fascist signifiers surrounding his portrayal of Saturninus in her Titus, then used hyperdiegetic casting to draw on his portrayal of Saturninus to establish his Sebastian as a corrupt politician in her Tempest. Because ‘most audiences read backwards from film to Shakespeare’, Taymor was initially criticized for using Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus because his well-known portrayal of Hannibal Lecter might overshadow her ‘attempt to critique violence via Fascism and the Holocaust’ (Burt 2001: 92). The intertextuality of casting Hopkins nonetheless provides a way to ‘code the character’s descent from upright soldier into vengeful monster’ by reminding audiences of the actor’s previous role as a cannibalistic serial killer in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal (Flaherty 2015: 233). Whedon utilizes the intertextuality of casting similarly in his Much Ado About Nothing, linking Shakespeare and geek culture as a means of coding characters for knowledgeable audience members who are already familiar with his oeuvre. Fans bring their geeky knowledge of the casting history of the Whedonverse to inform their understanding of Whedon’s portrayal of Shakespeare’s characters. To define hyperdiegetic casting, Alyson Buckman cites Fran Krantz’s roles as Topher in Dollhouse and Marty in The Cabin in the Woods, demonstrating how the ‘connections and repeat appearances’ typical of Whedon’s casting choices can ‘create richer textualities’ for a knowing viewer who is ‘enabled by the knowledge of the Whedon fan, clearly bringing more to his/her viewing experience than the non-fan’ (Buckman 2014: par. 1). Topher is the technological genius responsible for programming the human ‘dolls’ in the pre-apocalyptic Dollhouse until his technology destroys civilization. Marty is a college stoner whose weekend getaway with his friends turns deadly in The Cabin in the Woods, where the character’s heavy drug use and unexpected resourcefulness save his life and doom the world. Buckman notes that ‘both Marty and Topher are gifted visionaries who initially seem clueless but are revealed to have much greater depth at the end of the world’ (par. 1). In The Cabin in the Woods, where characters are constantly

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observed by a mysterious organization that sees them only as tropes in a horror-movie narrative, the casting of Krantz allows audience members familiar with his work in Dollhouse to figure out Marty’s significance and intelligence before the onscreen viewers do. Buckman contrasts Krantz’s role as Claudio in Much Ado with the connected roles of Topher and Marty, opining that ‘Krantz’s role in Much Ado seems that much more dull in comparison to Marty and Topher’ (par. 1). For Buckman, there is a dissonance in using casting to link the ‘dull’ Claudio with the smarter, more engaging characters played by Krantz in previous Whedon projects. Yet the casting of Krantz provides a means of interpreting some of Claudio’s more problematic words and actions in the film, using hyperdiegesis to make the character more (or less) palatable to audiences in a given moment. The aura of cluelessness that Buckman notes in both Topher and Marty is a crucial part of Krantz’s characterization of Claudio. All of the characters Krantz plays for Whedon are socially awkward in some way, and Topher and Claudio are also significantly younger than their peers. In Much Ado, the inexperience and lack of social awareness in Krantz’s Claudio is apparent in his hesitant reaction to Don Pedro’s plan to pretend to be Claudio and propose to Hero.5 Krantz’s gestures and facial expressions make it clear that Claudio has doubts about the plan, but he is unable or unwilling to voice his concerns. In Whedon’s film, Claudio’s gullibility, which is apparent when he accepts Don Pedro’s plan and when he twice falls for Don John’s manipulations, is linked with the social ineptitude that he shares with Krantz’s other characters. Rather than trying to present Claudio as an entirely sympathetic character, however, Whedon also emphasizes the painful repercussions of ‘Claudio’s savage rejection’ of Hero in the film, and critic Geoffrey O’Brien notes that the ‘modern trappings curiously erase the distance between 16th-century male sexual attitudes and today’s, with Claudio’s sudden misogynistic frenzy seeming like the erupting discontent of the Maxim-style laddishness that hovers in the air’ (2013: 67). While it is difficult to reconcile Claudio’s early scenes as a shy young lover with his public shaming of Hero and seeming indifference to the news of her death, the paradox is reminiscent of the contradictions in Topher, who can feel love and friendship despite his despicable role in an organization that strips individuals of their memories and free will before selling them to the highest bidders.

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Intertextual or hyperdiegetic casting should not be simply equated with typecasting (when an actor is repeatedly cast in similar roles due to their previous success in roles of that type). Not all intertextual casting is typecasting, and simple typecasting is rarely intertextual.6 Whedon’s casting sometimes involves an actor cast as characters with similar arcs or qualities across different projects. Jonathan Woodward plays three likeable characters who all die shortly after revealing a callous indifference to the lives of the main characters. Fran Krantz plays three quirky, awkward young men whose actions lead to pain and suffering. These narrative connections are not the same as casting stereotypes, however. As Buckman notes, college stoner Marty is an entirely different character type from the overachieving tech genius Topher, and neither resembles Krantz’s Claudio, a soldier who is comfortable wearing expensive suits and carrying guns while mingling with princes and politicians. The lens through which Whedon fans view each character is informed rather than dictated by the character types previously played by the actor. In the case of Much Ado, Reed Diamond’s portrayal of Laurence Dominic in Dollhouse and Clark Gregg’s appearances as Agent Coulson in The Avengers and other Marvel projects have accustomed audiences to seeing both men dressed in suits and representing powerful and potentially dangerous organizations. As a prince and a politician, Whedon’s Don Pedro and Leonato are meant to represent different forms of official power, and the actors benefit from the power accumulated by their previous characters, even if those characters share little in common with their Shakespearean doubles. Tom Lenk’s performance as Verges is as close to typecasting as Whedon comes in Much Ado. Whedon acknowledges that a key reason for reusing the actor across multiple projects is that ‘Tom has always got that Tom Lenk thing’ (Vary 2013: par. 55). Lenk made his Whedonverse debut as a lackey of mean-girl-turnedvampire Harmony in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he was later recast as Andrew Wells, part of a trio of nerds who set out to torment Buffy in the show’s sixth season. While one of the running gags of the season is that none of Buffy’s friends can remember Andrew or his previous attempt to summon flying monkeys to ruin the school play, Andrew becomes a memorable character with recurring appearances in the final seasons of both Buffy and Angel as he matures from Buffy’s incompetent enemy to her helpful

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hostage before finally joining the Watcher’s Council serving the new Slayers. In The Cabin in the Woods, Lenk plays ‘Ronald the intern’, a new low-level employee of the Organization, the mysterious company that is monitoring the college students in the cabin and setting them up to die in a sacrifice designed to mimic the plotlines of American horror movies. In all of his Whedonverse roles, Lenk plays an endearingly clueless subordinate who takes pride in serving the team’s mission (at least until a better offer comes along). In Much Ado, Lenk plays Verges, and his record of playing inept characters helps to establish the comic cluelessness of the private security guards who comprise the Watch in Whedon’s film. In Buffy, Andrew’s commitment to the various groups is compounded by the hero-worship he expresses toward male characters he finds charismatic: Warren (the self-appointed leader of the trio), the First Evil (who takes Warren’s form to convince Andrew to murder his friend and fellow nerd Jonathan), and Spike and Xander while he is fighting against the First Evil on Buffy’s team. Viewers who have seen Lenk’s other roles in the Whedonverse can easily apply the formula to read his character in Much Ado as a dedicated Watchman who serves as an admiring second-in-command to Nathan Fillion’s Dogberry. Nathan Fillion’s history of playing confident Whedonverse characters who inspire the devotion of others complements Lenk’s record, immediately coding the characters as leader and follower for Whedon fans, even if they are unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play. The intertextuality of casting Fillion as Dogberry moves beyond his work in the Whedonverse to include his title role as a mystery writer who works with an NYPD detective to solve cases in the ABC series Castle. Like Fillion’s Dogberry, who repeatedly dons sunglasses in an imitation of Horatio Caine from CSI Miami, Rick Castle is an enthusiast of detective fiction rather than an experienced police officer. While Castle is depicted as a competent member of a crime-solving team, however, Dogberry is presented as the comic extreme of an unqualified posturer who imagines himself as a brilliant cop. Fillion’s role in Castle has been noted by Bussolini as an example of the intertextuality of casting because ‘Vampire Weekend’, one of the show’s Halloween episodes, ‘featured Fillion dressed up in his costume from Firefly’ and included a reference to Buffy (2013: par. 5). The intertextuality becomes even more complex with Much Ado (a Whedonverse film indirectly referencing

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a non-Whedonverse series that has directly referenced the Whedonverse). Whedon acknowledges in his Much Ado director’s commentary that his inspiration for Dogberry’s scenes, particularly the interrogation scene, was a procedural cop show such as Law & Order SVU (01:19:30). While Whedon does not cite Castle directly, the audience’s knowledge that Fillion is the lead on an actual police procedural works to reinforce the idea that Fillion’s Dogberry incorrectly sees himself as the lead in a police procedural. Given the skilled characters he played in Firefly, Castle and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Fillion is playing against type as the incompetent Dogberry. Both Rick Castle and Malcolm Reynolds are presented as male leads in ‘Will they?/Won’t they?’ romantic relationships that function as key plot points in their respective series. Fillion’s role as Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible serves as a parody of the attractive hero-type that Fillion has previously played, and all three series incorporate lines and jokes that call attention to the character’s good looks (including Kaylee’s famous ‘Yes, sir, Captain Tight Pants!’ line in the Firefly episode ‘Shindig’). One of the most hyperdiegetic moments of Fillion’s portrayal of Dogberry is his outburst after Conrade has called him an ass: I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer, and, which is more, a householder, and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses, and one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him. 01:23:13 Dogberry’s defence of his own intelligence and good looks takes on a different meaning when he is played by an actor known for roles that emphasize both of those attributes. That he does so while struggling in vain to fit into a jacket that is far too small for him because it belongs to his sidekick Verges only adds to the ridiculousness and humour of the situation. When I first saw a screening of Whedon’s film, the audience broke into cheers and applause at the line ‘as pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina’ – a response I have never seen to that line in live theatre, even after seeing at least twenty different productions of Much Ado About Nothing. The audience response to Fillion’s words acknowledges the humorous dissonance of an actor known for playing intelligent

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and attractive lead characters speaking the lines of a humiliated and comic security guard who nonetheless sees himself as an intelligent and attractive lead character. As Fillion’s casting proves, Whedon’s fans bring insider knowledge to his casting choices even if the actor is playing a drastically different role in the new production. Citing Nathan Fillion’s role as the murderous and misogynistic Caleb in Buffy only a few months after the cancellation of Firefly, where Fillion played the noble Malcolm Reynolds,7 McCormick posits that the cognitive dissonance created when roles are contradictory is just as important as the similarities. McCormick argues that ‘hyperdiegetic casting in Whedony texts presents a contradictory interpretive position: at the same time as it reinforces the connectivity of these narratives, it also reminds viewers that the storyworlds are distinct’ (McCormick 2018: 371). The actors who played the ‘big damn heroes’ in Whedon’s Firefly and the follow-up film Serenity caused a significant amount of cognitive dissonance among fans who followed their trajectories from heroic characters on their own show to villains on Whedon’s other shows (or from villains to heroes, depending on viewing order). After Nathan Fillion played Caleb on Buffy, five of his co-stars portrayed evil (or at least threatening) characters on other Whedon projects. Gina Torres was in Season 4 of Angel, where she played a brainwashing goddess who devoured her followers, and Adam Baldwin joined Angel the following year as Marcus Hamilton, a powerful liaison to the evil senior partners of the Wolfram and Hart law firm. In Dollhouse, Alan Tudyk played Alpha, a serial killer who can take on new personalities thanks to the technology of the Dollhouse, while Summer Glau portrayed Bennett Halverson, a genius programmer from a rival Dollhouse who plots to murder the show’s main character. Lastly, Whedon gave the role of Don John, the duplicitous brother of Don Pedro in Much Ado, to Sean Maher, giving the actor his first chance to play a villain role. There are almost no similarities between Don John and Simon Tam, the reserved doctor Maher played in Whedon’s Firefly. Where Simon vows as a doctor to do no harm, even telling a man who has threatened his family that ‘no matter what you do or say or plot, no matter how you come down on us, I will never, ever harm you. You’re on this table, you’re safe . . . ’cause I’m your medic’ (‘Trash’), Don John embraces his identity as ‘a plain-dealing villain’ (1:3:25).

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Simon is a devoted brother in Firefly and Serenity, trading comfort and safety for a chance to save his sister from a sinister conspiracy; Don John, by contrast, trades the peaceful pardon he receives after his unsuccessful rebellion against his brother for the chance to humiliate and hurt his brother. Simon is hesitant to pursue romance or sex, not acknowledging or returning Kaylee’s clear interest in him until the two are in danger and unlikely to survive at the end of Serenity. Maher’s Don John is in a sexual relationship with a genderswapped Conrade, which Whedon highlights during a lengthy exposition scene with the two characters in a four-poster bed. The only thing Simon and Don John share is a fondness for sake (if we are to believe an isolated story of drunkenness after graduation from medical school, which Simon confesses to in the episode ‘Objects in Space’). Yet the casting of Maher as Don John (and his five Firefly cast-mates as other Whedonverse villains) fits with Whedon’s tendency to write and direct villains as if they are the protagonists of their own stories. The most compelling villains on Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse care about something or someone, and they can see their own behaviour as rational and justified in some way. Much Ado villains Conrade (Riki Lindhome, who played a minor role in an episode of Buffy) and Borachio (Spencer Treat Clark, appearing later in Agents of SHIELD ) are both motivated by their desire for other characters in Whedon’s film, which provides an explanation for their actions in support of Don John. While Don John cares about hurting his brother more than he cares about Conrade, Whedon’s decision to cast Maher gives the audience a way to connect with and enjoy the actions of a self-proclaimed villain who treats himself to a cupcake as he is leaving the ruined wedding. The most powerful and celebrated example of hyperdiegetic casting in Much Ado is undoubtedly Whedon’s choice to cast Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof as the witty lovers Beatrice and Benedick. While both actors have worked with Whedon on several projects (Acker in Angel, Dollhouse and The Cabin in the Woods; Denisof in Buffy, Angel, Dollhouse and The Avengers), the pairing is particularly poignant given the relationship between their characters Fred and Wesley in the series Angel. With the introduction of Acker’s character Fred in the second season, Whedon began a multi-year arc of unrequited love, missed opportunities and romantic obstacles that kept the characters apart for years. When the two characters

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finally express their love for one another in the show’s final season, their relationship ends before it can begin when the demon goddess Illyria takes over Fred’s body. Fred dies in Wesley’s arms, and Wesley himself dies in Illyria’s arms at the end of the season, speaking Fred’s name. Their love story is not only tragic, but tragically unfinished; the characters do not even have a single episode as a happy couple before Fred’s death and transformation into Illyria. As Tanya Cochran explains, ‘it is important to note the intensity of emotion, especially for shipping8 viewers, of Fred and Wesley’s history of repeated magnetism and repellence and magnetism to also understand the desire and need for some sense of release or resolution, for any semblance of catharsis’ (2015: 153). The passionate fan response to the painful deaths of the couple provides a crucial context for the casting of Acker and Denisof in Much Ado. Shakespeare was part of the casting process involved with bringing the actors together on Angel; Acker’s initial audition involved a scene based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written by Whedon ‘in iambic pentameter, [with the plotline] that Alexis and J. August Richards were basically cast under a spell that made them fall in love with whichever woman they were looking at’ (Konrad 2013: par. 1). Shakespeare also contributed to Whedon’s decision to break the couple apart. Whedon’s decision to kill Fred and replace her with a demon goddess named after a Shakespearean setting came when he heard Acker read the role of Lady Capulet using a deeper vocal register than her usual high-pitched speaking voice. As Whedon explains, after seeing Acker ‘turning off that Amy thing and suddenly being very regal and very frightening. I was like, “Ooh! America has to know she can do that” ’ (Vary 2013: par. 40). His response to the Romeo and Juliet reading was to call her and say ‘You read so beautifully. I’m gonna kill you! . . . But you’re still on the show – you’re gonna be a goddess’ (pars 43–4). It is therefore fitting to viewers who saw the characters as star-crossed lovers that the actors were reunited nearly ten years later in a Shakespearean love story. In true rhizomatic fashion, Shakespeare influences the development of the characters’ relationships on Angel, which then prompts viewers to see Whedon’s Shakespeare film as an extension of or response to Angel. The casting of Acker and Denisof allows fans to ‘negotiate their pain and loss from the series with their joy at the resurrection and union of these actors displaced into another storyworld. In a sense, hyperdiegetic casting is fan

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service – deliberate attempts by creators to capitalize on existing emotional investment’ (McCormick 2018: 371). Much Ado builds upon the investment that fans might have in the Fred/Wesley relationship by providing viewers with something that Angel could not: a happy ending for a love story between characters played by Acker and Denisof. If we believe Whedon’s commentary on the film, providing closure for the relationship between Fred and Wesley was not a factor in the casting of Much Ado, and ‘it was not until several screenings in that I realized that I had resurrected Fred and Wesley from Angel and given them a happy ending . . . a little Fred and Wesley Heaven . . .’ (01:18:00). While the implications for fans of Angel might have taken Whedon by surprise, he admits that seeing the two actors playing characters who get to be in love without bleeding or dying makes him ‘get all fanfic-y’ now that he has made the connection (01:20:00). His phrasing is echoed by Richard Albright in his paper for the 6th Biennial Slayage conference, when he notes that ‘the film operates as a kind of sanctioned piece of fan fiction’ because of the casting of Acker and Denisof (quoted in Hautsch, McGee and Nadkarni 2014: 9). Every Whedon scholar who has examined hyperdiegetic casting since Much Ado at least mentions the implications of the Acker and Denisof pairing for the resolution that it gives to the Fred/Wesley relationship. But if Much Ado proves significant to viewers who want to see it as a fanfic rewriting or a cathartic resolution to Angel, then Angel is equally important to the way that Whedon fans perceive Much Ado. To see Beatrice and Benedick’s love story as only an alternate ending for Fred and Wesley is to see the effect of Shakespeare on the Whedonverse without understanding how the Whedonverse informs audience perceptions of Shakespeare’s characters. Whedon’s vision for the relationship of Beatrice and Benedick includes a sexual history between the two, and the film opens with a silent scene of Benedick awkwardly dressing and leaving Beatrice, who is feigning sleep, on the morning after the two have slept together. O’Brien mentions the prelude in his review, noting that ‘the invention of a prior hookup for the couple – “too wise to woo peaceably” – who will spend much of the rest of the play engaged in a “merry war” balancing attraction and repulsion is in fact perfectly consonant with Beatrice’s statement, in their first scene together, that “I know you of old” ’ (2013: 66). Later in the film, when

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Beatrice remembers their encounter after hearing that she has lost Benedick’s heart, there are flashbacks of the night the characters spent together. Whedon’s commentary notes that Acker’s reading of the line ‘I do believe it better than reportingly’ signals that she is remembering their romantic encounter as she considers whether Benedick might deserve her love (00:48:36). The flashbacks of Beatrice and Benedick can serve as a reminder of the love story viewers have already seen on Angel, resulting in viewers who conflate or connect the two romances. Cochran cites a reporter from Vulture who links the morning-after scene in Much Ado with Fred and Wesley by referencing ‘another history you guys have together’ (2015: 153). The phrasing is, as Cochran notes, ambiguous; the ‘you’ could refer to Acker and Denisof, Fred and Wesley, or both the actors and their Angel characters simultaneously, and all of those histories inform the viewers’ reading of Beatrice and Benedick. While neither actor uses recognizable characteristics from Angel for their character in Much Ado (Denisof even plays Benedick in a very different accent from the one he used for Wesley), the actors themselves function as Whedonesque texts. Given the pains that Whedon takes to establish the romantic history between Beatrice and Benedick, it serves his purpose that audience members familiar with the actors’ work on Angel have already internalized a romantic history between characters played by Acker and Denisof. In Alyson Buckman’s presentation at the 6th Biennial Slayage conference, she acknowledged the hyperdiegesis of casting Acker and Denisof in the film, but she argued that ‘the collection of Whedonverse actors in Much Ado works mainly to create the pleasure of recognition rather than deeper meanings’ (quoted in Cochran 2015: 158). It is true that the press coverage for the film emphasizes the pleasure of seeing several known actors from the Whedonverse gather in Whedon’s own home to perform Shakespeare, offering the film as a chance to ‘be a fly on the wall at the Shakespeare readings’ (Holl 2017: 111). The pleasure of recognition in the film is not just an end in itself, however, particularly with audience members who are more familiar with Whedon than Shakespeare. McCormick cautions readers against dismissing the practice as a ‘cheap trick’ or ‘fan service’ (2018: 371). Instead, he argues that the casting ‘demonstrates the complexity of intertextual fandom at stake in the Whedonverse, as well as the ways in which audiences’ mental labor frames interpretation, revealing one form of active fandom’ (2018:

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371). When audiences with emotional investment read backwards from television onto Shakespeare, their active fandom will inform their readings of the new performance text. The pleasure of recognition then takes on deeper meanings for viewers, whether intentional (casting Tom Lenk as Verges) or serendipitous (Fred and Wesley’s happy ending). Whedon deliberately utilizes and rewards his fans’ obsessive knowledge of his work to generate interest, understanding and investment in the Shakespeare characters played by Whedonverse actors. He channels the geeky enthusiasm of the Whedon fandom into his own geeky passion for Shakespeare and the rhizomatic convergence of Shakespeare and the Whedonverse extends influence in both directions. As in Whedon’s television series, familiarity with Whedon’s work informs viewers’ readings of Shakespeare, and vice versa.

Notes 1 The use of Shakespeare lines and references in the Whedonverse, particularly in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is well documented in sources ranging from fan archives (such as the cited Archive of Our Own post by beer_good) to peer-reviewed journals (for example, Ariane Balizet’s article for Borrowers and Lenders). 2 McCormick draws the term ‘hyperdiegetic casting’ from Alyson Buckman’s 2012 presentation at the 5th Biennial Slayage conference. Buckman later applied the term to Much Ado About Nothing in her 2014 presentation at the 6th Biennial Slayage conference. 3 The concept of using strategic casting to incorporate the audience’s foreknowledge of an actor’s previous roles precedes Whedon and extends beyond his work, however. Vary cites Judd Apatow and Wes Anderson as other directors who draw upon the same actors repeatedly to play similar characters or create a familiar atmosphere (2013: par. 3). Bussolini’s work on the intertextuality of casting is used to clarify the way American Horror Story draws upon the established onscreen roles and personas of actresses such as Jessica Lange and Angela Bassett, as well as the show’s practice of recycling many of the actors in entirely new roles across multiple seasons in what is known as repertory casting, which can also be seen as a form of hyperdiegetic casting (Jowett 2017: 12). 4 The reuse of actors is also a key part of live performances of Shakespeare’s plays, dating back to the first production of Hamlet,

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when it is supposed that Polonius’ line about playing Caesar is an indication that John Heminges played both roles, which might hint at Polonius’ death at the hands of the same actor who played Brutus (Edwards 1981: 148). The practice of conscious doubling continues in the twenty-first century, particularly in productions such as Michael Boyd’s Histories cycle at the Royal Shakespeare Company. 5 Jillian Morgese, who plays Hero, is also a Whedon alumna; she made her film debut as an extra in The Avengers just before Whedon began casting Much Ado About Nothing. 6 For example, Marilyn Monroe plays similar characters in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, but her portrayals are consistent rather than intertextual; a knowledgeable audience member’s understanding that Marilyn plays similar characters in both films adds little meaning, connection or contrast between the films. 7 It is worth noting that both Caleb and Malcolm Reynolds share unusual speech patterns characterized by old-fashioned syntax and diction. This similarity adds to the unsettling juxtaposition of Fillion’s hero and villain roles and establishes a pattern for the actor to continue with Dogberry’s misuse of early modern English. J. Douglas Rabb and J. Michael Richardson also note that Fillion’s use of malapropisms in the Firefly episode ‘Ariel’ might have served him well with Dogberry’s lines (2014: 39). 8 ‘Shipping’ is the popular term for emotionally investing in a romantic relationship between fictional characters, such as the relationship between Fred and Wesley in Angel.

Works cited Balizet, Ariane (2014), ‘Shakespeare, Television, and Girl Culture’, in Deanne Williams (ed.), Shakespeare and Girlhood, special issue of Borrowers and Lenders 9, no. 1. beer_good (2016), ‘Sunnydale-Upon-Avon, or the Use of Shakespeare in the Whedonverse’, Archive of Our Own, 15 May, http:// archiveofourown.org/works/6859687. Buckman, A. R. (2012), ‘ “Didn’t Get the Memo? Hero of the People Now”: Joss Whedon, Hat Tricks, and the Complication of Viewer Responses’, Fifth Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, 12–15 July, Vancouver, British Columbia. Buckman, Alyson (2014), ‘ “We Are Not What We Are”: Hyperdiegesis in the Whedonverse’, Abstract for presentation, SCW6: Much Ado About

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Whedon: The 6th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, California State University, Sacramento, California, June. http://scw6. whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/buckman_scw6_ proposal.pdf. Burt, Richard (2001), ‘Shakespeare and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor’s Titus is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets the Camp’, Colby Quarterly 37, no. 1: 78–106. Bussolini, Jeffrey (2013), ‘Television Intertextuality After Buffy: Intertextuality of Casting and Constitutive Intertextuality’, Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 10, no. 1 (Winter). Cochran, Tanya R. (2015), ‘From Angel to Much Ado: Cross-Textual Catharsis, Kinesthetic Empathy and Whedonverse Fandom’, in Lincoln Geraghty (ed.), Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, 149–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. CompGeekHolly (2013), ‘The Hat Trick or You Look Familiar’, Comparative Geeks, 20 April, https://comparativegeeks.wordpress. com/2013/04/20/the-hat-trick-or-you-look-familiar/ Edwards, Philip (1981), ‘Shakespeare and Kyd’, in Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio and D. J. Palmer (eds), Shakespeare, Man of the Theater: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 148–54. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Flaherty, Jennifer (2015), ‘Filming Shakespeare’s Rome: The “Preposterous Contemporary” Eternal City’, Contemporary Jacobean Film, special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 2: 228–40. Hautsch, Jessica, Masani McGee and Samira Nadkarni (2014/2015), ‘Much Ado About Whedon: Report on the 6th Biennial Slayage Conference’, Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 12, no. 2/13, no. 1 (Winter/Spring). Holl, Jennifer (2017), ‘Shakespearean Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play’, in Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds), The Shakespeare User, 109–27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. James, Caryn (1990), ‘Review/Film; From Mad Max to a Prince Possessed’, New York Times, 19 December, Online Archive, https:// www.nytimes.com/1990/12/19/movies/review-film-from-mad-max-toa-prince-possessed.html. Jowett, Lorna (2017), ‘American Horror Stories, Repertory Horror, and Intertextuality of Casting’, in Rebecca Janicker (ed.), Reading American Horror Story: Essays on the Television Franchise, 8–26, Jefferson, NC : McFarland. Konrad, Erin (2013), ‘Amy Acker on “Much Ado About Nothing” and Joss Whedon’s Backyard Shakespeare Readings’, Daily Actor, 13 June, http://www.dailyactor.com/film/amy-acker-much-ado-about-nothingjoss-whedon-backyard-shakespeare-readings/.

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Lanier, Douglas (2014), ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’, in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 21–40. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. McCormick, Casey J. (2018), ‘Active Fandom: Labor and Love in The Whedonverse’, in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, 369–84. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley & Sons. Much Ado About Nothing (2012), [Film] dir. Joss Whedon, Bellweather and Lionsgate. O’Brien, Geoffrey (2013), ‘Much Ado About Nothing Review’, FilmComment, May/June. Rabb, J. Douglas and J. Michael Richardson (2014), Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist: Narrative Ethics of the Bard and the Buffyverse, Jefferson, NC : McFarland. Rambo, Elizabeth L. (2014), ‘Metaphoric Unity and Ending: Sending and Receiving Serenity’s Last Message’, in Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson and David Lavery (eds), Reading Joss Whedon, 185–97. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Settles, Burr (2013), ‘On “Geek” Versus “Nerd”: Language, Psychology: Social Science’, SlackPropagation, 3 June, https://slackprop.wordpress. com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-nerd/. Vary, Adam B. (2013), ‘Life Inside The Whedonverse’, Buzzfeed, 5 June, https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/what-its-like-to-live-in-thewhedonverse?utm_term=.baGrzjPok#.tvj1B65A.

17 Worst. Lear. Ever. Early Modern Drama and Geek Hermeneutics James D. Mardock

When, in 2013, Warner Brothers announced that Ben Affleck would be cast as Batman in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the reaction of fandom was swift. Batman geeks responded with incredulity, even before shooting began: thousands of tweets in the first hour after the announcement condemned the decision, fans launched an online petition to recast the role, and blogs were quick to condemn Affleck as the bottom of the barrel in the Batman actor rankings, below even Val Kilmer in 1995’s despised Batman Forever. In the phraseology of The Simpsons’s archetypal geek, the lispingly officious Comic Book Guy, Affleck, like Kilmer and Michael Keaton before him, was sure to be the Worst. Batman. Ever. It is unsurprising that the film – smothering a potentially powerful story with sloppy editing, hammy acting and unnecessary side plots – was poorly received by critics, receiving a 27 per cent Rotten Tomato rating, but even the usually more forgiving DC Comics fan base gave it comparatively low marks on that website, suggesting that the geekheavy target audience found something objectionable. Where critics are tasked with reviewing a film as a film, a comic-book blockbuster’s 285

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target audience often sees itself as the keepers of a deeper, enduring myth, and the anaemic box office receipts for Zack Snyder’s film seem to correlate to the egregiousness of its perceived offences to the canon: Lex Luthor is a twitchy millennial? Batman and Superman bond over their moms’ shared first name? Affleck does have his supporters on the blogosphere, though, and the controversy continues in dark corners of the internet: did Affleck capture Batman, or would we have to write him off as a heresy tantamount to the nipples on George Clooney’s batsuit? Even posing such a question, let alone answering it, presupposes a locus for authority entirely separate from the traditional model of authorship. Bob Kane may have created Batman, but he is not the only authority on the character, any more than Gene Roddenberry exclusively defines Star Trek or George Lucas dictates what makes Star Wars. Nor are we helped much by a cultural poetics that includes the author functions of actor and director. As successful as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was – establishing the cliché of the ‘gritty reboot’ – it did not establish Nolan as the definitive auteur or Christian Bale as the Measure of All Batmen. Nolan, like Tim Burton, Zach Snyder et al., is the servant of a larger authority. So where does that authority reside? Who decides what counts as Batman (or Star Wars or Star Trek or the X-Men) if not their creators? What is the role of the army of geeks on Tumblr, Reddit, 4Chan and elsewhere – perhaps not the producers’ only, or even primary, intended audience – who appoint themselves arbiters and curators of canonicity with regard to the modern sci-fi/fantasy/ superhero blockbuster? Where does their authority come from? With regard to modern fan culture, Foucault’s Author Function can usefully be supplemented by something like a ‘Geek Function’. I believe we might extend this concept beyond the modern blockbuster and its authoritative networks, using it as a hermeneutic lens through which to understand the relationship between company, audience and authorship in early modern drama. What do we get when we think of authority centring not on a playwright or on a company, but on assumptions about and expectations for a character? Is such a model advisable, or plausible? One possibly useful modern parallel the geek hermeneutic offers is the example of test screenings. Thanks in large part to Tiffany Stern’s work on prologues and epilogues, we know of the existence and importance of first-day audiences, those self-appointed judges

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of quality whom Puck implores to give him their pardoning hands and Pandarus begs not to hiss (Stern 2004). Such audiences expected to have a say in the success and continuation of a play’s run, and even to suggest emendations. Modern film production houses are often criticized for capitulating to test audiences and adjusting a play’s tone to appease them with detrimental aesthetic results – even, as in the case of I Am Legend (2007), rendering the film’s plot retroactively absurd. We might easily find analogues to test screening in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that expand the possibilities for interpretation of textual variants beyond the old models. The 1980s Oxford editors, for example, argued that F Hamlet was closer to the performed script of the play, and Q2 closer to what were once called ‘foul papers’. But what if we think of F not as the result of the play as adapted by the company for its first performance, but as the play offered to the world after approval by its test audience? Compare Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), severely cut for theatrical release after it confused test audiences, and altered by the studio to include an overbearing voice-over. While the theatrical release was quite successful, the director’s cut is now widely considered superior, both as a film and a more provocative adaptation of its source material in Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The release of the director’s cut on DVD was a response to geek demand as much as to Scott’s auteurship. If the first-day playhouse audience – the earlymodern equivalent of test screeners – were responsible for the removal of, say, the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy from the version of Hamlet underlying F, then we might think of the ‘restored’ Q2 version as equivalent to the director’s cut DVD: released for the hard-core Hamlet geeks a few years after its playhouse performance in a longer form, unbastardized by the demands of the undiscerning, non-geek public.1 The folio version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may offer a similar opportunity. While most editors have taken the quarto as copy text, the folio offers a series of changes to 5.1 – reassigned lines, changes to stage directions, that can hardly be considered errors, since they tend toward a pattern, bringing Egeus onstage and forcing him to interact with his unwanted new son-in-law. The changes to the text itself are superficial and would require relatively minor alterations to individual actors’ parts, but the effect,

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schadenfreude at discomfiture of the senex iratus, while perhaps inconsistent with the tone of the scene, must have appealed to someone: if not to the author or the company, then perhaps a New Comedy geek in the first-day audience. In modern filmic reworking of existing properties, the geek hermeneutic determines what is canon. Consider Batman again: in any iteration, whoever we would consider the author, whoever is the performer, whatever the tone and whatever the mode, we know the basics of the story and character. Bruce Wayne, scion of a wealthy family and heir to Wayne Manor, is orphaned by a mugger. He has a cave under his property filled with cool, but creepily panoptic gadgetry. He wears a cape and a cowl to play on criminals’ fear, and he fights crime nocturnally, but without a gun, in a place called Gotham City. Some degree of variation is acceptable: his relationship with the police commissioner, with Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing or other superheroes, can be different between iterations, or non-existent. The tone need not be consistent among performances, either – maybe he’s brooding, maybe he’s campy. Maybe he snarls in a Christian Bale stage whisper, or maybe he dances the Batusi and makes alliterative puns. Maybe he’s even made of meta-dramatic LEGO. But if Bruce Wayne is suddenly a gun-loving, married cop in Cleveland, he’s not Batman. Even smaller variations can be excluded from the canonical reception of the character if they do not meet geekdom’s standards. Michael Keaton’s curly hair made the cut among geeks (eventually, after the usual outcry at his casting), but George Clooney’s bat-credit-card did not. If you give Lex Luthor hair, if Gotham City and Metropolis are made into twin cities across a bay, if Batman can fly or kills wantonly, some portion of the audience will reject your iteration of the myth from the bat-canon. We will do well to investigate this geek-curation dynamic with regard to early modern English drama, a cultural phenomenon and a business that was also, for practical and commercial reasons, built upon the reworking of existing properties. The fact that ‘the Stationers habitually identified multiple plays on the same topic . . . as a single play’ speaks to the centring of authority in character and story rather than in a writer (Marino 2011: 116). The King’s Men squabbled with the Children of the Queen’s Revels not over the rights to Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, but to the character of Hieronimo, whom the children had staged in the prequel The First

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Part of Hieronimo (Reibetanz 1972). While this play was apparently not widely successful, its existence does suggest a taste for a campier, winking version of the tragic Spanish Marshal, a character who was still being quoted by irritating Hieronimo geeks twenty years after he first appeared on stage, according to Jonson’s Induction to Bartholomew Fair. Certain characters and their associated stories simply outgrow their creators and become cultural, or subcultural, property. One such story and character is that of King Lear (or Lir or Leir or Leyr). We know this now primarily as Shakespeare’s story, but his adaptation of it presents us with a different case from his other dramatizations or reworking of source material. Unlike Cinthio’s Othello tale, or Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus, the pre-Christian British king who divides his kingdom among his daughters had been a part of popular English culture for centuries. With its roots in folklore, it appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regium Brittaniae (c. 1135) and is transmitted via Robert Fabyan (1516), among others, to Holinshed’s Chronicle (1587), where, presumably, it was read by Shakespeare, as well as by Edmund Spenser, who incorporates the story into The Faerie Queene 2.10.27–32 (1590). Spenser also drew upon the version of the story, told by the ghost of Cordila, found in John Higgins’s additions to The Mirror for Magistrates (1574). By the time the first Lear/Leir play was written, the story had been told by ‘over fifty writers, historians, and poets’ (Stern 2002: viii), and what these non-dramatic versions of the story all have in common is the restoration of the Lear figure to his throne after a period of civil war. To be sure, after Lear’s death, the Cordelia figure is again overtaken by civil war – her despairing suicide provides Higgins and Spenser with a moral exemplum and Shakespeare with a tragic precedent – but nevertheless, Lear’s own story invariably has a redemptive if not comic ending.2 When the story first came to the professional stage with the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters (perhaps, as Stationers’ Register evidence suggests, around 1594), its playwright introduced several innovations to the chronicles’ version: a Gallian king disguised as a palmer who secretly woos Cordella; a scene in which Leir and his counsellor Perillus, like a successful Duke of Clarence, convince a hired murderer not to kill them with a moral argument coupled with a convenient thunderclap; and a French nobleman named Mumford

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who goes from bawdy clown to war hero. The play’s innovations do not, however, extend to changing the traditional comic ending of the Lear story. Free to stop the chronicles’ narration wherever he likes, the playwright ends with the restoration of Leir’s crown by Cordella and her royal Gallian husband. Perhaps Shakespeare had seen the anonymous play in the 1590s; it is even possible that he had acted in it with the Queen’s Men (Stern 2002: ix). Perhaps he encountered the version of the play printed in 1605 with a title-page claim to have been ‘lately acted’. Whether this claim suggests a stage revival, the printing of a Leir play ten years or more after its writing suggests a revival of interest in the story – perhaps piqued by the accession of James I and the reprinting in London of his Basilikon Doron. Shakespeare certainly seems to have known the earlier play, and he responds to its episodes directly, reworking in a tragic mode key elements of what had been comic in King Leir (Stern 2002: ix). For all his memorable additions to the story, though – the Gloucester subplot, the erasure of all mention of the princesses’ mother, the descent of the central character into madness, the fool – Shakespeare’s cheekiest innovation was his unrelentingly tragic ending, the ‘gritty reboot’ of the Lear legend. Regardless of its mode or context, the story had one thing Lear geeks at the turn of the seventeenth century could agree on: a happy ending. When Shakespeare’s version killed Cordelia and broke her father’s heart on stage, it must have been shocking, both to the audience, and at the earliest performances, even to the players, who would not all have seen evidence of the tragic reworking in the parts they had learned. When the actor playing Kent asked ‘Is this the promised end?’ at the first public performance, the audience could be forgiven for wondering along with him; the question must have seemed as relevant to genre as to eschatology. Absence of evidence is not, of course, proof of a negative, but aside from the royal performance at Whitehall in December 1606, a revival in 1608 and one staging in Yorkshire in 1610, Shakespeare’s version of the story seems not to have been performed until after the Restoration. As with Zach Snyder’s Batman v. Superman, Shakespeare’s gritty reboot of a well-known story seems not to have been terribly well received by that story’s geek-curators. It is not impossible that some of the tinkerings that differentiate the Q and F texts of Shakespeare’s play – the change of Lear’s last line from

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Q’s death rattle to the ambiguously hopeful ‘Look there!’ for example – are the result of trying to appease geekdom’s resistance to Shakespeare’s generic experiment with a slightly more redemptive version of the play for the 1608 revival. Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation of King Lear, which let Lear survive and married Cordelia to Edgar, held the stage from its writing until 1834. The Lear with the Hollywood ending is often trotted out, to the amusement and bafflement of undergraduates, to illustrate (and denigrate) the tastes of eighteenth-century audiences. But this obscures the quite relevant fact that Shakespeare was the anomaly – the unloved Zack Snyder among those who got Lear right. Tate, though he thought he was up to something new, stringing and polishing Shakespeare’s ‘Heap of Jewels’ into something decorous, was merely restoring the story to what it had always been (Tate 1681: A2v). It will be worthwhile in future to consider the influence of hardcore fans, of geeks, alongside that of the companies, poets and censors that have been the focus of much of our critical and performance histories of early modern drama. If we consider dramatic characters as having had their own fan bases, regardless of the authors of the plays they appeared in or the playhouses that staged those plays, we might expand the range of answers to certain questions. Do we need to ascribe the demand for a Falstaff comedy to Queen Elizabeth, or were Falstaff geeks clamouring for it? Is Jonson’s Richard Crookback a tantalizingly ‘lost’ play because Jonson never finished it or suppressed it, or because hard-core fans of the villain-king rejected it as a travesty of the character they loved from the tradition of Thomas More, the True Tragedy and Shakespeare? Troilus and Cressida has a famously obscure performance history, with one incarnation of its 1609 quarto claiming it was played by the King’s Men at the Globe, while a second saying that it was ‘neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapperclawd with the palms of the vulger’. We have taken this to mean that it was never performed, or performed only at court. But Troilus is the one play in Shakespeare’s canon whose characters have a longer history and a broader fan base than those of King Lear; another possibility is that the play was removed from the repertoire after failing to appeal to the discriminating gatekeepers in the firstday test-audience, the curators of millennia-old characters foundational to Europe’s, and England’s, cultural architecture.

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Maybe the geeks’ response was effectively #NotMyUlysses. Critical history has, of course, been kinder to Troilus and Cressida than the vulgar, with their unclapping palms; perhaps Shakespearean critical history, in this regard, illustrates the distinction made in this book’s Introduction between geeks who draw their critique only from their own proudly narrow expertise and preferences regarding popular culture, and the scholarly nerds who contextualize their responses within wider interpretive, historical and cultural conversations. I do not mean to suggest that the authority of geekdom should be privileged. The energy of geekery may be drawn from love, but its enthusiasms all too readily lead to pettiness, territorial bullying and hatred: witness the sexist ‘gamergate’ controversy, and the toxically racist and misogynist response to the alternate vision of Star Wars in the (critically, nerdically acclaimed) The Last Jedi or to the female-centred Ghostbusters reboot, in which white male agitation over ‘ruined childhoods’ was channelled into online harassment of minority actors and the hacking of Rotten Tomato metrics. Awareness of the geek response to cultural phenomena is crucial to our understanding of modern society, and I’m arguing that the geek–nerd distinction (or the overlap between these categories in our profession) is just as important for the understanding of Shakespeare reception history. If we only locate authorship in the writer of a script (or his company), we are left with a binary – Shakespeare or not-Shakespeare – that obscures the powerful authority of geekdom.

Notes 1 Lukas Erne’s (2003) argument about the apparently unplayable length of some Shakespearean texts rests on a similar interpretation – that Shakespeare wrote for a literary readership that would have appreciated longer play texts; my only suggestion here is that such texts could have been impelled by audience demand as easily as by authorial literary ambition. 2 A personal anecdote may suggest that the deep structure of the narrative, the folkloric conventions of the three daughters plot, even require such an ending. As an experiment to gauge whether any vague cultural memory attached to the story in the absence of an individual’s experience with it, I once asked a friend, who at the time had never read or seen Shakespeare’s play, what she thought happens in King

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Lear. She told a story precisely parallel to the main plot of Shakespeare’s play, with one exception: she guessed that the king was restored at the end, regardless of how many other characters had to die.

Works cited Erne, L. (2003), Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marino, J. (2011), Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and their Intellectual Property. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Reibetanz, J. (1972), ‘Hieronimo in Decimosexto: A Private Theater Burlesque’, Renaissance Drama 5: 89–121. Stern, T., ed. (2002), King Leir, The Globe Quartos. New York: Routledge. Stern, T. (2004), ‘ “A Small-Beer Health to His Second Day”: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theater’, Studies in Philology 101: 172–98. Tate, N. (1681), The History of King Lear. London: n.p.

18 ‘It Was Geek to Me’ Shakespeare, Performance and Geek Cultures Peter Holland

Many things are accomplished before the word to describe them is yet coined or appropriated. In 1980, before, at least as far as the OED is currently concerned, the word ‘geek’ had taken on the meaning of ‘A person who is extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers or related technology’ (n., 1.c) but when it was already identifiable as ‘any unsociable person obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit’ (1.b), Michael Mullin, with Karen Morris Muriello, published a two-volume work under the title Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. The title did not reveal very much – but the subtitle did: A Catalogue-Index to Productions of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre/Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1879–1978. It would be followed in 1994 by a First Supplement, covering 1979–93. The first two volumes, created at a time when printers for computer output could only generate capitals, in a low-res typeface that blurs in the printed volumes, look like a bizarrely primitive, amateurish and unquestionably geeky creation. Even though the First Supplement’s page design looks acceptably modern to our eyes (lower-case being by then available!), the whole project seems now 294

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strangely outdated. Of course one can search its different indexes for names, reviewers, chronologies, playwrights, play titles. So what are the searches that we would now do that makes Mullin’s project somehow pre-techno-geekish? (OED is at present ignorant of the word techno-geek.) I shall come back to that in a moment but I would want to suggest that, in many respects, work of this nature was already engaging with a geek culture, in that understanding of the phrase that is driven by its association with ‘computers or related technology’. If your sense of geek, geekery, geekdom and other cognates is not in part driven by the technological resonances, then that may be because your geeking is different from mine. There is no one agreed definition and we simply to have accept the broad and expanding semantic field within which each of the chapters of this volume found their place. One of the great achievements of twentieth-century theatre history, as a discipline seeking to document a historical past in as complete a detail as possible, was The London Stage, 1660–1800, which was, to give it its full subtitle – one that makes Mullin’s subtitle look positively restrained – A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, and Afterpieces together with casts, box-receipts, and contemporary comment compiled from the playbills, newspapers and theatrical diaries of the period. Published between 1960 and 1968 in eleven thick volumes, representing five periods, each under the control of a different editor, and with each period given a lengthy introduction (later republished separately), the work was characteristic of the publishing commitment of Southern Illinois University Press at this time, a commitment that would continue with the companion project, edited by Philip H. Highfill, Jr, Kalman Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of actors, actresses, musicians, dancers, managers and other stage personnel in London, 1660–1800, its sixteen volumes, from Abaco to Zwingman, appearing from 1973 to 1993. The geekiness of The London Stage, especially its technogeekiness, did not lie in anything done in its initial print publication but in the appearance, in 1979, of a full-scale index, running to 939 pages, far more substantial than the indexes at the back of each volume, edited by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. Schneider recounted in great detail (a sure sign of his geekiness) the long, long progress of the creation of the Index in – here comes another long title – Travels

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in Computerland, or Incompatibilities and Interfaces, a full and true account of the implementation of the London Stage Information Bank, which appeared in 1974, five years before the print publication of the Index itself. It was reading Schneider’s tale soon after it appeared – for as a devoted user of The London Stage I was fascinated by anything to do with accessing its riches – that first introduced me to the possibilities of OCR (optical character recognition), a vital tool, of course, for turning a print document into something machine-readable. And, while I am being autobiographical as a way of proving my techno-geek credentials, I should mention that I was the lead on creating A Concordance to T.S. Eliot ‘The Complete Poems and Plays’, co-edited with John Dawson and David McKitterick, a project I began in the early 1970s as an undergraduate, when inputting the data involved typing it onto fragile punched tape (even before the invention of punched cards), and which took a mere twenty years finally to appear. If Schneider taught me about OCR, the Eliot project taught me about KWIC concordance design, though there was nothing quick about it. I have therefore deep sympathies with projects like Schneider’s and Mullin’s. Academics getting in touch with their inner geek will recognize that the projects I have been describing were an end in themselves for those who laboured long to complete them. I had no real interest in researching Eliot’s poems and plays when I proposed the concordance initially to the head of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre in Cambridge, and I had even less interest in writing on them when the concordance appeared. Surmounting the technical problems was an end in itself – that and the equally intriguing problems of securing permission from Valerie Eliot and from Peter du Sautoy at Faber and Faber to work on material still very much in copyright. Someone else, I assumed, would find the concordance useful and perhaps provocative, not least for what it revealed of word frequencies in Eliot’s writing. I have no idea whether anyone did. But, in the introductory matter to Mullin’s project, Mullin and Muriello very deliberately set out ‘Opportunities for Research, using the Archives and Catalogue-Index’. Its curious opening flourish encourages exploration of the archives of the Stratford tradition ‘which await the discovery of all for whom the theatre of the past is the prelude to the theatre of the future’ (Mullin and

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Muriello 1980: 1: xxxiii). Theatre researchers are not usually concerned with the theatre of the future, but the group that is next addressed certainly is: ‘For Directors, designers, and actors’ (1: xxxiii). Then they turn to advice ‘for scholars and critics’ (1: xxxiv), who can now ‘reconstruct and interpret signal performances of the past, not as isolated productions, but as productions within the context of others of the same play and within the context of their theatrical mileau [sic]’ (1: xxxv). Having suggested repertory study long before anyone was doing much along those lines, they move on to the study of staging details, none of which form part of the Catalogue-Index itself, though the RSC archives, especially promptbooks, can help. The purpose of all this is not theatre history for its own sake but instead ‘speculations on the play’s meaning will find rigorous proof (or its absence) in the actualities of real performance’. I cannot think of anyone working on the study of the histories and geographies of Shakespeare performance now for whom the purpose of their research could be encapsulated as a search for ‘the play’s meaning’ (so emphatically and, to our eyes, strangely singular). And I am not sure that anyone did that then either. But the geekiness of the project, as an example of the early fascination with what would become Digital Humanities, intrigues, not least because I bought a copy of the first two volumes and do not think I ever took them down from my shelves. Of course, Mullin’s project was, in a sense, replicated and, in another sense, massively improved, through the various stages of the development of the RSC Performance Database, as it used to be called, hosted on the website of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (currently at http://collections.shakespeare.org.uk/search/rsc-performances), a resource whose title is entirely wrong since it covers all performances in Stratford and not only those since the founding of the RSC. It hardly needs a techno-geek to create such a site now. But what is it for? I use the database to check the opening date for a production or to look at cast and crew details. This is the scholar needing a factoid as s/he writes. It is also the nerd who is fascinated by the small details that turn out to be oddly engaging. When I was editing Coriolanus for the Arden Shakespeare 3rd series, I spent time reading as many promptbooks as possible. Some snippets found their way into my commentary notes. Take, for instance, the start of

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1.5 when, as F puts it, ‘Enter certaine Romanes with spoiles’, and the first Roman soldier says ‘This will I carry to Rome.’ ‘This’ is of course the kind of word that leaves wide open what the referent might be. As I put it in my note: Precisely what ‘This’ and the other spoils are is open to a director’s choice. The props list for the RSC 1973 London transfer includes ‘cradle, barrel, bedrolls, silver cup, sheet, dirty material, shoes, spoons etc. in cradle’. The 1959 SMT production made ‘This’ distinctly different: the Volscian woman that the soldier brought on over his shoulder . . . Both examples seemed and still seem to me well worth giving, a way of indicating to readers two specific performance examples of solutions to the referent for ‘This’, without in any way suggesting that these are the only possible or ‘right’ answers. But, having come across the second example by reading the promptbook, I could not help myself from continuing that that Volscian woman was ‘played by Diana Rigg’. If one checks the cast list in the RSC Performance Database, one finds that Rigg is listed as playing ‘Roman Citizen’, which she probably did as well. Here is an actor at the start of her career, her first season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, as yet nowhere near in the same league as the rest of the cast that Peter Hall had assembled, most notably Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus and Edith Evans as Volumnia. She played in Othello (starring Paul Robeson), King Lear (starring Charles Laughton), Tyrone Guthrie’s All’s Well and in Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the other plays in that season, but in all of these her roles were not identified: simply one of the extras, play-as-cast, the bottom of the theatrical heap. By 1962 when Hall revived his Dream, Rigg played Helena (as she did in his 1969 film, her first film role). We can – I have just done so – see the arc of her career in the cast lists: in John Barton’s 1960 Shrew at the SMT, Rigg was a ‘Wench’ with Peggy Ashcroft as Katharine, but, by the time Maurice Daniels’ Shrew was playing at the Aldwych in 1961, she was Bianca to Vanessa Redgrave’s Katherine. By 1966, via Cordelia and Adriana in Errors, both from 1962 to 1964 including tours, she was playing Viola in Clifford Williams’ Twelfth Night. In seven years she had established herself as an RSC star but, apart from being one of the readers in John Barton’s wonderful confection,

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The Hollow Crown, in 1967 and again, alongside Derek Jacobi, Ian Richardson and Donald Sinden, in 2002, she did not work with the RSC again. I have deliberately been myopic in this account, for the crucial influence on her casting in theatre and film after 1965 was her television work as Emma Peel in The Avengers, the name a pun on ‘M Appeal’ (standing for ‘male appeal’). Shakespeare scholars are often far, far more alert to the thread of an actor’s Shakespeare performances than to the many other roles that can be equally, if not, as in this case, even more significant in defining an actor’s casting and the ways a particular performance is read. Trying to make sense of David Tennant’s RSC Hamlet (2008) without considering the presence of Doctor Who would be impossible.1 I will return to this later. Diana Rigg’s performance as the Volscian woman, seized as spoils to be carried back to Rome, went unremarked. The woman may have been going willingly or not, for there is no mention anywhere in my researches of anything that indicated whether she was protesting furiously at this rape, acquiescing or even relishing the prospect of going to Rome – and in 1959 the gender politics of each possible playing of the moment would have read very differently to the audience from the ways in which we would now think of this example of the fate of women in a war zone. And, since there is nothing in her casting that in itself illuminates the moment as directorial choice, the information is irrelevant to anyone curious about Coriolanus and only of interest to those, like me, obsessed by the details of theatre history, this step for Rigg from a barely named role toward her current celebrity and iconic status. The identification spirals out away from the moment and I doubt whether anyone watching then could have predicted her career track. Theatre geeks and nerds alike are inordinately proud of moments when they did predict someone’s future stardom. My own contribution to this smug self-regard is that in 1964 I admired the talent of a novice actor playing the role of an Inca interpreter in the National Theatre’s Royal Hunt of the Sun – he was Derek Jacobi. But is the inclusion of the early moment of Rigg’s career a sign of my being theatre geek or theatre nerd? Time to step back again and consider theatre geeks and Shakespeare geeks a little further. As far as Seth Rudetsky is concerned, in his (2015) YA (young adult) novel, The Rise and Fall of a Theatre Geek, theatre geekery is little

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more than being stage-struck and desperately hoping for one’s moment in the spotlight, as his hero Justin discovers. This is, as amazon.com puts it, ‘for any kid who’s ever aspired to Broadway but can only sneak in through the stage door’.2 There is no sign in this of anything we would usually accept as signalling a geek. If stage-struck and theatre geek are synonyms, then the geek has acquired a desire for fame (and a lack of any techno characteristics) that runs counter to most other uses of the word. Most merchandising websites work by adding descriptors to goods in the hope that, when your search terms for items are ‘theatre geek’, you will want to buy what turns up. A hardcover journal on Redbubble Ltd, whose cover reads ‘I’m a theatre nerd. That means I live in a crazy fantasy world where I randomly break out into show tunes. Thank you for understanding,’ carries the tags ‘theatre lover, theatre geek, drama teacher gift, thespian shirt’ and many more.3 A T-shirt on Etsy reading ‘What happens backstage stays backstage’ is marked, in part, as ‘Funny Cute Theater Theatre . . . Crew Lights tech . . . Nerd Geek Birthday Director’, with the variant spellings of theatre ensuring that orthography doesn’t limit choice.4 My search for Shakespeare geek on Etsy produced 164 popular items, including, for instance, a T-short reading ‘’til death, we do art’, a slogan that is neither Shakespeare nor geeky. Most of the items have virtually no geekiness and only the ‘Elements of the Bard of Avon’ poster, which plays on the classic lists of chemical elements with Shakespearean overtones (at £60) really caught my geeky imagination. I would compare it with ‘Greater Shakespeare’, the Shakespeare tube map designed by Kit Grover and Hester LeesJeffries for the RSC, a riff on both the ‘real’ map but also Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear. Lees-Jeffries has pointed out some of the jokes she incorporated into it: Disabled access for Richard III seems reasonable, as does the riverboat interchange for Ophelia, but Aaron, Helena and Bertram’s baby-changing facilities, Titus’s refreshments, and the generous provision of unisex toilets around the comedies perhaps need to be puzzled out more carefully. In my experience, the joke that has needed the most explanation has been Hamlet’s ‘change here for the airport express’, because that requires textual knowledge, of the ‘flights of angels’. Troilus and Cressida remain my favourite joke: on a branch line from the rest of the

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lovers, they, like Angelo and Mariana, remain ‘evenings and peak hours only’. (Lees-Jeffries 2013: 193) Working out the jokes for the viewer has that crucial element of insider specialist knowledge that is a recurrent feature of the communities of fan geekdom and, again, a slight taxonomic unease as to whether this is geekdom or nerdery. Pinterest searches, like those on Etsy, have results with similarly marginal connections to the geek identity. Only the overlapping Venn diagrams for Shakespeare plays according to four controls – war, suicide, romance, supernatural – have what seem to me the essential scientifistic qualities of the geek.5 At this point, the slipperiness of the term ‘geek’ is fully apparent. Some would argue – on some days, I might argue – that this is not geekery at all but simply nerdiness. But for others – and usually for me – this stays within the domain of geekdom. Take, for instance, as representative of the true geek style, Rob Minto’s Sports Geek, which, as its subtitle accurately describes (and subtitles continue to figure largely in this chapter), is ‘A visual tour of sporting myths, debate and data’. Minto’s discussion of whether the distribution of tennis prize money undervalues doubles, ‘How tennis is killing doubles’, includes an elegant chart for the percentage of prize money that goes to the five main sections: men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles (Minto 2016: 106). Each topic has the kind of chart that geeks love to create and to read, accompanied by a discussion based on even more statistics. For sports geeks, statistics are crucial – hence the particular geekiness of baseball and cricket, two sports where the complexities of the stats leave ample room for geek engagement. Not entirely dissimilar statistics have started to figure in Shakespeare editions. After all, if the computer can generate stats easily, why not find something to count? The RSC Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, gives a percentage for each character’s speeches as a proportion of the whole play; the Arden Shakespeare 3rd series, when viewed on the Drama Online website, has a set of ‘Play Tools’, not part of the print edition nor created by the play editors, that include a grid showing which scenes a character is present in and a chart of total words per scene.

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Such data has uses, not least for trivia quiz questions, such as ‘Which is the second longest role in Dream?’ The answer depends on whether Theseus and Oberon are doubled and, if so, whether that is one character or two. When Oberon is a kind of dream avatar of Theseus, the roles become one role. Without the doubling working in such a fashion, The RSC Shakespeare’s counts make Bottom the longest role and Theseus second. With the double, Theseus/Oberon is by far the longest role: some 2 per cent of the lines are his/theirs. But in its comparison of characters, The RSC Shakespeare’s lists can also indicate more significant possibilities: for instance, the fact that in Dream, Theseus’ 11 per cent and Oberon’s 10 per cent add up to far more than Titania and Hippolyta (7 per cent and 2 per cent respectively), or that in Cymbeline Iachimo and Posthumus have exactly the same number of lines, or that, though Benedick is the largest role in Much Ado, Beatrice’s is smaller than those of Leonato, Don Pedro and Claudio. And the grid, familiar as a tool for theatre rehearsals, is a useful way of visualizing the flow of characters on- and off-stage and, indeed, many of these representations of distributions produce a kind of abstraction of the play, a level or angle of view of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that is too often underemphasized in critical analysis. Not all Shakespeare geekery is quite as concerned with a technology as this. Sometimes, the intersection is more coincidental. Duane, who runs the blog-site Shakespeare Geek, The Original Shakespeare Blog, with the subtitle Shakespeare Makes Life Better (https://www.shakespearegeek.com), describes himself as ‘a lifelong computer geek’. He started his website in 2005, because At the time, blogs were big. But there were no Shakespeare blogs. There were plenty of places where I could read the text, and plenty of places where you could get a ‘modern translation’ of the text. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted people saying, excitedly, ‘The new Halo commercial features the band of brothers speech from  Henry V,’ or, ‘I heard that Elton John produced a full length animated Romeo and Juliet.’ (Both true, by the way.) So I created the very first Shakespeare blog . . . I called it Such Shakespeare Stuff, a play on ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ from The Tempest . . . Over time I realized I was calling myself a Shakespeare geek because it did the best job describing

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how I approached the subject. I’m not a professional or an academic. But words like ‘fan’ or ‘hobbyist’ didn’t sound right.6 There is in this the identification, joyously embraced, of the geek as amateur (‘not a professional’ here means ‘not working in the theatre’). Actors and academics, employed because of Shakespeare, differ from a professional website builder who simply wants to share Shakespeare references and news and lists of Shakespeare knock-knock jokes7 and the availability of Shakespeare T-shirts with slogans like ‘Mercutio drew first’8 or ‘Don’t blame me. I voted for Cinna the poet.’ There are no parameters set for the activities of this website beyond the creator’s enthusiasms. There are no rules, such as those that, rightly, Hardy Cook operates with as moderator of the venerable SHAKSPER listserv. Anything with the word Shakespeare in it – and occasionally topics that don’t even quite manage that – belongs, as long as Duane wishes them to be included. In that sense, the border controls for the blog are oddly analogous to those that operate for the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual conferences. Not everything has to have Shakespeare in the title and a number of seminar topics every year are accepted precisely because they do not. And yet, in the variegated tapestry of offerings that the meeting programme points us to, the delegates accept that these things belong within our field(s) of study. Shakespeare geek culture is, typically, concerned with aspects of popular culture with which much Shakespeare criticism, the main stream, has not yet concerned itself. It takes pleasure in the kitsch, the ephemeral, the obsessive, the fringe, the enjoyably pointless manifestations of that cultural engagement with Shakespeare (aka the Bard, a word banned in my classroom) which we used to be told were irrelevant to scholarship. Aca-fandom is, in our work as geeks, transposed into an almost – but never entirely – respectable matter for investigation. Of course, being geeks we are especially taken with the fun to be had in playing with databases but, while I have suggested that there is something geeky about Mullin and Muriello’s project, a consequence of its playing with the early capabilities of computergenerated output, it does not follow that all such work is now, with the accelerating annual output of digital humanities projects, similarly geeky. I revel in playing with the possibilities of the

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magnificent Early Modern Print website created by Anupam Basu at Washington University at St Louis (https://earlyprint.wustl.edu/), but that does not mean Basu and his team are geeks, nor that those who created EEBO-TCP,9 on which it depends, are. There is something else, though, that marks our geekdom: we like lists. Long ago, when reviewing a book that seemed to have hundreds of pages of undigested information, I wrote something along the lines of ‘When Hamlet’s father ordered his son to “list, list, o list”, this was not quite what he had in mind.’ I did not know then that the author was simply being geeky. The geek’s fascination with databases is essentially the temptation of the list. If the data on Shakespeare performances in Stratford no longer looks like Mullin’s tomes, especially in the website’s current iteration, we still know and gleefully delight in the lists it contains, the lists we summon when we search, the lists from which our lists are drawn. I search the lists I create with a mixture of emotions, regret at the performances I didn’t see or whose details have long vanished, warm joy in the memories that remain, excitement in the connections I suddenly see and trace, the joy of geeking out in the Shakespeare theatres of our minds.

Coda I thought it only right that this volume should end by considering the one occasion on which Shakespeare may have used the word ‘geek’. In Cymbeline 5.4, a group of ghosts or apparitions appear, asking Jupiter why Posthumus is suffering. One of the group is Sicilius Leonatus, Posthumus’ father, who asks Jupiter about Iachimo’s role, putting his question in three lines of fourteeners – or six lines in Peter Quince’s ‘eight and six’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.22), as editors often rearrange them: Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, To taint his Nobler hart & braine, with needlesse ielousy, And to become the geeke and scorne o’th’others vilany? That at least is the First Folio’s form of the lines. Since Capell’s edition in 1768, ‘geeke’ has usually been emended to ‘geck’ and often compared to Malvolio’s asking Olivia why he has been ‘made

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the most notorious geck and gull / That e’er invention played on’ (Twelfth Night 5.1.340–1). Editors before Capell, such as Rowe, Pope, Theobald and Warburton, had no problem with the line’s reading of ‘geek’ or at least did not show they had noticed that ‘geek’ was in need of emending. OED (geck, n.1) advises us that ‘geck’ was spelled ‘geke’ in the fifteenth century and, when it quotes the line from Cymbeline, follows ‘geeke’ with ‘[sic]’. A search of Early Modern Print for ‘geek*’ up to 1660 brings up forty-four examples, all of which, except for the one in Cymbeline, are typos for ‘Greek’, though whether the typos are in the early modern texts or only in EEBO-TCP’s transcriptions I have not checked. Hence my title for this chapter and its deliberate misquotation from Julius Caesar: ‘It was geek to me’ comes, of course, from Casca’s ‘It was Greek to me’ (Julius Caesar 1.2.284). I had thought of making a different pun, using Bottom’s line to Titania, ‘Nay, I can gleek [= make a jest] upon occasion’ (3.1.139). You can choose which pun is worse (which, I suppose, means better). And we can recall that ‘geek’ was, in American slang from the early twentieth century, a term for, as the OED puts it with striking precision (geek, n.2), ‘A performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts, such as biting the head off a live animal.’ So the geek is, in that sense, always a performer, even if the specificity of the OED description is now rarely practised. So geeks now might be seen as coming from the world of the sideshow, the freak-show, of being strange, intriguing, demanding to be observed. Whatever the word’s semantic field has now come to be, I still rather hope that Posthumus’ father did ask Jupiter why his son had become a geek and that Shakespeare invented the word.

Notes 1 See Hartley 2009. 2 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Theater-Geek-ebook/dp/ B00DPTL34K/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=rudetsky+geek&qid=156406208 2&s=gateway&sr=8-1. 3 https://www.redbubble.com/people/qtstore12/works/30938680theatre-lover-theatre-geek-theatre-gifts-music-theatre-shirt-dramateacher-gift-theatre-gift-ideas-theatre-shirt-theater-gift-theatre-nerdthespian-shirt?p-hardcover-journal&paper_type=ruled_line&utm_

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source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=g. pla otset&country_code=GB&utm_source=connexity&utm_ medium=cpc&utm_campaign=c.pla%20-%20[g.gbr]%20[l.eng]. 4 https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/691951019/what-happens-backstagestays-backstage?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_ view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=theatre+geek&ref=sc_gallery-13&plkey=54a31776ef2e85a31780a0ec92ba49d50b24aae1%3A69195 1019&pro=1. 5 See https://imgur.com/gallery/juoS84Q. 6 https://www.shakespearegeek.com/. 7 https://www.shakespearegeek.com/2012/05/knock-knock-definitivelist-of.html. My current favourite is: ‘Knock, Knock. Who’s there? The Earl of Oxford. The Earl of Oxford who?  Exactly.’ 8 This is a reworking of the ‘Han Solo shot first’ T-shirt. See ‘Han Shot First’ in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first. 9 Early English Books Online – Text Creation Partnership.

Works cited Dawson, John L., Peter Holland and David McKitterick, eds (1995), A Concordance to ‘The Complete Poems and Plays’ of T.S. Eliot. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartley, Andrew James (2009), ‘Time Lord of Infinite Space: Celebrity Casting, Romanticism, and British Identity in the RSC’s “Doctor Who Hamlet” ’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4, no. 2: 1–16. Highfill, Philip H. et al., eds (1973–93), A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Lees-Jeffries, Hester (2013), ‘Greater Shakespeare: Working, Playing, and Making with Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lennep, William van et al., eds (1960–8), The London Stage, 1660–1800, 11 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Minto, Rob (2016), Sports Geek. London: Bloomsbury. Mullin, Michael (1994), Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. First Supplement, a Catalogue-Index to Productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1979–1993. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mullin, Michael with Karen Morris Muriello (1980), Theatre at Stratford-

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upon-Avon: A Catalogue-Index to Productions of the Shakespeare Memorial/Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1879–1978, 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rudetsky, Seth (2015), The Rise and Fall of a Theatre Geek. New York: Random House. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr (1974), Travels in Computerland. Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr (1979), Index to ‘The London Stage, 1660–1800’. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Shakespeare, William (2007), The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, William (2014), Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland. London: Arden Shakespeare.

INDEX

10 Things I Hate About You, 257, 263 1821 Comics, 67, 70 Aaron, Hank, 208 Abbott, Daisy, 118–19 Acker, Amy, 269, 277–80 Adams, Richmond, 232 Adventure Time, 83–92, 104 Affleck, Ben, 285 Agents of SHIELD , 277 Albright, Richard, 279 Alfar, Cristina Leon, 231 Almereyda, Michael, 261–2, 270–1 Alsford, Mike, 230, 232, 235 American Horror Story, 281 American Idol, 22 Anderson, Gillian, 116 Anderson, Wes, 281 Andoh, Adjoa, 166 Angel, 6, 269, 270, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282 Apatow, Judd, 281 Apples to Apples, 190 Archive of Our Own, 113, 117, 127, 129, 281 Armstrong, Karen, 227, 228 Armstrong, Neil, 208 Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa, 174 Asbury, Kelly, 265 Ashcroft, Peggy, 298 Assassin’s Creed, 243, 252 308

Atwood, Margaret Hag-Seed, 103 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 84 Avengers, The (film franchise), 118, 268, 273, 277, 282 Avengers, The (TV series), 162, 299 Axis and Allies, 198 Bachelor, The, 22 Back Street Boys, The, 6 Back to the Future, 77 Badgley, Penn, 263, 265 Bale, Christian, 286, 288 Bards Dispense Profanity, 203 Barish, Jonas, 18 Barret, J.K., 244 Barthes, Roland, 98, 132–3, 138, 171, 227, 230 Bartolomew, Julia Hall, The Women of Shakespeare, 135 Barton, John, 298–9 Bassett, Angela, 281 Bate, Jonathan, 301–2 Batman (film franchise), 228, 231, 232–3, 235, 285–8 Beale, Simon Russell, 167 Beatles, The, 6 Before Sunrise, 270 Bender, Hy, 34, 36, 38, 40, 43 Bennett, William, and David Wilezol, 174–6 Berger, Harry, Jr., 18 Berggren, Paula, 231

INDEX

Berry, Ralph, 123, 124 Bertocci, Adam, 71 Big Bang Theory, The, 3, 165, 189 Big Lebowski, The, 71 Bill, 150 Birke, Dorothee, and Birte Christ, 157 Blackwell, Anna, 117 Blade Runner, 84, 287 Blanchett, Cate, 167 Blinde, Loren M., 252 Bloom, Gina, 202 Bloom, Harold, 231 Bogost, Ian, 159 Bok, Derek, 173, 174, 178 Booth, Paul, 107 Botelho, Keith M., 209 Bowdler, Henrietta, 205 Boyd, Michael, 282 Boyer, Pascal, 52 Boys’ Life, 207, 210–23 Bramwell, Frank, 136 Branagh, Kenneth, 258 Bratton, Rick, 177 Brew, Simon, 24–5 Brill, David A., 184 Brooks, David, 264 Brown, Steven, 51–2 Bryant, Tim, 105 Buckman, Alyson, 269, 271, 272, 273, 280 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 5, 268–9, 273–4, 276, 277, 281 Bulman, James, 252 Burt, Richard, 258 Burton, Tim, 286 Bussolini, Jeffrey, 269, 274, 281 Cabaret, 260, 271 Cabin in the Woods, The, 271–2, 274 Cagney, James, 220

309

Capell, Edward, 305 Caplan, Bryan, 174 Captain America, 155; see also Marvel Comics Universe Cards Against Humanity, 203 Carlei, Carlo, 261 Castaldo, Annalisa, 33, 38 Castle, 274–5 Catan, 191 Certeau, Michel de, 81–3, 86, 88, 89–90, 91 Chamberlain, James, 172 Cho, Arthur, 230 Choose Your Own Adventure, 98, 105 Cinthio, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, 289 Clark, Spencer Treat, 277 Clooney, George, 288 Cluedo (Clue), 191 Clueless, 77, 222 Cochran 280 Cochran, Tanya R., 161, 278 Coe, Charles Norton, 235 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 71 Coleman, Di, and Chris Tingley, Quill Power, 135 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 232 Collingwood, R.G., 252 Comic-Con, 7, 25, 28, 207 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, see Holmes, Sherlock Condell, Henry, 149 Coogan, Steve, 264–5 Cook, Hardy, 303 Cooper, Susan, King of Shadows, 48, 53 Coppa, Francesca, 113, 162–3 Corti, Claudia, 126 Council of Verona, 190, 191–2, 194–6, 197, 198, 199 Croft, Janet Brennan, 16 Crystal, David, 74

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INDEX

Cumberbatch, Benedict, 162, 165 Cumming, Alan, 271 Cymbeline (2015 film), 257, 266, 271 Daly, Pierette, 229 Dante Alighieri, 67 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 260 Dawson, John, 296 Day, David, 17 DC Comics, 5, 109, 135, 229, 285 De Kosnick, Abigail, 160 Dekker, Thomas, 71–2 DeLanda, Manuel, 159 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 114–15, 116, 127, 128 Denisof, Alexis, 277–80 Derrida, Jacques, 22 Descartes, René, 233 Desmet, Christy, 156, 159, 192, 200 Dewey, John, 174 Dick, Philip K., 287 Dieterle, William, 219 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 50–1 djarum99, 123 Dobson, Michael, 26 Doctor Strange, 165 Doctor Who, 6, 47–8, 157, 160, 299 Doescher, Ian, 23–4, 64, 72–7, 219 Dollhouse, 6, 271–2, 273, 276, 277 Donaldson, Peter, 260 Donmar Warehouse, 113 Doran, Grgeory, 265 Douglas, Terry, 66 Dowd, Chris, 43–4 Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, 275 Dragon Con, 7, 25

Drake, 6 Du Sautoy, Peter, 296 Dungeons and Dragons, 4, 84, 91, 101, 196–7 Dutton, Denis, 173 E.T., 4 Eagleton, Terry, 228 Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 165, 166 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 296 Eliot, Valerie, 296 Elizabeth I, Queen, 291 Ellis, John, 68, 78 Erne, Lukas, 292 Essex, Earl of, 35 Evans, Chris, 155 Evans, Edith, 298 Everyman, 165 Exit Pursued by a Bear, 222 Fables, 134–5 Fabyan, Robert, 289 Fallout, 101 Falzone, P.J., 121, 126, 128 Fantastic Beasts, 157, 160 Fazel, Valerie, and Louise Geddes, 114, 192, 200 Ferguson, Niall, 252 Fiennes, Ralph, 160 Fighting Fantasy, 101 Fillion, Nathan, 274–6, 282 Finn, Kavita Mudan, 157 and Jessica McCall, 113, 120–1 Firefly, 6, 269, 270, 274–7, 282 First Part of Hieronimo, The, 288–9 Fischlin, David, and Mark Fortier, 20, 22 Fitter, Chris, 89 Fleabag, 167 Flegel, Monica, and Jenny Roth, 103, 106

INDEX

Foakes, R.A., 234 Ford, Gerald, 208 Ford, Sam, 259 Forsyth, Neil, 229 Foucault, Michel, 51, 82, 91, 134, 192, 286 Fraser, Hadley, 118, 119, 120 Freeman, Mark, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 134 Frey, Charles, 205 Friends, 3 Gaiman, Neil, 28–46, 134, 148 Gamboa, Brett, 180 Game of Thrones, 26, 28, 45 Garber, Marjorie, 71, 121 Garrick, David, 135 Gates, Bill, 4 Gehayi, 163 Genette, Gérard, 157–8 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 289 Geraghty, Lincoln, 157–8 Get Over It, 264 Ghostbusters, 8, 226–7, 292 Gibson, Mel, 270 Gilsdorf, Ethan, 257–8 Glau, Summer, 276 Gloomhaven, 193 Gnomeo and Juliet, 265 Godspell, 260 Goldberg, Jonathan, 50, 124 Good Place, The, 3 Goodman, Lesley, 99 Grandage, Michael, 153–4 Green, Joshua, 259 Greenblatt, Stephen, 232, 234, 235 Grover, Kit, 300 Guillet-Chapuis, Elsa, 262 Gunnels, Jenn, and Carrie Cole, 159, 161 Gurian, Michael, 216 Guthrie, Tyrone, 298

311

Halbwachs, Maurice, 52 Hall, Sir Peter, 298 Hamilton, Kirk, 241 Hamlet (1990 film), 270 Hamlet (2000 film), 257, 261–2, 263–4, 266, 270–1 Hamlet 2 (film), 264–5 Hamlet Prince of Denmark: The Restored Klingon Version, 23, 66 Hannibal, 271 Harper, William Jackson, 3 Harris, Brian J., 108 Harris, Charlene, 45 Harry Potter (films), 5, 26–7; see also Rowling, J.K. Hartley, Andrew James, 98 Hateley, Erica, 218 Haver, Tommy, 264 Hawke, Ethan, 262, 265, 266, 270 Hellekson, Karen, 106 Heminge, John, 149, 282 Henderson, Katherin, and Barbara McManus, 229 Hermaline74, 113, 123 Hiddleston, Tom, 113–14, 116–29, 162, 165 Higgins, John, 289 Highfill, Philip H., Kalman Burnim and Edward S. Langhans, 295 Hillier, Brenna, 242 Hills, Matt, 116, 120 Hindmarch, Will, 101 Holderness, Graham, 20, 22, 150 Holinshed, Raphael, 36, 289 Holland, Peter, 52, 61, 122, 208 Holland, Tom, 155 Hollow Crown, The (play), 299 Hollow Crown, The (TV series), 158, 160–3 Holmes, Sherlock, 30, 233 Hong, Sun-ha, 242

312

INDEX

Hope, Jonathan, 78 Hopkins, Anthony, 271 How to Marry a Millionaire, 282 Hoyt, Sarah A., 135 Hu, Jane, 4 Hunger Games, 84 Hurley, Kameron, 226 Hutcheon, Linda, 19, 67, 70 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, 84 I Am Legend, 287 Ian, Janis, 260 Indiana Jones, 171 Jackson, Peter, 15 Jackson, Russell, 261–2 Jacobi, Derek, 299 James Bond (film franchise), 160, 162 James VI and I, King, 290 Jason and the Argonauts, 8 Jefferson, Thomas, 174 Jenkins, Henry, 73, 99–100, 107, 120, 259 Jenkins, Patty, 229 Jenner, Bruce, 208 Jessica Jones, 160 Jibrailis, 126 Jobs, Steve, 4 John, Elton, 265 Jolin, Dan, 191 Jonson, Ben, 36, 37, 43, 149, 289, 291 Junger, Gil, 263 Kahn, Coppélia and Clara Calvo, 52 and Heather S. Nathans, 78 Kane, Bo, 286 Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Claudia Kalb, 216

Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm, and Andrew Elliot, 243 Kastan, David Scott, 244 Katsiadas, Nick, 44 Kazimierczak, Karolina, 66 Keaton, Michael, 285, 288 Kelly, Philippa, 231 Kidd, Kenneth, 210, 216 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 115 Kill Shakespeare (board game), 190, 191–4, 196, 197, 198, 199 Kill Shakespeare (graphic novels), see McCreery, Conor Kilmer, Val, 285 King Leir and his Three Daughters, The True Chronicle History of, 289–90 King, Stephen, 6 Kinnear, Rory, 161 Kline, Daniel T., 251 Krantz, Fran, 271–2, 273 Kurosawa, Akira, Throne of Blood, 103 Kyd, Thomas, 288 Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb, 205, 206 Lancaster, Kurt, 38 Lange, Jessica, 281 Lanier, Douglas, 49, 60–1, 114–15, 127, 128, 200, 202, 203, 264 Laughton, Charles, 298 Leacock, Matt, 191 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The, 134–5 Led Zeppelin, 259 Lee, Stan, Romeo and Juliet: The War, 64, 66–70 Lees-Jeffries, Hester, 58, 300–1 Lenk, Tom, 273–4, 281

INDEX

Lennon, John, 39 Lennon, Julian, 39 Lerer, Seth, 77–8 Lethal Weapon, 270 Levine, Jonathan, 261 Levine, Jory, A Bard’s Day’s Night’s Dream, 136 Levitt, Harold, 220 Linton, Lynette, 166 Lizardbeth, 125 Looney Tunes, 83 Lord of the Rings, The (film franchise), 4–5, 15, 21, 26 Love, Courtney, 39 Love, Frances, 39 Lucas, George, 104 Luhrman, Baz, 70, 222, 260 Luthi, Daniel, 59 MacBeth, Charles E., 211, 213 McCabe, Richard, 10 McCormick, Casey, 269, 270, 276, 280 McCreery, Conor, and Anthony Del Col, Kill Shakespeare, 134–51, 202 McGonigal, Jane, 190, 201, 202 McHugh, Emer, 167 McKellen, Sir Ian, 25, 29–30 McKenzie, William, and Theodora Papadopoulou, 227, 230 McKitterick, David, 296 Macnee, Patrick, 162 Mad Max, 226, 29 Maher, Sean, 276, 277 Makaryk, Irena, 56 Mandel, Emily St. John, 65 Marino, James, 288 Marlowe, Christopher, 34, 39, 71, 89 Marsden, Jean, 71 Marvel Comics Universe (MCU, film franchise), 5, 28, 70,

313

104, 108, 118, 135, 155, 157, 165, 226, 229 Marx, Karl, 134, 173 Mathiews, Frank, 219 Matleena, Venla, 117–18, 127 Mean Girls, 77 Menon, Madhavi, 50–1, 52, 124 Miller, Frank, 232–3 Milton, John, 229, 232 Minto, Rob, 301 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 289 Mitchel, Lucy Sprague, 217 Monday Night Football, 22 Monopoly, 191, 197, 203 Monroe, Marilyn, 282 Montaigne, Michel de, 47 Moore Alan, 134–5, 232, 235 Moore, Roger, 162 Moranis, Rick, 8 More, Sir Thomas, 291 Morgese, Jillian, 282 Morrison, John, MacMorris, 136 Morrissette, Billy, 259 Much Ado About Nothing (2012 film), 257, 262–3, 268–84 Mullin, Michael, 294, 296–7, 303, 304 Mullin, Romano, 157–8 Munchkin Shakespeare, 190, 191–2, 196–8, 199, 203 Munchkin, 196–7 Muriello, Karen Morris, 294, 296–7, 303 Namath, Joe, 260 Neill, Michael, 205 New Girl, 155 Newkirk, Thomas, 216 Nicholas, Rachael, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 170, 171–2, 183, 232 Nixon, Richard, 30 Nolan, Christopher, 286

314

INDEX

North, Ryan, 97–111 North, Sir Thomas, 112, 124 Nussbaum, Martha, 174 O’Brien, Geoffrey, 272 Obama, Barack, 221 Olivier, Laurence, 258, 298 Orbán, Viktor, 176 Oxford English Dictionary, 1, 294, 295, 305 Oxford, Earl of, 35 Palfrey, Simon, 244 Pande, Rukmini, 165–6 Pandemic, 191, 193 Pappademas, Alex, 257 Parrish, J.J., 113 Patterson, James, 6 Patterson, Simon, 300 Pendergast, John, 44 Perret, Marion D., 69 Pictionary, 190 Piper, Melanie, 160 Pirandello, Luigi, 137 Pirie, Bruce, 216 Plutarch, 36, 112, 124, 126 Pope, Alexander, 305 Pratchett, Terry, 47–63 Prescott, Shaun, 251 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 103 Pulp Fiction, 71 Quincy, Joseph, Jr., 220 Rackin, Phyllis, 244 Radcliffe, Ann, 134 Rambo, Elizabeth, 270 Rasmussen, Eric, 301–2 Reality Bites, 270 Redgrave, Vanessa, 298 Redmayne, Eddie, 153–4, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167

Rehnquist, Chief Justice William, 221 Reinhardt, Max, 219 Reinheimer, David, 66 Revenge of the Nerds, 155, 165 Richard III , The True Tragedy of, 291 Richardson, Ian, 299 Rigg, Diana, 298–9 Rigney, Ann, 52 Risk, 198 Roach, Joseph, 56 Robeson, Paul, 298 Roddenberry, Gene, 286 Rogalus, Paul, 71 Rokison, Abigail, 206 Romeo and Juliet (2012 film), 257, 261 Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song, 265 Romney, Mitt, 221 roryheadmav, 118, 126 Roth, Michael, 172–3, 174 Rourke, Josie, 113 Rowe, Nicholas, 305 Rowling, J.K., 5, 26–7, 28, 157, 160, 171 Royal Hunt of the Sun, The, 299 Royal Shakespeare Company, 3, 265, 282, 294, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301–2 Rudensky, Seth, 299–300 Russo, Julie Levi, 121 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 124–5 Rylance, Mark, 167 Saint, The, 162 Sandifer, Philip, and S. Alexander Reed, 8 Sapkowski, Andrzej, 240, 242, 251 Saunders, Tim, 29 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 228

INDEX

Saxo Grammaticus, 289 Saxton, Julie Myers, 41 Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., 295–6 Schwimmer, David, 3 Scotland, PA , 259 Scott, Andrew, 167 Scott, Rick, 175, 184 Scott, Ridley, 287 Scrabble, 191 Serenity, 277 Serpico, 259 Shakespeare (board game), 190, 191–2, 198–200, 202 Shakespeare Association of America, 9, 303 Shakespeare Geek (website), 302–3 Shakespeare in Love, 150 Shakespeare Memory, 203 Shakespeare, Anne, 40 Shakespeare, Hamnet, 37–40, 42 Shakespeare, Judith, 36, 40 Shakespeare, Susanna, 43 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well, 298 Antony and Cleopatra, 108 Comedy of Errors, The, 298 Coriolanus, 112–29, 297–9 Cymbeline, 257, 263–4, 302, 304–5 Hamlet, 39, 49, 54, 65, 84, 85, 98–105, 109, 133, 137–46, 148–9, 167, 199, 201, 213, 228, 233, 246, 265, 281–2, 287, 289, 299, 304 Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, 11, 135, 137, 140, 144, 179, 199, 244–6 Henry V, 48, 56 Henry VI Part 2, 83, 88–90 Julius Caesar, 43, 108, 282, 305

315

King Lear, 199, 229, 231, 234–5, 289–93, 298 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 170, 171, 178–84 Macbeth, 16–17, 18, 30, 48–63, 103, 135, 137–8, 140, 143, 146–9, 211, 213, 217–19, 230, 259 Merchant of Venice, The, 66, 108–9 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 291 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 17, 35, 39, 49, 55, 76–7, 105, 135, 137, 219, 230, 278, 287, 298, 302, 304 Much Ado About Nothing, 137, 199, 268–83, 302 Othello, 66, 108–9, 135, 137–8, 165, 199, 228, 231, 232, 233, 289, 298 Richard II , 90–1, 153–4, 159–69, 231 Richard III , 75, 135, 137–8, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147 Romeo and Juliet, 67, 69, 98–105, 107, 118, 135, 137–8, 141–2, 145, 146, 148–9, 194–6, 257, 260–1, 265, 278 Taming of the Shrew, The, 298 Tempest, The, 17, 36, 37, 43, 48, 49, 66, 103, 108–9, 142, 145–8, 233 Timon of Athens, 3 Troilus and Cressida, 291–2 Twelfth Night, 75, 141, 199, 298 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 71, 75 Winter’s Tale, The, 58 SHAKSPER (listserv), 303 Shaw, Fiona, 167

316

INDEX

Sherlock (TV series), 162, 167 Short, Martin, 264 Shrikmath, Sushmita, 83 Silence of the Lambs, The, 271 Simmons, Dan, 65 Simpsons, The, 197, 285 Sinden, Donald, 299 Sinfield, Alan, 184 Skyfall, 161 Smith, Michael, and Jeffrey Wilhelm, 216 Snyder, Zack, 286, 290, 291 So Currently Captivated, 119 Sobczynski, Peter, 265 Something Rotten!, 150 Sorkin, Aaron, 2 South, James B., 61 Spenser, Edmund, 237, 289 Spider-Man (films), 5, 155 Spitz, Mark, 260 Sriwusan, Skan, 66 Star Trek (film and TV franchise), 5, 23, 30, 65–6, 100, 120, 228, 236, 286 Star Wars (film franchise), 4, 5, 10, 23–4, 26, 72–7, 103–4, 219, 230, 286, 292 Stephens, John and Robin McCallum, 205–6, 220 Stern, Tiffany, 286–7, 290 Stewart, Sir Patrick 5, 10–11, 167 Stiles, Julia, 262, 263 Stratford-upon-Avon Monopoly, 203 Supergirl, see DC Comics Superman, see DC Comics Tagore, Rabindranath, 174 Tarantino, Quentin, 71 Tarzan, 207 Tate, Nahum, 291 Taylor, Gary, 21–2

Taymor, Julie, 70, 271 Tempest, The (2010 film), 271 Tennant, David, 160, 161, 162, 165, 265, 299 Terminator, 84 Theobald, Lewis, 305 They Might Be Giants, 8 Thom, Alex, 231, 234, 235 Titus (film), 271 Toffler, Alvin, 259 Tolkien, Christopher, 15, 19, 21, 22, 28 Tolkien, J.R.R., 16–23, 26, 27–8, 29, 30, 240 Torres, Gina, 276 Trader, George Henry, Shakespeare’s Daughters, 135 Tudyk, Alan, 276 Twain, Mark, 207, 222 Uhlich, Keith, 265 Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The, 104 Unwritten, The, 134 Urban Dictionary, 1–2 V for Vendetta, 228, 232, 233, 236 Varney, Jim, 220 Vary, Adam, 269, 281 Wagner, Matthew, 244 Wallace, Naomi Claire, Madman William, 136 Walsh, Brian, 244 Wanzo, Rebecca, 166 Warburton, William, 305 Ward, Pendleton, 85, 91–2 Warm Bodies, 261 Warner, Deborah, 167 Weeks, Kathi, 172 Welles, Orson, 258 West Wing, The, 2, 10

INDEX

Weymans, Wim, 82, 87 Whedon, Joss, 5–6, 262, 265, 268–83 Whishaw, Ben, 160, 161, 162–3 Wilde, Oscar, 163 Will, 150 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, 70, 222, 260 William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, see Doescher, Ian Williams, Clifford, 298 Williams, Rebecca, 259 Winterlive 113, 119 Witcher, The, 240–3, 246–52 Witmore, Michael, 72

317

Wittenberg, David, 61 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 228 Wonder Woman, 229, 237; see also DC Comics Woodward, Jonathan, 269, 273 Work, Max, 66 X-Men, 286 Young, J. Warren, 217 Zahn, Timothy, 24 Zakaria, Fareed, 174 Zeffirelli, Franco, 270 Ziegler, Georgianna, 223

318

319

320