Why Ganymede Faints and the Duke of York Weeps: Passion Plays in Shakespeare

This article revisits contemporary critical debates surrounding the presence of cross-dressed boys as women on the early modern stage – in particular the question of whether or to what extent boy-actors could or should be said to represent ‘women’ or ‘femininity’ – through the Shakespearian emblem of the bloody rag or handkercher. In all but one instance, these soiled napkins appear alongside what the plays call ‘passion’ of various kinds. I examine bloody rags on Shakespeare’s stage in the light of early modern anti-theatrical polemics, medical disputes about sex-difference and the conflicted cultural status of printed paper in order to argue that these besmirched tokens bring together early modern ‘passions’ in multiple senses: strong or overpowering, embodied feeling; the fluid dynamics of early modern bodies; the Passion of Christ; erotic suffering; and, crucially, the performance on stage of all of the above

Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which a South Indian, a North Indian "Bollywood" and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy

Copyright, Copyleft, and Shakespeare After Shakespeare

Much critical ink has been spilled in defining and establishing the terms of discussion: appropriation, adaptation, off-shoot, recontextualization, riff, reworking, and so on have been used interchangeably or under erasure. This paper both examines the utility of such nice distinctions, and critiques existing taxonomies. It takes as its starting point the premise that scholars must carefully articulate our reasons for deploying particular terms, so that Shakespearean thinkers, readers, writers, and performers can develop a shared, even if contested, discourse. Ultimately, however, it suggests a new rubric or heading under which to consider Shakespearean appropriations: as transformations. In a US context, to evoke either "adaptation" or "appropriation" is to evoke copyright law. I suggest that Shakespearean appropriations potentially metamorphose or mutate culture, literary form, creativity, pedagogy, and, most provocatively, the market economy, in part because Shakespearean texts antedate current US copyright law and thus any use we make of them is already “transformative.” In particular, Shakespearean appropriations transform creative production and intervene in contemporary commodity culture or the hypermediatized, monetized creative self. Shakespearean transformations in both legacy and emerging media also offer models for the new hybrid creative economies predicted ten years ago by Lawrence Lessig in part because of Shakespeare's "spreadability" (Jenkins', Ford, and Green's term for content that can be remixed, shared, grabbed and so on) and its "stickiness" (a marketing term popularized by Grant Leboff meaning the power to draw repeat users who forge a lasting connection with the source material)

Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press

Published in #Bard, special issue of _Shakespeare Quarterly_ edited by Douglas Lanier, this essay combines the arguments of present-day neuroscience about “hard-wired” letter-recognition in the brain and theories of “intermediality” or movement between or among aesthetic methods of sensory communication with the mystical early twentieth-century theories of bookness, reading, and vision propounded by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, co-founder and co-director of the Doves Press. Specifically, it argues for the early twentieth-century fine press edition as a critical, as well as an aesthetic, intervention that intermediates public play-going and private reading. Moreover, it identifies the specific qualities of bookness, and the particular quiddities of type, that enable this intermediality. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663526/summar

Peter Frase’s Four Futures, Malka Older’s Infomocracy, and Some Futures for the Humanities (with maybe a little Shakespeare thrown in)

I briefly survey the function of books, written artifacts, literary criticism and connoisseurship/curation in apocalyptic literature from Mary Shelley to Malka Older (with a nod to the Book of Revelation) and in contemporary Young Adult fiction and "cli-fi" -- science fiction and fantasy centered around climate change, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's California Trilogy, Octavia Butler's _Parable of the Sower_, Emily St. John Mandel's _Station Eleven_, Jeff VanderMeer's _Annihilation_, Neal Stephenson's _Seveneves_, and Malka Older's _Infomocracy_. If I were to revise it, I'd include a full reading of Butler and maybe some references to the relationship between books and learning in N.K. Jemisin's _The Fifth Season_. It might also be worth looking at Ursula LeGuin's _Wizard of Earthsea_ trilogy, but to do all that would really be to turn it into an essay on feminist apocalyptic cli-fi rather than the brief survey it is currently

Introduction: Shakespeare's Discourse of Disability

Non-copy-edited MS Word doc of the intro to my edited collection _Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015), uploaded in accordance with publisher's Green OA policies

Gertrude/Ophelia: Feminist Intermediality, Ekphrasis, and Tenderness in _Hamlet_

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare's Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as essential, constructed, or contingent and in between? Can the subject of an artwork express a kind of selfhood or is such a subject invariably objectified through being turned into art? Can artists' ironic use of sexist tropes interrogate such tropes without reinforcing them? The figure of Ophelia in some of the artworks produced does seem to give women and girls explicitly feminist avenues for self-expression and self-realization: they present Ophelia as self-creating artist, not just as artifact. Other incarnations of this character, however — because of the material contexts in which they are created and disseminated — reiterate the voyeurism that earlier critics found in Gertrude's elegy on the drowned Ophelia. The essay reconsiders Gertrude's speech through its textual variants to find spaces for tenderness and interactivity between Gertrude and Ophelia, spaces that attest to the complex, non-binary solutions available to women artists as they seek to represent themselves and each other in their arts

The Post-Shakespearean Body Politic in Jeff Noon’s Vurt

This paper argues that Jeff Noon’s 1993 British cyberpunk novel Vurt rewrites Shakespeare’s tragedy of exogamy or racial crossing, Othello, as a triumphant fable in favor of interspecies mixing. The novel moves among 1990s Manchester, the drug-fuelled, multi-species virtual game-world or Vurt, and the deadly cultural crossings of Shakespeare’s Othello. The gang whose exploits the narrator, Scribble, documents prides itself on its racial purity, to such an extent that Scribble is in love with his own sister, Desdemona. By the end of the novel, however, Scribble discovers that the world of the Vurt favors cross-cultural myth-making over antique Englishness and hybrid adaptation (in both its literary and racial senses) over generic or genetic purity.Cet article suggère que le roman “cyberpunk” de Jeff Noon, Vurt, réécrit la tragédie shakespearienne de l’exogamie du croisement racial, Othello, comme une histoire de l’union triomphante entre des espèces et des races humaines. L’action du roman se déroule entre la ville de Manchester dans les années 1990, qui constitue l’univers virtuel de Vurt, fait de drogue, de jeux vidéo et de mélanges entre les espèces, et les rencontres culturelles mortelles représentées par Shakespeare dans son Othello. Le gang dont le narrateur, Scribble, raconte les exploits, s’enorgueillit de sa pureté raciale, à tel point que Scribble est amoureux de sa propre sœur, Desdemona. À la fin du roman, cependant, Scribble découvre que le Vurt favorise la production de mythes trans-culturels au détriment d’une anglicité traditionnelle et encourage l’hybridation (dans le domaine littéraire aussi bien que racial) plutôt que la pureté générique ou génétique

Some Practices for Publishing the Precariat

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia, scholarly periodical _Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation_, of which I am a co-founding editor, in publishing contingent, independent, and untenured scholars, and suggest some practices, many drawn from writing pedagogies, that can help include and nurture these valuable, precariously employed colleagues, whose under-compensated labor makes our universities run

Damage or Pleasure? Teaching Shakespeare as a British Indian in the US

Text of a talk delivered remotely to Seshadripuram Evening Degree College to commemorate their Golden Jubilee in July 2022. Not peer-reviewed. Discusses, in memoiristic fashion, Tripthi Pillai's coinage "Shakespeare Damage" -- the initial encounter of many minoritized or colonized subjects (including LGBTQ+ persons) with Shakespeare-- and considers how some such subjects often nonetheless find something capacious and accommodating within these texts and, moreover, can identify "against-the-grain" readings that turn out to contain unexpected historical truths