The Shakespeare User

The Shakespeare User explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction

“Give me your hands if we be friends”: collaborative authority in Shakespeare fan fiction

Due to the interactive affordances of twenty-first century technologies, the relationship between readers and texts is often repositioned as part of a communal experience of consumption and reproduction. Inclusive in this expanding culture are user-generated adaptations of Shakespeare, most saliently fanfic. The fanfic universe prolifically crosses genres, putting the Shakespearean urtext in conversation with any other object of cultural interest, and occasionally subjugates the Shakespearean text to the dominant popular icon of the moment. Fanfic manifests textual enjoyment as a creative act; the genre is both recreational and re-creational, resulting in new adaptive works that expand the dramas to include sequels, prequels, and off-stage explorations of character and plot. Because Shakespeare is experienced variously through printed text, television, film, theatrical, or digitized performance – all of which underline the instability of an authoritative Shakespeare text – Shakespeare studies is uniquely positioned to expand critical understanding of adaptation and appropriation vis-a-vis the fanfiction universe. Fanfic’s online modality, existing on websites that facilitate dialogic interaction between author and audience, offers scholars an ongoing chronicle of reception. Uniquely, online interactions allow Shakespeare cultural critics to analyze the ways user-generated fanfic positions Shakespeare’s work as open to transition, crafting adaptations that illustrate what Shakespeare means to everyday users

Variable Objects Introduction - Bound in A Nutshell: Shakespeare's Vibrant Matter

When Ben Jonson summons Shakespeare in his famous poem, “To The Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” and assures the late dramatist that he is “alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read and praise to give,” Jonson affirms an authorial presence typical of the humanist approach to Shakespeare. More tantalizingly, however, Jonson invites us to think of the book as a living object, implying that the book has its own vitality and, by extension, as much agency as the very human WIlliam Shakespeare. This essay suggests the transmedial and transcultural history of Shakespeare combats the commonly-held assumption that there is a causal logic to appropriative acts, and seeks alternative ways to account for the logical networks that shape the way Shakespeare appears - seemingly unexpected - in a variety of objects as fragments - words, ideas, characters, scenes, poetry, narrative, and so much more. The introduction looks to new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and alien phenomenology to explore the consequences of reconceptualizing Shakespeare as composed of an infinite variety of discrete objects and suggest that these fragments activate a variable and unpredictable energy that fluctuates as they encounter other objects. Without the ordering presence of the author, fragments of Shakespeare’s work become agental objects, vibrant and dynamic, affective forces that spur a spectrum of appropriative uses. New materialism suggests that objects emanate their own intrinsic meaning, and accordingly, Shakespeare fragments upend theories that the driving force of the appropriation is the human user

Fragmented Shakespeares: Local Encounters with the Digital Bard

Panel chair: Carol Mejia LaPerle, Wright State University Valerie Fazel, Arizona State University, “Digital Remix, Creative Collisions, or What You, Will Shakespeare?” Louise Geddes, Adelphi University, “Unlearning Shakespeare Studies: Affective Readership and Fan Activism” Noam Lior, University of Toronto, “Multimediating Shakespeare: Encounters on Digital Platform