Richard Burt, ed. Shakespeare After Mass Media.(Book Review)

New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xii + 340. $26.95 paperback.

Richard Burt's introduction in this volume on the commercial exploitations of Shakespeare's cultural capital is followed by thirteen lively, thoughtful essays divided into two sections: one on the appropriations of Shakespeare's cultural authority, and the other on specific appropriations of his works. Both citation (defined here as the invocation of Shakespeare's iconic status) and the radical revision of Shakespeare's work have a long history that antedates "mass media" by several centuries. Even within Shakespeare's own lifetime, Fletcher wrote a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio, now a widower, fails to tame his second wife. Restoration dramatists revised Shakespeare's plays to suit contemporary tastes, while in the nineteenth century English music halls burlesqued Shakespeare's works, and political cartoonists used his characters to lampoon public figures. Exploiting Shakespeare's cultural authority to sell merchandise goes back at least as far as Garrick's Stratford Jubilee of 1769. Burt and his contributors update this narrative by examining appropriations of Shakespeare in cultural forms that are part of what we now call mass media (e. g., film, radio, romance fiction, comic books). Burt insists on the terms "mass media" and "mass culture" because the cultural forms he and his contributors investigate are products of aggressive commercialism rather than expressions of authentically popular culture, resistant counterculture, or subversive politics.

Burt seems pleased that some of the works examined in the current collection will seem marginal to most academic Shakespeareans, but he warns that it is precisely in these seemingly marginal areas, what he call "Schlockspeare," that our culture reformulates the iconic significance of Shakespeare and redefines his cultural authority--a redefinition that is already influencing if not supplanting the role of Shakespeare(ans) in our schools, colleges, and universities. At stake, according to Burt, is not so much whether Shakespeare's work should be brought to the masses (as Orson Welles and others believed), or whether it should be the preserve of a cultural elite (as Allan Bloom and others have held), but rather how the works and the image of Shakespeare are refracted in mass media forms often characterized as "trash, kitsch, obsolete, trivial, obscure, unknown, forgotten, unarchived, beyond the usual academic purview" (8).

Burt seems determined to blur the distinction between adaptation and citation. Most previous work on the uses of Shakespeare, he notes, has focused on the "dialogical and hermeneutic" properties of adaptations, that is to say, on reading re-presentations of Shakespeare--plays, novels, operas, ballets, films--as being in dialogue with their sources. What interests Burt more is citation, which he calls "posthermeneutic" and defines as the body of artifacts that allude to Shakespeare and signify his place in our culture but that cannot be understood as re-presentations of his original work. Although Burt claims that the boundary between citation and adaptation is increasingly difficult to draw, a few ambiguous cases (as in human sexual anatomy) do negate difference.

The distinction between adaptation and citation seems worth preserving. Two essays articulate the difference between hermeneutic adaptation and posthermeneutic citation by demonstrating a shift from the former to the latter within the life span of the cultural form. Laurie Osborne, for instance, finds that while a few earlier writers of romance novels frame plots and characters in hermeneutic relation to Shakespeare, the primary function of Shakespearean allusion in later works is to claim higher intellectual status and to elevate these works above the so-called trashier contributions to the genre. Craig Dionne begins his essay on Shakespeare and Star Trek by considering some episodes of the science fiction show narratively derived from the plays, but he soon modulates into a survey of episodes featuring characters who quote from Shakespeare. The primary function of such quoting (as has been the case in American culture for two centuries) is to associate the speaker with the genteel tradition. That villains as well as good guys quote Shakespeare, Dionne notes, might well have caused viewers to question the moral value of that tradition. Helen Whall traces a change in successive editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a purely citational ...