The use and abuse of Shakespeare: a review essay.(Shakespeare After Mass Media)(Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema)(All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels)(Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-century Women Novelists and Appropriation)(Book Review)

Burt, Richard, ed. 2002. Shakespeare After Mass Media. New York: Palgrave. $65.00 hc, $24.95 sc. xii + 340 pp.

Lehmann, Courtney and Lisa S. Starks, eds, 2002. Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. $42.50 hc. 243 pp.

Roof, Judith, 2002. All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $37.50 hc, $16.95 sc. x + 212 pp.

Sanders, Julie, 2001. Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-century Women Novelists and Appropriation. New York: Manchester University Press. $74.95 hc, $24.95 sc. xi + 258 pp.

 
    The enigma of the consumer sphinx. His products are scattered in the 
    graphs of televised, urbanistic and commercial production. They are 
    all the less visible because the networks framing them are becoming 
    more and more tightly woven, flexible and totalitarian. 
    Michel de Certeau 

In the name of Shakespeare today, many things are done. The collective authors of these four books ask us to consider how the swan of Avon flies in our hopefully late capitalist times where Shakespeare means celebrity, mass-media and big bucks, and ripping him off or offering him homage supposedly amounts to the same thing. They offer us critical case-studies of what is being done now in--and to--the bard's name and his works by contemporary culture in high and low, mass and popular forms. The authors' aim, to evaluate accidental or intentional use of Shakespeare in major and minor modes of cultural productions, leads us down myriad paths. In digitized, (mis)appropriated, adapted, regurgitated, counterfeited and adulterate forms, the cultural capital of the now niche-marketed ("priced-right" and "made-easy") Shakespeare has been firmly unmoored from his first-folio "home," that once imagined domain of the sovereign poet. The more he comes to life in the media, however, the more he seems to disappear, the way perception functions in Leonardo's attempts to capture a "prospettiva de perdimenti" or "perspective of losses" (Gombrich 1986, 57), as in the obliquity of Mona Lisa's intimate smile.

The academy of professors and Hollywood actors and directors bank on the master's vatic name, hoisting counterfeit forms upon him. Shakespeare, transformed from poet into postmodern industry, has long since succumbed to the "universal wolf" of commodity reification, a politico-economic dynamic the bard himself perhaps prophesied as Hugh Grady has recently argued in his analysis of Ulysses' speech on degree (Qtd. in Burt 2002, 41). Indeed, a strange Shakespeare comes into view under the lens of these four works. An ever marketable bard has proven useful to every cultural style and form, including theme-parks as discussed in Diane Henderson's wise pro and con assessment of them (125) And of course to Hollywood and even to "Bollywood." Lehmann and Starks's collective brings a varied theoretical perspective to why Shakespeare appears to have become "the man of the new millennium in Hollywood" (19). The phenomenon of Shakespeare in Bollywood is explored by Julie Sanders's fine analysis of Leslie Forbes's novel Bombay Ice that heavily draws from The Tempest to explore, as Sanders argues, the post-colonial problem of locating an indigenous Indian culture "in a sphere dominated by Western capitalists" (165). One can see why, in Sanders's fine explications, so many modern novelists have put the bard to work. His plays' repeated focus on families in crisis invite a universal applicability to the human condition while at the same time his particularized human voices ring out with the raucousness of life, making Shakespeare a ripe source for both normative and aberrant imaginings, with the latter so influential on alternate, secondary but important forms of human characterization. Roof's study especially reveals this alternate influence as she links Hollywood's sidekick roles that are routinely assigned to "wise comic female characters" to the perverse possibilities of the Shakespearean fool-figure (2-3).