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

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr

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...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.