The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture (review)

Robert Shaughnessy's fine collection of essays draws together thoughtful and engaging new work by an impressive list of contributors. Each of the essays investigates the relationship between Shakespeare and some aspect of popular culture and examines how the culture re-creates him or his work in material products, writing, art, music, radio, television, and digital technology. The essays cover four hundred years of cultural negotiations and examine how various facets of popular culture within a given historical moment position themselves in relation to Shakespeare. Rather surprisingly then, Shaughnessy's brief introduction to this volume leaves the reader somewhat rudderless, alone to navigate such an extensive topic with no theoretical guide.

Fortunately, however, these pieces do cohere and present a comprehensive argument. Each chapter, in its own way, suggests that the shifting tension between Shakespeare and popular culture reflects a self-positioning along a cultural continuum. Popular culture renders Shakespeare and his texts in newly formed narratives that attempt to achieve legitimacy through worshipful adoration or seek cultural cachet through iconoclastic irreverence. Taken as a whole, the collection argues that through an array of visual and auditory media a mass audience references, reshapes, and imaginatively reifies Shakespeare and his works in order to understand and represent itself. These renderings reflect cultural attitudes toward privilege, respect, authority, power, and capital, and they demonstrate how a polymorphous culture negotiates among these concepts for its own pleasure.

The first four essays situate popular culture firmly in an historical context, looking at manifestations of the Shakespearean and the popular from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first. Diana E. Henderson's "From Popular Entertainment to Literature" brilliantly offers an engaging retrospective of the complex development that saw Shakespeare move from a popular writer of mainstream entertainment to an icon of elite culture. Peter Holland examines theatrical redactions and adaptations that began to appear in the seventeenth century. Holland finds that these new works, which often function on the level of burlesque or parody, enact "a deliberate intervention in a history of cultural reception that negotiates concepts of high/low and popular/elite cultural formations" (28). Barbara Hodgdon surveys the historical construction and cultural status of the Shakespearean star, beginning with Richard Burbage and ending with Sir Ian McKellen. Hodgdon's focused, sobering essay reviews the "slow drift" (62) away from theatrical performance and toward popular film. Stephen Orgel traces the rise of Shakespeare's cultural capital through pictorial depictions of the plays, starting with Henry Peacham's sketch of Titus Andronicus, and also considers Shakespeare portraiture. Orgel analyzes the relationship between performance, text, and image and argues that Shakespeare illustrations stand alone as art even as they influence both readers' and spectators' perceptions of the plays.

The four essays clustered in the middle of the book address various forms of Shakespeare appropriations, including different textual formats, television, and popular music. Douglas Lanier's outstanding "Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction" examines the unrestrained use of Shakespeare as trademark before investigating Shakespearean adaptations and allusions that appear in novels, films, and plays. Lanier's excellent essay argues that within a mainstream capitalist system all these works trade on the cultural authority Shakespeare represents. Laurie Osborne's brilliant essay concentrates specifically on narrative borrowings of Hamlet. Osborne is concerned with the relationship between "perspective, priority, and power" (132) in popular narrative fictions and the iconic original. She investigates how Shakespeare's characters and his own life inspire new fictional treatments in recent mysteries and literary novels, as well as simplified stories in young adult fiction. Emma Smith uncovers a surprising affinity in her "Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings," which analyzes the fifteen-episode BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's history cycle that appeared in 1960. Smith maintains that the editors of the Folio were the first to serialize the scripts, and she calls for a reassessment of "the role of Shakespeare in and on television, the medium...