The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture

This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare’s life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the subversive, the oppositional, the scandalous and the inane. Leading scholars discuss the ways in which the plays and poems of Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been interpreted and reinvented, adapted and parodied, transposed into other media, and act as a source of inspiration for writers, performers, artists and film-makers worldwide.

• Covers a wide range of popular manifestations of Shakespeare, past and present • Engages in dialogue across and between media forms • Contains a comprehensive bibliography, providing an authoritative overview of work in this field

Preface Robert Shaughnessy; 1. From popular entertainment to literature Diana E. Henderson; 2. Shakespeare abbreviated Peter Holland; 3. Shakespearean stars Barbara Hodgdon; 4. Shakespeare illustrated Stephen Orgel; 5. Shakespeare: myth and biographical fiction Douglas Lanier; 6. Narration and staging in Hamlet and its afternovels Laurie Osborne; 7. Shakespeare serialised: An Age of Kings Emma Smith; 8. Musical Shakespeares: attending to Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona Stephen M. Buhler; 9. Shakespeare overheard: performances, adaptations and citations on radio Susanne Greenhalgh; 10. Shakespeare on the tourist trail Nicola J. Watson; 11. Performing Shakespeare in digital culture W. B. Worthen; 12. Shakespeare’s popular face: from the playbill to the poster Carol Chillington Rutter; Further reading.