The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture

by Robert Shaughnessy (Editor)

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.

Genres: Shakespeare, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies, Nonfiction

306 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a personal reaction only, so your mileage will no doubt vary, but I was disappointed in this book. I usually love love love Cambridge Companions - and 'Shakespeare and Popular Culture' should be right up my alley in both 'academic' and 'personal interest' terms.

Part of the problem was the examples used. The whole set of essays is mainly concerned with the play 'Hamlet', which doesn't really float my boat. So if you love 'Hamlet', then you may just eat this up. I was totally engaged by a paragraph discussing Mark Knopfler's song 'Romeo and Juliet' - but usually I am engaged by a Cambridge Companion throughout, and whether or not I am familiar with the examples and sources then I am moved to go (re)discover them.

I was very interested by the last essay on playbills and posters, but it was written in such a staccato style that I found it quite hard to read, so that was disappointing again. I know I'm a fan of 'the classic style' so again YMMV, but this seemed a classic case of idiosyncratic style getting in the way of substance.

Anyway, it seems very cheeky of me to 3-star a Cambridge Companion, but Goodreads labels the ratings in subjective ways, so in this case that's how I'm using them. I remain sure there's a large audience out there who'll happily engage with this volume in ways I did not!

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays on the multiple roles and representations of Shakespeare and his works is a useful and informative, if at times somewhat opaque text that will find its most appreciative audience in academic circles. Whilst it offers numerous references to when Shakespeare (the man, the work and/or as a construct) informs or creates popular cultural experiences and/or artefacts, the overall intellectual thrust of the text negates its ability to engage with readers from a non-specialist or non-critical background. This is a shame because there is a lot to be said for examining the relationship between Shakespeare and popular culture in such a way that it helps make the Bard more accessible for all.

Those chapters in the book that are more focused on offering surveys or thematic discussions of their respective sub-topics are the better. This includes those on the transition of Shakespeare's works from popular entertainment to high literature (written by Diane Henderson), the abbreviation of the original texts (Peter Holland), the actors who have become iconic because of their association with Shakespeare's drama (Barbara Hodgson) and Shakespeare as musicals (Stephen Buhler). These essays and some of the others offer a readable balance between an examination of the theoretical and critical aspects of their respective topics whilst also citing and discussing the range of examples they use to inform their articles. The chapter by Hodgson is particularly valuable in that it highlights the importance of actors like Garrick, Kean, Oliver, Gielgud and Branagh in creating representations of Shakespeare's characters, and by association his artistry, whilst cataloguing their achievements. It might be argued that as many people will engage with Shakespeare through and because of those who perform his plays it is vital that Hodgson essay be accessible and informative and not too theoretical.

Shaughnessy's editing has brought together twelve different investigations of Shakespeare in popular culture and where the essayists are less successful it is due to their obtuse academic language and arguments. The chapters that reflect on the digital mode of representing and transmitting Shakespeare and the radio productions of his plays or his life are the most egregious offenders on this criteria. There are also some problems with the essay by Laurie Osborne on the narration and staging of Hamlet, whilst the consideration of posters as representation of Shakespeare and his plays is limited by the reliance of Chillington Rutter on descriptions of the selected promotional materials.

The idea of examining how Shakespeare's writing and identity has been adapted, adopted, abused and abbreviated overt the last four hundred or so years across multiple medias in popular society (most Anglophone) is a worthy one and this Cambridge University Press book does a very good job of meeting this literary and critical challenge. Unfortunately it doesn't quite succeed as had been hoped by this reviewer because in some parts the essayists worked against the core concept of popular culture which is accessibility. Through the use of relatively inaccessible academic language those writers made their arguments and by association their concept of Shakespeare non-popular (or dare one say elitist).