This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

In As You Like It, Shakespeare glorifies the social bandits that survive in the Forest of Arden, likening them to Robin Hood outlaws. Near-contemporary pseudo-biographies also record Shakespeare’s early life as a poacher and youthful renegade. Shakespeare’s play might suggest his advocacy of food sovereignty and social justice, a romanticized ima…[Read more]

Moon-Crossed reimagines the central plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well as a means to examining the female monstrous in early modern drama, literature, and though. Why doesn’t Bertram like Helena? Because she’s a werewolf. But as he learns, she’s of a very noble line of werewolves. She saves the King of France, he learns a bit more…[Read more]

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

This chapter examines the tendency of readers of Thoreau’s 1864 book “The Maine Woods” to read the landscape through which Thoreau travels as pristine wilderness. I argue, by contrast, that Thoreau presented a social landscape, a “working-forest” avant-la-lettre.

Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Attenuated Shakespearean references in popular cultural texts communicate meaning only because audiences, storytellers, and lovers all over the world identify the scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet instantly as an emblem of romantic love. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra likewise include scenes i…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]

Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediat…[Read more]