Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations

Four hundred years after William Shakespeare’s death, his works continue to not only fill playhouses around the world, but also be adapted in various forms for consumption in popular culture, including in film, television, comics and graphic novels, and digital media. Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new ’Shakespeares’ to emerge, revealing Shakespeare’s ongoing impact in popular culture. Significantly, this collection explores the role of play in the construction of meaning in Shakespearean adaptations--adaptations of both the works of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare the man--and contributes to the growing scholarly interest in playfulness both past and present. The chapters in Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations engage with the diverse ways that play is used in Shakespearean adaptations on stage, screen, and page, examining how these adaptations draw out existing humour in Shakespeare’s works, the ways that play is used as a pedagogical aid to help explain complex language, themes, and emotions found in Shakespeare’s works, and more generally how play and playfulness can make Shakespeare ’relatable, ’ ’relevant, ’ and entertaining for successive generations of audiences and readers.

Marina Gerzic works for the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Inc., and Medieval and Early Modern Studies at The University of Western Australia in both research and administration roles, and is the editorial assistant for the academic journals Parergon and Shakespeare Bulletin. She is the editor, with Aidan Norrie, of From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (Routledge), and has published articles on film and adaptation theory, Shakespeare, pedagogy, cinematic music, cultural studies, science fiction, comics and graphic novels, and children’s literature.

Aidan Norrie is a historian of monarchy, and a Chancellor’s International Scholar in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at The University of Warwick. Aidan is the editor, with Marina Gerzic, of From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (Routledge); with Lisa Hopkins, of Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press); and, with Mark Houlahan, of New Directions in Early Modern English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections (Medieval Institute Publications). Aidan is currently working on a monograph, Elizabeth I and the Old Testament: Biblical Analogies and Providential Rule, which is forthcoming from Arc Humanities Press.