Search

The introduction acquaints readers with the concept of Shakespeare as a variable object and explains its value to Shakespeare studies. It proposes that through the lens of OOO, Shakespeare is perceived as an object that contains all vast meanings ascribed to it through performance and appropriation, recentering Shakespeare as the object at the heart of the appropriative act. Attending to rhizome theory and Desmet’s work on tiny ontologies, the introduction argues that appropriation can never be “unfaithful” to Shakespeare because Shakespeare has infinite capacity to absorb its various shapes, each actualized by the political ecologies in which human users situate him.

Due to the interactive affordances of twenty-first century technologies, the relationship between readers and texts is often repositioned as part of a communal experience of consumption and reproduction. Inclusive in this expanding culture are user-generated adaptations of Shakespeare, most saliently fanfic. The fanfic universe prolifically crosses genres, putting the Shakespearean urtext in conversation with any other object of cultural interest, and occasionally subjugates the Shakespearean text to the dominant popular icon of the moment. Fanfic manifests textual enjoyment as a creative act; the genre is both recreational and re-creational, resulting in new adaptive works that expand the dramas to include sequels, prequels, and off-stage explorations of character and plot. Because Shakespeare is experienced variously through printed text, television, film, theatrical, or digitized performance – all of which underline the instability of an authoritative Shakespeare text – Shakespeare studies is uniquely positioned to expand critical understanding of adaptation and appropriation vis-a-vis the fanfiction universe. Fanfic’s online modality, existing on websites that facilitate dialogic interaction between author and audience, offers scholars an ongoing chronicle of reception. Uniquely, online interactions allow Shakespeare cultural critics to analyze the ways user-generated fanfic positions Shakespeare’s work as open to transition, crafting adaptations that illustrate what Shakespeare means to everyday users.

This introductory chapter argues that in the twenty-first century, Shakespeare readers are increasingly replaced by Shakespeare users. The chapter imagines Shakespeare not as a man or a body of work but a network of collective innovation, and considers the ways in which materialist forces shape—and are shaped by—Shakespeare use. The emergence of digital culture as mass media has expanded the user’s ability to participate in the text, and this chapter considers how new opportunities for critical interrogation arise when Shakespeare is used in communities, online and otherwise, that catalyze a new economy of creative and critical appropriation. Fan agency, transmedia representation, and creative critical use point to a new intracultural identity for Shakespeare, encouraging critics and users to rethink Shakespeare’s presence in cultural and intellectual thought.