The Shakespeare Trade: Performances And Appropriations

In 1623 Ben Jonson touted Shakespeare as the soul of his age- three centuries later, a newspaper advertisement used Shakespeares reputation to market Budweiser, The King of All Bottled Beers. Spanning the past hundred years, The Shakespeare TradeMoreIn 1623 Ben Jonson touted Shakespeare as the soul of his age- three centuries later, a newspaper advertisement used Shakespeares reputation to market Budweiser, The King of All Bottled Beers. Spanning the past hundred years, The Shakespeare Trade looks at how present-day representations of Shakespeare borrow from and negotiate with his cultural authority to shore up particular obsessions, preoccupations, and myths while making and remaking Anglo-American images of gender and subjectivity.In these provocative case studies, Barbara Hodgdon examines not only how Shakespeares plays are staged and restaged by readers and critics as well as by performers and directors but also how the Elizabethan age itself is recirculated and marketed.Hodgdons look at The Taming of the Shrew scans from silent films to the Shrew episode of the eighties television show Moonlighting, to the most recent Royal Shakespeare Company productions. Moving beyond Shakespeares plays themselves, she considers how film and television have marketed Queen Elizabeth Is popular cultural memory and how Stratfords various museum spaces celebrate and exhibit an authentic Shakespeare side by side with the Shakespeare kitsch: T-shirts, ties, thimbles, savings banks, and other mass market souvenirs. Styled as a collectors history, The Shakespeare Trade offers an absorbing and timely account of the means through which Shakespeares plays, the figure of Shakespeare, and Elizabethan England function in twentieth-century British and American cultures.