Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations

In these provocative case studies, Barbara Hodgdon examines not only how Shakespeare's 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. Hodgdon's 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 Shakespeare's plays themselves, she considers how film and television have marketed Queen Elizabeth I's popular cultural memory and how Stratford's various museum spaces celebrate and exhibit an "authentic" Shakespeare side by side with "Shakespeare kitsch" - T-shirts, ties, thimbles, savings banks, and other mass market souvenirs. Styled as "a collector's history, " The Shakespeare Trade offers an absorbing and timely account of the means through which Shakespeare's plays, the figure of Shakespeare, and Elizabethan England function in twentieth-century British and American cultures.