ABSTRACT
Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer’s Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) presented something of a milestone in Shakespeare Studies. As the first edited collection to appear in Terence Hawkes’s ground-breaking series, Accents on Shakespeare, it put cutting-edge scholarship on Shakespeare into the hands of scholars and students all over the world, and as one of the first scholarly essay collections on Shakespearean appropriation, it legitimized, validated, and broadened a new sub-discipline, one that encompassed Shakespeare, film and media studies, performance studies, and genre studies. Six years later, Desmet and Sujata Iyengar launched what would become the award-winning, online, multimedia, scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (B&L) (Iyengar et al. 2019), the first scholarly journal to be devoted to the study of Shakespearean afterlives. A generation after Shakespeare and Appropriation, and nearly fifteen years after the first issue of B&L, however, the time has come for a new look at how the field of Shakespearean appropriation has developed and exists today: globally. This brief introduction to the volume cannot serve as a comprehensive guide to the field of Shakespeare and appropriation but instead seeks to offer a glance at three particular realms that Shakespeare and Appropriation and Borrowers and Lenders brought into focus, almost by accident: the work of women and minority scholars, scholarship from developing or former Eastern bloc countries, and innovative media renderings of Shakespeare and Shakespeareana.
