ABSTRACT
The affordances of a global, post-textual Shakespeare network have presented challenges for those who seek out the place of language in appropriation theory. As appropriative critical practice finds itself increasingly oriented towards cultural studies, it becomes necessary to rearticulate the place of the Shakespearean text in such work. Shakespeare studies continues to wrestle with what fidelity might mean; appropriative critical practices increasingly dismiss of visible manifestations of the Shakespeare text. Douglas Lanier’s influential application of Deleuzian rhizomatics to appropriation theory recognizes the limits of this approach even as he acknowledges that the absence of a centralized “root” threatens to elide Shakespeare entirely and requires that we “revisit the role of the Shakespearean text and the authority it seems to provide in relation to adaptation” (Lanier 2014: 23). Instead, Lanier proposes that we engage in a process of “selective essentialization,” emphasizing a fidelity to the “spirit” of Shakespeare (Lanier 2017: 9), while Desmet, Loper, and Casey suggest that this reassessment “brings to the foreground the relationship between medium and message” (Desmet et al. 2018: 6). Likewise, Julie Sanders’s update to her seminal Adaptation and Appropriation affirms the need to reconsider the space we allocate to the presence of the text, noting that “in any study of adaptation and appropriation the creative import of the author cannot be as easily dismissed as Roland Barthes’s or Michel Foucault’s influential theories of the ‘death of the author’ might suggest” (Sanders 2017: 3).
