ABSTRACT
Ever since the publication of the First Folio in 1623, Shakespeare has been an inexhaustible source for playwrights, novelists, poets, scholars, translators, theatre directors, and Hollywood producers. From the early laudatory Restoration adaptations of his plays to the most recent and “radical” appropriations of them, Shakespeare has been a literary classic whose contemporary appropriative invocation reveals not so much the endurance of his universal genius as the modern appropriator’s current concerns. Postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare, for instance, involve less an attempt to do away with what Harold Bloom describes as the paralyzing grip of a gigantic literary precursor than an attempt to investigate profitably the otherwise infelicitous hiatuses in the Bard’s works. Such appropriations are not emulations of the Shakespeare text; rather, they are definitional reinscriptions of it.
