ABSTRACT
Shakespearean adaptations She’s the Man (2006, dir. Andy Fickman) and O (2001, dir. Tim Blake Nelson) replace early modern nobility with a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century sports-based meritocracy, reorienting around sport because it shows that the status and triumphs its characters experience are earned and are not accidents of birth. Repeatedly, sport offers a fair accounting of value translated to the scoreboard. The fairness of sport operates as a counterweight to the socio-cultural milieux in Shakespeare plays that do not translate to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This vision depends on not just a misguided belief in the meritocracy but also a misunderstanding of team sports. She’s the Man and O depend on the meritocracy implicit in sport to show that what happens within their narratives affirms not only the merit of the characters in their fictional worlds, but also the films in a broader cultural context. By placing sport at the centre of their updating adaptations, O and She’s the Man show how the maintenance of both the canon and contemporary social order depends on a belief in the meritocracy, in which sporting triumphs make it appear as if success outside the boundaries of the field is also earned in a fair contest objectively scored.
