ABSTRACT
There has been a boom in academic work on Shakespeare’s afterlives during the past two decades, prompted by a variety of internal and external factors: cultural materialism’s emphasis on the contemporary work art does; the poststructuralist recognition that readers (and by extension theatrical interpreters) create “meaning by Shakespeare” (Hawkes 1992); historicist studies and political challenges to canonical authorship; and, perhaps most importantly, creative multimedia revisions by modern artists (postcolonial and feminist, queer, populist, and apolitically experimental) that puzzle university students and have found enthusiastic advocates among like-minded scholars. These developments have all been, to a greater or lesser degree, controversial and contested, and the standpoints of their practitioners varied: while
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Differences notwithstanding, amidst and alongside this exploration, there has been a fundamental expansion of understanding regarding Shakespeare’s role as a collaborative artist.
