ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores a festival' of Shakespearean appropriations, primarily from the late 1980s to the turn of this century, that use Shakespeare's texts as part of their counter-cultural or oppositional endeavours. It brings together a number of case studies to explore other key carnivalistic traits, especially the body, temporality and the trickster Death in the cultural phenomenon of counter-cultural Shakespeare in the cinema. More specifically, the book presents non-hegemonic and in any sense counter-cultural appropriations of Shakespeare's monolithic works as carnivalistic acts. It argues that play and festivity are key to the process of appropriation. The book focuses on counter-cultural appropriations of Shakespeare on film as a very particular cycle during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, taking six diverse case studies to explore their carnivales que process and product.
