ABSTRACT
When it comes to Shakespeare, the last century witnessed a powerful return to his original texts, the Folio and the quartos. This demand to encounter the Bard in all his authentic grandeur continues to dictate both how the plays are typically staged and how his texts are discussed in the classroom. Now only children and uninspired students are permitted to encounter Shakespeare via an adapted text. In such a climate, the intervening tradition of adaptation has been shunned. As a result, there has been little serious investigation into the logic that dictated this long history of repurposing Shakespeare via adaptive methods. This book is offered as a corrective to this situation. In this book, I explore both why we value and how we evaluate Shakespeare. To this extent, my work is concerned with the dynamics of literary taste. More specically, and as my subtitle-Better Than New-ironically implies, I have chosen to focus on those parts of Shakespeare that have proven indigestible: the dregs, dross, and corrupt matter that subsequent writers, directors and players have rejected in the course of producing work that nevertheless derives from Shakespeare. I proceed with a belief that the study of adaptation provides us with a valuable alternative perspective on some key Shakespeare texts, thereby allowing us to explore the complex and mutually informing dialectic that binds together strong aesthetic evaluations and the psychological processes that led precisely to those evaluative judgments.
