ABSTRACT
Today, many Shakespeareans have moved away from the concept of the plays as Works. They see the plays as free of the processes of fi liation and (again to cite Barthes) read them “without the father’s signature.” (Mowat 137)
Unlike contemporary criticism, popular culture remains invested in authorship and particularly in Shakespeare the author, even though its Shakespeare is patently a fi ction. Pop depictions typically locate the meaning of Shakespeare’s works fi rmly with the man himself, in his personal life or his individual genius rather than, say, in the source texts which he imitated, the collaborative conditions of the playhouse, or his posthumous reinvention by posterity. In fact Shakespeare is popular culture’s favourite symbol for the principle of literary authorship (Lanier, Shakespeare 114)
Mowat and Lanier capture the tensions here of late twentieth-century academic and popular receptions of Shakespeare. For the former, post-structuralist theory rendered the Romantic author obsolete; for the latter, Romantic authorship became increasingly central to understanding Shakespeare as the paterfamilias of Western culture. For academics then, “Shakespeare” is a signifi er or a discourse that continues to inspire the production and reception of biography, but whose personal history and experience are fundamentally irrelevant to the Shakespearean play. In contrast, within the popular cultural imaginary, Shakespeare is fi rst and foremost the man whose plays refl ect his personality and experience. To briefl y use the Barthesian model referenced by Mowat, one might suggest that the academy sees the plays as texts where popular culture sees them as works (see Barthes, “From”). It makes sense then
that contemporary children’s literature has often refl ected and responded to such tensions by inscribing Shakespeare as a character in concert with appropriations of his plays.
