ABSTRACT
The manipulation of Shakespearean texts is obviously not new, and since Dryden’s and Davenant’s well-known adaptations Shakespeare has been rewritten by successive generations of playwrights, actor-managers and directors. At the same time, in the last thirty years the grammar of appropriating Shakespeare has changed. Modern playwrights do not merely ‘rewrite’ Shakespeare by imposing new words on the textuality of the original text to create a ‘secondary script’; instead, their deep distrust of the verbal code leads them to ‘redesign’ Shakespeare using visual images.
