ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Shakespeare as an international brand used by Asian popular consumerist forms to reinforce their own global currency. Focusing on Japanese manga/anime creators, fans and cosplayers who deploy Shakespeare as an easily accessible, non-copyrighted resource and not as a source of cultural authority, the chapter explores how these re-versionings destabilise the power hierarchies of original and adapted text, presenting instead a horizontal, weblike notion of ‘Shakespeare rhizomatics’. These Japanese innovations, while providing an alternative paradigm of global and Asian Shakespeare, also help in re-evaluating the bard’s international currency in global media beyond notions of canonical universality.
