ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders some of the key concepts at work in the discussion of globalized Shakespeare—translation, adaptation, and appropriation, inter alia—through the concept of articulation and the ethics involved in the uses of Shakespeare texts across the globe. Moving beyond, but also in line with, the current consensus that eschews fidelity to an original in favor of a rhizomatic relation among the products of Shakespeare's afterlife and the shibboleth of “Shakespeare's language,” it argues that the Shakespeare canon is itself best considered as a “language,” with a history of uses and gathering resonance freely available to anyone to use as best they can for their own purposes. Combining a Saussurean metaphor with a Bakhtinian insight, it argues that any instance of that “language” (la parole) is an articulation of an historical system (la langue) available for repeated and differential employment, thereby regenerating and releasing the historically accumulated multiplicity (heteroglossia) of earlier uses.
