ABSTRACT
Embedded in one of the many short narratives that make up the seventy-five issues of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book series, which features a family of philosophical, allegorical gods dominated by Morpheus, William Shakespeare makes a brief but important appearance. Gaiman dedicates two episodes of The Sandman to Shakespeare. They are re-tellings of two plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and both stories share their titles with the plays. The Sandman reconfigures Shakespearean authorship as dynamic, collaborative communities of appropriation, a model of literary production that lends itself fittingly to the medium of comics. This protean model of narrative extends to entire Sandman epic, which references Ovid to depict the fluid and timeless nature of literary appropriation itself. Appropriation as both seizure and gift allocation, as an exchange that necessitates encounters between self and other fittingly describes the narratives of the writing and performing of Shakespeare’s plays in The Sandman through the transaction between Dream and Shakespeare.
