ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the examples of the kinds of "fictive William Shakespeare" transmitted – and transmigrated – within and between such diverse national broadcasting cultures as Britain, North America, South Africa, and Denmark, via the internationally dominant televisual formats of the single play and the series. Across the Anglophone world and beyond Shakespeare permeates television in the form of event scheduling, niche programming, numerous "incidental appropriations", or fleeting "weak" references, as well as occasional "full strength" adaptations of his plays. Like single plays, drama mini-series loosely inspired by Shakespeare often appropriate narratives for political or social comment, adding new plotlines, characters, and locations to fill the increased airtime. The planned opening up of the archives – together with the recent international cluster of re-stagings, new commissions, and expansion of Shakespearean content into evolving genres and modes of transmission – suggests that these energies are currently moving in the direction of television.
