ABSTRACT
I’ve so far suggested that textual-theatrical instances are productive of the work, and that the limits of the work are continually redefined by distinguishing what can be recognized as legitimate productions from adaptations or illegitimate productions. This process becomes especially visible when users disagree about what should count as ‘genuine’. As explored in the previous chapter with reference to performances at the Royal Shakespeare Company, looking into claims of adaptive production pins down not the work’s ‘essence’, but rather what prompted failures of recognition of the work among specific audiences at certain times. Another important, related function of naming adaptation is to seem to insulate the work from certain productions with which it remains, nonetheless, closely identified. Calling Return to the Forbidden Planet an adaptation falls only just short of describing it as its own work, and yet as an adaptation it remains locked in an uneasy tension with The Tempest. It is because Shakespeare’s works can, logically, never be made free of their adaptations that fears about work perpetuation over time persist. As a category negatively defined by what its adaptations are not, the work as process is never complete. It necessarily contains, in the senses of includes and suppresses, the possibility of its own (illegitimate) transformation.
