ABSTRACT
“Can there still be an alternative Shakespeare?” muse some skeptical colleagues. Can there not be? The very success of the first two volumes in this series, and the radically progressive impulse within Shakespeare studies for which they stand, conjures such questions. So do the remarkable range and freedom of Shakespeare in performance during these decades, both live and on screen, which have brought the plays to larger audiences and new cultural locations. With these expansions of possibility, both in practice and method, Will Shakespeare has attained a new kind of pop celebrity even as the Bard remains in some quarters the last bastion of community and inherited values. Thus if we take the title as descriptive, it is assured that any representative collection of Shakespeare essays today will indeed be about alternative Shakespeares.
