Shakespearean Adaptation and Appropriation (LSE, pre-1700)

Shakespearean Adaptation and

the burgeoning world of adaptation studies, Shakespeare has become a central
concern. This course will examine the various kinds of adaptation employed by
those who adapt or appropriate Shakespeare’s plays. It will consider examples
of dramatic adaptations of period from 1660 to 1800, some operatic versions
from the nineteenth century, and modern adaptation, mostly film and fiction,
from the twentieth century to the present. Many of these adaptations have had a
difficult critical history. The Restoration adaptations were denounced as desecrations,
and both the operas and early Shakespearean films were routinely dismissed with
contempt. Now critics, freed to a degree from Bardolatry and early assumptions
about the nature of the literary canon, have been interested in Shakespearean
adaptations of all sorts. And their interest is not based only on the cultural
evidence that these works have, though that is also important. They have found
aesthetic values in works that were dismissed at one time as popular trash. One
issue for the course is how such adaptations should be judged. Can
Shakespearean adaptations match the originals?

goal of this course is to analyze various issues and debates related to
Shakespearean adaptation in relation to this historical range of actual
adaptations. We will have to consider what debt, if any, is owed to the
originating text or author, or if any writer can accurately be called
originating or original, given intertextual theories about the relationship of
texts to each other and the notion of the death of the author. We must consider
ideas of plagiarism.  And we will consider
the purposes of adapted works: are they inevitably comments or parodies of the
adapted work? Must they be faithful (in some degree or sense) to the adapted
work? Must they acknowledge the adapted work? Must the adaptations’ audience
know something of the adapted work?

will concentrate on four Shakespearean plays, reading them first as original
texts, while noting the texts they adapt or appropriate. We’ll consider their
original style of theatrical production, audiences, and cultural context. Then
we’ll be following these plays through a series of adaptations. Thus, Macbeth will be traced through the
Restoration rewriting by Sir William Davenant, Verdi’s opera of 1847 (revised
in 1865), and Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood,
and the dark comedy Scotland, Pa.
Since Shakespeare’s best known plays tend to be the most frequently adapted,
the other texts are A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, King Lear
, and The Tempest.



There will be
weekly short papers and reports on different texts, including the works of
criticism and theory. There will also be a medium-length book review of a book
on some aspect of the topics we are considering, and a full seminar paper, done
with preliminary assignments on bibliography, definition of topic, and
opportunity for revision, after discussion of an oral presentation before the
seminar as a whole.

Secondary Texts (some excerpted or on

Hutcheon, Linda.
A Theory of Adaptation (2006)

Marjorie Garber,
Shakespeare And Modern Culture(2009)

Michael Dobson, The Making Of The National Poet (1992)

Margaret Jane
Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem ofAdaptation

Peter Sabor and
Paul Yachnin, eds. Shakespeare And The
Eighteenth Century

Chantal Zabus, Tempests After Shakespeare (2002)

Holderness, The Shakespeare Myth (1988)

Marsden, Jean I.
The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare,
Adaptation, And Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory


of Blood, Were the World Mine, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear,
Prospero’s Books, The Tempest.


Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear,
Macbeth, The Tempest