Shakespeare and Seriality

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. She is the author of several books including Serial Shakespeare. An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American T.V. Drama (2020), Night Passages. Philosophy, Literature, and Film (2013) and Crossmappings. On Visual Culture (2018). Christina Wald is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Cultural Inquiry at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She is the author of several books including Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV (2020). Her work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Modern Drama, Adaptation, Anglia, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Classical Receptions Journal.

This brilliant book shows how Shakespearean drama spirals forward in a process of creative returns. It brings into fresh focus an extraordinary range of material – from Shakespeare’s own artistry to the structures of history, from ballet to Beckett, from comfort television to trauma, apocalypse and the posthuman. The rich range of approaches includes queer theory, theatre history, memory studies and psychoanalysis. But perhaps its most valuable contribution is to define self-consciously serial reading itself as a form of creative interpretation and renewal of Shakespeare’s form and meanings.

• List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Theorizing Shakespeare's Seriality, Elisabeth Bronfen (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Christina Wald (University of Konstanz, Germany)I. Reading Shakespeare Serially: Shakespeare as a Serial Writer & Serial Rewritings of Shakespeare1. Shakespeare's Serial Secrets, Elisabeth Bronfen (University of Zurich, Switzerland)2. Shakespeare's Uneven Ends: The First Tetralogy as Historical Series, Carla Baricz (Yale University, USA)3. The Desdemona effect: Empathy, retelling and seriality in Shakespeare’s Othello, Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz, Germany)4. Shakespeare's Serial Legacies: Joyce and Beckett, Claudia Olk (Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany)II. Performing Shakespeare Serially: Theatrical Serialization Effects5. Falstaff, again: Configurations of Serial Memory in Early Modern Culture, Isabel Karremann (University of Zurich, Switzerland)6. "Play it Again, Antony!": Performing Antony and Cleopatra as Julius Caesar's Sequel on Stage and Screen, Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul Valéry, France)7. "And they dance": Queering Shakespeare through Balletic Seriality, Jonas Kellermann (University of Konstanz, Germany)III. Televising Shakespeare Serially: Shakespeare and complex TV Series8. ‘Is this the promised end?’: Afterwards, airflows, and Shakespearean dissonant repetitions in HBO’s Succession (2018-2023), Stephen O'Neill (Maynooth University, Republic of Ireland)9. The Poacher Poached, or a Serial Repurposing of the Bard in Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators, Kinga Földváry (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary)10. Serial Shakespeare after the end of the world: From repetition compulsions to the romance of recycling in Station Eleven, Christina Wald (University of Konstanz, Germany)Index