Suspecting it was more widely known for its sporting prowess than its culture, Australia decided to stage four arts festivals prior to hosting the 2000 Olympics. The first, held in 1997, celebrated the indigenous cultures of the world, with prominence given to Aboriginal Australia. Conceived as the “Festival of the Dreaming,” it featured, in addition to dance, storytelling, and art, performances of Waiting for Godot in Bundjalung. It was hoped parallels between the play’s universal themes and historical Aboriginal experience – a politics of waiting and existential despair – would reveal indigenous culture. In the event, this was not realized. This chapter explores some of the reasons why. Audiences heard Bundjalung spoken but it proved so mellifluous that the expected interplay of antagonism and resignation voiced in English did not take place. Audiences could follow the English text cued as sur-titles but given ignorance of Bundjalung they could not appreciate they were hearing a transliteration. Audiences could see the cast interacting, but they were not aware that the protocols of Aboriginal conversation had been set aside. While the Bundjalung Waiting for Godot was years ahead of its time, it continues to raise issues for the notion of global Irish studies.

The chapter argues that Robert Lowell erred morally, and thereby aesthetically – since art must be held to account – in his literary experiment of appropriating the epistolary voice of Elizabeth Hardwick, the esteemed literary critic, novelist, and co-founder of and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, into The Dolphin (1973). Hardwick was Lowell’s second wife, then ex-wife at the time Lowell composed his sequence. Saltmarsh argues for a need to see her as a subject, and not an objectified "Lizzie" character. In quoting from many of Hardwick’s essays, letters, and writings, she hopes to restory what we think we know about the literary history of Lowell and Hardwick. Broadly, this chapter offers a reappraisal of both Lowell and Hardwick, and sheds light on the limits of confessional poetry, particularly when a writer is purporting to speak as an intimate other.

This chapter examines a range of 1916 Shakespearean appropriations from the German sphere of influence (the German Reich and Austria-Hungary). Many of them argued that Germany had thoroughly ‘naturalised’ Shakespeare and thus had as much, or more, right to ‘own’ him as Britain. They also used Shakespeare to criticise Britain's alleged iniquities. However, German responses to the Shakespeare Tercentenary did not present an entirely unified, patriotic front. Some of them, like the April 1916 issue of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, exposed significant blind spots in the propagandistic uses of Shakespeare. Chief among them was the uncomfortable contradiction inherent in the claim that Shakespeare was universal and above the hostilities of the war while, at the same time, constituting a uniquely German property. Moreover, it proved possible to use Shakespeare in radical ways which contradicted the official patriotic line, as evidenced in Karl Kraus’s subversive articles published in his magazine Die Fackel.

This section situates the study within the current debates surrounding the issues of commemoration, cultural memory, and identity. It applies the insights offered by memory studies to investigate the political implications of Shakespearean appropriation and legacy. It introduces the key focus of the book: the ways in which memorialising Shakespeare was used to formulate and contest imperial, national, and social identities during the global crisis of the First World War. As diverse groups evoked him to underpin their collective past and common values, Shakespeare provided a starting point for dialogue and a shared ‘language’ in which it could be conducted. This dialogue was not always friendly, as people used Shakespeare not only to highlight their commonalities, but also to insist on their differences. Although imperialist and nationalist agendas often dominated, Shakespeare also provided an outlet for other, usually silenced and forgotten voices, as marginalised racial, ethnic, and social groups adopted him to respond to the prevalent totalising narratives. Examining these exchanges within the framework of memory studies offers a unique view of the intertwining of culture and politics at the time that saw the emergence of the world order which is still with us over a hundred years later.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

This chapter analyses Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2009) and David Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet (2005) as screen works that appropriate Shakespeare not through the play-text of Romeo and Juliet but instead through its screen history of networked hypertexts. I argue that both films decentre Shakespeare as a source by appropriating Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), rather than the play-text, as a key hypotext. Both Levine and Lachapelle’s works can be discussed from various perspectives of adaptation studies. They are, for example, good examples of genre films – Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet, a six-minute film advertising H&M denim jeans, is a commercial advertisement in the form of a music video, whilst Warm Bodies is a romzomcom.

I will explore how web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet challenge and revise the famous (and infamous) narrative of the star-crossed lovers. Participating in a new model for Shakespeare on screen, these series change the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expanding the number and variety of the female characters, adapting Shakespeare to address issues of gender, sexuality and love in the digital age. The young women who create web-series such as Any Other Rosie, Any Other Vlog, Jules and Monty and Rome and Juliet shift the viewer’s focus away from Juliet and her complicated legacy.

Created by Chicanx and Indigenous artists living and working in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Borderlands Shakespeare appropriations situate Shakespeare within the unique context of la frontera, engaging with its hybrid cultures, genres, and languages. These appropriations draw from Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous traditions, and they confront Shakespeare’s colonial legacies, interrogating the complex layers of colonialism shaping the region and Shakespeare’s reception in it. To explore the decolonial vision of Borderlands Shakespeare, this essay focuses on Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in post-apocalyptic San Diego. These plays engage with Shakespeare to critique imperialist policies that have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, the criminalization of migration, and high levels of labor and environmental exploitation. In their use of multilingual Indigenous and Chicanx frameworks to imagine more just futures, Borderlands Shakespeare plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry offer valuable methodologies for decolonizing English literary studies and for approaching canonical Western texts in culturally sustaining ways.

The Introduction establishes the distinctive focus and range of contributions within Shakespeare at War. This transhistorical material history prioritizes how Shakespeare is used at times of war from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and shows how this focus sheds light on some of the core political issues dominating a conflict, the wartime role played by the arts, and the shifting cultural capital of Shakespeare for different communities. The Introduction argues for the importance of a ‘material’ emphasis: all contributions use a significant archival object as their starting point in order to establish how these items can help us recover different wartime stories, voices, and perspectives. In place of a single, linear history, our aim – through the structure, content, and material focus of the collection – is to embrace a plurality of histories. The Introduction also contextualizes the diversity of its twenty-six contributions: nineteen are essays by Shakespeare scholars, war historians, or public figures who have served in the British Army, while the remaining seven are by theatre directors who have directed Shakespeare while the UK was at war or have set their productions at times of war to encourage audiences to think critically about the complexities of major conflicts.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.

This chapter considers “uncreative” appropriations of comics archives. Uncreative comics go a step further in presenting the result of collecting as the product itself, further unsettling the lines between archiving, curating, and drawing. In fact, these comics tend to shift toward undrawing and the “uncreative” cartoonist often avoids making their own mark visible. Instead, the tactics that come to define these avant-garde works are détournement, erasure, collage, digital editing, reprinting, cutting-up, and crowdsourcing. This chapter looks at proto-experiments with uncreative practices and considers their expanded continuities in the era of digital remixing, particularly as they are facilitated by the online archives of comic books. It considers more particularly the multifaceted works of Ilan Manouach, who has adopted radical approaches to appropriation by privileging mechanical, automatized, or distributed forms of comics production.

This chapter examines the perceptions of communities and participants where Fambul Tok works. The program was designed to provide people with ritual spaces to discuss war-related experiences, but I suggest that the vast majority of participants neither desired nor enjoyed hearing about wartime experiences. The confessions at these organization-sponsored ceremonies were performances that sought to stimulate further development opportunities. The space did, however, provide an opportunity to address other, more contemporary issues. This is exemplified through the story of a heated chieftaincy conflict. The organization’s presence and the ceremony provided a forum through which this conflict played out, exemplifying how existing social structures play a critical role in shaping local transitional justice programs. I explore how pre-existing hierarchies, social status and individual agency influenced how different people engaged with the program. This exemplifies the diversity of needs and priorities in communities and how people engage with these mechanisms for different reasons. It provides a comprehensive analysis of how local transitional justice programs shape and are shaped by the various actors at play (both staff and participants), which has implications not only for TJ mechanisms but development programs more broadly.

This chapter introduces the book’s approach and its main theses, ending with an overview of the Phaedo. I argue that the dialogue has an unfolding structure, in which claims made early are often explained only at later stages. I briefly lay out the distinct stages of Socrates’ accounts of the forms, of the soul, and of ethics. These are not three independent topics; instead, his ethical account is grounded in his account of the soul, which is in turn grounded in his account of the forms. Another important thread running through the dialogue is how Socrates responds to Simmias’ and Cebes’ fears by trying to help them acquire the right sort of rational confidence in their views. I also discuss how Socrates appropriates and transforms ideas from his religious, scientific, and literary context in articulating and defending his philosophical theories.