Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom 9783030337254, 3030337251

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Shakespeare’s Fans Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom

Johnathan H. Pope

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series Editors Julie Grossman Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA R. Barton Palmer Clemson University Clemson, SC, USA

This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture. Advisory Board: Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia James Naremore, Indiana University, US Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US Robert Stam, New York University, US Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Université de Bourgogne, France More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654

Johnathan H. Pope

Shakespeare’s Fans Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom

Johnathan H. Pope Memorial University of Newfoundland Corner Brook, NL, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ISBN 978-3-030-33725-4    ISBN 978-3-030-33726-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Image: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would like to begin by thanking Andrew Hartley and Peter Holland for organizing the ‘Shakespeare and Geek Culture’ panel for the 2017 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of American. My work on Ryan North for that session became the foundation and inspiration for Shakespeare’s Fans. Writing for and participating in that panel helped me connect a whole range of disparate thoughts and ideas that had been knocking around in my head for many years, so I am forever grateful to Andrew and Peter, as well as to my fellow panelists. I would also like to thank everyone at Palgrave who has had faith in and supported this project. From the moment I proposed the book through to the completion of the manuscript, Palgrave has been a joy to work with. Thanks especially to Lina Aboujieb, Ellie Freedman, and Emily Wood, as well as all of the anonymous reviewers who gave constructive and encouraging feedback at every stage of production. Many thanks are due to those at the Memorial University of Newfoundland (Grenfell Campus) who supported the research for this monograph. The staff at the Ferriss Hodgett Library ensured that everything went smoothly from start to finish, no matter how strange a document I requested. Heather Strickland, Nicole Holloway, Catherine Stone, Krista Howell, Anita Park, Crystal Rose, and Louise McGillis work wonders every day. Thanks also to Jennifer Butler Wight for her good humor and feedback on funding proposals and to Sarah Levita for her assistance with research at a very early but essential stage. Thanks to Jeff Keshen for his unwavering support for research activities at Grenfell. Finally, to any v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

student who got trapped in a conversation with me about Shakespeare fan fiction: thank you, and I am sorry! I am eternally grateful to Mary and Howard Pope for their many years of optimism, encouragement, and emotional support. Many frustrations and doubts about this book were vented over numerous Sunday dinners, and the patience and drinks helped get me through this process. Most of all, thank you to Bonnie White. You are my first and best editor, my daily motivator, and my academic idol. I promise that I will now stop regaling you with excerpts of Tom Hiddleston erotica. Finally, thank you Jack for your love and enthusiasm and for being a willing recipient of my own fannish nature.

Contents

1 Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee?  1 2 “My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the Shakespeare Fan from 10 Things I Hate About You to Garrick’s Jubilee 33 3 “my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the Gift Economy 67 4 “the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction 99 5 “There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare, RPF, and Parody133 6 Conclusion169 Index177

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee?

At a recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), I participated in a conversation with some fellow panelists about why we all chose to study Shakespeare in the first place. Some spoke about the intellectual rewards offered by texts, while others told more personal stories about reading the plays as a child with their parents. While some of us did not contribute to the conversation, others held back until someone postulated that in trying to answer the question, many of us were probably looking for the ‘right’ answer, one that was suitably scholarly or poignant enough that it would not compromise our standing with our peers in the room, a room which was filled—as SAA sessions often are—with junior scholars through to the titans of our field. This person joked that none of us wanted to say, “I got interested in Shakespeare because I had a crush on Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.” We laughed, and the conversation soon moved in a different direction. The whole discussion reminded me of the game of Humiliation played by a group of professors in David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975) in which the participants admit which famous work of literature they have never read. The ‘winner’ of the game is an English professor who admits to having never read Hamlet, a revelation so ghastly that he loses his job because of it. Saying that you came to Shakespeare because of Leo seemed to be the equivalent of being ignorant of Hamlet: there are just some things you do not say, no matter how true

© The Author(s) 2020 J. H. Pope, Shakespeare’s Fans, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1_1

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they are. In the case of Romeo  +  Juliet (1996), the fear being danced around was of being seen by your peers as immature and overly affective rather than appropriately serious and academic. In fan cultures, ‘squeeing’ describes excessive “emotional exuberance” when discussing a favorite film or meeting the actors from a favorite television series.1 It is also a term that is almost always used in a pejorative sense, the suggestion of shamelessly overdoing it by gushing, by getting too excited. Many of us are at the SAA because we love Shakespeare or because we love talking about his works with other people who love talking about the same thing. But we are scholars and critics. We do not confuse infatuation with critical inquiry. We do not squee, not when we are talking about Shakespeare, and not when we are meeting our academic idols at the conference. When we think of fans, Shakespeare does not come immediately to mind. Rather, we tend to think of media fandom, particularly fans of science fiction and fantasy, that image of the fan that has come to dominate popular culture depictions of the fan, whether they be Trekkies or fans of Star Wars or Harry Potter. Images of enthusiastic individuals dressed up as a favorite character while waiting in line to buy a movie ticket or the newest book in a series might spring to mind. We might also think of sports fans devoted to a favorite team, decked out officially licensed gear, and proclaiming that ‘this is the year!’ Or we might think of fans of a particular band who are continually saving for plane tickets and concert tickets. Maybe we think of collectors of sports or film memorabilia, passionate proponents of a particular videogame console or cellphone manufacturer, or adherents of celebrity culture. Shakespeare, however, tends to remain on the margins of our conception of fandom in spite of—or, perhaps, partly because of—his cultural and educational pride of place as the canonical author. This also in spite of the fact that, as I argue throughout this book, Shakespeare’s fans have been around for centuries, even if they have not often been written about or conceptualized as fans. Rather, we have a different name for Shakespeare fandom: bardolatry. For Shakespeare scholars unfamiliar with it, fan studies has grown substantially as a field of study over the past three decades, especially since the publication of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), exploding further with the advent of Web 2.0 in the late 1990s when fan practices became both more visible and more accessible. Jenkins wrote in response to the 1  Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 46.

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popular perception of fans as socially inept, sexually immature, and obsessive consumers of popular culture who were mindlessly uncritical of the media they consumed. Writing as both a fan and a scholar, Jenkins’ “ethnographic account” of fandom theorized it not as a form of passive, brainless media spectatorship, but rather as a “participatory culture” that was engaged and critical, receptive but responsive, and frequently constructing new meaning from a text rather than operating solely as an ideological mirror to it.2 And, equally important, Textual Poachers is a self-reflective work that contemplates Jenkins’ role as a participant-observer, what has become known in the field as an ‘aca-fan,’ the combined identities of an academic and a fan.3 Jenkins’ work has evolved considerably since 1992 in tandem with changes in the way media is consumed and the fluctuating relationship between cultural producers and the fans they court, as well as the changes in the ways fans communicate with and disseminate their work to each other.4 Fandom—and the mainstream acceptability of it— has come a long way from the homemade fanzines and small conventions of the late 1960s to the massive digital archives of fan fiction and the newsworthy, cultural pervasiveness of the annual San Diego Comic-Con today. Following Jenkins, Matt Hills has done considerable work on how we reconcile and theorize those dual identities of fan and scholar, as well as the tensions and contradictions within and between them that emerge from differing “imagined subjectivity” that establishes criteria for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fans/academics.5 And while Hills has often written about the similarities between academia and fandom, he has also cautioned against overly celebratory models of analysis. He argues instead in favor of, first, studying fandom as it is and not just according to the media tastes of like-­ minded scholars and, second, of maintaining a necessary “proper distance” from the object of study. Ideally, “proper distance” is achieved when the scholar is neither “too close” to nor “too distant” from the object of study. Being too close “can problematically give rise to academic work 2  Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 20th anniversary edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 1. Although Jenkins was not the first fan scholar, Textual Poachers stands as the most influential early work in the field. 3  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, vii. 4  In particular, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013). 5  Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 3–5.

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which replays scholar-fans’ pre-theoretical investments in specific fan cultural practices, and non-investments in other fan practices,” whereas being too distant can result in “a symbolic annihilation or exnomination of fan practices beyond the scope of the scholar’s pre-theoretical affective relationships.”6 As will become evident, Hills’ arguments about the fan objects we choose to write about are of paramount importance to the present work. Oftentimes, trying to define fan feels like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net. It is an identity or label that many of us feel that we understand as it applies to ourselves or to others and our general likes and dislikes. We use phrases such as ‘I’m a fan of’ or ‘I’m not a fan of’ as our daily vernacular in reference to almost anything, to the point that the term loses appreciable stability and meaning. ‘I’m a big fan of summer,’ I might say, or ‘I’m not a fan of mushrooms.’ Colloquially, we invoke our fan status to denote everything from mild indifference or inclination to passionate enthusiasm or support. When applied to specific cultural texts or objects, the term tends to coalesce into something slightly more precise, although still elusive. We are or know fans of Star Trek, the Grateful Dead, Harry Potter, the Green Bay Packers, and Joss Whedon, and in these examples, we apply labels to those fans (Trekkies, Deadheads, Potterheads, Cheeseheads, and Whedonites, respectively). We know of fans of specific actors, tech companies, clothing brands, and so forth. Seemingly, anyone or anything is capable of spawning its own fandom. In her overview of fan culture (particularly as it relates to science fiction), Karen Hellekson offers useful general definitions of two key terms: “Fans are people who actively engage with something … and fandom is the community that fans self-constitute around that text or object.”7 In this, Hellekson addresses two of the dominant elements of the fan identity that have emerged in the critical literature, particularly since Jenkins’ 6  Hills is drawing on Roger Silverstone’s concept of ‘proper distance’ from Media and Morality (2007). See Matt Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of ScholarFandoms: Between Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?,” in Fan Culture: Theory/ Practice, eds. Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 20–21; Matt Hills, “Forward,” in Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture, ed. Mark Duffett (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), vi–vii. 7  Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 153.

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Textual Poachers: fan is a necessarily active identity, and oftentimes a communal one as well. For Jenkins, characterizing fan activity as ‘participatory culture’ served as a way to “differentiate the activities of fans from other forms of spectatorship.”8 Jenkins also reminds us that although all fandoms are made up of fans, not all fans are part of fandoms: “Individual fans can be thought of as parts of audiences, while fandoms start to demonstrate some traits of publics, bound together through their ‘shared sociality’ and ‘shared identity.’”9 Additionally, fans are typically characterized by their emotional investment in the object of their fandom. As Mark Duffett asserts, “To become a fan is to find yourself with an emotional conviction about a specific object.”10 Fans are passionate and enthusiastic, and it is this passion and enthusiasm that encourages them to do more with a cultural text than simply consume it passively. Fan is also a frequently gendered category that—especially when used in the pejorative sense catalogued by Jenkins—feminizes and infantilizes its participants, in no small part due to its association with stereotypically feminine emotional (over)reactions and responses, as opposed to, say, stereotypically masculine logic and objectivity.11 Women and children are more likely to turn their interests into infatuations, to lose sight of the distinction between fantasy and reality, to become so emotionally invested in a narrative or character that they are moved to tears. Indeed, Francesca Coppa has pointed to the ways in which some seemingly innocent terms related to media spectatorship—and often central to the fan identity—carry misogynistic undertones, such as when we ‘binge watch’ multiple episodes of a television show: “the experience of binge watching, binge reading, binge eating, has historically been cast as female, and as indubitably bad … One of the most derided figures in Western culture is the woman in sweatpants watching television and eating ice cream out of the carton.”12 Fans do not know when to stop, when enough is enough, and thus engage in unhealthy  Jenkins, Spreadable Media, 2.  Jenkins, Spreadable Media, 166. Jenkins here is drawing on Daniel Dayan’s work on audiences and publics as distinct from one another. Whereas an audience is largely passive and unaware of or uncaring of the parameters of its engagement with media industries (an audience offers attention), a public is more actively involved in establishing or inviting a discourse with those media industries and its messages (a public calls for attention). 10  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 30. 11  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10. 12  Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), x. 8 9

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behaviors as a manifestation of their lack of control. At the same time, fan scholars have understood fandom as a feminine sphere in a much more positive sense, wherein fan activities such as the writing of fan fiction have historically been dominated by women.13 Abigail Derecho, for example, argues that fan fiction is the “literature of the subordinate, because most fanfic authors are women responding to media products that, for the most part, are characterized by an underrepresentation of women,” and represents an “act of defiance of corporate control and a reclamation of women viewers’ rights to experience the narratives they desire by creating them for themselves.”14 Over the past two decades in particular, however, the authorship of fan fiction has become more diverse, such that it “can no longer be considered the aegis of straight white women.”15 As fan studies scholars have noted, one of the challenges in writing about fans stems from their diversity, the fact that there is no single fandom within which all fans operate.16 Each fan community operates with its own set of rules and terms of engagement, such that fans of soap opera and fans of Star Wars and fans of the Montreal Canadiens do not cohere as a unified group of Fans. While Star Wars fans might cosplay at a convention and Canadiens fans might paint their faces during a playoff game, very little costume play takes place amongst fans of General Hospital; while fan fiction might be a prevalent feature of soap opera and Star Wars 13  Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 178; Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 44; Ross Haenfler, Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115–18; Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 91; Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 116; Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 102. 14  Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 71–72. 15  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 80. 16  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 6.

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fandoms, most diehard hockey fans are likely unaware of the existence of Sidney Crosby erotica on hockeyfanfiction.com. Whereas amateur ­muggles might express their Harry Potter fandom by participating in the US Quidditch Cup and amateur hockey players might roleplay as favorite players during a game of pick-up, Hello Kitty fans have no sport to call their own. Likewise, each fan community comprises numerous expressions of fandom that not all fans participate in. Not all Star Trek cosplayers write fan fiction, and not all fan fiction writers collect action figures, and not all collectors collect Pez dispensers. Likewise, although passion and emotional investment are hallmarks of fandom in general, how that passion is expressed and received can differ greatly between fandoms. As Duffett notes, although excessively exuberant responses—the aforementioned squeeing—are frowned upon in many fan communities, we fully expect music or sports fans to cheer, yell, dance, or be visibly moved in a number of ways as spectators of performances or games.17 Suffice it to say that there is considerable variation both between and within fan communities, with new forms of engagement emerging in step with new technologies, and because fandom in general is continually changing, “any discussion of it is always already obsolete.”18 Additionally, fans are rarely fans of just one thing, often circulating with varying degrees of comfort and engagement within a number of fandoms. Insofar as fandoms operate as, as Jenkins argues, communities, those communities have porous and overlapping boundaries and do not “maintain any claims to self-sufficiency.”19 Fandom is—and always has been—part of a multifaceted identity. Another challenge of writing about fans involves the pejorative connotations of fan. The term is rooted in the Latin fanaticus, which carries with it a derogatory sense of religious obsessions—a form of madness or possession that is closed-minded, irrational, and overzealous.20 It is devotion taken to an extreme. The term ‘fanatic’ rose to prominence in seventeenth-­century England to describe religious fanatics, retaining its derogatory sense: you might call others ‘fanatics,’ but it is not a term you would willingly apply to yourself—except in a self-deprecating way— because of its implied lack of critical thought and perspective.21 Fanatics  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 46.  Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” 9. 19  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 3. 20  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 12. 21  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5; Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 12–15. 17 18

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pursue the object of their devotion without entertaining possible alternatives, deviations, or logical exceptions, and with a near total blindness to its faults or hypocrisies and to the way that their own fanaticism marks them as the deserving objects of scorn or ridicule by rational, logical people. Importantly, fanaticism is associated with a lack of a baseline self-­ awareness that is presumably possessed by those around them. Think of Shakespeare’s treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night or Ben Jonson’s mockery of Puritan extremes and hypocrisies in The Alchemist. Although fan is largely devoid of the explicitly religious or political connotations of fanatic, it still carries with it the sense of irrational, embarrassingly unselfconscious, unhealthy obsession that goes beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ enjoyment, appreciation, and spectatorship. As Jenkins notes, this has led to the emergence of numerous popular stereotypes about fans: they are “brainless consumers,” they are devoted to the pursuit of “worthless knowledge” about something unimportant, their obsession has made them socially, sexually, and intellectually immature and thus childlike, and they are “unable to separate fantasy from reality.”22 Paradoxically, although perceived as sexually immature (or perhaps because of this immaturity), fans are often perceived as turning their obsessions into sexual fetishes wherein enthusiasm becomes indistinguishable from—or transforms into—abnormal erotic fixation. Read: bronies, the adult male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the popular target of much online mockery and derision. Urban Dictionary, for example, scornfully defines a brony as “a way to keep your virginity.”23 Consequently, fan comes loaded with an awful lot of pejorative baggage that has as much to do with one’s perceived personal deficiencies as one’s media preferences. The earliest use of fan to describe fandom in terms recognizable today came in relation to baseball in the late nineteenth century, and then to the theater and those patrons who would follow the performances of particular actors, especially the ‘Matinee Girls’ who were accused of going “to admire the actors rather than the plays.”24 Since then, fans have come to embrace many different objects from celebrities to musicians, professional sports teams to amateur athletes, specific authors and artists to whole media franchises, commercial goods to particular websites, the epicenter  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10.  “Brony,” Urban Dictionary, accessed August 5, 2019, https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Brony. 24  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 12. 22 23

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of popular culture to fringes that many of us cannot begin to imagine. Up until the 1990s, many fandoms were still viewed through the derogatory patina of religious obsession: fans took their enjoyment of an object to an enthusiastic and thus distasteful level, paralleled with geek and nerd identities and viewed as inherently childish. Some fandoms have been largely exempt from these negative stereotypes and are more widely accepted in the culture at large, namely, sports and music fandoms, wherein proclaiming one’s passionate enthusiasm for a football team or rock band does not automatically make one a social outcast. With the exception of these fandoms and despite the increased mainstream acceptability of fandom in recent years, the popular image of the media fan is still dominated by the obsessive, socially and sexually inept weirdo whose fandom either makes other people laugh or feel uncomfortable. The characters on The Big Bang Theory are lovable losers, but they are still losers.25 Shakespeare does not often find his way into many of the debates and case studies where we are more likely to encounter the television show Supernatural than we are Shakespeare. When Shakespeare is discussed in fan studies, he is usually brought up briefly in an effort to historicize fandom, typically stranding Shakespeare’s fans in the past. Mark Duffett, for example, notes Shakespeare’s popularity during his own lifetime, his enduring literary celebrity, and the tourist draw of the Shakespeare homestead since the mid-eighteenth century.26 Abigail Derecho and Francesca Coppa briefly consider adaptations of Shakespeare as fan fiction, but without offering a sustained discussion of this possibility.27 Coppa, though, offers a broadly inclusive take on membership into Shakespeare’s fan collective, from fan fiction authors to professional theaters to literary critics, all of whom—by staging, adapting, rewriting, or interpreting Shakespeare’s plays—are doing the work of the fan.28 Hills presumably sees Shakespeare fans as the embodiment of cult fandom, which he discusses in terms of temporality rather than intensity: what separates cult fans from fans is “the

25  Margaret A. Weitekamp, “‘We’re Physicists’: Gender, Genre and the Image of Scientists in The Big Bang Theory,” Journal of Popular Television 3, no. 1 (2015): 82. 26  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5. 27  Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 69; Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 236. 28  Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space,” 238.

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absence of ‘new’ or official material in the originating medium.”29 Thus, Shakespeare fans are cult fans in the same sense that fans of the original Star Trek series (1966–69) are cult fans: because no new Shakespeare plays/poems or William Shatner episodes are being produced and “the original artifact has left mainstream culture,” fans necessarily become cult fans.30 This distinction helps us articulate how we are engaging with Shakespeare as fans because his temporal distance introduces numerous factors that complicate how we assess Shakespeare as a fan object. Nevertheless, the temporal distinction is indistinct in some regards. Although Shakespeare is not writing any new plays at the moment, his ‘cult’ works are continually being adapted and generating new fans—of either Shakespeare or of that specific adaptation—in the process. Certainly, as mentioned, fan studies has often attempted to historicize fandom by indicating that fan activities are not entirely new, stretching back to early science fiction fan publications and conventions, to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, to the early celebrity culture of fan letters written to silver age screen stars, to theater enthusiasts who followed the careers of particular actors, to perhaps even the portraiture culture of European nobility throughout the centuries that encouraged the population to view royals as the earliest celebrities.31 Indeed, Duffett notes that “In most research there is a tendency to talk about the phenomenon as if it has always existed, fully formed, in society,” but the history of fandom is much more complex and varied than ‘it has always existed.’32 Although these efforts to historicize fandom do much to illuminate the existence and promotion of fannish activities through history, most fan scholars focus on contemporary or very recent fan objects, especially when considered in relation to a playwright who died over 400 years ago. Indeed, fan scholars frequently write about those cultural objects that come readily to mind when one thinks of fans: videogames, sports teams, soap operas, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, and a slew of media franchises that have elicited a passionate response from fan communities that emerge continually in response to new cultural objects. Why do we see so much work on Star Wars fans but so little on Shakespeare  Hills, Fan Cultures, x. Italics in original.  Kristin M. Barton, “Introduction,” in Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Culture in the 21st Century, eds. Kristin M.  Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley (Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014), 5–6. 31  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5–7. 32  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5. 29 30

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fans? As Hills argues in his discussion of ‘proper distance,’ I believe it is because Shakespeare simply falls beyond the margins of the fan cultures and activities that scholar-fans engage in, nearly resulting in the “symbolic annihilation” of Shakespeare in the field.33 Thus, the contemporary focus of fan studies is as invigorating as it is limited, skewed toward certain media texts and fan practices while ignoring others, acknowledging the potentially long history of fandom while also leaving it there. Indeed, as Jenkins’ work has demonstrated since the publication of Textual Poachers, advances in technology, dramatic changes in the ways in which we consume media, the ever shifting relationship between media producers and media consumers, and the fluid cultural and legal attitudes toward copyright, fair use, and open access mean that fandom on the whole is in a constant state of flux, even as scholars strive to articulate and respond to new or changing forms of fan engagement. Undoubtedly, the work on contemporary fan objects and fan activities is both exciting and enlightening. However, such work is frequently focused—out of necessity—on the legal and economic relationships between producers and consumers. While Shakespeare’s fans engage in similar activities as contemporary media fans by writing fan fiction, creating fan art, and traveling to his birthplace, the temporal distance of his plays and poems and the absence of copyright attached to them complicates many of the most salient debates and assumptions within fan studies such as the professional or amateur status of fan writers, whether their works are creative or derivative, the extent to which fans operate within a gift economy, the extent to which fans are associated with play and childishness, and even the misogynistic feminization of affective fan responses. Likewise, when we approach Shakespeare as a fan object, we can find new perspectives on questions that are central to Shakespeare studies in the twenty-first century: who owns Shakespeare? Who determines the acceptable parameters for engagement with this playwright? What is at stake when we as academics, scholars, and educators denigrate affective and subjective responses to Shakespeare from our students, colleagues, and the general public? What does a fan work even look like in the context of Shakespeare? This last question is a difficult one to answer, especially in the context of our understanding of adaptation so that it does not water down the notion of adaptation by suggesting that every adaptation is automatically  Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms,” 21.

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a fan work. This debate is most frequently taken up in studies of fan fiction, which—in its most inclusive varieties—argue that “fan fiction ­originated several millennia ago, with myth stories, and continues today, encompassing works both by authors who identify themselves as fans and those who do not write from within fandoms.”34 Along these lines, Hellekson and Busse suggest that if fan fiction is conceived as “a form of collective storytelling, then the Iliad and the Odyssey might be tagged as the earliest versions of fan fiction.”35 Similarly, discussing fan fiction’s history, Anne Jamison reminds us that “Reworking an existing story, telling tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship until very recently.”36 At its core, fan fiction represents the desire to see narratives and characters from a prior work continue past the pages or scenes of that prior work, a desire for more that is not fully satisfied by the original text. Fan fiction emerges when readers and audiences feel like they are not yet done with these texts and take it upon themselves to keep them going. Sheenagh Pugh stresses that the fannish desire for more is not always a desire for more of the same. While it is common for fan fiction writers to seek to spend more time in these worlds and with these characters, it is also quite common for fan fiction to demand more from these worlds and characters, recognizing faults and seeking to address or fix them.37 In this sense, fan fiction sometimes does work that runs parallel to scholarly criticism, often by repudiating, for example, the lack of diversity in a text by making it more diverse.38 Nevertheless, fan works—whether fan fiction or otherwise—have often been dismissed as childish, derivative, and unoriginal or without creative merit because they are grounded in existing characters and worlds. If these writers were talented enough, the logic  Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 62.  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 6. See also: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Fiction as Literature,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 22–23. 36  Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 18. 37  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 19. 38  Such is the case, for example, in early Star Trek fan fiction that sought to carve our more diverse and representative space for female and queer characters, perspectives, and experiences. See: Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 41–54; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 20; Lamb and Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” 97–115. 34 35

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goes; then they would write their own stories rather than piggybacking on or, worse, stealing from the work of others. Insofar as we accept that Homer is the precursor to fan fiction, we would balk at dismissing the Iliad for the reasons listed above. The difference, perhaps, is that no fan fiction work “pretends to be an autonomous work of art,” even if it can stand on its own.39 It wants you to see and revel in the connections, the shared worlds and characters, and the persistent dialogue between the texts. As Jamison emphasizes, some fan fiction can be read as an independent narrative by readers unfamiliar with the source text or texts, “but that’s not its point.”40 At this point, it should be obvious that fan fiction and adaptation overlap in significant ways, to the point that we are better served by considering fan fiction as a form of adaptation where the primary concern is breathing new life into established characters and established worlds in a way that is both allusive and citational. If you are not engaged in the active intertextuality of fan fiction, then you aren’t reading it right. Whether or not we consider fan works to be adaptations is a persistently contested issue: what is accepted as a self-evident truth in fan studies is anything but in adaptation studies. In her influential and wide-ranging transmedial theorization of adaptation, Linda Hutcheon rejects the subordination of adaptations to the adapted text, emphasizing that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary.”41 However, Hutcheon lumps fan fiction in with plagiarism and sequalization as “not really adaptation,” because “There is a difference between never wanting a story to end … and wanting to retell the same story over and over in different ways.”42 Perhaps ironically, Hutcheon dismisses fan fiction as adaptation on similar grounds that adaptation has sometimes been dismissed and which she argues against. There are some implicit problematic assumptions about fan fiction at work here, namely, that it continues or expands stories but does not retell, recast, or reinterpret them. This may be true in some cases, but certainly not by default: consider the aforementioned feminist and queer revisions of Star Trek. Additionally, I am not convinced that Hutcheon’s comments about  Jamison, Fic, 14.  Jamison, Fic, 14. 41  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (London and New  York: Routledge, 2013), 9. 42  Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 9. 39 40

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sequels work, either: take, for example, the case of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), which serves simultaneously as a sequel to the original trilogy, as well as both an adaptation and remake of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). One of the problems here, as well, is that Hutcheon positions the fan as passionate but lacking agency in relation to adaptation, which is important because her discussion of fan fiction excludes fans from participating in the adaptive process. This casts fans as passive media spectators, a position that fan studies has convincingly argued against for over three decades. Hutcheon rightly characterizes fans as part of the “knowing audience” for whom adaptations are received as adaptations because they oscillate between the adapted and the adapting texts; however, these fans, she implies, are the consumers of a unidirectional adaptive process, emphasizing the inherent risks of adapting: “The more rabid the fans, the more disappointed they can potentially be.”43 By excluding fan works from her definition of adaptation, Hutcheon ignores the way in which fans will often use their passion or disappointment to offer a response in the form of adaptation. Furthermore, fan studies does not quite know what to do with Shakespearean transformative works. As noted, fan scholars consistently point to the potentially unlimited history of, particularly, fan fiction to note that it potentially stretches back to Homer, and by pointing to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) as examples of the widespread acceptability of essentially fan fiction retellings of popular narratives. This is a tantalizing possibility because of the way in which it implies that all adaptations— for as long as they have been around—can be thought of through the lens of fan fiction. However, it has become something of a trope in fan studies to raise this possibility before choosing a more restrictive definition. In their introduction to The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, which helpfully collects many of the key critical texts of the field, two of the leading fan scholars, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, choose to restrict the definition to rewritings of shared media (particularly television and film) grounded in communities of fans and based on works under the legal protection of authorial (or corporate) copyright.44 Francesca Coppa further emphasizes the central importance of copyright to any definition of fan fiction because “It is only in such a system—where storytelling has been industrialized to  Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 120, 123.  Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 6.

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the point that our shared culture is owned by others—that a category like ‘fanfiction’ makes sense.”45 By this logic, no retelling of Shakespeare could be considered a work of fan fiction purely because of the copyright status of his works. A few problems come to mind. Although Hellekson, Busse, and Coppa mention commercially produced texts/performances like Stoppard’s play, they mostly strand the possibility of Shakespearean fan fiction in the historical past and limit it to traditional genres such as theatrical or novelized adaptations. However, visit archiveofourown.org—one of the largest online databases of fan fiction—and you will see plenty of examples of Shakespearean retellings sharing digital shelf space with Doctor Who and Game of Thrones fan fiction. Likewise, these authors rewrite Shakespeare according to the widespread conventions, tropes, and genres of fan fiction: Shakespearean slash, het, hurt/comfort, fluff, crossover, alternate universe, PWP, body swap, genderswap, podfic, and dozens— hundreds—of other fanfic tags proliferate. There are Shakespeare drabbles, flashfic and Yuletide challenges, gift fics, 5+1 things, and Real Person Fics (RPFs).46 As Pugh notes in her effort to sketch the generic parameters of fan fiction, copyright issues or whether or not authors were paid for their work do not fundamentally determine, from the standpoint of genre, how fanfic is written.47 If the only substantive difference between Star Wars fan fiction and Romeo and Juliet fan fiction is the copyright status of the characters when the texts share substantial stylistic and generic similarities, are those grounds enough to mark one as fan fiction and one as not  Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 7.  These tropes and genres will be dealt with and defined in more detail as relevant and especially in Chap. 4, but briefly, their meaning is as follows. Slash: focused on queer pairings of characters; het: focused on straight pairings; hurt/comfort: characters are in physical or emotional pain and are comforted by other characters; fluff: feel-good narratives often without plot or sexually explicit content; crossover: characters from multiple fictional worlds appear in the same text; alternate universe; characters and/or narratives are reimagined in a different time and/or place; PWP: porn without plot (or plot, what plot?) texts normally focused on sexual encounters but without concern for narrative; body swap: characters find themselves in unfamiliar bodies; genderswap: a character’s gender is changed from what it appears to be in the original text; podfic: an audio recording of a fanfic text; drabble: a text that is exactly one hundred words long; flashfic: short texts longer than drabbles but typically less than 2000 words; Yuletide: texts written upon request and exchanged around December 25; challenge: a text written in response to a prompt; gift fics: texts written as gifts for specific readers or as a ‘thank you’ to a specific author; 5 + 1 things: five vignettes on a similar theme followed by one on a related but different theme; RPF: real person fic in which the focus is on real people (i.e., historical figures or celebrities) rather than fictional characters. 47  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 11, 25–26. 45 46

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fan fiction? Additionally, if we accept Hutcheon’s assertion that fan fiction cannot be categorized as adaptation and Hellekson, Busse, and Coppa’s implied exclusion of all rewritings and retellings of Shakespeare from the fan fiction category, then where do we place Hamlet/Horatio slash? To this point, only a handful of authors have focused on specifically Shakespearean online fan fiction, beginning with Douglas Lanier’s chapter on homage, adaptation, and parody in his ground-breaking articulation and analysis of ‘Shakespop.’48 Although he spends little time on individual texts, Lanier reads fan fiction as a playful form of postmodern pastiche that “recognizes certain formal and ideological limits of its Shakespearian source (or the limits of how that source has been traditionally interpreted) and seeks to push against those limits, in a spirit of critique, anarchy, pleasure, recuperation, participation.”49 More recently, Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes have read online Shakespeare fan fiction as a form of amateur communal and collaborative authority that negotiates and grapples with the playwright “outside the hegemony of dominant institutional structures,” leveling the distinction between the original text and the fan text.50 Going further, Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall invest fan fiction with radical, subversive ideological potential, operating not just outside traditional institutions but by granting amateurs the platform “to actively undercut the positivism of traditional approaches to interpretation,” challenging the stuffy academic elevation of Shakespeare to the status of “author-god.”51 Michelle K. Yost reads Shakespeare fan fiction as “Shakespeare-related amateur fiction” that “demands a lowbrow examination of Shakespeare as a folk product of twenty-first-century popular culture.”52 Along with Yost, Amelia R. Bitely acknowledges the parallels between fan fiction and more traditional, commercially available Shakespeare adaptations such as the film She’s the Man (2006). Bitely rightly argues that Shakespeare scholars ignore online fan fiction at their 48  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82–109. 49  Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 85. 50  Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction,” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 275. 51  Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 28, 32. 52   Michelle K.  Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 193.

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peril, suggesting that it has been largely ignored because it has not gone through the tried-and-true peer review process that grants films and novels “some cachet as revisionist responses.”53 While some authors are open to exploring such parallels, others are less eager. Scholar and novelist Graham Holderness has recently pushed back against and balked at the potential categorization of his novels The Prince of Denmark (2001) and Black and Deep: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (2015) as fan fiction, preferring instead the term “creative criticism” and offering the following distinction: The fan seeks to imitate, emulate, and extend Shakespeare’s own creative and fiction-making practice. The creative critic, while also experimenting with fictional forms, is engaged rather in devising new forms of literary criticism. Fan fiction could be described as ‘uncritical fiction,’ an innocence that is part of its charm but also limits its utility. Creative criticism proceeds with the same resources of scholarly enterprise, critical understanding, and historical information as formal discursive criticism, aiming to produce knowledge by different means to a similar end.54

Whereas fan fiction is an uncritical emulative novelty, creative criticism is the scholar’s imagination set free but guided by professional academic rigor and intellectual accountability. By this logic, whether or not something is categorized as fan fiction hinges on the credentials of the authors and the aesthetic merit and sophistication of the text. Good work is creative criticism, while bad work is fan fiction. By contrast, in a 2016 interview about her novel Hag-Seed (2016), part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series offering new adaptations by established writers in commemoration of the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death, Margaret Atwood happily acknowledges her novel as a work of fan fiction. Atwood draws an explicit connection between fan fiction and adaptation of any kind going back to classical literature, emphasizing that fan fiction necessitates simultaneous reverence and irreverence toward the source text, ruminating on the

53  Amelia R. Bitely, “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare,” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, vol. 1 (2007), 59. 54  Graham Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26.

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meaning of ‘fan’: “What does fan mean? … It’s from the word fanatic, someone with a passionate interest,” which she has in Shakespeare.55 While I do not wish to deny the validity of Holderness’ claims about the redemptive intellectual value of his novels, it is worth noting that we can see hints of some of the hotly contested debates within and about fan fiction communities, particularly regarding gender and the categorization of texts. Fan fiction authorship and readership has traditionally been gendered female, and whether or not a piece of writing should be considered fan fiction or something else has been debated as a gendered issue. The point is succinctly made in Kaila Hale-Stern’s article for themarysue.com sarcastically entitled “When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction Because It’s ‘Academic.’”56 To be clear, Hale-Stern is responding to a specific case that has nothing to do with Holderness, a Lithub interview in which a male writer, Lonely Christopher, rejects categorizing his reworking of Stephen King’s The Shining as fan fiction because of its academic and theoretical roots.57 I am not in any way accusing Holderness of misogyny because of his preference for ‘creative criticism’ over ‘fan fiction,’ but am rather pointing to the ways in which his discomfort—and Atwood’s comfort—with the term intersects with longstanding debates within the fan fiction community. Likewise, it raises an important question that haunts Shakespeare’s Fans: does one have to self-identify as a fan or a fan fiction author for us to categorize them as such? As will become clear over the course of the present work, I do not believe such a proclamation is necessary. Texts that foreground recognizable (recognizable to fans, anyway) characters, characterizations, and fictional worlds are all part of the history and present of Shakespeare fandom. When it comes to Shakespeare, a broadly inclusive definition of fan fiction raises numerous questions as Shakespeare has been both widely adapted and has served an allusive function for centuries. In what follows, I leave aside the question of just how far back the history of fandom and 55  Monica Heisey, “Writing Fan Fiction with Margaret Atwood,” Hazlitt, Published October 14, 2016, accessed August 6, 2019, https://hazlitt.net/feature/writing-fan-fictionmargaret-atwood. 56  Kaila Hale-Smith, “When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction Because It’s ‘Academic,’” The Mary Sue, Published March 1, 2018, accessed August 6, 2019, https:// www.themarysue.com/when-men-write-fanfiction-its-academic/. 57  D. W. Gibson, “Beyond Fan Fiction: Rewriting and Distorting The Shining,” Literary Hub, Published February 28, 2018, accessed August 6, 2019, https://lithub.com/ beyond-fan-fiction-rewriting-and-distorting-the-shining/.

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fan fiction goes because the case of Shakespeare demonstrates just how complex and conflicted this history is. I leave it to the Arthurian and Classical scholars, for example, to explore the viability of connecting their fields to fan studies. In terms of Shakespeare, the prioritization of recognizable characters and worlds helps us distinguish between fan texts and other transformative adaptations. Unlike Yost and Bitely, I do not consider films such as She’s the Man to be fan texts for this reason. While the film adapts Twelfth Night, it does make a claim to standing on its own as an independent narrative without requiring the audience’s participatory and knowing experience of both the film and the play. Any time I have discussed She’s the Man in class, numerous students express surprise at its adaptive status because they had previously watched the film as something else. By contrast, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead largely requires the audience’s awareness of Hamlet, explicitly announced in the title. Yes, you can experience Stoppard’s play as an intelligible narrative independent of Hamlet, but as Jamison emphasizes, that’s not the point. Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) does not require our knowledge of Macbeth, but Ryan North’s choosable-path adventure Romeo and/or Juliet (2016) and Claire McCarthy’s film Ophelia (2018) hail, first and foremost, those of us who want to see more of or more from the characters in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, respectively, by filling in missing scenes. The question of what is and is not a fan text becomes much more ambiguous, however, when we consider textual adaptations of the plays, as any stage or film version of one of the plays also foregrounds recognizable characters. If we attend a performance of The Tempest, for example, we can reasonably expect to see Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban acting and speaking in recognizable ways. By this logic, should we not consider all stagings of the play to be fan texts? I do not believe so, and for the similar reasons that I exclude She’s the Man: they are—or can be—experienced as independent texts with required prior knowledge of the play. A staging of The Tempest does not rely on our recognition of Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban but can instead function as our first experience of The Tempest, its world, and its characters. Certainly, because of Shakespeare’s cultural ubiquity, many audiences do, in fact, possess prior knowledge, but that is simply a function of that cultural ubiquity. In this regard, a new staging of The Tempest is no different than the revival of a comparatively obscure play by a comparatively obscure playwright: it has to stand on its own.

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There are undoubtedly exceptions that render the distinction less stable. What do we make of stuff like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2013), which has its roots in a kind of Shakespeare fandom but which, as a text, does not do anything explicitly fannish except to merely exist? Is it a fan text, or the embodiment of formalized fan enthusiasm? The method and timing of production of Much Ado are important from a fan perspective. It was filmed at the same time as Whedon was working on The Avengers (2012), was self-financed, and was filmed in just twelve days.58 As such, it becomes inseparable from The Avengers, even as it serves as a kind of fannish antithesis of that blockbuster. Whedon’s Much Ado was made with a decidedly DIY ethos that takes advantage of the director’s industry clout while working on The Avengers in a way that implies that he parlayed it into promotion for an independent film that was the culmination of a longstanding Shakespeare fandom. It also draws on the director’s own established fandom as he draws on his cohort of ensemble actors who have appeared in numerous projects of his. As such, it is also a film that cannot be disentangled from other fandoms, those of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and those of Whedon himself, and these connections were presumably as likely to draw in viewers as was the connection to Shakespeare. Part of the pleasure in watching the film stems from the fact that the director used some of the same actors in both The Avengers and Much Ado. The “intertextuality of casting” that is common in Whedon’s work is heightened by the overlapping production of both films as we are encouraged to playfully imagine these actors traversing between two roles on two sets simultaneously, whether or not the connection is made explicit in either film.59 Rather, it empowers the Whedon fan to knowingly observe the metatextual and potentially subversive exchange between the two films. Clark Gregg, for example, plays Agent Coulson in The Avengers and Leonato in Much Ado. Philip Smith argues that, in part, the similarities in Gregg’s costume and performance as both Leonato and Coulson is part of a “deliberate strategy” to link the two and thus invites critical intertextual analysis.60 And it is through Coulson that Whedon explicitly addresses and incorporates fandom into 58  K. Brenna Wardell, “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of the Joss Whedon Ensemble,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2016): para. 13. 59  Bussolini quoted in Wardell, “Actors Assemble,” para. 11. 60  Philip Smith, “‘I Look’d Upon Her with a Soldier’s Eye’: The Normalization of Surveillance Culture in Whedon’s Much Ado,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 2016): para. 9.

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The Avengers. As Coulson operates from a position of authority to help assemble the titular superhero team, we learn that he is a fan of—and in awe of—Captain America and has been collecting a set of Second World War–era trading cards that he desperately wants Captain America to autograph. Upon meeting Captain America for the first time, Coulson becomes flustered as he imitates the superhero’s movements and makes unintentionally embarrassing statements that tease a pseudo-sexual stalkerly obsession with him: Coulson is happy to meet him “officially,” noting that “I watched you, while you were sleeping.” Similarly, when Black Widow talks to Captain America about Coulson later in the film, she says, “I thought Coulson was gonna swoon. Did he ask you to sign his Captain America trading cards yet? … They’re vintage. He’s very proud.” Thus, the powerful government agent is gently mocked, feminized, or queered for his fandom. Whedon himself has a history of acknowledging and engaging with his own fans, and the depiction of Coulson serves as a knowing nod to some of the prevalent stereotypes of fans without overtly diminishing the authority of the character in the film. And, as Smith suggests, Whedon invites the audience to see Coulson in Leonato. The fan-ness of Much Ado is relevant in other ways as well in terms of the work-versus-play dichotomy that is central to many discussions of fan texts but in a way that inverts the underlying assumptions of work and play in cultural terms. As Rhonda V. Wilcox notes, Much Ado bears metatextual relevance to Whedon’s parallel production of two films. Don Pedro’s visit to Leonato’s home is intended as a break—a vacation—from his successful military pursuits, “a time of freedom not unlike the filming of Much Ado was for Whedon after the almost military strategies required to make The Avengers,” with Much Ado filmed after the completion of The Avengers’ principal filming but prior to final editing.61 We might extend this to note that Shakespeare comedies typically involve a suspension or inversion of the rules of social and political order, reveling in the transgressive space in between what has to be and what could be. In this sense, for Whedon, the superhero movie was work whereas the Shakespeare film was play—made during “recreation time”—regardless of the fact that both were released commercially, and regardless of the fact that the work text belongs to the realm of costumed superheroes and the play text belongs to the realm of 61  Rhonda V.  Wilcox, “Joss Whedon’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: Historical Double Consciousness, Reflections, and Frames,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2014): para. 2.

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the Bard.62 David Lavery likewise characterizes Whedon’s Much Ado as “a relaxation project.”63 Although I am inclined to consider the film a fan text, this inclination relies on meta- and paratextual concerns, as the film itself is, according to the logic laid out above, ‘just’ a standalone film version of Shakespeare’s play. In this project, however, it is also necessary to embrace effusiveness as, in part, a defining characteristic of fan activity, which is continually seeking to find new and novel expressions, often in conjunction with emergent technologies. In some ways, to try to offer a wholly stable definition of fan work is to erroneously deny its potential to morph in unanticipated ways. The issue of self-identification is a tricky one in relation to Shakespeare in other ways as well, particularly because of the association between Shakespeare, education, work, and cultural elitism. Whereas the growth and increasing—if not fully established—intellectual legitimacy of pop culture studies is bringing things like Star Wars into academia, the inversion of that trajectory is taking Shakespeare out of it. Hills writes about scholars who work to make their own individual fandoms a part of their academic work, normalizing the acceptability of such work in the process. For scholars of Shakespeare, however, the playwright’s work and status have been central to academia for a very long time indeed. Amidst all of the debates regarding whether fan fiction is derivative/unoriginal or creative/ original, we would do well to remember that, viewed through the same lens, scholarship and literary criticism are inherently derivative and unoriginal, rooted as it is in the creative output of others.64 Without Shakespeare’s words and characters, we Shakespeare scholars would not have much to write about. Nevertheless, to ask many scholars to consider their work as a kind of fan activity might be too much to ask, especially when we are asking Harold Bloom to share mental shelf space with slash fan fiction. Shakespeare scholars have never had to argue for why we should take the 62  Rhonda V. Wilcox, “Much Ado about Whedon,” in Reading Joss Whedon, eds. Rhonda V.  Wilcox, Tanya R.  Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 1. 63  David Lavery, “Dollhouse: An Introduction,” in Reading Joss Whedon, eds. Rhonda V.  Wilcox, Tanya R.  Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 201. 64  Christine Handley, “‘Distressing Damsels’: Narrative Critique and Reinterpretation in Star Wars Fanfiction,” in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, eds. Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 99. Handley here draws on Joseph Harris to parallel scholarly criticism and fan fiction.

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playwright seriously or to justify their interests as a valid field of academic inquiry. Undoubtedly, an association with pop culture fandom, for some, will mean taking a step down the ladder. However, I follow Juliette Wells’ conclusions about the value of Jane Austen fan fiction and its relation to more traditional literary criticism: “Austen’s popular cultural currency, far from threatening or undermining our literary criticism, benefits our work very directly by bringing us students and readers who are curious to learn more and to discover what academic perspectives have to offer them. These are our fellow readers, and we share with them a commitment to Austen, among other authors. Let us build on our common ground, and begin by cultivating new perspectives on Austen’s popular readers.”65 The same is equally true of Shakespeare. The challenge of determining what is and is not a fan text is even further complicated by that nagging copyright issue that traditionally separates the fan text from the fan object. With the exception of parodies, the only people who can make Star Wars films or write Star Wars fiction are those approved by Disney, Lucasfilm, and their lawyers, people who have been officially invited to contribute to the Star Wars universe by those people and companies who control the intellectual property and relevant copyright. By contrast, anyone can conceptualize, produce, and sell any kind of Shakespeare book, film, or other product without such an invitation. I can make a video in which I dress up as Titus Andronicus and host a cooking show on YouTube where I sell Titus-themed pie pans, and Joss Whedon can make his Much Ado film with his friends and release it in theaters, and there are very few legal impediments to prevent either of us from doing this work. At the same time, Whedon cannot simply choose to make his own Star Wars film unless he is invited to do so. Shakespeare fan texts can be produced by film industry insiders and first-time vloggers and disseminated through any venue within the producer’s realm of influence. A Shakespeare fan film might employ homemade costumes and be filmed on a smartphone, or it might star Nathan Fillion and employ the talents of a costume designer, Shawna Trpcic, with dozens of film and television credits to her name. A Shakespeare fan text might be a 1500-word piece of fiction uploaded to archiveofourown.org, or it might be Ryan North’s Romeo and/or Juliet and be available for purchase at your local bookstore 65  Juliette Wells, “New Approaches to Austen and the Popular Reader,” in Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, eds. Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 88.

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alongside the author’s other publications. Whedon’s film and North’s book bear the traditional markings of ‘official culture’: they are disseminated in traditional ways (theater, DVD, bookstore), they were made with access to professional film and book editors, graphic designers and marketing departments, and so forth. In short, a Shakespeare fan text is not always recognizable as such because of what it looks like and where or how you can access it. In other contexts and other fandoms, the fan text is often assumed to carry with it the markers of DIY amateurism, partly due to some of the necessary circumstances of its production. Perhaps as a consequence of our cultural consumption of fandom predominantly in relationship to contemporary intellectual properties, the aesthetics and the means of production and dissemination have become the assumed markers of the fan text. We know a Shakespeare fan text when we see it because it looks like other fan texts that emerge from other fandoms. Thus, if we want to find Shakespeare fan films, we look to YouTube; if we want to find Shakespeare fanfic, we look to online archives; if we want to find Shakespeare fan art, we look to Tumblr. And we do this because these are the places where we find fan films, fiction, and art for Star Wars, Harry Potter, and so forth. Notions of contemporary intellectual property have served to establish the assumed parameters of fandom and have heavily influenced how we engage with Shakespeare fandom. Assumptions and labels such as amateurism, oppositional readings, and the fan’s rebellious resistance to academic discourse proliferate. While these are certainly all aspects and artifacts of Shakespeare fandom, we have to acknowledge that Shakespeare fandom also exceeds these limits to include a wide range of sources and not just those typically associated with fan output. As Duffett and Pugh have noted about slash fan fiction more generally, its visibility in fan studies has perhaps led to a disproportionate assessment of its prevalence and relative proportion within actual fan communities, which has led to a kinda selection bias amongst fan scholars.66 They write about slash because they find it interesting, and readers thus come away from fan studies with the sense that slash is a—if not the—predominant form of fan discourse, when it actually occupies a relatively small corner of fan fiction output. But scholars read about it, go looking for it, then write about it more. Likewise, Hills notes that certain fandoms predominate in fan studies because of scholar-fans who might be writing in

 Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 178; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91.

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relation to their own chosen fan objects.67 Thus, it is quite common in fan studies to read work on Star Trek and Game of Thrones that have cultural cachet as appropriately ‘cool’ objects of fandom, but it is less common to read about soap opera or country music fandom despite their cultural prevalence, as “Interest in relatively ‘uncool’ or regressive kinds of texts goes underrepresented.”68 Similarly, there are certain fan practices that are well-represented in fan studies (such as the writing of fan fiction) while others are underrepresented, particularly practices that involve building or crafting objects, even such commonplace fan practices as building prop replicas or making costumes for cosplay, as distinct from the cosplay performance itself. In deciding where to look for Shakespeare fan text and what they look like, there is an obvious selection bias at work: we are aware of fan fiction as a category of writing, go looking for it in its expected places, and then write about it, paying less attention to other expressions of fandom that do not conform to those expectations in the process. The sheer diversity of fan texts means that it is impossible to address them all. The two most obvious examples that come to mind are the fan fiction available via online archives and fan-made videos uploaded to YouTube. There is, of course, considerable stylistic and generic variety within these two categories, but we also have fan art available through Tumblr; fan-made material objects available through Etsy; numerous Shakespeare-inspired tattoos that have been photographed and uploaded to Instagram; webcomics and graphic novels; Shakespeare cosplayers at Renaissance festivals; Shakespeare cookbooks and culinary experiments; and parodic social media accounts such as @Shakespeare on Twitter, to name a few. There are those who collect Shakespeare ephemera and memorabilia from rare books to kitsch. Moving beyond the stereotypical connection between the fan’s amateurism and folk practices, we can also see fan practices connected to aspects of the Shakespeare industry and tourism to places such as Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the many annual or semi-annual Shakespeare theater festivals across the globe, or the Folger Shakespeare Library, all of which offer some kind of Shakespeare experience to potential visitors. And in place of the fan convention, Shakespeare enthusiasts travel to academic conferences such as the SAA to discuss his works, cosplay as professors, and to meet or listen to some of the celebrities within that academic community. Shakespeare’s  Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms,” 19–20.  Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 263.

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Fans touches on some of these objects and activities, but there remains much work to be done if we are to capture the full range of Shakespeare’s fans as fans. The following chapters are organized thematically and embrace the anachronism inherent in fan works as, in part, an organizing principle. On the whole, I attend primarily to two broad historical moments in order to contextualize Shakespeare fandom as an ongoing practice rooted in the longstanding negotiation of the playwright’s cultural meaning and significance. First is our own contemporary culture in which media fandom is both prominent and visible, the culture in which fan studies has flourished, from the late 1990s through to the present. Second is the early through mid-eighteenth century when Shakespeare fandom was articulated and debated in its early form, what scholars often refer to as bardolatry. Through such a temporal focus, I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare fandom began entirely in the eighteenth century, or that nothing happened to it between then and the late twentieth century. Rather, I argue that the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, is a key period in the history of fandom, regardless of its connection to Shakespeare, the precursor to our contemporary understanding of fan cultures. Focusing on affect and the pejorative stereotypes often applied to fans, Chap. 2 traces the history of Shakespeare fandom backward through an analysis of Gil Junger’s film 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) that links back to David Garrick. Although 10 Things has attracted considerable attention from scholars since its release, very little attention has been paid to the relatively minor character Mandella, who is explicitly identified as a Shakespeare fan in the film. Mandella embodies the negative perception of fans as feminized, emotional, and obsessive social outcasts whose fandom renders them incapable of separating fantasy from reality and which often takes the form of sexual fixation. As one of the few fictional characters in popular culture identified as a Shakespeare fan, Mandella demonstrates the hurdles to be overcome for fandom to be taken seriously and not dismissed out of hand. Additionally, her Shakespeare fandom ties into a more widespread depiction of gendered fandom that is evident in the protagonist’s music fandom in which women’s passions are infantilized and men’s passions are represented as rational and critically discerning. I connect this back to Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, particular in relation to public and scholarly reception and interpretation of not just the event, but of Garrick’s motives. Many of these criticisms either mocked the esteemed actor for an excessive

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infatuation with Shakespeare that was inappropriately idolatrous or accused him of stealing from Shakespeare, of leeching glory in order to inflate his own public standing and reputation. As I argue, these criticisms anticipate many of the core debates regarding fans that would emerge more clearly and repeatedly two centuries later, making Garrick and his Jubilee an important part of the history of fandom in general. Part of the criticism leveled at the Jubilee came from the perception that Garrick was trying to profit off of Shakespeare while claiming he was doing what he was out of love. Affective and financial gain are seen as antithetical in this respect, as the desire to turn a profit is seen as hypocritical and exploitive rather than reverent and celebratory. Additionally, this chapter considers the eighteenth-­century contemplations of Shakespeare’s cultural and literary status in conjunction with the growing number of pilgrimages to Stratford-­ upon-­Avon as part of that same history. In Chap. 3, I take up the contentious question of who owns Shakespeare in the context of debates within fan studies regarding copyright and intellectual property. Although Shakespeare scholarship and popular culture in general have embraced the idealistic notion that Shakespeare belongs to everyone, this ideal of collective ownership—and, thus, responsibility—is in ideological conflict with the playwright’s status as an intellectual property in which he legally belongs to no one. In this conflict, scholars and other purveyors of ‘official culture’ or the “Shakespeare industry” have become the pro bono defenders of an informal Shakespearean intellectual property.69 This paradigm of authority is illuminated by the ongoing debates within fan studies regarding the economic status of fan works, the often blurry distinction between amateurs and professionals, and whether or not fan works should be considered work or play, labor or gifts. Additionally, I explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s copyright status complicates many of the assumptions about the relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers that are based on contemporary legal distinctions. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a detailed examination of two types of Shakespeare fan works. In Chap. 4, I draw on the rich scholarship on fan fiction to delve into Shakespeare-specific fan fiction available through the archiveofourown.org database, focusing primarily on texts that make use of Shakespeare’s characters. This chapter strives to assess fan fiction on and 69  Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 155.

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in its own terms, attending to the diverse range of genres and tropes that are common to fan fiction but which may be unfamiliar or wholly alien to the novice reader. I aim to avoid sensationalizing its extremes or arguments that seek to claim that fan fiction is either wholly derivative and unoriginal or that it is ideologically and politically radical. Rather, fan fiction is part of the diverse critical and adaptive approach to Shakespeare that is too wide-ranging to be pinned down to any one perspective. Unlike the majority of fan studies approaches that strand Shakespeare fan fiction and fan works in the past, this chapter foregrounds Shakespeare’s presence in the contemporary fan fiction community. Chapter 5 builds on the work of the previous chapter through an exploration of slanderous and secondary Shakespeares that ties back to many of the issues raised throughout Shakespeare’s Fans. Although fan fiction has attracted a great deal of critical attention, one genre that has often been left out of these scholarly discussions is RPF, fan fiction focused—usually—on celebrity actors and musicians, a genre that is marginalized even within the fan fiction community as inappropriate or creepy because of its often erotic and potentially slanderous content. In addition to briefly discussing RPF focused on Shakespeare himself, I examine RPF in which Shakespeare is of secondary importance, taking as a case study the RPF focused on Tom Hiddleston, an actor who has appeared in a number of Shakespeare film and stage productions but who is also the focus of his own celebrity fandom as well as fandoms associated with his other projects, notably the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. In many of these text, Hiddleston is depicted as a Shakespeare fan himself, a fandom that is core to his fictionalized escapades but which is not often of primary importance to the RPF author. Here, Shakespeare fandom is crossed over with Hiddleston or Marvel fandom. From there, I move on to other instances of fandom crossover, particularly Ian Doescher’s series of Shakespearean Star Wars plays and other similar commercially available texts that mash up Shakespeare with a variety of pop culture objects. I consider these texts in the context of generic and legal definitions of parody, calling back to the issues of ownership raised in Chap. 3. Shakespeare’s Fans stems from my own love of popular culture and involvement in various media fandoms, combined with an academic and pedagogical interest in Shakespeare and early modern English literature. I am, therefore, prone to my own selection biases, and the texts I have chosen to discuss reflect my own comfort and expertise within specific fandoms. But as Jamison emphasizes, although it is possible to read in fandom

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that you do not belong to, that is not the point. I do not possess a fan’s knowledge—or even passing knowledge, for that matter—of the long-­ running series Supernatural (which is extremely popular in fan culture), so any discussion of Shakespeare-Supernatural crossover fan fiction would ring hollow. As a result, I have undoubtedly excluded and overlooked texts, especially fan fiction, that would be ideal for the present work. Such is fandom. We all possess a unique and sometimes overlapping constellation of media interests and passions that constructs and reflects us as readers and audiences. The present work embodies mine, and I look forward to work by others that is produced by the light of different stars.

Bibliography The Avengers. Directed by Joss Whedon. Marvel Studios, 2012. Barton, Kristin M. “Introduction.” In Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Culture in the 21st Century, edited by Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, 5–8. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014. Bitely, Amelia R. “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare.” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, 1 (2007): 58–77. “Brony.” Urban Dictionary. Accessed August 5, 2019. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brony. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 41–59. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006a. Coppa, Francesca. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Coppa, Francesca. “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–44. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006b. Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 61–78. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Fazel, Valerie and Louise Geddes. “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction.” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 274–86. Finn, Kavita Mudan and Jessica McCall. “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe.” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 27–38.

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Gibson, D.  W. “Beyond Fan Fiction: Rewriting and Distorting The Shining.” LitHub. Published February 28, 2018. Accessed August 6, 2019. https:// lithub.com/beyond-fan-fiction-rewriting-and-distorting-the-shining/. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. Haenfler, Ross. Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Hale-Smith, Kaila. “When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction Because It’s ‘Academic’.” The Mary Sue. Published March 1, 2018. Accessed August 6, 2019. https://www.themarysue.com/when-men-write-fanfiction-its-academic/. Handley, Christine. “‘Distressing Damsels’: Narrative Critique and Reinterpretation in Star Wars Fanfiction.” In Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, edited by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, 97–118. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Heisey, Monica. “Writing Fan Fiction with Margaret Atwood.” Hazlitt. Published October 14, 2016. Accessed August 6, 2019. https://hazlitt.net/feature/ writing-fan-fiction-margaret-atwood. Hellekson, Karen. “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture.” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 113–18. Hellekson, Karen. “Fandom and Fan Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, 153–63. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Fiction as Literature.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 19–25. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014b. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Identity and Feminism.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 75–81. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014c. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Introduction.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 1–17. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014a. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 5–32. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Hills, Matt. “Forward” to Mark Duffett. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture, vi–xii. New  York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hills, Matt. “Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgments in Media and Cultural Studies.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated

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World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington, 33–47. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007. Holderness, Graham. Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001. Holderness, Graham. “Shakespeare and the Undead.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 207–28. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006a. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006b. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 20th anniversary edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New  York and London: New  York University Press, 2013. Lamb, Patricia Frazer and Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 97–115. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lavery, David. “Dollhouse: An Introduction.” In Reading Joss Whedon, edited by Rhonda V.  Wilcox, Tanya R.  Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery 201–04. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Smith, Philip. “‘I Look’d Upon Her with a Soldier’s Eye’: The Normalization of Surveillance Culture in Whedon’s Much Ado.” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 43 paragraphs. Wardell, K.  Brenna. “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of the Joss Whedon Ensemble.” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 44 paragraphs. Weitekamp, Margaret A. “‘We’re Physicists’: Gender, Genre and the Image of Scientists in The Big Bang Theory.” Journal of Popular Television 3, no. 1 (2015): 75–92. Wells, Juliette. “New Approaches to Austen and the Popular Reader.” In Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, edited by Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson, 77–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Wilcox, Rhonda V. “Joss Whedon’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: Historical Double Consciousness, Reflections, and Frames.” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2014b): 32 paragraphs. Wilcox, Rhonda V. “Much Ado about Whedon.” In Reading Joss Whedon, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery, 1–14. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014a. Yost, Michelle K. “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 193–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 2

“My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the Shakespeare Fan from 10 Things I Hate About You to Garrick’s Jubilee

One of the barriers to effectively integrating fan studies into Shakespeare studies is the need to overcome the common predisposition among scholars to view affective responses as the antithesis of academic rigor. Contrary to the stereotype of uncritical emotional obsession, fans are typically both self-aware and self-effacing, even if they are not often represented as such in popular culture. In this chapter, I explore how fans of Shakespeare have been both represented and received in popular culture and criticism through a focus on two primary examples. First, I will examine how fandom is represented, challenged, and largely denigrated in the film 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew that has become a staple in studies of Shakespeare film adaptations. While existing scholarship tends to focus on the contentious issue of adaptation versus appropriation or the gender politics at work in the representation of the film’s central romantic couple, my analysis focuses on an oft-ignored character: Mandella (Susan May Pratt), a self-professed Shakespeare fan. Mandella embodies the most pejorative stereotypes about fans in general and is depicted as a comical cautionary example of fannish obsession. This Shakespeare fandom parallels the representation of music fandom in the film, demonstrating how fandom itself is associated with blind affect and gendered as uncritical feminine obsession. From this fictionalized Shakespeare fan I jump back 250 years to Shakespeare’s first prominent

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fan, actor and theater manager David Garrick, whose Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 established the parameters and discourse for bardolatry, an event that can be read as the world’s first fan convention. In the process, I embrace the playful anachronism inherent in fandom itself by tracing Shakespeare’s fans back to a period when ‘fan’ had yet to enter the popular discourse to describe one’s relationship to a celebrity or an intellectual property. However, as we will see, fandom and fan studies provide a productive lens through which to view what Garrick sought to do in Warwickshire, how he articulated and performed his own love of Shakespeare, and how both his Jubilee and his proto-fandom were received and interpreted by his contemporaries. 10 Things has inspired a great deal of scholarship since its release, even as it has been dismissed by some critics as “condescending teen fodder” that takes an “opportunistic” appropriative approach to Shakespeare that exploits his cultural caché.1 This scholarship tends to focus primarily on the film’s gender politics and its depiction of feminism as shrewish and repulsive, the central element of Kat’s (played by Julia Stiles) character that must be shattered in order to enable Patrick’s (played by Heath Ledger) romantic conquest of her.2 Or, as is often the case in Shakespeare 1   Naomi C.  Liebler, “‘So What?’: Two Postmodern Adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedies,” in Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 176; Richard Burt characterizes the film as part of a spate of “Shakesploitation” films of the late 1990s. See: Richard Burt, “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, eds. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 205. 2  My interpretation of 10 Things is more in line with the oppositional readings of the film offered by L. Monique Pittman, Elizabeth A. Deitchman, and Jennifer Clement than it is to Michael Friedman’s reading of the film’s gender politics as “progressive.” See: Michael D. Friedman, “The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (2004): 46; L. Monique Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011), 98–113; L. Monique Pittman, “Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the Teenage Film Audience,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2004): 144–52; Elizabeth A.  Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style: Shakespeare, Julia Stiles, and American Girl Culture,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon and W.  B. Worthen (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 478–93; Jennifer Clement, “The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1–24.

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and film scholarship, critics focus on the adaptive relationship between the film and the play, and the contentious critical debate over whether 10 Things I Hate About You adapts or appropriates Shakespeare. In the process, however, we have ignored a prominent aspect of the film that considers the acceptable limits of cultural engagement and appreciation through its depiction of fandom and affect. Additionally, this depiction of fandom in the 1999 film embodies many of the critical challenges that have, I would argue, undergirded Shakespeare studies’ general resistance to fan studies as a productive field of inquiry. Certainly, I do not want to cast this criticism of Shakespeare studies too widely because there has undoubtedly been some strong work done recently on Shakespeare fan fiction in particular, but it is a fairly small body of scholarship. Such a general critical silence is peculiar given Shakespeare studies’ penchant for intellectual colonization: any time a new critical field emerges, one of us inevitably walks up with a copy of the Complete Works and says, “I can do that, too!” Fan studies can help us better understand how the playwright has been dealt with not just since the 1990s and the proliferation of fan studies, but indeed over the past few centuries, at least since David Garrick led a band of merry Shakespeare enthusiasts to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. Fandom comes in two flavors in 10 Things I Hate About You. The most obvious one is presented via Kat’s friend Mandella who is obsessed with Shakespeare, an obsession that is presented as creepy and thus funny in the context of the film. Less obvious and yet more central to the plot, however, is Kat’s music fandom, quite separate from anything specifically Shakespearean. In both cases, fandom is depicted as exploitable, feminine emotional intensity, providing an inroad for sexual conquest to the men pursuing them. As I have noted, Mandella is a fairly minor character in the film. She speaks probably fewer than fifty words in the film, and she is employed primarily as a sympathetic, but largely silent, sounding board for Kat’s antisocial frustrations, giving Kat someone to complain to rather than argue with, which is Kat’s dominant form of discourse throughout the film. Mandella laughs at Kat’s witticisms and refrains from critiquing her actions, unlike the majority of the other characters in the film who roll their eyes at or angrily dismiss Kat’s comments about patriarchy and popularity. From the perspective of the film, then, Mandella helps to soften Kat for the audience, and Mandella’s association with Kat solidifies their outsider status in the context of the film: neither girl wants to conform to the social and behavioral demands or expectations of high school, and both find solace in each other on the social margins.

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Mandella’s character comes more clearly into focus over halfway through the film when she is approached at her locker by Michael (David Krumholtz), who is interested in dating her. After a few feeble and failed attempts to get Mandella’s attention, Michael notices the picture of Shakespeare hanging in her locker and comments, “I know you’re a fan of Shakespeare.” “More than a fan,” she scoffs, “we’re involved.” Although this would seem to end the conversation, Michael responds by quoting some lines from Macbeth, and this prompts an almost instantaneous change in Mandella, who smiles with recognition and finishes the lines that Michael has begun. She now gives Michael her full attention, looking into his eyes and biting her lip as if aroused by the revelation of their shared fandom. In what follows, Michael seems to embrace Mandella’s fandom as a point of access. He asks her to the prom by putting a vaguely Shakespearean dress in her locker with a note pinned to it in old timey script that reads: “O fair one, Join me at the Prom. I will be waiting. [L]ove, William S.” And Mandella responds to this invitation with excitement as Michael has willingly subsumed his own identity in favor of Shakespeare. This identity substitution is made most palpable at the end of the film when we see Mandella wearing the dress, looking around for her date, anxiously asking, “Have you seen him?” “Who?” Kat responds. “William! He asked me to meet him here.” At this point, Michael shows up in his own vaguely Shakespearean costume. Significantly, when asking where he is, Mandella asks if anyone has seen ‘William,’ not ‘Michael,’ as if to imply that she confuses the substituted identity with the real one, poking fun at the stereotypical irrationality of fans and their presumed inability to separate fiction from reality (and, true to this, Kat worries that Mandella has “progressed to full-on hallucinations” as she frantically looks for ‘William’).3 Because we see Michael in other contexts in the film as a prime mover in the machinations of the plot, we see that he can separate fiction from reality and that his donning of the ‘Shakespeare’ costume is purely performative and used to exploit Mandella’s fannish, feminine irrationality. That Michael can call forth lines from Macbeth at will in order to woo Mandella at her locker implies a more masculine rationality and discernment that invokes a song from Kiss Me Kate (1953), another adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” which implores men to “Brush up your Shakespeare/ Start quoting him 3  Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 20th anniversary edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 10.

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now/ Brush up your Shakespeare/ And the women you will wow/ … / Just recite an occasional sonnet/ And your lap’ll have honey upon it.” Mandella’s excessive irrationality is further emphasized in a deleted scene from the film in which Kat and Mandella discuss an unidentified ‘he’ in a restaurant. “By ‘he’ do you mean Shakespeare?” asks Kat. “Is there anyone else worth starving for?” Mandella respond with a scoff, as if stating the obvious before she opines “Imagine, the things he’d say during sex!” Although the scene did not make the final cut of the film, it provides a window onto how the filmmakers intend to depict Mandella’s fandom in stereotypically pejorative terms characteristic of the 1990s, as discussed by Henry Jenkins and others, namely, that fandom is linked to an unhealthy sexualized obsession or sexual immaturity, and the aforementioned inability to separate fantasy from reality.4 Mandella’s insistence on the presentist nature of her relationship with Shakespeare—‘we’re involved,’ ‘I’m starving myself to look good for him’—implies that she is unaware of or unconcerned with the fact that Shakespeare has been dead for nearly 400 years and is thus unlikely to reciprocate her affections and desires, or that she has transferred those desires to the text itself—the copy of the Complete Works that we see her carrying around—in the absence of Shakespeare’s body. Indeed, in her sexual fantasy in the deleted scene, she prioritizes the word over the body: “Imagine, the things he’d say during sex!” (in contrast to what he might do, or how he might look). Thus, when Michael spouts lines from Macbeth to Mandella at her locker, he effectively becomes Shakespeare for Mandella, most evident when she is looking for ‘William’ rather than ‘Michael’ at the prom. And as such, addressing one another using quaintly archaic, and thus vaguely Shakespearean-sounding, forms of address—“good sir” and “m’lady”—plays out as a kind of foreplay, implying that Michael—as William—can and will proffer Shakespeare’s words during sex, allowing Mandella to bring her fantasies to life. That is, so long as Michael continues to adopt the William Shakespeare persona that she craves.

4  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10; Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 38; Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 76; Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 18; Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 177–78.

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Mandella’s feminine and irrational fandom is contrasted by Michael’s masculine, rational discernment: he is playing a game, while she is not. Michael, like other men in the film, demonstrates an awareness of and appreciation for Shakespeare by quoting him occasionally in the film as part of their normal conversations, quotations whose origin is not commented on or discussed. Seeing Bianca for the first time upon his arrival at his new school, Cameron—speaking to Michael—expresses his longing via the line “I burn, I pine, I perish” from the play which the film adapts, The Taming of the Shrew. Later, and again in a homosocial context, Michael offers up a line from Sonnet 56 in the lunch line, “Sweet love, renew thy force!” Both Cameron and Michael are able to engage with Shakespeare in a way that does not compromise or overtake their own individual identities, an implied masculine rationality (at least in relation to Shakespeare) that contrasts Mandella’s obsessive tangling of her own identity with the playwright. Mandella’s gendered fandom is also denigrated through its juxtaposition with the perspective of the students’ high school English teacher, Mr. Morgan, whose critical voice invests him with more authority, which is again gendered masculine. The only black teacher in a posh, white private school, Mr. Morgan discusses the lack of diversity in the English curriculum and later raps one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, concluding that “I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his shit.” Thus, unlike Mandella’s myopic and irrational fandom, her teacher’s appreciation of Shakespeare is more nuanced and carefully considered. Mr. Morgan’s astute intellectual authority is also emphasized early in the film in one of the many instances in 10 Things wherein feminism is disparaged as juvenile, trivial, or (worse) unselfconsciously hypocritical.5 Kat has the audacity, for example, to lecture her black English teacher about diversity in the school curriculum, and while her question is valid—why do we have to study the misogynistic Hemmingway when we could be bringing more women into the literary canon?—Mr. Morgan’s response undercuts her self-righteousness: “Kat, I want to thank you for your point of view. I know how difficult it must be for you to overcome all those years of upper middle class suburban oppression. Must be tough,” he says with mock sincerity. But next time you storm the PTA, ask them why they cannot “buy a book written by a black man.” The implication here is that Kat 5  Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 195–96.

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does not actually understand oppression and diversity, unaware of the fact that her English teacher is being forced to teach a whitewashed curriculum whether or not he wants to.6 These comments are made in the opening scenes of the film, and they influence how we read Mr. Morgan’s later comment that “I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his shit.” The implication is that even if he had free reign to teach what he wanted, he would still teach Shakespeare. As such, both Mandella’s Shakespeare fandom and Kat’s prioritization of women writers wither in the face of patriarchal, academic authority.7 Quite separate—but by no means disconnected—from Shakespeare fandom is the film’s depiction of music fandom, which subtly alludes to both the informal hierarchies within and between fandoms while continuing to pejoratively gender fandom. A subplot of the film involves Kat’s love of music and her desire to start a band, and it is her fandom that is recognized and exploited to enable Patrick’s romantic conquest of her, a part of the updated psychological warfare used to tame the shrew. We must keep in mind here the film’s connection to a play that revolves around strategies for how to bring an unruly woman to heel through mental and emotional games rather than physical coercion or violence. In order for Joey to be able to date Kat’s sister, Bianca, he must first find someone to date the undesirable Kat. The hypermasculine Patrick is enlisted in this task and is offered money if he can get Kat to agree to date him. Patrick accepts the challenge but is immediately rebuffed in his efforts when he approaches Kat while she is playing soccer. “Hey there, girlie,” he opens condescendingly, and Kat’s facial expression tells us she is not impressed with the infantilization. It is implied that Patrick believes his natural roguish desirability will be enough to draw her in so he can win his fifty dollars from Joey, but Kat’s refusal to play along with this “screwhead” indicates that she is not fooled by him. When he asks flirtily how she is doing, she responds with “sweating like a pig,” an explicit refusal to be objectified by him despite his best efforts as she lets him know in no uncertain terms that she is not interested in whether or not he finds her attractive. Their first interaction ends with Kat indifferently walking away from a stunned and confused Patrick who clearly expected things to go a  Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 103.  Burt also emphasizes that Kat’s intelligence is part of a broader infantilization of teen girls in the film that pits dumb and pretty against smart and less attractive. See: Burt, “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks,” 206–07. 6 7

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different way. If Patrick is going to earn the money, he will have to try a different tactic. This leads to Patrick enlisting Cameron’s help to find another point of entry, and with the help of Bianca, Cameron goes on a fact-finding mission to Kat’s bedroom in order to find something that can be exploited. As we follow Cameron and Bianca during their undetected invasion of Kat’s room, we are given a glimpse of Kat’s supposedly true self, her likes, dislikes, and desires. Some of these traits are problematically imposed upon the absent Kat against her will, such as when Bianca rifles through her sister’s underwear drawer and triumphantly proclaims “you don’t buy black lingerie unless you want someone to see it” while holding out a pair of nondescript black underwear. In addition to finding ‘proof’ of Kat’s secreted sexual availability, Cameron also finds out that Kat likes “feminist prose” and “angry girl music of the indie rock persuasion,” which he conveys to Patrick along with a list of CDs she owns. As the viewer, we see proof of this in the bedroom: Bianca finds a pile of concert tickets in a drawer, and the walls are covered with posters of bands like The Gits, Seven Year Bitch, No Doubt, The Lovemongers, Ednaswap, and other female-fronted bands active during the 1990s. While there are other posters for predominantly male rock and grunge bands, they are secondary to the “angry girl music,” a characterization that alludes to the feminist punk ‘Riot Grrrl’ music scene that, along with grunge, rose to prominence in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s (the film itself is set in Seattle).8 We might also note here that, in a slightly different context, music fandom becomes code for sexual identity. Prior to their incursion into Kat’s room, Cameron uncomfortably tries to ask Bianca if her sister might be a lesbian. “She’s not a …,” Cameron begins, which Bianca finishes with “… K. D. Lang fan? No. I found a picture of Jared Leto in her drawer once, so I’m pretty sure she’s not harboring same-sex tendencies.” 8  Deitchman offers a compelling and thorough discussion of the film’s tepid ‘Girl Power’ message that is proffered as a more palatable alternative to the confrontational and threatening Riot Grrrl politics. See: Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 479–85. Tim McNelis likewise notes that in the Club Skunk scene, Patrick “exploits riot grrrl for financial gain, since he is being paid to pursue Kat,” a financial exploitation that mirrors mainstream culture’s appropriation and repackaging of riot grrrls as an aesthetic rather than political movement. See: Tim McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music: Identity, Genre, and Musical Agency (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 32–33. Although the film namechecks—in both the dialogue and mise en scene—feminist punk, its soundtrack is decidedly more commercial alternative pop, in step with the film’s overall dilution and pacification of feminism.

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In response to the information about her musical tastes, Patrick offers a dismissive response to Kat’s preference for “chicks who can’t play their instruments.” In this comment, he draws a connection between gender and musical talent. He does not think such bands are real musicians, establishing himself as the arbiter of musical authenticity, in no small part implying that they cannot be true musicians because they are “chicks.” While the audience is not given any overt indication of what kind of music Patrick himself enjoys, we see him in a smoky biker bar, and his self-presentation offers up a generic rock-and-roll aesthetic. When he wants to get Kat’s attention later in the film, he croons Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” over the school PA system, showing off his apparently considerable vocal talents. Patrick’s hard rock aesthetic, effortless knowledge of standards, and choral ability all serve to prop up his status as an authority on real music, and one that is more comprehensive and substantive than Kat’s fannish devotion to a single subgenre. Here, Patrick is to music what Mr. Morgan is to literature: critically discerning. When it is revealed to Patrick that Kat’s favorite band, Letters to Cleo, are playing at Club Skunk, providing him with an opportunity to run into Kat, he faces a conundrum because “I can’t be seen at Club Skunk”; “assail your ears for one night” if you want the opportunity, Michael tells him. As we see when Patrick does swallow his pride to make the trip, Club Skunk is apparently an all-­ ages venue for a predominantly female crowd. When he walks in, he is greeted with numerous disapproving stares from the women in the hallway entrance, signaling to the viewer that he does not belong here. Why does Patrick bristle at the thought of being seen at the club? Presumably, he fears Club Skunk will tarnish his reputation by either feminizing or queering him, or he worries that his presence there will imply his endorsement (even enjoyment) of objectively terrible music that ‘assails the ears.’ The only thing worse than being seen as either girly or a fan of angry girl music would be being seen as both. When Patrick first sees Kat at the club (and, significantly, she is unaware of his presence when he is looking at her in this moment), he sees something other than the “heinous bitch” that he is prepared to see. She dances with and smiles at her friends, moved to an affective state by her favorite band, communing with other fans in the process, and the voyeuristic Patrick takes pleasure in her uninhibited expression of pleasure or fannish affect. Still playing his game, however, Patrick goes to the bar where he pretends not to notice Kat as he quietly sits and enjoys the music. When Kat sees him, she rolls her eyes in disgust and confronts him—although it

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is unspoken, it is clear that she thinks he is at Club Skunk in order to ask her out, and she tells him to “get it over with.” In the conversation that follows, Patrick explicitly works to exploit her music fandom by claiming it as his own. “Would you mind? You’re kind of ruining this for me,” he responds, implying that he is just trying to listen to Letters to Cleo. “You know, these guys are no Bikini Kill or The Raincoats, but they’re not bad,” he says before standing up and heading toward the stage. Throughout this interaction, Kat’s demeanor changes significantly, a mirror to Mandella and Michael’s initial interaction regarding Shakespeare fandom. Although she is frowning and confrontational at the outset, Kat stares agape at Patrick when he reveals his own unexpected appraisal of the band and she begins asking him questions about himself. When he goes to the stage, Kat follows him, her interest piqued for the first time, and as Patrick walks away from her, we observe her undertake a quick mental appraisal of what he just said before pursuing him. “You know who The Raincoats are?” she questions, looking at him while he keeps his gaze unbroken on the band, as if this is where he really wants to be. “Why, don’t you?” Patrick retorts with a smirk. What is important about this scene is the way in which Patrick performs fandom in order to exploit it, positing himself as already a fan of the genre. He plays the stereotypically masculine fan persona. Whereas Kat dances to the music up close, Patrick sits at a distance and listens with his back to the stage, a true audiophile rather than an enthusiastic girl, appreciating and assessing the music rather than being possessed by it. More important than his positive assessment of Letters to Cleo is his effort to present himself as an authority within the fandom by weighing this band against a more comprehensive knowledge of the genre and its history. Letters to Cleo was a fairly mainstream pop band, whereas their contemporaries Bikini Kill were significantly less commercial and unapologetically feminist, the epicenter of the Riot Grrrls. Likewise, The Raincoats were a seminal female-led British punk band and contemporaries of the Sex Pistols and The Clash. By namedropping two of the most influential bands in “angry girl music of the indie persuasion,” Patrick rhetorically pulls rank on Kat: Letters to Cleo are just fine, but real fans would prefer these other bands whom Kat may not have heard before. We can assume that through the list of CDs provided to him by Michael, Patrick is purposefully naming bands that Kat knows of so that his mock pretension will serve to expose their shared, independently formulated interests rather than to embarrass Kat by successfully demolishing her sense of her own music knowledge.

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His faux cockiness thus serves to build up her own self-esteem by giving her an opportunity to not only experience fannish comradery but to prove that she knows more than he thinks she does. By giving Kat a false sense of authority in terms of her music knowledge, Patrick—and thus the film—plays up a derogatory understanding of feminism that sees feminists as wanting to dominate men. By presenting himself as superior, he gives her the opportunity to feel superior to him and his misogynistic assumptions. That she does not know—and never learns—that this is a performance serves to grant Patrick an authority that the audience is keenly aware of but which remains undetected by Kat. As planned, Patrick’s manipulation of Kat’s fandom becomes an immediate point of romantic or sexual access. As soon as his fannish foreplay concludes, Patrick instantly transitions to sex as he offers Kat the unsolicited compliment “I’ve never seen you look so sexy.” As L. Monique Pittman notes, this exchange embodies the problematic gender politics of the film as Kat’s enjoyment of her own “independent subjectivity” is hijacked and sexualized by Patrick.9 As the unwitting object of the male gaze in a supposedly safe space wherein she is not seeking to attract Patrick’s desiring gaze, her body, movement, and pleasure are eroticized nonetheless. But rather than being critical, Kat is flattered, the film’s way of telling us that, deep down, all girls—even the ‘heinous bitches’—want to be objectified. Just as Patrick’s exploitation of Kat’s fandom grants him his initial point of romantic entry, it serves as his grand gesture when he arranges for Letters to Cleo (or at least their vocalist) to perform at prom. “Oh my God, it’s …!” Kat squeals and points as the singer, Kay Hanley, takes the stage. In response to her stunned silence, Patrick tells her “I called in a favor,” and while Kat gazes lovingly into Patrick’s eyes, Hanley descends the stage and walks over to sing directly to the couple on the dance floor. Kissing and dancing ensues. Here and elsewhere, it appears that Patrick has some mysterious reach in the Seattle music scene. Although he implies that he would never be caught dead in Club Skunk, the bartender greets him by name when he arrives, and he is apparently owed favors by people who can arrange for bands to appear at high school proms. Patrick and Kat’s happiness, however, is interrupted when Kat learns about Patrick’s bet with Joey and storms out. In spite of this falling out, the two realize that their affections for one another are real, which leads to Kat’s in-class recitation of her Shakespearean sonnet assignment, the titular “10 Things 9

 Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 109.

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I Hate About You” about how, in spite of all the things she dislikes about him, she does not hate Patrick, “not even at all.” As Diana Henderson notes, the poem serves as a public profession of Kat’s “emotional submission”10 to Patrick and a disavowal of her aggressive feminism (complete with a symbolic reigning in of her previously wild hair, now conservatively braided).11 Kat leaves the classroom in tears, and at the end of the school day, she finds Patrick’s gesture of atonement in her car, a new Fender guitar (the very one he had seen her trying out in a store earlier in the film) sitting in the passenger seat. “I thought you could use it, you know, when you start your band,” he demures. The two finally engage in some banter about him not being about to buy her a guitar every time he makes a mistake in their relationship. Of course not: there are still drums, bass, and tambourines to buy, he jokes, and the film concludes with Patrick kissing Kat to shut her up while Letters to Cleo play a cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” on the roof of the school, a song that serves as the antithetical counterpoint to the song blaring from Kat’s car when she is first introduced in the film, Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.” The conclusion of the film serves to blunt the sharp edges of Kat’s confrontational and thus undesirable feminism, marking her transition from a strong-willed woman without the need for external validation (a la Joan Jett’s song) into one who craves masculine desire (“I Want You to Want Me”), trading in the Riot Grrrl for “defanged Girl Power.”12 Although the gift of the guitar is meant to be understood as a positive romantic gesture (Patrick is in tune with her feelings and desires), we can also read it as a patronizing gesture of masculine authority and discernment.13 We are  Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 197.  Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 484. For a more positive and recuperative reading of Kat’s poem, see: Rachael McLennan, “To Count as a Girl: Misdirection in 10 Things I Hate About You,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 1 (July 2014): 1–18. Kat’s poem also gives the Shakespeare fan or scholar an opportunity to feel superior to Kat, although whether this is intentional or not in the film is unclear. Her poem is the end result of an assignment requiring students to write a sonnet, but what she recites is most definitely not a sonnet: four quatrains of, primarily, tetrameter that follow the wrong rhyme scheme. As true students of Shakespeare, we can smirk with condescension that Kat has likely sacrificed a passing grade in favor of emotional self-immolation. 12  Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 480. 13  Pittman and Hodgdon likewise discuss the negative implications and consequences for female agency in both Patrick gifting Kat her independence and in the shift from Joan Jett to Cheap Trick. See: Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 113; Barbara Hodgdon, “Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of 10 11

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never given any indication that Patrick grows to appreciate or enjoy “angry girl music” (or “feminist prose,” for that matter), and after his manipulative performance of Riot Grrrl appreciation at Club Skunk, the issue is not raised again. Presumably, he persists in his belief that her favorite music is without merit or proficiency. Additionally, the gift—and the film’s treatment of Kat’s interest in music—are emblematic of her “distinct lack of musical agency throughout the film,” which is also evident in the fact that, despite her aspiration to start a band, we never see her perform music in the film.14 As McNelis notes, “Whereas girls in some other youth films play a role in their own musical exploration and performance, Kat must ultimately wait for her boyfriend to provide the means, at least as far as performance is concerned.”15 So what does the gift of the guitar imply other than that he is content to let this “girlie” pursue her fantastical delusion of emulating her talentless idols? In terms of the film’s treatment of fandoms in general, we see evidence of the implied hierarchy of music over media fandom wherein the former is deemed cool and socially acceptable, while the latter is nerdy and socially weird. At the prom, Michael appears before Mandella as ‘William S.,’ waving to her from the stage moments before Hanley takes the microphone. In this instant, both Patrick and Michael simultaneously offer up the objects of their dates’ fandoms, and both earn affection as their reward. However, whereas the whole school enjoys and approves of the music, validating the legitimacy of music fandom, Michael and Mandella’s costumes mark them as outsiders unconcerned with popularity, happily lame in a sea of cool.

Genre,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. III: The Comedies, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 260. Over the course of the film, Kat is transformed into more conventional ‘girlfriend material’ in a way that “benefits, rather than threatens, boys” (Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 481). Alternatively, Alexander Leggatt briefly discusses the guitar gift in his work on roleplaying and conformity in the film, arguing that because the scene is preceded by Kat’s tearful recitation of her poem with Patrick sitting—attentive and pained—in the classroom, and presumably because Patrick uses Joey’s money to buy the guitar, the gift is not simply an effort to buy off Kat. See: Alexander Leggatt, “Teen Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You and O,” in Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 249–50. As Pittman, Hodgdon, and Deitchman’s works have demonstrated, the overall gender politics of the film makes it difficult to view the gesture as purely reconciliatory, especially when coupled with Patrick’s indifference to or disdain for Kat’s passions. 14  McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music, 35. 15  McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music, 36.

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10 Things’ engagement with and treatment of fandom contributes to the “quiet misogyny” of the plot16 by explicitly connecting it to female naïve irrationality and uninformed opinions and to an emotional and sexual intensity that is comically extreme and unpredictable. In contrast to the gendered affective tunnel vision of Kat and Mandella, the two girls are surrounded by men who know what they know, know more, and know better about literature and music, men who are critically discerning rather than childishly passionate. My sense is that Shakespeare studies has been slow to engage with fan studies because we are still stuck in a largely outdated paradigm in which we view fandom as uncritical, amateurish, and unnecessarily affective: that fans are a bunch of Mandellas, so to speak. Shakespeare fandom, however, is much older than Mandella. To a certain extent, Shakespeare himself incorporated early modern theater fandom into some of his plays, whether it be in Hamlet’s enthusiastic reception of the players at Elsinore and his disruptive and affection spectatorship of The Mousetrap, or in the metatheatrical ribbing of amateur playwrights and actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Love’s Labor’s Lost.17 For the clearest and most influential early example of fandom focused on Shakespeare, however, we need only look to David Garrick’s Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon over the course of three days in September 1769. From a fan studies perspective, this is a ground zero event as the first literary festival that has all the markings of a proto fan convention in its conception, deployment, and reception, with the famous actor and theater manager playing the role of the devoted fan and organizer. The Shakespeare Jubilee is widely regarded as the event that instigated bardolatry, elevating the playwright from his prior status as largely a writer like the rest of his theater contemporaries to a cultural, national, and devotional icon. The event likewise established Stratford-upon-Avon as a site of literary  Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 101.  Indeed, we might push this idea further to comment on the Rude Mechanicals’ concerns for their royal audience’s own potential affective response to Pyramus and Thisbe, especially on two fronts: that they will be unable to distinguish between performance and reality, or that the nuance of their work might be lost on the audience. Both contribute to create an overly literal and comically amateur performance that is humorous largely because it lacks a requisite self-awareness. The best example of this kind of affective, amateurish fandom from the period comes not, however, from Shakespeare but rather from Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) in which a boorish group of theater patrons want to see themselves reflected in the play so much that they literally insert themselves into it. Additionally, there is the extent to which we might consider some of Shakespeare’s plays— especially his earlier ones—to be Ovid, Plautus, or Holinshed fan fiction themselves. 16 17

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­ ilgrimage, “the inaugural moment in the history of Shakespearian tourp ism” that has persisted down to the present day.18 Nevertheless, Garrick was not the first to contemplate visiting the birthplace or home of Shakespeare. In 1756, Reverend Francis Gastrell, the owner of New Place, the home Shakespeare had purchased in his home town following his success in London, grew so irritated at the presence of ‘pilgrims’ showing up to take sprigs from and languish in the shade of the mulberry tree that Shakespeare had reputedly planted on the property that he had the tree cut down and sold for firewood. Garrick himself had visited Stratford and the New Place mulberry in 1742 when the property was owned by Sir Hugh Clopton, so although there was, in 1769, little evidence of an official Shakespeare tourist industry in the village, obtaining some regenerative or inspirational sustenance from the playwright’s ghostly presence had been drawing people there for decades with enough frequency to provoke Gastrell’s spiteful response. According to Benjamin Victor’s received account of the event, the townspeople were so aghast at the act of sacrilege that they “vowed to sacrifice the Offender, to the immortal Memory of the Planter,” eventually running Gastrell out of town.19 The reverend’s irreverence for Shakespeare culminated in 1759 when, as a result of a dispute over taxes, he decided to simply knock New Place down, leaving just its foundation behind for Shakespeare devotees to gawk at alongside the mulberry stump.20 Additionally, Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays emphasizes the playwright’s connection to Stratford-upon-Avon during his formative years and the influence his experiences there had on the plays, such as Falstaff’s deer stealing in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which Rowe reads as an allusion to a formative experience in Shakespeare’s youth that compelled him to leave Warwickshire for London.21 Rowe also elevates Shakespeare to a pride of place in the history of English drama, noting the lamentable state of theater in 1709 and that “there is not one Play before him of a Reputation good enough to entitle it to an Appearance on 18  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 32. 19  Benjamin Victor, The History of the Theatres of London, from the year 1760 to the Present Time (London, 1771), 202. 20  Andrew McConnell Stott, What Blest Genius? The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 5. 21  Nicholas Rowe, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, vol. 1 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), xviii.

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the present Stage.”22 The editor also notes the skilled actor Thomas Betterton whose “Veneration for the Memory of Shakespear having engag’d him to make a Journey into Warwickshire, on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a Name for which he had so great a Value.”23 Recounting Shakespeare’s retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon and eventual death, Rowe includes an engraving of the monument that stands above the playwright’s grave.24 Rowe ultimately says very little about Shakespeare’s life and time in London, preferring instead to assert Shakespeare’s geographical significance in his rural place of birth and death. It is perhaps worth noting here that while Rowe describes and indirectly endorses the earliest forms of Shakespearean literary pilgrimage, he does not specifically address some of the key touchstones that would become a central part of the narrative in the coming decades. No explicit mention is made of New Place by name, which Rowe alludes to simply as “an Estate equal to his Occasion” that Shakespeare had the “good Fortune” to afford later in life, and no mention is made of the mulberry tree.25 Exactly what ‘remains of a name’ Betterton and other early Shakespeare pilgrims were looking for—and where they sought them— was still in flux in the early eighteenth century. Later, in 1724 Daniel Defoe briefly recounts his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, where the sole notable feature was Shakespeare’s monument in the parish church. He characterizes Shakespeare as “the famous Poet, and whose Dramatick performances so justly maintain his Character among the British Poets; and perhaps will do so to the End of Time.”26 Although this description persisted in the shorter Curious and Diverting Journies, Thro’ the Whole Island of Great-­ Britain (1734) that appeared after Defoe’s death, Defoe’s editor, Samuel Richardson, evidently saw fit to amend Defoe’s assessment of Shakespeare. In the second edition of A Tour that was overseen and expanded by Richardson in 1738, the vacillation disappeared from his account of Stratford-upon-Avon: “The Parish Church of Stratford is very old. In it we saw the Monument of the inimitable Shakespeare, whose Dramatick Performances set him at the Head of the British Theatre, and will make  Rowe, vol. 1, xxvii.  Rowe, vol. 1, xxxiv. 24  Rowe, vol. 1, xvii–xviii. 25  Rowe, vol. 1, xxxv. 26  Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London, 1724), 63. 22 23

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him renown’d to the End of Time.”27 In the elevation of Shakespeare from ‘famous’ to ‘inimitable’ in the intervening fourteen years (or four years, if we count the 1734 text), Shakespeare’s legacy and immortality ceased to be a matter of ‘perhaps.’ This description of Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare would remain unchanged in a number of the subsequent editions of A Tour until the eighth edition of 1778 (in which Richardson’s work was expanded by “Gentlemen of Eminence in the Literary World”).28 In this edition of the text, the description of Stratford-upon-Avon was significantly expanded for the first time and ballooned from two paragraphs into three pages. The additions consist primarily of a firsthand account provided by an anonymous traveler who visited Stratford-upon-Avon in July 1777.29 This account considers the village through the lens of Garrick, mentioning first his visit to the White Lion Inn, the same one “represented in the entertainment of [Garrick’s Play] The Jubilee.”30 He goes on to describe the house Shakespeare was born in, making special note of a chair in which the playwright supposedly once sat, which “has been pretty much cut by different visitors, who have been desirous of preserving a relict of something belonging to the immortal bard,” sold off by the current occupants of the house.31 Other Shakespeare—and Garrick—attractions around town are described, and he notes that he was shown the grave and church by a “guide.”32 Like Rowe, Defoe makes special note of the graveside monument without mentioning New Place, the mulberry tree, or the Birthplace. And although Richardson made some small but significant changes to Defoe’s description, the grave and monument remained the central focus of the first seven editions of A Tour, commemorating the resting place of a celebrated writer and emphasizing the physical location of his corporeal remains. Following Garrick’s Jubilee, equal attention was paid to chasing the vestigial presence of Shakespeare around Stratford-upon-Avon, and one of the lasting contributions Garrick made to literary tourism more generally was the attention given to birth and formative years, visiting  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 2nd edition (1738), 266.  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), title page. 29  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 263. 30  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 263–64. 31  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 264. 32  Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 265. 27 28

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“context prior to text,” Shakespeare before ‘Shakespeare.’33 Certainly, the persistence of Defoe’s original account for over five decades with changes made solely to Defoe’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s status and legacy is consistent with Richardson’s overall editorial approach which “rarely adds any new information or makes any alterations of Defoe’s description of the natural features or economic and social life of a locality.”34 There was no urgent need to flesh out Defoe’s initial assessment of what was noteworthy about Stratford-upon-Avon or Shakespeare’s relationship with it. But the desire for fresh eyes emerged in the 1770s, indicating that the place of Stratford-upon-Avon in the imagination of some was undergoing revision and that it was more than just a resting place: it was a place of Shakespearean provenance, inspiration, and reflected glory. While it had certainly been this for some in decades past, the revision of A Tour reflects a more general sense of Stratford-upon-Avon’s significance. The Jubilee also came at a key moment in the struggle over the scholarly future of Shakespeare. In his 1765 edition of the playwright’s collected work, Samuel Johnson—Garrick’s former teacher and an invitee to the Jubilee—advocated for a critical and objective approach to the playwright as a necessary curative to “envious malignity” or the “superstitious veneration” of Shakespeare that blinded readers to his true faults and excellencies,35 a condemnation of the fan’s affective, idolatry response. Besides, Johnson argued, William Congreve was the better writer anyway. This response anticipates some of the most common threads in popular critiques of fans by accusing them of being, in a pejorative sense, a version of Jenkins’ ‘adoring audience,’ inflecting the criticism with implications of religious fanaticism. Johnson made his comment in his 1765 preface to Shakespeare’s collected work (years before the Jubilee had been initiated), and he was by no means challenging Shakespeare’s merit as a poet and a 33  Nicola J. Watson, “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 202. 34  Godfrey Davies, “Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,” Modern Philology 48, no. 1 (August 1950): 23–24. 35  Samuel Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1765), xix. In this passage, Johnson is writing specifically about the effect of the passage of time (i.e., the century and a half since Shakespeare died) on helping achieve critical distance from the text, which enables Johnson to more accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of the work in question. Affect and scholarship are antithetical notions, according to Johnson’s preface, part of the reason Johnson refrained from attending the Jubilee, despite Garrick’s invitation.

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playwright but is rather positioning himself as a more discerning and objective reader whose opinions emerge from careful consideration and critical inquiry, unlike those who myopically venerate Shakespeare. By labeling their admiration of and approach to Shakespeare as ‘superstitious,’ Johnson rhetorically denies the possibility that anything worthwhile could come from it because their affect taints them. As with many popular responses to a profession of fandom, being outed as a fan makes one’s tastes and opinions suspect in all areas. Patrick Verona would approve. Such critiques carried over into the activities of this eighteenth-century Shakespearean participatory culture, and the supposedly exploitive relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers that is also central to pejorative assessments of fans. Throughout the summer leading up to the Jubilee, for example, pieces written from the perspective of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree—or its remaining stump—mocked the relic hunters purchasing absurd mementos. James Dodd collected and reprinted some of these letters in 1770. In one, the tree recalls being cut down by profiteers, complaining that it would rather have been sold off in total to Garrick rather than suffer the indignity of being “converted into tobacco-­ stoppers, handles to knives and forks, and nutmeg-graters,” lamenting that “Not a girl in our town but carries about her a tooth-pick, knitting-­ sheath, or comb-case fabricated out of my ravaged entrails.”36 The contrast here between the “beauties of Shakespeare” and the base utility of the relics emphasizes the discordance between the poet’s hand that wrote the plays and planted the tree, and the anonymous hand that would smoke a pipe or pick a tooth with the vestiges of Shakespeare.37 As the titular character in Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee (1769) jokes in his account of the Jubilee festivities, “I drank too—and now I a poet may be—/ From a charming fine cup of the mulberry tree.”38 In another letter, a visitor to Stratford-upon-Avon recounts a dream he had in advance of the Jubilee in which the “venerable stump” is brought to the town hall and the pieces of its “body” auctioned off in parcels large and small to make crutches, fan sticks, and walking sticks for Garrick and other dignitaries of the theater world who stake their claims over the woody corpse.39 36  Quoted in: James Solas Dodd, Essays and Poems, Satirical, Moral, Political, and Entertaining (Cork, 1770), 255. 37  Quoted in: Dodd, Essays and Poems, 253. 38  Gentleman, Francis. The Stratford Jubilee. […] To which is prefixed Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee (London, 1769), np. 39  Quoted in: Dodd, Essays and Poems, 259.

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That a single tree felled thirteen years prior to the Jubilee could not have produced the number of relics ascribed to it was, in part, the point of some of the mockery as these ignorant and uncritical Shakespeare devotees were being comically exploited by people who knew better while the more intelligent and discerning observers watched such exchanges with amusement from the sidelines. As Andrew McConnell Stott notes, such mockery “highlighted the way in which the veneration of relics replaced any sensible discussion of literary merits with slack-jawed wonder.”40 “Lord! what monsters came to see,/ SHAKESPEARE’S house, and SHAKESPEARE’S tree,” remarks the speaker of Edward Thompson’s poem Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee (1769) of the motley crew of lords and clowns “Running round and round the town,/ Swearing for the BARD’S renown.”41 On a related note, Nicola J. Watson sees the denigration of literary tourism in academic circles today as, in large part, a consequence of New Criticism and post-structuralism, the prioritization of text and the belief that “Purists and professionals should find the literary text in itself enough, it should not need supplementing or authenticating by reference to externals, especially to supposedly non-textual external realities, such as author or place. Only the amateur, only the naïve reader, could suppose that there was anything more, anything left, anything either originary or residual, let alone anything more legitimate or legitimating, to be found on the spot marked X.”42 Although Watson sees these points of view as not emerging until about the 1920s,43 the comments by Johnson and the broad mockery of visitors in search of traces of Shakespeare indicate that similar demarcations between the intellectual and the naïve reader have persisted for centuries. According to one song in Francis Gentleman’s satirical The Stratford Jubilee (1769), those who arrived for the Jubilee are those who “know Shakespeare’s name,/ And have heard of his fame,/ Though his merit their shallow conception escapes.”44 In George Colman’s play Man and Wife; or, the Shakespeare Jubilee (1770)—written for Garrick’s Covent Garden rivals for performance immediately after the

 Stott, What Blest Genius?, 134.  Edward Thompson, Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee (London, 1769), 9. 42  Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6. 43  Watson, The Literary Tourist, 8. 44  Gentleman, The Stratford Jubilee, 5. 40 41

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Jubilee in October 176945—a visitor to Stratford is simply sick of hearing about the Jubilee throughout the summer of 1769: “I have heard nothing but jubilees, and Shakespeares, and mulberry-trees, for these three months. What the devil is this jubilee?”46 Shakespeare mania was as irritating to some as it was invigorating to others. In Man and Wife, a Falstaff-esque character, Buck, drunkenly sings a song Garrick wrote in praise of a cup made of the mulberry tree, sung on the first day of the Jubilee. Certainly, whatever solemnity Garrick had intended was rendered comic as the tispy Buck sings (before calling for more wine), “All shall yield to the mulberry tree,/ Bend to thee/ Sweet Mulberry!/ Matchless was He/ Who planted thee,/ And thou like him immortal shalt be.”47 Where it is focused on the Jubilee, much of this play mocks the quality, availability, and cost of food and lodgings in Stratford, as the event afforded plenty of opportunities for locals to drain the purses of the visitors. This seems to be largely acceptable to many of the visitors, who are in Stratford not to celebrate Shakespeare but to rub elbows with the social elite, as one Mrs. Cross puts it in response to the suggestion that she does not care for Shakespeare: “And what does that signify, as to going to the jubilee? Are not all the people of condition round the country to be here? Shakespeare is nothing to the purpose.”48 Likewise, Johnson and others objected to Garrick’s proposed dedicatory ode, which he dismissed as an inferior piece of writing. It was “an ode without poetry,” too direct to be of literary merit.49 This criticism ties into 45  Peter Holland, “David Garrick: Saints, Temples and Jubilees,” in Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, eds. Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 32. 46  George Colman, Man and Wife; or the Shakespeare Jubilee (Dublin, 1770), 6. 47  Colman, Man and Wife, 3. 48  Colman, Man and Wife, 22–23. 49  Colman, Man and Wife, iv. This dismissal of the ode on grounds of its quality clearly bothered Garrick. In the manuscript version of his play The Jubilee, he has written “This is what Foote said of the Jubilee in his Devil upon Two Sticks,” referring to Samuel Foote, one of Garrick’s most public critics (and a man who attended the Jubilee with the intent to quickly satirizing it in writing). See: David Garrick, “The Jubilee,” in The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 2, eds. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 106n37. The “ode without poetry” line, repeated in Colman’s play, comes from Foote’s The Devil upon Two Sticks, staged mere days after Garrick’s Jubilee ended in September 1769. See: Holland, “David Garrick,” 31.

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the general questioning of Garrick’s motives in organizing the Jubilee in the first place, and here we see a compelling paradox that represents Garrick as simultaneously a Shakespeare fan and a cultural producer exploiting fans like himself for financial gain. Add to this Garrick’s status as a lauded actor, theater manager, and celebrity himself whom Stott describes as “the most famous man in Britain after the king”50 and we have a tangled web of financial and affective relationships. Unlike 10 Things’ Mandella or the contemporary writer of fan fiction, Garrick’s Shakespeare fandom played out in public, he was an object of fandom himself, and he stood to gain financially through his relationship with Shakespeare, both through the performance of plays in Drury Lane (and, subsequently, the maintenance or expansion of his own notoriety and cultural caché) and through profits—direct or ancillary—garnered by the Jubilee. In this respect, Garrick was like an eighteenth-century Joss Whedon, blurring the distinction between amateur and professional as it relates to each man’s relationship to Shakespeare and culture more generally. Garrick’s personal and professional history with Shakespeare are largely indistinguishable from one another. His London stage debut came in a 1741 production of Richard III, earning him immediate public praise for his skill. Regardless of his personal affection for Shakespeare, Garrick evidently felt indebted to him for his start, celebrating this early success by visiting New Place in 1742 while the property was owned by Sir Hugh Clopton and the sacred mulberry tree still stood, thirteen years before the next owner had it removed.51 As Garrick’s fame and wealth increased, he purchased a lavish villa in Hampton in 1754 and also immediately began designing and building his Shakespeare Temple on the grounds, a structure that would become a tourist attraction itself for the visitors that Garrick entertained.52 Two key objects contained in the temple were a costly statue of Shakespeare commissioned in 1757 and a chair purportedly built from Shakespeare’s felled mulberry tree, wood that Garrick had purchased—with a letter of authenticity—in 1762.53 Key in many critical assessments of Garrick’s relationship with Shakespeare is the question of what motivated it, and what Garrick used it to say about himself. The sense of religious devotion and excess was not  Stott, What Blest Genius?, xviii.  Watson, “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” 204. 52  Holland, “David Garrick,” 16. 53  Holland, “David Garrick,” 19; Stott, What Blest Genius?, 130–31. 50 51

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simply applied to Garrick but was rather embraced and voiced by him. In his dedicatory ode recited at the Jubilee, Garrick referred to Shakespeare as “The god of our idolatry.”54 He had been using this phrase (one borrowed from Juliet’s description of Romeo in 2.1) for years to describe Shakespeare, sometimes when inviting them to his temple to bow before the statue.55 As Peter Holland notes, The Public Ledger attack on Garrick’s Ode in 1769 both mocked and criticized the ‘Christian’ Garrick for ignorantly but appropriately casting himself in a negative light—Garrick might not understand what idolatry actually meant, but it was the perfect word to describe what Garrick was doing.56 “Well said Christian! But it is no wonder that he should endeavour to make a God of Shakespear, since he has usurped the office of his High-priest; and has already gained enough money by it, to make a golden calf, to be an object of that idolatry which he recommends,” writes the anonymous author, ‘Longinus.’57 Similar attacks were leveled at Garrick for calling the event a ‘jubilee’ to begin with because of its religious connotations as a particularly papist or Jewish term of commemoration. The short satirical play Garrick’s Vagary (1769) devotes its opening scene almost entirely to mocking Garrick— “the Pope of Drury-Lane”58—for his choice of terminology and offering an extended comparison between the Jubilee and popish practices. Although the epilogue to Garrick’s Vagary claims to have offered a balanced interpretation of the event with voices both in favor of and in opposition to it, the opening scene—which comprises nearly half of the total play—clearly establishes the perceived inappropriateness of conceptualizing the event as a jubilee on nationalistic religious grounds, regardless of whether or not Shakespeare was a deserving focus of adulation.59 However, it is the next point in Longinus’ criticism of Garrick that should sound familiar to fan scholars, as his critic notes that while the “extravagant 54  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 188. All references to the ode are taken from Stott’s annotated version that appears appended to What Blest Genius?. 55  Holland, “David Garrick,” 20. 56  Holland, “David Garrick,” 22. 57  Longinus, Letter in The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769. This letter, along with three more, are reprinted for inclusion with the anonymous Anti-Midas: A Jubilee Preservative from Unclassical, Ignorant, False, and Invidious Criticism, written and published as a refutation of Longinus’ criticisms and enthusiastic defense of Garrick’s ode, the Jubilee, and The Jubilee play. See: Anti-Midas: A Jubilee Preservative from Unclassical, Ignorant, False, and Invidious Criticism (London, 1769), 23. 58  Garrick’s Vagary (London, 1769), 13. 59  See also: Holland, “David Garrick,” 35.

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expression”—‘the God of our idolatry’—might be “pardonable from the mouth of a young girl distracted with love, and applied to her lover, he uses [it] as his own serious sentiment.”60 Certainly, the author here is alluding to the source of the phrase, the young girl who is distracted with love: Juliet. In a grown man, though, the same sentiment becomes unpardonable. In the process, and, I would argue, purposefully, the author characterizes Garrick’s affectation for Shakespeare as immature, uncritical, and feminine, key notes in the criticism of fans in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. Although separated by a wide span of time, space, and genre, Garrick’s engagement with Shakespeare is couched in similar terms as the fandoms of both Mandella and Kat in 10 Things, relegated to a gendered category of naïveté. However, the critique of the Jubilee and Garrick’s adulation of Shakespeare on the grounds of pseudo-sacrilege and fanatic obsession is to miss what is now recognizable as fannish modes of discourse and devotion as play. Writing specifically about Sherlock Holmes fan culture, Anne Jamison comments on the ways in which “fans play exaggerated versions of themselves, taking their obsession seriously and ironically at the same time.”61 To ignore this aspect of fandom is to assume that fans are overly serious and lacking in self-awareness, implying that they are, truly, fanatics. But fandoms are frequently very self-aware, playfully employing the often hyperbolic performance of affect and obsession as a rhetorical tool to emphasize both their investment in their fan object and an awareness that such enthusiasm could be interpreted as actual fanaticism. To suggest that Garrick’s description of Shakespeare as ‘the god of his idolatry’ is anything but an ironic and self-effacing way for him to say ‘I really like Shakespeare’ is to suggest he has no understanding of the meaning of ‘idolatry.’ ‘Idolatry’ has purely negative connotations, a suggestion of inappropriately and ignorantly mistaking the created for the divine to describe other persons or religions. As a description of one’s own faith or devotion, ‘idolatry’ can only be used ironically. Otherwise, to use it honestly would require the speaker to paradoxically be simultaneously aware and unaware that their devotion is misplaced and sacrilegious. As in the patronizing depiction of Mandella in 10 Things who cannot distinguish between fiction and reality as a result of her fandom, to take Garrick’s professed idolatry seriously is to deny the intentional playfulness of his usage of the term as  Longinus, Letter in The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 24.  Jamison, Fic, 8.

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appropriately inappropriate. After all, Garrick had built part of his career on adapting Shakespeare’s plays to his own tastes and the tastes of his eighteenth-century audiences rather than staging them with puritanical fidelity. He had been playing with Shakespeare for a long time. The Jubilee itself also bears a striking resemblance to a fan convention in its eighteenth-century version of cosplay. Among the planned events was a procession of Shakespeare’s most famous characters—from Garrick’s perspective—taken from nineteen plays, accompanied by muses and satyrs. Each of the nineteen groups was to perform a dumb show of a key scene from their respective play while carrying an identifying banner. Unfortunately, this pageant was canceled due to the persistent rain that plagued the Jubilee as a whole.62 While the aborted procession of characters is frequently pointed to as one of the many comical absurdities that beset the event, it looks perhaps somewhat different through the lens of the fan, speaking to—as did the Jubilee as a whole—Garrick’s own fannish perspective and what he saw as the most memorable characters and moments from the plays, performed on a mute loop for the duration. There is undoubtedly a financial angle to the choices as well: these are plays that were popular not just with Garrick personally, but in his Drury Lane theater as well, those that drew in audiences. Nevertheless, the procession bears a striking resemblance to what we might expect to see at a fan convention, with many costumed attendees striving to mimic a favorite character. In both Garrick’s procession and contemporary cosplay, it is the spectator’s recognition or shared fandom—a knowing audience—that is key to the pleasure derived from such costumed displays. The dumb show snippets take a scene out of context, such that a spectator’s inability to recognize the source of the dumb show would render it unintelligible— context is provided by the spectator’s prior knowledge of the text. Whether Juliet or Princess Leia, the pleasure that arises from such spectatorship is one grounded in recognition. And the spectators themselves would be invited to participate in cosplay themselves in the form of a masquerade ball during the evening festivities. Indeed, it is the fannish importance of recognition that helps us understand another oft-noted aspect of the Jubilee: the conspicuous absence of any actual performance of Shakespeare throughout its duration. For all of the planned events in Stratford-upon-Avon, which ranged from fireworks to singing to horse races, not a single play—or scene from a play—was to  Stott, What Blest Genius?, 139–41.

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be performed. Such an absence has been described at worst as evidence of Garrick’s vanity, and at best a curious oversight at an event paying homage to a playwright. However, such an absence would not seem particularly unusual at a fan convention (or academic conference, for that matter). In one of his earliest efforts to define fans (specifically in relation to Star Trek), Jenkins argues that “One becomes a ‘fan’ not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans who share common interests,”63 a movement away from “passive media spectatorship.”64 Attendees come armed with prior knowledge of the text and in order to partake in paratextual engagements, such as meeting favorite actors, purchasing memorabilia, interacting with like-minded fans, and a plethora of other activities that do not involve re-watching favorite episodes. As Lanier notes, in subsequent nineteenth-century commemorations of Shakespeare, particularly those initiated by small societies around the tercentenary of 1864, “theatrical presentation was not a necessary feature.”65 The Jubilee thus instigated the transformation—for those involved and for those who would follow similar forms of engagement—of Shakespearean “spectatorial culture into participatory culture” along similar lines that the objects of Jenkins’ study would take up Star Trek two centuries later.66 The pleasure of recognition is also a key feature of the centerpiece of the Jubilee: the dedicatory ode that Garrick prepared for the unveiling of a new statue of Shakespeare that he had commissioned and then sold to Stratford-upon-Avon. Undoubtedly, the ode enshrines Shakespeare— “that demi-god!”67—as a semi-divine being, describing the playwright in 63  Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 41. 64  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 3. I recognize here that theater spectatorship and media spectatorship can involve varying degrees of passivity, with theater spectatorship being inherently less passive than, say, television spectatorship, if for no other reason than the fact that the illusory fourth wall in the theater does not segregate audience from performance in the same way a screen does. 65  Douglas Lanier, “Commemorating Shakespeare in America, 1864,” in Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, eds. Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 150. 66  Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, 41. 67  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 188.

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the devotional terms that irritated Garrick’s critics and served as partial proof of his deficiencies as a poet and an intellectual. Sprung from the banks of Avon, the Shakespeare of the ode is the immediate student of both Fancy and Nature who, through his mastery of words, became a divine creative force whose power surpassed the conquering sword of Alexander: “He heav’d no sigh, he made no moan,/ Not limited to human kind,/ He sir’d his wonder-teeming mind,/ Rais’d other worlds, and beings of his own!”68 He is both a god and a magician, an immortal being capable of granting immortality through poetry and using his “charms, and spells, and incantations” to conjure both terror and delight, as his imagination dictates.69 Directing the audience’s attention of the statue that Garrick was dedicating, the final lines emphasize Shakespeare’s longevity: “The song will cease, the stone decay,/ But his Name,/ And undiminsh’d fame,/ Shall never, never pass away.”70 Undoubtedly, the ode voices an affective, ebullient praise for Shakespeare that is couched in hyperbolic terms. In his preface to Shakespeare’s complete works, Johnson is careful to emphasize that while Shakespeare was a playwright of considerable skill, he was nevertheless beset with “faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit,” going on to criticize—among other things— the apparent lack of “moral purpose” in the plays, the weaknesses of many of his plots (particularly in the latter parts of many plays), and so forth.71 Sometimes, Shakespeare is simply too wordy when it comes to narration and often “tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few.”72 Acknowledging these weaknesses avoids the ‘superstitious veneration’ of Shakespeare that Johnson detested because the work of the critic is to ensure “that his virtues be rated with his failings.”73 From a critical perspective like Johnson’s, Garrick’s ode is embarrassingly one-sided, all blindly breathless hyperbole, a “love [that] admits no qualifying dross” or moderation (as Cressida might say).74 Indeed, Garrick’s unselfconscious affect when performing the ode in Drury Lane—which Garrick did repeatedly following the Jubilee—was one of the many points of contention taken up by ‘Longinus’ in his lengthy  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 191.  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 194. 70  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 202. 71  Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xix–xx. 72  Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxii. 73  Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxiv. 74  Troilus and Cressida, 4.4.9. 68 69

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attack on the ode published in The Public Ledger in October 1769. For Garrick “to repeat this Ode often in the face of the World, to repeat it with that enthusiastic delight, which shews him enraptured with his own wretched Composition” is the height of humor.75 Over the course of four letters, Longinus undertakes a pedantic attack on Garrick’s weak diction, poor grammar, and misunderstanding of the basic tenants of figurative language, while also accusing Garrick of being a superficial reader of Milton.76 And like any good critic, Longinus employs contemporary critical discourse to invalidate Garrick’s assertions about Shakespeare in the ode, drawing from Elizabeth Montagu’s recent response to Voltaire, published in 1769, in order to dismiss Garrick as “an ignorant zealot.”77 The final letter concludes with the author’s mock exhaustion as he is unable to complete his task: “Upon looking over the remainder of the Ode, I find so many other passages equally obnoxious to Criticism, that, being heartily tired of the task, I give it up, in utter despair of being able to finish it.”78 David Garrick: laughable amateur, feminine idolator, and glory thief. Of additional interest, however, is Johnson’s defense of Shakespeare, particularly regarding the playwright’s refusal to follow (or ignorance of) the classical unities of time, place, and action. After dismantling the necessity of the unities in the first place on the grounds that while an audience suspends its disbelief it is not so naïve that it becomes unaware that it is still watching a play (and can thus fill in the gaps between scenes), Johnson emphasizes that Shakespeare did not write for the critics anyway: “We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance.”79 Johnson stresses Shakespeare’s intended audience: if the playwright was not writing for the approval of scholars and critics, then it is not entirely appropriate to judge his work according to his adherence to their rules regarding the unities. Likewise, our assessment of Garrick’s ode must be attentive to its intended audience—the attendees of the Jubilee, the (ideally) knowing audience.  Longinus, The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 23.  Longinus, The Public Ledger, November 2, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 30. 77  Longinus, The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 26. Longinus quotes from: Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769), 140. 78  Longinus, The Public Ledger, November 6, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 33. 79  Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxix–xxx. 75 76

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The fan’s pleasure of recognition is key to the reception of the ode, which is peppered with allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, direct quotations, or slight adaptations of lines that are cleverly integrated into Garrick’s praise. As such, it is productive to consider Garrick’s ode as a kind of fan text wherein the fannish—as opposed to literary or hegemonic—notion of ‘canon’ comes into play. Sheenagh Pugh defines ‘canon’ as “the source material accepted as authentic and, within the fandom, known by all readers.”80 That is, the canon of Shakespeare’s words and characters, known and accepted by the audience. And in the context of Garrick’s ode, the author offers reflected knowledge to the knowing audience, pleasurable participation in the text by way of recognizing the various Shakespearean ‘Easter eggs’ throughout, rewarding their own mastery of that canon. Such recognition might come through Garrick’s slight reworking of Hamlet’s comments about his father: “’A was a man, take him for all in all;/ I shall not look upon his like again.”81 This becomes, in reference to Shakespeare, the “best of men,” “We ne’er shall look upon his like again!”82 Recognition might also come in Garrick’s representation of Shakespeare as a Prospero-esque magician who, “more inspired,/ By charms, and spells, and incantations fir’d,/ Exerts his most tremendous pow’r;/ The thunder growls, the heavens low’r,/ And to his darken’d throne repair,/ The Demons of the deep, and Spirits of the air!”83 Longinus’ grammatical and technical quibbles ignore the participatory nature and intent of the ode, which incorporates the audience into the text through its playful interaction with the Shakespeare canon and subsequently mapping that canon onto Stratford-upon-Avon and the experience of the Jubilee itself. Just as Mandella responds with pleasurable recognition to Michael’s quoting of Macbeth in 10 Things, Garrick’s ode strives to evoke a similarly affective reaction in his audience. Garrick’s own simulacrum of the event appeared in his play The Jubilee that same year. The centrality of the pageant to the event as a whole is indicated by the fact that it appears in full in both Garrick’s play and the satirical Man and Wife, where the procession passes in front of Shakespeare’s

80  Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 26. 81  Hamlet, 1.2.187–88. 82  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 202. 83  Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 194.

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birthplace.84 While it may not have happened in Stratford, revisionist narratives made sure to include it: in Garrick’s case, “as it was intended for Stratford-upon-Avon,” according to the Dramatis Personae.85 Garrick’s ‘intended’ version of the Jubilee staged at Drury Lane mocks the rustic simplicity of Stratford’s native inhabitants and their concern that the Jubilee is some sort of popish event before being frightened by the celebratory canon fire marking the beginning of the event. This is surely a response to Garrick’s critics who took issue with his choice of terminology—only a simpleton would earnestly connect his Jubilee with popery. And in the play, it is Stratford itself that becomes the primary impediment that threatens to ruin the event, whether through their ineptitude or greed in handling the influx of visitors or in the efforts of the “mulberry scoundrels” hawking pieces of “the true Mulberry Tree.”86 Despite the behind-­ the-­scenes hustle and bustle, the pageant goes off without a hitch this time, with the rain only seeming to start after the procession has concluded and before the festivities move into the rotunda. The Jubilee concludes with the dedication of Shakespeare’s statue and a celebration of the success of the Jubilee itself. Garrick omits the damage done to the rotunda by the rain on the second evening, the cancellation of the planned fireworks due to the same weather, and the soggy horserace for the Jubilee Cup on the final day, in favor of ending on a high note with the dedication. In spite of the criticism of the Jubilee, Garrick was having none of it, choosing instead to enshrine the event as a successful commemoration of his love and reverence for Shakespeare that overcame rubes, critics, and profiteers. At the close of the play, actors and audiences joined together to cheer “Bravo Jubilee!/ Shakespeare forever!”87 And whatever the perceived 84  Colman, Man and Wife, 38–42. Once the pageant concludes, Man and Wife largely abandons the Jubilee in favor of following the comedic romantic shenanigans of its central plot, with the Jubilee offering the masquerade ball as a plot contrivance for comical mistaken identity. As Colman’s play premiered before Garrick’s, it does not mimic the exact order of procession as arranged by Garrick. Colman’s version of the procession is organized around genre whereas Garrick’s follows, presumably, his own preferences without regard to genre. Antony and Cleopatra bring up the rear in Garrick’s Jubilee, but they appear near the front of the procession in Man and Wife. See: Garrick, The Jubilee, 115–21. Additionally, there are some notable differences in the characters included in the individual dumb shows: although Anne Boleyn does not appear in Garrick’s list of characters for Henry VIII, she is central in Colman’s. 85  Garrick, The Jubilee, 101. 86  Garrick, The Jubilee, 112. 87  Garrick, The Jubilee, 126.

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deficiencies of the Jubilee, the Drury Lane Jubilee ran for a record ninety-­ one nights.88 Together, Mandella and Garrick represent the challenges facing Shakespeare’s fans when fandom is collectively dismissed, especially according to the caricature of it embodied by Mandella as idolatrous, sexually confusing, ignorant of the boundary between fantasy and reality, and simultaneously excessively emotional and emotionally immature. Such an assessment of fans ignores their own self-awareness and misconstrues their often playful approach to their fan objects, an approach that blends reverence with irreverence rather than expressing blind devotion or actual fanaticism. Looking back to Garrick’s Jubilee, the event is best understood as the precursor to a modern fan convention rather than a comical and failed devotional gesture that verged on actual sacrilege by seeking to deify Shakespeare. Centuries before fandom become a predominant form of cultural engagement, Garrick planned an event that sought to evoke the pleasure of recognition and winking reverence inherent in fan communities today. Such an approach would not be possible from the position of true fanaticism.

Bibliography 10 Things I Hate About You. Directed by Gil Junger. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. Anti-Midas: A Jubilee Preservative from Unclassical, Ignorant, False, and Invidious Criticism. London, 1769. Burt, Richard. “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, 205–32. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Clement, Jennifer. “The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3, no. 2 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 1–24. Colman, George. Man and Wife; or the Shakespeare Jubilee. Dublin, 1770. Davies, Godfrey. “Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.” Modern Philology 48, no. 1 (August 1950): 21–36.  Stott, What Blest Genius?, 176.

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Defoe, Daniel. Curious and Diverting Journies, Thro’ the Whole Island of Great-­ Britain. London, 1734. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Vol. 2. London, 1724. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. 2nd edition. Vol. 2. London, 1738. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. 3rd edition. Vol. 2. London, 1742. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Island of Great Britain. 8th edition. Vol. 2. London, 1778. Deitchman, Elizabeth A. “Shakespeare Stiles Style: Shakespeare, Julia Stiles, and American Girl Culture.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W.  B. Worthen, 478–93. Malden: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2008. Dodd, James Solas. Essays and poems, Satirical, Moral, Political, and Entertaining. Cork, 1770. Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Friedman, Michael D. “The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You.” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (2004): 45–65. Garrick, David. “The Jubilee.” In The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques. Vol. 2, edited by Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 97–126. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Garrick’s Vagary. London, 1769. Gentleman, Francis. The Stratford Jubilee. […] To which is prefixed Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee. London, 1769. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Identity and Feminism.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 75–81. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Henderson, Diana E. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of Genre.” In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. III: The Comedies, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 243–65. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

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Holland, Peter. “David Garrick: Saints, Temples and Jubilees.” In Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, edited by Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn, 15–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006a. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006b. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 20th anniversary edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Johnson, Samuel. Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays. London, 1765. Kiss Me Kate. Directed by George Sidney. MGM, 1953. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lanier, Douglas M. “Commemorating Shakespeare in America, 1864.” In Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, edited by Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn, 140–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Leggatt, Alexander. “Teen Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You and O.” In Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter, 245–58. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Liebler, Naomi C. “‘So What?’: Two Postmodern Adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedies.” In Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter, 175–89. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. McLennan, Rachael. “To Count as a Girl: Misdirection in 10 Things I Hate About You.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 1 (July 2014): 1–18. McNelis, Tim. US Youth Films and Popular Music: Identity, Genre, and Musical Agency. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Montagu, Elizabeth. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare. London, 1769. Pittman, L.  Monique. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011. Pittman, L. Monique. “Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the Teenage Film Audience.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2004): 144–52. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005.

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Rowe, Nicholas, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. 6 vols. London, 1709. Stott, Andrew McConnell. What Blest Genius? The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Thompson, Edward. Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee. London, 1769. Victor, Benjamin. The History of the Theatres of London, from the Year 1760 to the Present Time. London, 1771. Watson, Nicola J. “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 199–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Watson, Nicola J. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

CHAPTER 3

“my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the Gift Economy

One of the most salient issues that undergird fan studies—and which the assessment of Shakespeare fandom both invigorates and complicates—is one of power and authority. This issue of control has both intellectual and economic facets that are often intertwined with one another. As such, in considering Shakespeare as a fan object, it is necessary to consider him and his works as property: that is, things that can be possessed, exchanged, sold, and profited from. And when conceived of as an intellectual property invested with considerable cultural caché whose works are continually doing work (both intellectually and in terms of labor), Shakespeare, it seems, can be exploited, stolen from, and copied for personal gain. In Shakespeare studies, these issues come to the surface most frequently in debates over adaptation versus appropriation, typically in relation to film to distinguish between those films that offer an extended and announced engagement with a text whether or not it pursues fidelity (adaptation), and those that borrow from the same texts. Linda Hutcheon defines ‘appropriation’ as “taking possession of another’s story, and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and talents,” emphasizing that all adaptations involve a certain amount of appropriation.1 ‘Appropriation,’ however, simultaneously implies inferiority (it is ‘less than’ an adaptation) and theft (taking something without permission to 1  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (London and New  York: Routledge, 2013), 8, 18.

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adorn the present text), “a matter of a weaker party wresting something of value from unwilling or hostile hands.”2 As it pertains to Shakespeare, the tension and blurred boundaries between adaptation and appropriation are infused with assessments of value and reciprocity. Richard Burt, for example, employs “Shakesploitation” to describe films like 10 Things I Hate About You that ‘dumb down’ Shakespeare for a mass audience.3 In this consideration, the fact that the film is both an extended and—largely—announced engagement with Taming of the Shrew is secondary to the fact that it takes from the play without giving much back. Similar ideas are at work in Graham Holderness’ preference for the term “creative criticism” rather than “fan fiction” to describe his novels The Prince of Denmark (2001) and Black and Deep: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (2015) on the grounds that he sees fanfic as emulative whereas creative criticism is rooted in professional academic and interpretive accountability.4 Rather than simply copying aspects of—and thus taking from—Shakespeare, creative criticism offers something back in return in the form of intellectual compensation. Some critics maintained more neutral ground in their assessments, such as Douglas Lanier who acknowledges the connotations of theft/possession/property in ‘appropriation,’ offering the term “Shakespop” to describe appropriative relationships “that might better be explained in terms of negotiation, collaboration, exchange, or other models.”5 More recently, Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes have posited ‘Shakespeare user’ to characterize a broad range of digital-age engagements with Shakespeare that helps account for some of the technological and cultural shifts that have occurred since Lanier published Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture in 2002. Fazel and Geddes argue that “to use is not to create but re-create; use suggests a recalibration, exploitation, and consumption of something that is

2  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 3  Richard Burt, “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, eds. Courtney Lehnmann and Lisa S. Starks (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 206. 4  Graham Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26. 5  Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 5.

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already there, and builds connections between the traditional conventions of critical and creative practices that are deemed appropriative.”6 In this chapter, I consider the contentious issue of ownership as it pertains to Shakespeare. As Robert Shaughnessy notes in his discussion of Shakespeare and popular culture: “The ‘popular’ is itself hardly a singular or uncontested term or frame of reference: seen from some angles, it denotes community, shared values, democratic participation, accessibility, and fun; from others, the mass-produced commodity, the lowest common denominator, the reductive or the simplified, or the shoddy, the coarse, and the meretricious. When the transmission and appropriation of Shakespeare are at stake, considerations of taste and aesthetic value are also bound up with inevitably vexed questions of cultural ownership, educational attainment and class, and with issues of who the desired and actual consumers of ‘popular’ Shakespeares may be, who these hope to include, and who they don’t.”7 Shaughnessy here—and as Lanier does via Shakespop—highlights the often palpable but difficult to define dividing line between official, professional Shakespeares and informal, amateur Shakespeares, with the quality and inherent value of the former surpassing that of the latter. Writing on the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, Michael Whitmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote that “On this 400th anniversary of his death, we celebrate Shakespeare’s staying power as a poet, playwright, and cultural force. But we also celebrate the nearly infinite adaptability of his stories and the fact that they sustain a conversation across a truly diverse set of languages and cultural forms. The conversation continues because of what we, every one of us, bring to it. Shakespeare belongs to all of us.”8 Whitmore here echoes what is among the first and most famous commemorations of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson’s eulogizing of the playwright as “not of an age, but for all time!” in the preface to the First Folio. Seen as transcending time and place from the 6  Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5. 7  Robert Shaughnessy, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. 8  Michael Whitmore, “Shakespeare Belongs to All of Us,” The Folger Shakespeare Library, Published April 21, 2016, accessed June 17, 2019, https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger. edu/2016/04/21/shakespeare-belongs-us/.

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seventeenth century to the present, the timelessness of Shakespeare means that he can be claimed by everyone. The truth of this ideal, I would argue, is in continual flux and a source of endless debate, an assertion that certainly sounds good but which is weighed down by numerous catches and caveats when it comes to engaging with and interpreting Shakespeare. While we are all theoretically permitted equal access to Shakespeare and can do with him as we please, to also conceive of him as something that can be exploited, stolen from, or even misinterpreted is to expose some of the tensions at work in the assertion of accessibility and collective ownership. Indeed, to appropriate George Orwell, we might suggest that in practice, while all engagements with Shakespeare are equal, some are more equal than others. Scholars and members of the Shakespeare industry become, in this regard, the determiners of value. It is important to note here, however, that I do not intend to suggest that there exists some shadowy, hegemonic, Shakespearean monoculture that these custodians defend, as there are easily identifiable disagreements within and between these groups regarding what Shakespeare ‘means,’ or why his works are historically or contemporaneously significant. Indeed, it would be more accurate to think of Shakespeare in the plural in this regard, as there are— and have been—many Shakespeares since the late sixteenth century. Such is the nature of popular culture, of criticism, of commemoration, of tourism. Holderness points to the way in which texts and history are interpreted in the present as essentially presentist objects: “in reading an old text we cannot disown our modern knowledge: consciously or unconsciously, we can interpret the language of the past only by translating it into a language we ourselves can understand.”9 Shakespeare is continually being reinterpreted for a ‘now’ that is always in flux, a present that means different things to different people, and which leads to many different official (critical, historical, commercial) Shakespeares. And as Douglas Lanier notes, the professionalization of Shakespeare scholarship had birthed a “class of cultural professionals” “that wields considerable institutional authority,” and which “lends its authority to a web of loosely affiliated institutions that comprise official Shakespeare-dom,” such as the Shakespeare Association of America, Folger Shakespeare Library, Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and so forth.10 In 9  Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 168. 10  Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 139–40.

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more recent years—and following on the ‘Shakespop’ phenomenon that Lanier articulated—the multiplicity of Shakespeares has grown, often in ways that do not purposefully seek to prop up the multifaceted Shakespearean official culture. Regarding the ‘Shakespeare user,’ Fazel and Geddes note that in the digital age, “Shakespeare is seized in service of a potentially limitless archive of cultural memory, constructed through its willful disregard for the traditional avenues of canonicity.”11 Running throughout all of assessments of Shakespeare is the notion that insofar as he and his works can be owned by us all, so too can he be kidnapped, seized, and stolen from the purveyors of official and institutional Shakespearean culture and put to—or exploited for—other unofficial uses. This communal property paradigm illuminates the debates regarding how Shakespeare can be used, as it is infused with notions of stewardship and collective responsibility. Shakespeare’s garden is open to all, but that does not mean we can pick all of the violets, litter on its footpaths, or call its roses by another name. Instead, we have a responsibility to tend the garden, pick sparingly from its blossoms, to acknowledge and appreciate its beauty, so that our fellow co-owners can continue to enjoy the garden. And the purveyors of Shakespearean official culture—scholars and otherwise—serve as the most prominent stewards and caretakers of that garden, even if they might disagree on the best practices for doing so. An illuminating example of this is the response of official culture to the “sacrilegious thesis” of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous (2011) which loosely follows the Oxfordian theory of authorship, depicting Shakespeare as an illiterate buffoon in the process.12 In an act of protest against the film’s premiere at the London Film Festival, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust symbolically covered Lord Ronald Gower’s Shakespeare Memorial (1888) that stands in Stratford-upon-Avon, along with covering up street and pub signs bearing Shakespeare’s name.13 Following the release of the film, the Birthplace Trust and Paul Edmonson collaborated with Stanley Wells to release the free e-book Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous (2011), directed specifically at countering the anti-Stratfordian theory and  Fazel and Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” 3.   Sébastien Lefait, “Irreverence as Fidelity?: Adapting Shakespearean Reflexivity in Anonymous (Emmerich 2011),” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 242. 13  “Shakespeare Trust Attacks New ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Film Anonymous.” The Telegraph, Published October 25, 2011, accessed June 25, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8848351/Shakespeare-trust-attacks-new-conspiracy-theory-filmAnonymous.html. 11 12

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­ utlining in detail the evidence in support of Shakespeare’s authorship.14 o After lamenting the “dangerous and foolish” nature of the ideas promoted by works like Anonymous, they lament that “from having been almost entirely the province of amateurs, the topic has begun to infiltrate academia.”15 And such conspiracy theories are grounded in a dangerous form of willful ignorance: “Those who know virtually nothing about the history of a particular period may enjoy engaging with and creating fantasies about it.”16 It is the very antithesis of academic rigor or the pursuit of objectivity, with ‘amateur’ coded as both silly and intellectually suspect, with echoes of fanaticism—anti-Shakespeareans “hardly smile, perhaps characteristic of an obsessive mind.”17 The rigorous scholar here is figured as the rightful steward of Shakespeare’s garden, safeguarding it against those who are “vandalizing the works themselves and the world’s appreciation of them.”18 The concept of vandalism here is significant because it refers to property crime, suggesting that the works are a finite property that can be defaced, thus diminishing their overall value by obscuring our view of the art that lies beneath the graffiti. It is also worth noting that in Edmonson and Wells’ Stratfordian defense, they repeatedly deploy legal rhetoric and approach the debate as a trial, arguing that “We have examined the anti-­Shakespearians’ case with objective rigor and we reject it totally. Any competent court of law would do the same.”19 Writing in response to the academic debate surrounding Anonymous and in support of open-access publishing, Eleanor Collins rightly emphasizes that “Ownership claims on Shakespeare are often complex and multivalent, but they are endemic to this particular academic field; Shakespeare’s name and reputation make him one of the world’s most ardently adored 14  I have no interest here in debating the authorship question. I take it as an established fact that Shakespeare (historical figure) and ‘Shakespeare’ (authorial identity) are one and the same. Rather, I am interested in how the ownership of Shakespeare is articulated as a contentious struggle between amateurs and professionals. Edmonson and Wells’ work here would also lead to the publication of their edited collection Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013) aimed primarily at a scholarly audience as opposed to the imagined popular audience for Shakespeare Bites Back. 15   Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Misfit, Inc. 2011), 12–13. http://bloggingshakespeare. com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Shakespeare_Bites_Back_Book.pdf. 16  Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 19. 17  Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 26. 18  Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 32. 19  Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 27.

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authors, and one of its most marketable products …. A sense of academic ownership has, for many decades, been inscribed within the exclusive institutions that scholars work in, which refuse access to non-members, vet research according to predetermined academic standards and priorities and guard their electronic resources with institutionally bought passwords.”20 In the process, Collins employs a term that is central to struggles over authority within fan cultures: gatekeeping. While the term is employed broadly across many fields of knowledge, in fan cultures, gatekeeping typically refers to the practice by which a fandom’s self-appointed ‘elders’ determine the parameters for membership in their exclusive club. Gatekeeping is most prevalent in science fiction and fantasy fandoms: it is almost always gendered and is often inflected with race and sexuality. ‘Real fans’ tend to be straight, white men—as appointed by other straight, white men—because they possess the right kinds of geek credentials or knowledge about the fan object, whereas women, for example, are more likely to be deemed pretenders, ‘fake fans’ who are latecomers to the fandom and who do not like the right things in the right way and with the right encyclopedic knowledge applied. Writing for CNN in 2012, for example, Joe Peacock lamented the influx of “pretty girls pretending to be geeks for attention” at scifi/comic conventions, women “who have no interest or history in gaming” who are simply playing at being models.21 These gatekeeping efforts are routinely rejected. In response to Peacock, author John Scalzi wrote, “If anyone tells you that there’s a right way to be a geek, or that someone else is not a geek, or shouldn’t be seen as a geek— or that you are not a geek—you can tell them to fuck right off.”22 While these debates have ebbed and flowed, gatekeeping remains a hotly ­contested issue within fan cultures. Gatekeeping regarding Shakespeare 20   Eleanor Collins, “Unlocking Scholarship in Shakespeare Studies: Gatekeeping, Guardianship and Open-Access Journal Publication,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, eds. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 134. 21  Joe Peacock, “Booth Babes Need not Apply,” CNN, Published July 24, 2012, accessed June 30, 2019, http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/booth-babes-need-not-apply/. 22  John Scalzi, “Who Get to Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be,” Published July 26, 2012, accessed June 30, 2019, https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/26/who-gets-tobe-a-geek-anyone-who-wants-to-be/. See also: Kate Gardner, “Viral Tweet About Fandom Gatekeeping Proves We Still Have a Male Geek Problem,” The Mary Sue, Published September 23, 2018, accessed June 30, 2019, https://www.themarysue.com/fandom-gatekeeping-male-geeks/; “Geek Gatekeeping,” Geek Feminism, accessed June 30, 2019, https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Geek_gatekeeping.

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has some parallels in kind but it has established significantly more formalized criteria for inclusion wherein interpretive authority is localized in academic scholarship behind paywalls and in classrooms. See, for example, Edmonson and Wells’ lamentations above regarding the know-nothing amateurs who are beginning to infiltrate the hallowed halls of academia. When we get down to contentious issues such as the authorship debate, we see how collective ownership is negotiated and policed, as well as how hierarchies within that collective are articulated. Writing about fan cultures and gatekeeping, Scalzi proclaims that “Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it.”23 Perhaps rather than conceptualizing anti-Shakespearianism as something that “should be as much despised as any mainstream political or moral taboo or ‘-ism’, such as sexism, racism, or homophobia,”24 we might look at it as another door to Shakespeare. Anti-fandom is, after all, also a form of fandom that paradoxically contributes to the tapestry that it seeks to unravel. In addition to an idealized intellectual or cultural collective ownership of Shakespeare, his legal status as an intellectual property offers further dimension to the question of possession. With no copyright applicable to Shakespeare and no Shakespeare estate to request permissions from or pay royalties to, the mirror of Whitmore and Jonson’s sentiment is emphasized. If intellectually Shakespeare belongs to everyone, legally and literally he belongs to no one. As such, we are all free to profit—financially, intellectually, or otherwise—from our engagements with Shakespeare. It is, in part, the all/none ownership paradox of Shakespeare that makes him such a fascinating case for fan studies to consider because the terrain of the field is traditionally spread with fan objects that are governed by copyright and the evolving legal definitions of—and impinging upon—intellectual property. For many fan scholars, it is the presence of the legalistic relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers that establishes the parameters of fandom. Indeed, in their introduction to The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014), two of the leading scholars in the field grapple with how to define fan fiction and fan activity more generally. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse acknowledge the potentially lengthy history of fandom but prefer to limit their discussion not just to the era of a­ uthorial copyright beginning in the early eighteenth century, but more narrowly to  Scalzi, “Who Get to be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be.”  Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 34.

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the 1960s and later when fan fiction first became most clearly recognizable in its current generic forms, modes of production, and legal entanglements.25 With the emergence of zine culture and science fiction media fandom, fanfic becomes most recognizable as fanfic following the first Star Trek television series that ran from 1966 to 1969. Their choice of such a narrow definition is self-consciously convenient and controversial because, as Hellekson and Busse recognize, defining fanfic becomes more and more challenging the farther we get away from a postmodern media and cultural environment. And they are writing specifically about fanfic in their Reader, excluding other fan activities and forms of engagement which become equally murky as we travel back to the early twentieth century and before. Such definitions become even murkier when we consider fannish engagements with Shakespeare (or Jane Austen, or Arthur Conan Doyle) that have persisted for decades if not centuries before Star Trek and which continue down to the present moment. As Sheenagh Pugh points out in her examination of fan fiction as a literary genre, definitions that hinge on a legalistic relationship between author and content, or on whether or not the author was paid for the writing (paid writing is often referred to as ‘profic’), are problematic because the parameters of the genre become entirely extratextual.26 This is especially problematic as it relates to Shakespeare because, by any definition of the genre, John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (1611) is essentially Taming of the Shrew fan fiction in that it seeks to extend the lives the characters beyond Shakespeare’s play, killing off Katherine so that Petruchio can have the tables turned on him by his new wife, Maria. Thus, Fletcher’s play both expands upon and revises Shakespeare’s characters and plots, what Holly A. Crocker describes as an effort to “recast,” “rewrite,” and reflect upon Shakespeare’s characterizations, offering audiences both more of and more from popular characters in the repertoire of the King’s Men.27 Or we 25  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 6–7. Francesca Coppa makes a similar point in the following: Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 225–44. 26  Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 11. 27  Holly A. Crocker, “The Tamer as Shrewd in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize: Or, The Tamer Tam’d,” SEL 51, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 410.

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have Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear (1681) which revises and tweaks Shakespeare’s tragedy to restore the happy ending of the narrative that Shakespeare himself had revised from Holinshed, with Tate retaining much of Shakespeare’s dialogue even as he cut key characters like the Fool. And in this case, the fan text took the place of the original on the English stage for decades. Although historically and technologically different, these texts are similar to fics that explore Kate and Petruchio’s married life following the conclusion of Shrew, or ones which intervene in and rewrite the endings of the Harry Potter novels or Game of Thrones television series. Pugh embraces a definition of fan fiction as “writing, whether official or unofficial, paid or unpaid, which makes use of an accepted canon of characters, settings and plots generated by another writer or writers.”28 With this definition in mind, Shakespeare fan fiction has existed since Shakespeare’s own lifetime. Because fan fiction dominates fan studies more generally, choosing a definition that restricts the temporal origin of the genre based on a convenient, late-twentieth-­century legal paradigm simultaneously shifts our sense that fan cultures and activities share a roughly contemporaneous point of origin, suggesting that fandom as a concept and set of practices is a post-Star Trek phenomenon. As demonstrated in Chap. 2, however, proto fan conventions have existed since at least Garrick’s Jubilee in 1769. Quite separate from Shakespeare, Natasha Simonova makes a convincing case for reading the “continuations” of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia following the poet’s death in 1586 as “an alternative originary moment” for fan fiction because of their efforts to “adopt Sidney’s characters and settings in order to fill apparent gaps, propel the story toward a happy ending, and recast it in a different mold.”29 Although fan scholars frequently and readily allude to the historical possibilities for a much deeper, pre-twentieth century starting point for fan practices, we need to do more to take those possibilities seriously, even when—and perhaps because—they complicate our assumptions about what fandom looks like as grounded in and responding to contemporary media properties like Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and Harry Potter. The notion of intellectual property as it applies to Shakespeare is deceptively simple, and thus exceedingly messy. Shakespeare’s body of work predates contemporary notions of intellectual property, which can be traced  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 25.  Natasha Simonoa, “Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Case of Sidney’s Arcadia,” Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (2012): sec. 1, para. 1. 28 29

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back to the 1710 Statue of Anne, the first effort to establish legal parameters for copyright. But as Elizabeth F. Judge notes, the Statute of Anne was primarily aimed at protecting the rights of booksellers rather than authors: it “significantly, did not protect individual elements of a fictional work, such as fictional characters, and, as judicially interpreted, did not grant authors the right to prevent others from creating new works derived from the authors’ original books, such as adaptations and abridgments.”30 Busse sees the Statute of Anne as a key moment in the prehistory of fan fiction because it “reconceptualized the role of the creator of a work of art … that regarded the author as the sole owner of his work,”31 but as Judge demonstrates, in practice, the law, rather than defending the author’s exclusive ownership of characters and plots, “protected the proprietor against a fairly narrow compass of potential infringements best described as piracy of the verbatim text.”32 Nevertheless, 1710 certainly marked the beginnings of legal steps toward our current understanding of intellectual property, as eighteenth-century novelists in particular sought to assert a moral right to their characters—often in vain—even as the law primarily protected the economic rights of the sellers. The statute gave rights to the authors for a set, and renewable, period of fourteen years, so long as they remained alive. In practice, however, the author’s possession of copyright was of intangible value: the copyright held by the author was typically purchased by the publisher along with the manuscript, limiting the author’s legal right to the work once it appeared in print. Subsequent Copyright Acts in 1842 and 1911 expanded the protections and rights granted to the author. Previous legal measures such as the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 and the Licensing Order of 1643, however, made little mention of the authors of the works in question and focused exclusively on regulating the book trade and censorship. Regardless of the general silence of eighteenth-century law regarding an author’s ownership of his or her characters as intellectual properties, Judge reminds us that such discussions were still being had by authors such as Samuel Richardson who were incensed by the appearance of their ‘kidnapped’ characters in 30  Elizabeth F. Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters: Eighteenth-Century Fan Fiction, Copyright Law, and the Custody of Fictional Characters,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 29. 31  Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 21. 32  Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 29.

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other texts and unofficial sequels, debates that were often figured in “parental and custodial, rather than proprietary or legal” terms.33 By the time the Statute of Anne was passed in 1710, Shakespeare had been dead for nearly a century, making him incapable of asserting either a legal or moral right to his works or characters. Nevertheless, other authors and playwrights who adapted Shakespeare certainly addressed the permissibility of what they were doing in legalistic terms. In the preface for Christopher Bullock’s The Cobler of Preston (an adaptation of the Induction frame of The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in 1716 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields), the playwright defends his use and method of crediting Shakespeare for the reading audience: “I believe it will appear I have the Story as it was wrote by Shakespear in The Taming of the Shrew; and part of his Language I have made use of, with a little Alteration (which, for the satisfaction of my Readers, I have distinguish’d by this Mark “ before each Line) and I hope I may be allow’d (without Offence) to take Shakespear’s Tinker of Burton-Heath, and make him the Cobler of Preston, as well as another: for no single Person has yet pretended to have a Patent for plundering Old Plays, how often soever he may put it in practice.”34 Bullock goes on to note that he does not wish to be accused of “endeavouring to acquire the Name of a Poet by transcribing from other Men’s Plays.”35 Although, he does note that he wrote the play in an effort to scoop Drury Lane when he heard they were preparing a play of the same name adapting the same part of the same Shakespeare play, so wrote his own version in a few days to get it on stage first because “I thought it might be of as good service to our Stage as the other.”36 Bullock defends this undercutting as a common historical practice in the theater which some people have only now “urg’d against me for a Crime,” but which he prefers to see as the “intercepting of Ammunition going to the Enemy, and afterwards employing it against them.”37 Bullock is referring here to Charles Johnson’s The Cobler of Preston (1716), which premiered the following week, after Bullock’s play was staged.38 What is interesting here is the way in which Bullock negotiates his intellectual and moral debt—or lack thereof—to both Shakespeare and Johnson. He makes a point to demarcate Shakespeare’s words with  Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 37–41, 58  Christopher Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, a Farce (London: 1716), vi–vii. 35  Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, viii. 36  Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, ix–x. 37  Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, ix. 38  See: Charles Johnson, The Cobler of Preston (London, 1716). 33 34

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quotation marks so as not to be accused of claiming them as his own. But because, as he wryly puts it, no one has “a Patent for plundering Old Plays,” his Drury Lane rivals have no legitimate claim of ownership over the idea or even the title. We might owe an intellectual debt to Shakespeare that should be acknowledged, but Bullock embraces the notion that Shakespeare does not belong to anyone, a notion that extends from Shakespeare to anything he or his works inspire, although, as Bullock points out, not everyone is quite so open-minded about the issue as he is as he alludes to new arguments about the potential criminality of intellectual poaching in the wake of the Statute of Anne. In his prologue to Love in a Forest (1723), an adaptation of As You Like It, Johnson represents himself as simply modernizing Shakespeare, proclaiming that “His whole Ambition does, at most, aspire/ To tune the sacred Bard’s immortal Lyre;/ The Scene from Time and Error to restore,/ And give the Stage, from SHAKESPEAR one Play more.”39 Despite his claims of fine-tuning the play, Johnson does make a number of large-scale changes, not least of all by having Duke Senior entertained by the Rude Mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe performance from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By contrast, the full title page of The Three Conjurors (1763), an adaptation of Macbeth dedicated to the embattled MP John Wilkes, identifies the play as “Stolen from Shakespeare.”40 I would argue that ‘stolen’ here refers to the intent of the adaptation and the anonymous playwright’s use of Macbeth to make a political point about Wilkes, tyranny, and the freedom of the press, as opposed to doing something with Macbeth for Macbeth: he or she is purposefully taking from Shakespeare with no intention of giving something back to him. Prior to the Statute of Anne, John Dryden provides one of the most detailed accounts of what it meant to be both inspired by and to adapt or appropriate Shakespeare, and the balancing act between reverence and revision, inspiration and imitation. In the preface to his Troilus and Cressida (1679), Dryden expresses his reverence for Shakespeare but notes the weaknesses in his writing, which Dryden ascribes primarily to the deficiencies of the English language while Shakespeare lived. Furthermore, he criticizes the First Folio, laying the blame for its deficiencies at the feet of “the Actors, who printed it after Shakespeare’s death; and that too, so  Charles Johnson, Love in a Forest: A comedy (London, 1723), 70.  The Three Conjurors, a Political Interlude. Stolen from Shakespeare (London, 1763), title page. 39 40

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carelessly, that a more uncorrect Copy I never saw.”41 Consequently, he sees his work as an act of restoration more so than alteration: “because the play was Shakespear’s; and that there appear’d in some places of it, the admirable Genius of the Author; I undertook to remove that heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d.”42 He then goes on to outline exactly where he has inserted new scenes or altered existing ones, what he has “borrow’d” from Euripides, and his overall approach to modernizing Shakespeare’s “obsolete” language.43 The play proper begins with a prologue spoken by the ghost of Shakespeare who begins by addressing the audience, “See, my lov’d Britons, see your Shakespeare rise./ … / In this my rough-drawn Play, you shall behold/ Some Master-strokes, so manly and so bold/ That he, who meant to alter, found ’em such/ He shook; and thought it Sacrilege to touch.”44 Robert W.  McHenry Jr. reads this as “an early expression of Bardolatry.”45 Shakespeare’s presence here implies the playwright’s approval of Dryden’s work and, importantly, his lack of carelessness when altering the original play—Dryden’s reverent hesitation and fear of sacrilegious intervention tells the audience that every change has been carefully considered and would be approved by Shakespeare. Equally interesting is Dryden’s allusion to the ownership of Shakespeare. The ghost addresses himself to the audience as “your Shakespeare,” the author giving himself over to the collective ownership of Britons. Dryden thus creates a literal Shakespeare of his own to proclaim that Shakespeare belongs to all of us, himself included. Earlier in the preface, Dryden cites Longinus to proclaim, “We ought not to regard a good imitation as a theft; but as a beautiful Idea of him who undertakes to imitate, by forming himself on the invention and the work of another man.”46 Whether an imitation is to be deemed theft or not theft hinges not on what or how much of the original is imitated but rather on the perceived aesthetic or literary value of the finished product.  John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida (London, 1769), np.  Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, np. 43  Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, ar. 44  Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, Pro. 45  Robert W.  McHenry Jr., “Plagiarism and Paternity in Dryden’s Adaptations,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 15. McHenry offers a detailed examination of Dryden’s sometimes anxious articulation of his debt to Shakespeare in the prefaces to a number of his adaptations through the paradigm of plagiarism. 46  Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, av. 41 42

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A bad imitation is a theft, but a good one is a collaboration between two authors in which imitative impulse becomes a ‘beautiful idea’ that ultimately elevates the imitator by virtue of his ingenuity.47 Categories of exclusion based on aesthetic or literary quality, however, are inherently unstable. What exactly distinguishes a ‘good’ imitation from a ‘bad’ one? By justifying his process in detail in the preface to Troilus and Cressida and by staging Shakespeare’s approval, Dryden implies that his work is done in the spirit of Shakespeare, an ambiguous claim of authenticity that simultaneously proclaims the deficiencies of the original text and writing while asserting that the changes he made are the kinds that Shakespeare himself would have made had he been alive in the 1670s and benefited from their better sense of the English language. Paradoxically, even as he goes to great lengths to explain his alterations and improvements on the play—delineating Shakespeare from Shakespearean—Dryden also confesses that the process has blended their two voices together: “I am willing to acknowledge, that as I have often drawn his English nearer to our times so I have sometimes conform’d my own to his: & consequently, the Language is not altogether so pure, as it is significant.”48 Through the process of reverent revision, both Shakespeare and Dryden come to speak via a unified voice and in a language that is neither wholly Shakespeare’s nor wholly Dryden’s. Dryden takes possession of Shakespeare, but in so doing Shakespeare also takes possession of Dryden, an animate intellectual property possessed of some intangible agency that ultimately takes the active form of Shakespeare’s ghost. Additionally, Dryden’s claim that it is his responsible handling of Shakespeare that makes his work ‘not theft’ anticipates Holderness’ preference to categorize his novels as ‘creative criticism’ rather than ‘fan fiction’ because they embody “a dialogue between the play and its sources, attempting to mediate between two historical periods.”49 Both perspectives are quite distinct from Bullock’s suggestion that all imitations of Shakespeare are acts of plundering, ones which do not need to be justified or apologized for because you cannot steal what does not belong to any47  What Dryden embraces here is very much akin to Diana E. Henderson’s preference for “diachronic collaborations” rather than ‘appropriations,’ evident here in Dryden’s understanding of himself as working with Shakespeare. See: Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 8. 48  Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, ar. 49  Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” 209.

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one: that is, an idea inspired by an ‘Old Play.’ And yet Bullock is simultaneously clear that he does not want to be accused of stealing Shakespeare’s words, which is why he uses quotation marks to distinguish Shakespeare’s writing from his own for the reader, perhaps an implicit acknowledgment of the recent Statute of Anne’s prohibition against verbatim reproduction. By contrast, adapters from Dryden to David Garrick sought to represent themselves as collaborators with Shakespeare, whether through harmonious amalgamation of voices in Troilus and Cressida or through Garrick’s removal of “the Jingle and Quibble” from Romeo and Juliet (1748) or by “judiciously blending … TATE and SHAKESPEARE” in King Lear (1756).50 In an era of the emerging sense—and legal definition—of copyright that primarily applied to living authors and the replication of text, adapters of Shakespeare articulated their engagement with him through an ambiguous and shifting paradigm of theft, property crime, and communal ownership that was a form of reverentially justified tampering with outdated but admirable writing. And the more reverential the approach, the less it was an act of theft. The perception of noble intentions has come to undergird the modern sense of the custodial approach to Shakespeare that sees ‘good’ Shakespeare as professional, adaptive, and scholarly responsible, and ‘bad’ Shakespeare as amateur, appropriative, or intellectually suspect (even if we cannot all agree on what exactly belongs to one category or the other). A key element of fandom and the identification of fan texts lies in the distinction between professional and amateur, as well as between work and play, distinctions that are—intentionally or not—equally grounded in cultural and economic hierarchies conceptually separate serious professional work from affective amateur play, as well as in the traditional connection between professional work and cultural/economic production, and amateur play and cultural/economic consumption. As Mark Duffett points out, many critics of fandom draw an inextricable connection between fandom and consumer culture, suggesting that fan activity is often, if not 50  Garrick, “To the Reader” in Romeo and Juliet in The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 3, eds. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 77; “Introduction,” in The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 3, eds. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 303.

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primarily, about consumption. But Duffett rejects the primacy of consumption to fans, emphasizing that “first, fans often like things for free, and, second, … they are always more than consumers. They are more than buyers and their transactions are purchased with a cultural interest that goes beyond merely practicing the process of buying.”51 Setting aside Shakespeare for the moment, I will examine some of the important features of the professional/amateur and work/play divisions as they are articulated in fan studies that offer a productive lens through which to view Shakespeare before demonstrating how Shakespeare also complicates these divisions in ways that necessitate a reconceptualization of what we mean by ‘fan works’ or ‘fan texts,’ in the light of ownership paradigms that I have outlined thus far. Simply by virtue of his (lack of) copyright status, Shakespeare threatens to undermine many of the working definitions of various fan practices, even as those same discussions and definitions help shed new light on how we have been engaging with Shakespeare over the centuries. Connected to the issue of copyright is the question of whether we consider fan creators amateurs or professionals, and their creations to be a form of play or work. On the surface, these categories of distinction seem straightforward. In our contemporary media environment, professional work comes from cultural producers: say, HBO and the directors, writers, producers, and actors working on Game of Thrones. These are the people who get paid for their work by the network that produces the show and who are ultimately responsible for establishing and disseminating the official, canonical narrative and characterizations that comprise the fan object that is the Game of Thrones fan object. Some of these cultural producers are also responsible for enforcing the copyright status of their work. Invested fans whose affection for that object who are motivated and inspired to transform that object in some way, such as by writing fan fiction, are typically prohibited from receiving financial compensation for their efforts because they do not own the copyright. Fans thus do what they do for free, which becomes a key distinction that divides professionals from amateurs: professionals get paid to do what amateurs will do for little or no compensation. Equally important is the implication of skill and quality, that professionals get paid to do what they do because they are better at it than everyone else. In part, however, this is also a legal necessity. 51  Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 21.

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Karen Hellekson notes that “Fans’ fear of cease-and-desist orders … has resulted in a fannish convention of making no money from their projects, thus relegating fans to amateur status.”52 By explicitly refraining from seeking remuneration and giving their works away as gifts (such as by uploading a fic to an online database), fans are able to—largely—avoid being subjected to the enforcement of copyright laws that could result in their writing being quashed or in the fan themselves being sued for damages/infringement. When fans seek financial compensation, “Play is now labor, and the product itself either, it is argued, competes with the original copyholder’s work or represents a product in which s/he should benefit.”53 As Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth note, when copyright is enforced against fan creative output, cultural producers are ultimately defending themselves against the very audience they have sought to create and for acting on the adulation they have sought to cultivate.54 Relegated to the status of a hobby, fandom becomes conceptually a form of play rather than work, which the fans’ actual jobs or income support provide the means and free time to pursue, tolerated so long as it remains harmless. Many of these legal issues remain roughly consistent and straightforward, shifting in line with broader cultural debates about intellectual property, whether debates about sampling in the music industry in the 1980s and 1990s, or the more contemporary practice of streaming or uploading videos of people playing videogames on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. But fans and fan studies scholars have done much to explore the theoretical/ideological implications and history of a binary that situates playful, gift-giving amateur consumers on one end and working, paid, professional producers on the other, hinging on the ability—or inability—of either to participate in the literary or media marketplace. Some of this exploration involves one of the questions that permeate the present work: who owns a story? And what is the distinction between derivative and inspired work? As Francesca Coppa argues, fan fiction can only exist as a category within a system “where storytelling has been

52  Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 157. 53  Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor,” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 6 (2014): 1096. 54  Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,” 1092.

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industrialized to the point that our shared culture is owned by others.”55 Building on Henry Jenkins’ work in Convergence Culture, she goes on to suggest that fan fiction is best understood as “what happened to folk culture: to the appropriation of fables and the retellings of local legends, to the elaborations of tall tales and drinking songs and ghost stories told round the campfire,” separate from any formal marketplace.56 Consequently, situating fan creativity in the gift economy makes pragmatic sense. However, as a number of fan scholars have argued, doing so recapitulates the gendering of work. As Jenkins and others note, contemporary media fandom (beginning in the 1960s) and the writing of fan fiction has historically been dominated by women and, later, other marginalized groups, with fan labor generally viewed as ‘women’s work,’ and fannish affect—as we saw in Chap. 2—gendered female.57 Doing work without compensation because it is emotionally fulfilling—payment 55  Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 7. 56  Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 7. Speaking about the American example in particular, Jenkins argues that in the twentieth century, folk culture was largely displaced by mass media to generate the stories that mattered to people, pushing folk practices underground. Fan works represent “the public reemergence of grassroots creativity.” See: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 135–37. 57  Jenkins addresses this history throughout Textual Poachers. See also: Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London: New  York University Press, 2006), 43–54; Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 178; Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 101–14; Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 42–54; Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 71–72; Ross Haenfler, Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115–18; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91; Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 116; Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,” 1093; As Hellekson and Busse note, in more recent years, “Gay, lesbian, bi, and trans fans, fans of color, queer fans—all are now vocal and visible, and fan fiction, particularly slash, can no longer be considered the aegis of straight white women.” See: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 80.

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enough—reinforces the patriarchal stereotype that men’s work is economically valuable and thus deserving of pay, whereas women’s work is less so, and women’s labor—or, in the case of fan fiction, women’s creative labor—is a gift freely given. Some fan scholars see recognizing fan labor as a legitimate form of work and creative interpretation that is accommodated by copyright laws as an issue of gender equity,58 with Abigail De Kosnik in particular arguing that fan creativity does not have to belong to the gift economy, encouraging fan authors, especially women, to monetize labor that does, in fact, generate income indirectly by serving as free “advertising for mass-marketed media products,” prolonging the lives of those products by encouraging continued engagement with them.59 Alternately, Hellekson suggests that gendered gifting that objectifies the female fan “turns one role of woman and gift on its head: the woman is still the gift, but now she can give herself. This permits women agency that they lack under traditional patriarchal models.”60 As Jenkins notes, the tensions between cultural producers and cultural consumers as it relates to fan creativity and the dissemination of that creativity comes down to two economies—two “different systems of appraising and allocating value”— interacting with one another, where in “One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (the gift economy) on social motives,”61 economies that are inflected with gendered ideologies. Gifting has further significance within fan communities, particularly in the writing of fan fiction that is separate from—but not entirely disconnected from—the broader property, legal, and ideological considerations discussed above. As Coppa notes, fan fiction is frequently conceived of and written as a gift for the fan community as an act of reciprocity, of giving back to the very community that has inspired a fan fiction writer to write and which involves more than purely marketplace considerations of gift giving, a system of social rather than financial obligations.62 And while many fics—especially first-time fics—are gifts written to give back to the community at large, many others are written as gifts for specific authors or  Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,” 1104–05.  Abigail De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 124. 60  Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 116. 61  Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York and London: New  York University Press, 2013), 63. 62  Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 9–11. 58 59

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in response to specific requests. I will deal with fanfic in more detail in the next chapter, but two examples here will suffice. GloriaMundi explains that they wrote “The Triumphs of the Amazon” in response to a general request made by another user, AriadnesThread: “Ariadne’s Thread asked for ‘anything involving the fairies … I’m also fascinated by the dynamic between Theseus and Hippolyta. He captured her in battle, yet the first words we hear them say to each other are deeply sensual: how did that happen?’. This is my answer to that question.”63 Likewise, aTableofGreen’s “13th Night: Malvolio’s Revenge” is identified as “a Shakespeare Birthday Exchange gift for the wonderful runecestershire based on his title prompt.”64 Fan fiction archives are populated with numerous examples of ‘gift fic,’ which can also include fan fiction written as part of community-­ driven challenges or games—a different form of play than that which is evident in the work–play dichotomy—that require writers to be clever and innovative within a set of generic, narrative, or structural limitations.65 Fan fiction thus has a necessary legal and economic basis in a gift economy in relation to commodity culture as a whole, but the circulation and reciprocation of gifts within the community is also one of the most vital forms of interaction that takes place between community members. Likewise, gifts of time and experience are also given in the form of beta reading, the fan fiction version of peer review and editorial assistance that is offered on a voluntary basis. Relegating fan works to an inferior category of amateur play ultimately downplays and diminishes their status as frequently progressive acts of cultural engagement and criticism. In recent years, popular culture has been engaged in a very public debate about diversity and representation— both in terms of its necessity and its limitations—in media texts. This is, however, a very old debate for fan creators, whose work has often responded to the lack of diversity and representation by forcibly refashioning cultural texts to be more diverse and representative, carving out spaces for more female voices and characters, inserting non-white or non-­ 63   GloriaMundi, “The Triumphs of the Amazon,” Archive of Our Own, Published December 20, 2009, accessed, July 8, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/32333. 64  aTableofGreen, “13th Night: Malvolio’s Revenge,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 22, 2015, accessed July 8, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3802597. 65  Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 23. It is tempting to read some of Shakespeare’s own writing as part of this history, particularly his sonnets. What is “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” if not a sonnet challenge fic?

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Christian characters into existing WASP-y fictional worlds, exploring queer or non-binary identities, desires, and relationships, or by disrupting chaste, shame-based propriety through the inclusion of sex-positive eroticism. As Lev Grossman reminds us, “Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be to only way things have to be.”66 In many cases, the current cultural debates about what is lacking in or problematic about media texts were anticipated and addressed—sometimes radically so—in fan communities years, sometimes decades, ago. Fan works are frequently at their most radical and ideological when, rather than revising or changing a plot or characterization, they exploit the subversive potential of the text’s gaps and silences by “teasing out the subtext” to “appropriate and redefine the empty spaces and read the text against its industrial and historical context.”67 Why assume, for example, that all media texts are composed of heteronormative worlds unless otherwise stated? Of course, Shakespeare adaptations and criticism has been doing this kind of work for a long time as well. Many critics and adapters have promoted subversive readings and interpretations of the plays and have addressed the gaps and lacks of the text by doing essentially the same thing that fans have been doing with Star Trek or Harry Potter, frequently produced by the purveyors of official culture, achievable in no small part because of Shakespeare’s (lack of) copyright status. There are an infinite number of examples of race- and/or gender-blind casting in productions of the plays, all-female productions, queer adaptations, or ones that critique the ideologies and stereotypes of gender, race, class, and religion that appear in the original play, too numerous to list here. And many of these objects of official culture are produced for the marketplace, to be performed on stages, in cinemas, in classrooms, or in print. The distinction between amateur and professional Shakespeares, or between the Shakespeare fan and the Shakespeare critic, is more nebulous than the common use of these terms suggests. In some cases, as in Edmonson and Wells’ use discussed above, ‘amateur’ carries with it distinctly ‘less than,’ pejorative connotations of intellectual inferiority. Others 66  Lev Grossman, “Forward,” in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, ed. Anne Jamison (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), xiii. 67  Hellekson and Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” 76.

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have been more forgiving in their use of the term, although it still carries with it hedging about things like quality and intellectual significance. Writing about videos created and uploaded to YouTube by The Geeky Blonde (Rhiannon McGavin), Stephen O’Neill claims that her “one-­ woman performances bear the characteristic attributes of what can be variously described as fan, amateur, or … YouTube Shakespeares,” while also noting that his essay is not an effort “to valorize the category of the amateur.” In this configuration, ‘fan’ and ‘amateur’ become largely synonymous.68 Michelle K. Yost characterizes Shakespeare fan fiction as unpaid “Shakespeare-related amateur fiction,” in contrast to “the world of professional adaptation.”69 In Shakespeare studies, the amateur fan is typically seen as separate and distinct from the professional adapter and critic, although the basis of this distinction is unclear, contingent as much on the perception of a given text’s aesthetic or intellectual value (and the credentials of its creator), as it is on its platform of dissemination or potential remunerative value, and a distinction that preserves academia’s role as the gatekeepers of Shakespeare. So whereas some Shakespeare critics have dismissed fanfic as mimetic and simplistic, others have gone to the opposite extreme to proclaim it as a radical space for pushing beyond the limits of institutional Shakespeare in particular. Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall describe fanfic as a renegade art form that serves as the refreshing antithesis of academic stuffiness and “offers a radical and safe space for students and amateur Shakespeareans alike to stretch their wings through a ridiculousness that only exists, and can only exist, in the unmonitored marginalia of academia.”70 In the process, they posit a somewhat misleading dichotomy between fans and academics by implying that contemporary Shakespeare criticism is largely closed to alternative, subversive readings of the plays and that it presents Shakespeare as an “author-god,” thus maintaining the “hegemonic discourses of domination that infest all of Shakespeare’s

68  Stephen O’Neill, “Theorizing User Agency in YouTube Shakespeare,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 130. 69   Michelle K.  Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 193, 195. 70  Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 29.

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work” while ignoring the fact that “Shakespeare is dated.”71 Going further, they argue that “[t]he discourse of fanfiction operates opposite the authoritative discourse” of academia, and that the two are so dialectically opposed that it may not be possible to bring fan fiction to academia or vice versa.72 There are a number of problems with this line of argument, primarily because Shakespeare scholarship is not so universally conservative and fanfic so universally radical as they suggest. To rehearse all of the examples here would be tedious and tangential, but suffice it to say that Shakespeare criticism has been mining the subversive potential of the plays and poems for a number of decades and without finding a universal infestation of hegemonic oppression in the process. While it may be tempting to proclaim that Shakespeare is dated (which must literally be true in some respects regarding someone who died 400 years ago), the proliferation of alternative Shakespeares in criticism, theater, film, and adaptations more generally—including fan fiction—indicates that this fact is perhaps not as self-evident as Finn and McCall suggest. Indeed, criticism and fanfic can often be seen doing similar work through different means and methods. Fan works such as fan fiction are often written about as subversive or countercultural texts produced to resist the hegemonic ideologies and assumptions that are evident in the original text.73 Slash, for example, forcibly carves out a space for queer representation in films and television shows that are hesitant or unwilling to do so. Likewise, fan fiction that focuses on under- or misrepresented gender, racial, or religious categories serves as a political or activist intervention into whitewashed, patriarchal, or homogenous fictional worlds. This approach is particularly evident in early fan scholarship by Jenkins and others that typically focuses on the subversive potential of fan activities. Certainly, such works proliferate in the Shakespeare fan fiction community just as they do in the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Harry Potter fan fiction communities. However, in the case of Shakespeare, what culture is being countered is more difficult to pin down. If, for example, academic discourse is what is perceived as being resisted, it is important for us to keep in mind that Shakespeare has found a home in numerous theoretical approaches that have consistently sought to subvert dominant ideologies and to emphasize the multivalent potential  Finn and McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan,” 32–33.  Finn and McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan,” 36–37. 73  Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662. 71 72

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of the texts. University students today will regularly encounter feminist, queer, ecocritical, and many other approaches to Shakespeare’s plays and characters (the extent to which such interpretations will be encountered obviously depends heavily on the individual classroom or department within which the encounter takes place). The location of the authority that fans resist or play with is difficult to determine, especially when elements of those resisted institutions are doing some of the same kind of work, and especially when these subversive texts have been produced for the marketplace. In the absence of a copyright holder for Shakespeare, academics serve as the pro bono defenders of his intellectual property, with the stakes being their own professional and interpretive integrity. With no studio, publisher, or family to assert control, Shakespeare scholars play that role, as evident in their attacks against the film Anonymous, in which many notable scholars denounced the film in terms that might sound familiar to a lawyer trying to squash fan fiction. The issue of copyright and ownership is important not just in terms of who profits and whether or not certain stories can be told because of notions of intellectual property, but because of how we experience the narrative world as unified or fragmented. This gets to the issue of the multiplicity of ‘official’ Shakespeares in contrast to the singularity of the official narrative of other media worlds/texts/films. As Henry Jenkins has noted, “transmedia storytelling” is a dominant mode of entertainment today, particularly in the context of franchise storytelling: “Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience.”74 In transmedia storytelling, the official, canonical narrative is widely dispersed across a variety of texts. Important here is the centralized nature of transmedia storytelling, something that those in control of the Stars Wars universe have excelled at for many years. In its current incarnation since Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, the canonical Star Wars narrative is dispersed across: the core films (Episodes I–IX) as well as the spinoff ‘Star Wars Stories,’ Rogue One and Solo; a wide range of novels (Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath novels) and comic books (Marvel’s Darth Vader and Princess Leia series)  Jenkins Convergence Culture, 20–21.

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that fill in the narrative gaps of the films and the backstories or adventures of minor and major characters; television shows (Rebels, Resistance); videogames (EA’s Battlefront series); character and vehicle encyclopedias; websites (Holonetnews.com). The official Star Wars universe and narrative is expansive and multifaceted, consumable as the core films alone or across transmedia texts in as small or as large chunks as the individual wishes or desires to invest time and money into. As expansive as that universe is, it is also singular and hierarchical, with Episodes I–IX of primary importance and everything else subservient to that narrative according to the individual fan: some will read the novels but not the comics; some will play the videogame but not read the novels; some will watch the television shows but not visit the websites. All of this is done in varying configurations according to tastes and preferences of the individual fan. With Shakespeare, however, the fan experience can be similar, but it is also very different due to the multiplicity of ‘official’ Shakespeares in which Shakespeare as text/author is dispersed into an infinite multiplicity of Shakespeares. As readers, students, and fans of Shakespeare, we experience him through the same modes of transmedia storytelling as we can/ do Star Wars: through the text and performance of the plays, through films and novels, through class lectures, and so forth. However, these transmedial Shakespeares are not unified by the same centralized narrative canonicity, with narrative authority dispersed amongst them, with canonicity newly and repeatedly constituted by local clusters or individual instances of texts, interpretations, performances, films, and so on. Shakespeare fandom can thus be a response to a wide range of official Shakespeares that are not accessible to or experienced by all fans. Very few of you have likely seen the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Corner Brook, Newfoundland that I saw as a teenager that first captured my own imagination about Shakespeare, but it is generally true that Star Wars fans have all seen the same version—or versions, to include the re-releases—of Return of the Jedi. One of the challenges evident in evaluating Shakespeare as a fan object is that it is increasingly rare for fans to initially find their way to Shakespeare outside of some formal education system. Unlike other fan objects which attract new fans through a web of individual discoveries, peer recommendations, or cross-pollination from other fandoms, such an ­ organic discovery of Shakespeare is comparatively rare. While it is unlikely that a new viewer will encounter Star Wars for the first time in a classroom, it is probable that Shakespeare will indeed be encountered in this

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context. Such first contact has implications for how the parameters and dominant discourses of the fandom are articulated. In particular, Shakespeare fandom is often articulated in relation—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively—to academic discourse and didacticism. Thus, that which can instigate fandom is also that thing which is responsible for stifling it. Such paradox is central to participatory culture as a whole, just in a slightly different form (a form which is also evident in Shakespeare fandom). That is, the fan object is the focus of one’s adulation and desire to play in its world, but to do so simultaneously recognizes that the object is lacking in something that participation provides, a lack that may be collectively or individually felt: more world building, more time spent with a character or group of characters, more or different relationships, more inclusive representation, alternative narrative choices, and so forth. To be a fan is thus to have one’s desires stimulated without being fully satisfied, necessitating a fan’s need to push beyond the perceived limits of the object even as those limits might be part of what comprises the fan’s desires. Such desire-lack is clearly evident in expressions of Shakespeare fandom as it is in other fandoms: Viola/Olivia and Kirk/Spock ‘shipping’—the fannish desire to see characters in a romantic relationship, whether or not the pairing is ever offered by the text—each expresses a desire for the fan object (Twelfth Night and Star Trek) and a desire for more—or more explicit— queer pairings in that object to the point that the fan feels compelled to provide what the object does not. When Shakespeare fandom emerges from an academic context, the desire-lack paradox extends beyond the text to the context of its conveyance. Academia might open Shakespeare up to the fan, but it is also popularly perceived to denigrate emotional investment, counterfactualism, and self-generated engagement. It does this by establishing rigid criteria for how to engage with and interpret the plays, legitimizing some interpretations while shutting down others, offering a variety of authorized interpretations and dismissing others as insufficiently researched or argued, making claims that Shakespeare belongs to us all and is for all time while seeming to contradict that claim by promoting prescriptive, exclusionary forms of belonging (write this way, argue this way, research this way, theorize this way, etc.). This is certainly not the case in all educational contexts (a cursory search of universities across the globe reveals many exciting ­ approaches to teaching Shakespeare), but the perception within the fan community is often that academia is as stifling as it is invigorating, opening up Shakespeare to numerous possible readings but also determining

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exclusionary parameters for how those readings should be conducted and conveyed, legitimizing some because they play by the rules of academia and invalidating others because they do not. In many ways, this relationship between the academy and the student of Shakespeare mirrors the fraught relationship between cultural producers and consumers that undergirds contemporary fandoms as authors, filmmakers, publishing houses, movie studios, and a whole host of other entities who own the constituent parts of an intellectual property dictate the acceptable parameters for expressions of fandom and limits of acceptable participation. ‘You can do this with Harry Potter, but not this,’ we are told by J. K. Rowling and/or Warner Brothers (WB). In June 2018, for example, Harry Potter fans learned that WB was becoming more active in putting an end to unofficial fan festivals and gatherings such as a quidditch tournament in Philadelphia. According to WB’s statement to the Associated Press, “Warner Bros. is always pleased to learn of the enthusiasm of Harry Potter fans, but we are concerned, and do object, when fan gatherings become a vehicle for unauthorized commercial activity.” In response, one frustrated and disappointed organizer commented: “Magic existed before Harry Potter, and you can’t put a trademark on enthusiasm and creativity.”75 The difference within the academy, of course, is that the teachers and professors of Shakespeare have no such legalistic claim of ownership over the author or his works, and in many respects are doing the work of the fan in the name of scholarship, establishing a hierarchy of academic objectivism and theorization over fannish enthusiasm and speculation. The apparent hypocrisy of this perspective emerges in high contrast when academics laud non-traditional and inventive adaptations of Shakespeare or scholarly interpretations that students feel are themselves unfounded and disconnected from the text as they have read or experienced it, but which are accepted because such adapters speak to the critical or theoretical desires of the scholar. Academics, it seems, are the self-selected group ­dictating which interpretations matter and which ones do not, much to the chagrin of readers and audiences who feel their interpretations and desires are equally valid. Furthermore, this interpretive authority is decentralized, constituted, and reconstituted in disparate classrooms every day 75  Kristen De Groot, “Warner Bros. Crackdown Puts Dark Mark Over Potter Festivals,” AP News, Published June 16, 2018, accessed July 10, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/77 daf58afa7f4bf2a45f93a93a59cdc8.

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under the tutelage of individual instructors: psychoanalytical insight lauded in one classroom is anachronistic counterfactualism dismissed in another (in this regard, we need look no further than the extent to which Hamlet’s Oedipus complex is promoted or rejected). What is the Shakespeare fan to do when confronted with the apparent didactic, arbitrary, self-fulfilling professional authority of institutional Shakespeare? The answer for many is to write fan fiction.

Bibliography aTableofGreen. “13th Night: Malvolio’s Revenge.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 22, 2015. Accessed July 8, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/3802597. Bullock, Christopher. The Cobler of Preston, a Farce. London: 1716. Burt, Richard. “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehnmann and Lisa S. Starks, 205–32. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Collins, Eleanor. “Unlocking Scholarship in Shakespeare Studies: Gatekeeping, Guardianship and Open-Access Journal Publication.” In Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, 132–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 41–59. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006a. Coppa, Francesca. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Coppa, Francesca. “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 225–44. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006b. Crocker, Holly A. “The Tamer as Shrewd in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize: Or, The Tamer Tam’d.” SEL 51, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 409–26. De Groot, Kristen. “Warner Bros. Crackdown Puts Dark Mark over Potter Festivals.” AP News. Published June 16, 2018. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://www.apnews.com/77daf58afa7f4bf2a45f93a93a59cdc8. De Kosnik, Abigail. “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 118–24.

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Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 61–78. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Dryden, John. Troilus and Cressida. London, 1769. Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes. “Introduction: The Shakespeare User.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes, 1–22. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Finn, Kavita Mudan and Jessica McCall. “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe.” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 27–38. Flegel, Monica and Jenny Roth. “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 6 (2014): 1092–108. Gardner, Kate. “Viral Tweet About Fandom Gatekeeping Proves We Still Have a Male Geek Problem.” The Mary Sue. Published September 23, 2018. Accessed June 30, 2019. https://www.themarysue.com/fandom-gatekeepingmale-geeks/. Garrick, David. “King Lear.” In The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques. Vol. 3, edited by Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 301–90. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980a. Garrick, David. “Romeo and Juliet.” In The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques. Vol. 3, edited by Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 75–149. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980b. “Geek Gatekeeping.” Geek Feminism. Accessed June 30, 2019. https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Geek_gatekeeping. GloriaMundi. “The Triumphs of the Amazon.” Archive of Our Own. Published December 20, 2009. Accessed July 8, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/32333. Goodman, Lesley. “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author.” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662–76. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

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Grossman, Lev. “Forward.” In Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, edited by Anne Jamison, xi–xiv. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Haenfler, Ross. Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hellekson, Karen. “Fandom and Fan Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, 153–63. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hellekson, Karen. “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture.” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 113–18. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Identity and Feminism.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 75–81. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014a. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Introduction.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 1–17. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014b. Henderson, Diana E. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Holderness, Graham. Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001. Holderness, Graham. “Shakespeare and the Undead.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 207–28. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006a. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006b. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 20th anniversary edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New  York and London: New  York University Press, 2013. Johnson, Charles. The Cobler of Preston. London, 1716. Johnson, Charles. Love in a Forest: A Comedy. London, 1723. Judge, Elizabeth F. “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters: Eighteenth-Century Fan Fiction, Copyright Law, and the Custody of Fictional Characters.” In Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, edited by Reginald McGinnis, 22–68. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Lamb, Patricia Frazer and Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 97–115. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lefait, Sébastien. “Irreverence as Fidelity?: Adapting Shakespearean Reflexivity in Anonymous (Emmerich 2011).” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 241–63. McHenry, Robert W. Jr. “Plagiarism and Paternity in Dryden’s Adaptations.” In Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, edited by Reginald McGinnis, 1–21. New York: Routledge, 2009. O’Neill, Stephen. “Theorizing User Agency in YouTube Shakespeare.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes, 129–47. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Peacock, Joe. “Booth Babes Need not Apply.” CNN. Published July 24, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2019. http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/boothbabes-need-not-apply/. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Scalzi, John. “Who Get to be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be.” Published July 26, 2012. Accessed June 30, 2019. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/26/ who-gets-to-be-a-geek-anyone-who-wants-to-be/. “Shakespeare Trust Attacks New ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Film Anonymous.” The Telegraph. Published October 25, 2011. Accessed June 25, 2019. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8848351/Shakespeare-trustattacks-new-conspiracy-theory-film-Anonymous.html. Shaughnessy, Robert. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 1–5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Simonoa, Natasha. “Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Cast of Sidney’s Arcadia.” Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (2012). The Three Conjurors, a Political Interlude. Stolen from Shakespeare. London, 1763. Whitmore, Michael. “Shakespeare Belongs to All of Us.” Folger Shakespeare Library. Published April 21, 2016. Accessed June 17, 2019. https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2016/04/21/shakespeare-belongs-us/. Yost, Michelle K. “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 193–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 4

“the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction

Remember the part in The Tempest when Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise land on Prospero’s island?1 Or in Twelfth Night when Antonio is spurned by Orsino, the man he loves, in the nineteenth-century gold-­ mining town of Illyria, California?2 Or the dramatic crocodile cook-off during which Claudius accidentally poisons himself that resolves the political discord of Hamlet?3 Or Kate’s soliloquy at the end of Taming of the Shrew during which she expresses regret for her too-convincing performance of wifely submission to Petruchio who has left her feeling trapped and afraid in an emotionally abusive relationship?4 In the chapter that follows, I delve into the multifaceted and ever-expanding world of online Shakespeare fan fiction, which gives voice to all of these scenarios and many more. Fan fiction grants readers an opportunity to participate in, play with, and sometimes radically refashion the texts they consume according to any criteria they deem fit. Although online, unpaid fan fiction predominates discussions of the form, is it clear that such works are part of 1  planet_plantagenet, “Tempest/Star Trek Crossover,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 6, 2016, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/7401964. 2  fiftysevenacademics, “Antonio Evens the Score,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 23, 2015, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3808588. 3  a_t_rain, “The Great Danish Crocodile Cook-Off,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 18, 2019, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875281. 4  beacandy, “Exit, Katherine,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 19, 2015, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827524.

© The Author(s) 2020 J. H. Pope, Shakespeare’s Fans, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1_4

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the long history of Shakespeare adaptation and criticism, regardless of whether these works are made available for free online or sold to consumers and paying audiences. Paid or unpaid, fan fiction is primarily concerned with established characters originating in prior works, written for a readership that shares a similar interest in and knowledge regarding those characters as the author. Nevertheless, digital databases have created unique environments wherein fan authors have generated idiomatic tropes and reading practices to create texts unbound by considerations of length, marketability, appropriateness, or courting a mass readership that can undoubtedly lead new readers in particular to view them as entirely distinct forms of adaptation. Although fan studies has covered considerable ground in illuminating the wide variety of fan practices and works that are available across a diverse range of fandoms, fan fiction remains as one of the predominant foci of its interest. And for good reason: as of July 2019, archiveofourown.org (hereafter AO3) houses over 207,000 fics on the Harry Potter books and movies alone, a large number indeed, but only a fraction of the over five million texts available on the site. Other popular sites and archives such as wattpad.com, livejournal.com, and fanfiction.net push those totals even higher, with new fics available every day. With few prohibitions against posting fics on multiple sites simultaneously, the potential for the same fic to be posted with different titles by different users, and the proliferation of other archives in addition to the ones named above, it is impossible to offer any definitive final tally of the number of fics available for even a single fandom on the internet. Between July 2018 and July 2019 alone, AO3 added approximately 500,000 users and 1,000,000 texts. The sheer quantity of available texts poses challenges to any researcher seeking to establish feasible parameters for an academic study because an exhaustive, comprehensive study is impossible for all but the least vocal of fandoms. I have chosen to focus on Shakespeare fan fiction available on AO3 for a number of reasons. As one of the most popular archives, it offers readers a wide and representative range of fan fiction that is immediately accessible without requiring readers to register for an account. For each fic that is uploaded to AO3, authors have the option to tag their stories with brief descriptions of (and sometimes warnings about) the content and style of the fic, and these tags appear both in the search results and the header before the individual fic (tagging will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter). Additionally, AO3 provides metadata and paratextual commentary along with each text that makes it a particularly appealing archive

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for researchers. Along with date of initial publication and last date updated, each entry gives a word count, hit count, and kudos count (kudos are akin to ‘likes’ on Facebook, typically left by readers who enjoyed the fic). The ability of the reader to see both the date the fic was published as well as the date it was last updated in important in a culture and community that routinely posts and reads unfinished works and works that are uploaded serially. All fics are thus living, malleable texts that can be altered or removed entirely at the discretion of the author, whether in response to reader feedback or their own inspiration and motivations. Fics are preceded by a summary in which the author can tell readers something about what they are about to read, and fics are often followed by a ‘Notes’ section in which the author might provide further information regarding something in the narrative or about the writing process. Readers are permitted to leave comments at the bottom of the fic, and it is not uncommon for authors to engage with and respond to these comments. In contrast to the broader internet community, the comments section for fan fiction tends to be a positive and supportive space where readers leave encouraging or affective responses, express a desire to see the work continue, or compliment the author’s style, and where the authors say some version of ‘thank you’ or discuss either specific struggles or points of pride they encountered while writing. AO3 contains standard ‘terms of use’ policies regarding harassment and abusive comments, but encountering negative comments is relatively rare, especially when reading in the various Shakespeare fandoms. While this is reflective of the overall supportive and reciprocal culture of the fanfic community, it is also reflective of how readers use the database, filtering results by genre, tags, and content warnings. Regular users read what they want to read and, when armed with an understanding of fanfic terminology, can easily avoid specific texts or whole genres they might find offensive or just not to their tastes. Additionally, when comments and kudos are offered by registered users, readers can click on their usernames to see what they have written or commented on elsewhere on AO3. As such, AO3 was the most attractive archive for me to work on, even though other sites use some of—or variations on—these types of metadata and paratextual information. Before moving on to a more precise discussion of Shakespeare fan fiction, it is important that we first map some of the terrain of fan fiction, terrain that can feel very alien to a first-time reader. Throughout the book as a whole, I have endeavored to engage with fan works and fandoms on their own terms, and the terms of engagement become heightened in any

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discussion of fanfic. On the most basic level, I use the synonymous terms ‘fan fiction’ and ‘fanfic’ to refer to the body of writing as a whole, insofar as we can conceive of it as a genre unto itself with perceptible boundaries—even murky ones—for inclusion and exclusion. Consistent with the fan fiction community, I use ‘fic’ or ‘fics’ to refer to the individual texts themselves, in no small part to avoid the awkward sound of writing about ‘a fan fiction’ or something cumbersome like ‘a fan fiction text.’ Using the general term ‘fic’ also helps overcome the challenges posed by writing about a group of texts that incorporate any imaginable genre, style, or length. While it might be accurate to describe some of these texts as short stories, poems, plays, novellas, novels, and so forth, such categories are not applicable to every fic, regardless of length or style. These terms will be used when relevant to discussions of specific fics, but—as will become evident—it would be inaccurate and misleading to characterize every 4000-word prose fic as a short story, for example. Similarly, I aim to avoid forcing fanfic to conform to the terminology we might be comfortable with as Shakespeare scholars and rather to employ the terminology of the community itself and of fan studies more generally. In his important Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002), Douglas Lanier offered one of the earliest efforts to address Shakespeare fan fiction, grappling with it by disconnecting fanfic from its own terms of reference and recategorizing it according to his own preferred classifications, grounded in what he saw as the narrative strands of the genre: extrapolated narrative, interpolated narrative, remotivated narrative, revisionary narrative, reoriented narrative, and hybrid narrative.5 Doing this, however, forces fanfic into a false sense of overarching coherence that prioritizes narrative, even though these categories certainly offer useful ways to assess a large body of fanfic. So while narrative priority is certainly important for many fics, there are also subgenres of fanfic that do not find easy homes in Lanier’s categories, such as ‘PWP’ (Plot? What Plot?, or Porn Without Plot) or ‘fluff’ fics that are not narrative in any conventional sense, or ‘drabbles,’ fics that are exactly one hundred words long. As Francesca Coppa notes, fan fiction is accessible to all, but it is written for a relatively small audience of readers and fellow writers who are well versed—or who are in the process of becoming well versed—in the terminology, genres, tropes, insider jokes, and modes of expression of the fanfic 5  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 83.

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community. However, this “has resulted in a series of literary practices and conceits that make perfect sense if you’re a part of the culture—and may be incomprehensible to those outside of it.”6 Fanfic frequently employs genres and tropes that will be unfamiliar to the novice reader. Some of these genres have parallels in the rich history of Shakespeare adaptation, which is part of what makes Shakespeare fanfic unique: it often has a textual or performative counterpart outside the world of fan fiction itself, which is not often the case for the vast majority of media fandoms. The fanfic genre that has garnered perhaps the most critical attention is ‘slash,’ which inserts or teases out male-male romantic or sexual relationships in the fan object (female-female pairings are typically referred to as ‘femslash,’ and straight pairings as ‘het’). The name ‘slash’ refers to the forward slash between the names of the characters who are being ‘slashed’ in the fic, whether Kirk/Spock in Star Trek (one of the preeminent slash couples in fanfic), Holmes/Watson in Sherlock Holmes, or Romeo/Mercutio or Olivia/Viola. Although some slash is quite sexually explicit, much of it— especially in Shakespeare fanfic—focuses on emotional rather than physical intimacy. Whereas tvecking depicts Romeo and Mercutio in an intimate but non-explicit vignette in “Just this once,” benvoliio offers up a much more explicit slashing of Mercutio and Tybalt in “Patience Perforce.”7 In ‘genderswap’ fics, the genders of key characters (sometimes one, sometimes more) are changed, such as in “Hamlette” by hamlets_scribe, which swaps the genders of both Hamlet and Horatio (and femslashes them in the process).8 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse suggest that the use of insular terminology and categorization serves a community-building function: “This use of acronyms and cryptic terms deliberately excludes those unaware of their meaning. Part of the task of the newbie is to sort through the unfamiliar terms and come to an understanding of their meaning. The exclusionary nature of the discourse enculturates the newbie and cements

6  Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), ix. 7  tvecking, “Just this once,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 6, 2018, accessed August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/13890330; benvoliio, “Patience Perforce,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 6, 2018, accessed August 7, 2018, https:// archiveofourown.org/works/14225991/chapters/32798499. 8  hamlets_scribe, “Hamlette,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 21, 2014, accessed August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668677.

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the online community.”9 While the community is open to all, its nomenclature forces new readers to adapt to its terms of engagement rather than providing them with an expected, if modified, set of conventions or points of reference. Whereas genres such as slash and genderswap enable fanfic writers and readers to explore alternatives that are unavailable in the official version of the text, we do not have to look far to find queer or genderswapped adaptations of Shakespeare on screen or stage. The stage from Shakespeare’s time (and before) down to the present has been a transvestive space in which genderswapping has been a visceral and visible aspect of the history of these plays, whether in the all-male companies of Elizabethan actors that Shakespeare wrote for, Charlotte Cushman playing Romeo and Hamlet in the nineteenth century, or Erica Whyman’s choice to cast a female Escalus and Mercutio in her 2018 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet and simultaneously swap the genders of the characters as well in order to “delve deeper into questions of identity” by exploring how lines spoken by women accrue different meanings than when those same lines are spoken by men.10 Readers of Shakespeare fanfic who are themselves familiar with the rich adaptive and critical history of the plays will likely find genderswapping to be at least somewhat conventional and familiar. Or at least more familiar than a first-time Harry Potter fanfic reader encountering a genderswapped Harry, Hermione, or Dumbledore. By contrast, fanfic genres that are well known within the community such as ‘wingfic’ (in which characters, sometimes suddenly and inexplicably, sprout wings) or ‘mpreg’ (male characters become pregnant), or the ‘sex pollen’ trope in which characters—frequently unlikely pairs or groups— have sex with one another while under the influence of an ingested alien or magical pollen (on closer inspection, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the effects of the love-in-idleness flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), may seem entirely alien and strange to the wandering Shakespearean. However, such genres and tropes “and literally hundreds more are as familiar to fans as the bildungsroman, lyric, tragedy, elegy, and epic are to literary scholars.”11 9  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 12. 10  Erica Whyman, “Queering the Pitch,” Romeo and Juliet Program (Stratford-uponAvon: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2018), np. 11  Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 9.

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I will emphasize here that I make very little effort to assess fanfic according to my own subjective standards of quality, taste, or appropriateness to establish criteria for ‘good’ or ‘successful’ fanfic, nor do I aim to critique the talents of the individual writers. As noted in the previous chapter, such criteria have the effect of arbitrarily hierarchizing texts, a problem that is heightened when assessing online fic archives in particular.12 In fanfic communities, authors might be writing for a general audience, to satisfy the request of a specific, individual reader (the ‘gift fic’ alluded to in the previous chapter), or to satisfy their own personal desires to transform a text. Some are writing in response to the many challenges issued within fanfic communities, such as the Yuletide challenge in which pairs of writers are assigned a set number of characters from a rare fandom (one deemed relatively obscure by the fan community at large) by each other, with pairs matched randomly based on what fandoms they are offering to write in and which ones they are requesting fics from. The resulting fics are them exchanged on December 25, secret-Santa style (or pseudonymous-Santa style). Some fics are highly polished and edited, whereas others are purposefully written within specific temporal or spatial constraints, and still others are posted—and identified—as unfinished works in progress (WIP). Some are written by grade school students, others by university professors. Some fics contain shockingly graphic descriptions of sex and violence, whereas other individual writers or communities conform to self-imposed guidelines of perceived taste. In what follows, I strive to write about Shakespeare fan fiction as it exists across the available spectrum, regardless of length, style, or content in order to best assess the diverse ways in which Shakespeare’s fans put him to work without casting aspersions on them for how or why they do it.

12  Cornel Sandvoss offers a wonderful discussion of the contentious debate regarding aesthetic value in the assessment of fan works as texts, but also of fan studies (and, more broadly, cultural studies) as a field, arguing that “we need to formulate aesthetic categories that avoid the absolutism of traditional textual interpretation as much as the relativism of poststructuralism and deconstructionism.” See: Cornel Sandvoss, “The Death of the Reader?: Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 73–74. See also: Matt Hills, “Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgments in Media and Cultural Studies,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), 33.

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Regardless of the presence of narrative development in a given fic, it is also generally true that fanfic prioritizes character above all else and frequently seeks to mine the authenticity of characters who exist in prior works written by other authors in order to extrapolate on how those characters might speak, behave, and respond to new situations. Expanding on the work of Mary Ellen Curtain, Coppa articulates fanfic’s interest in character by contrasting it with science fiction. Whereas science fiction is speculative fiction that asks ‘what if?’ questions about the world (i.e., what if the world was different in some essential way? What if we ran out of oil, or could travel at the speed of light?), fan fiction is speculative fiction that often asks ‘what if?’ questions about specific characters (i.e., what if Draco Malfoy was in love with Harry Potter? Or what if Hamlet had killed Claudius while his stepfather prayed?).13 The ‘what ifs?’ of fanfic range from situational (how would a character react if y happened rather than x?) to probing issues of class (what if Bruce Wayne was working class?) and identity (what if Spock was queer?), to the fantastical (what if Romeo was a vampire?). In many cases, then, fanfic aims to—playfully or seriously— search out the supposed core of an individual character or group of characters and to extrapolate on what we know—or think we know—about them and to preserve what is authentic or recognizable regardless of the changed context. I use terms like ‘authentic’ and ‘essential,’ however, with some obvious caveats that render them largely meaningless insofar as they are accepted as truly authentic or essential because what is regarded as authentic about a character is highly subjective and varies from fan to fan, and is often debated by factions within a fandom. In a comment about narrative canon that extends equally to character authenticity, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse note that “Complete agreement on what comprises canon is rarely possible, even with repeated viewings of the primary source, because of the range of individual interpretations.”14 But readers of fan fiction expect to see these essential, if also subjective, truths represented or else the fic loses its coherence and pleasure as fan fiction.15 If an author reimagines Harry Potter as a sailor on a naval ship but the character does not say or do anything that is recognizably Potter-esque, or he is clean cut with no lightning bolt scar or need for corrective lenses,  Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 12–13.  Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” 9. 15  Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 67. 13 14

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then the fic will likely be deemed a failure by many readers regardless of the merits of the piece of writing as a whole: fan fiction must “be in constant dialogue with the source text’s characters, already fully realized and well known to the story’s readers.”16 Narrative or other ‘literary’ considerations certainly are not unimportant in fan fiction, but they are frequently subservient to character considerations, emphasized by the fact that many tags (discussed below) that accompany fics foreground issues of characterization. The ability of readers to recognize those characters is key, and the priority of character is evidenced by the general dearth of OCs (original characters written by the fic author who interact with characters and worlds of the fan object) in fan fiction, with the exception of Real Person Fic (RPF) which will be discussed in the next chapter. As Anne Jamison notes, “Fic makes no claims to ‘stand on its own.’ It doesn’t need anyone to point out its props and sources because it doesn’t hide them; it celebrates them. A work of fic might stand on its own as a story—it might be intelligible to readers unfamiliar with its source—but that’s not its point.”17 This is one of the ways in which fan works, not just fanfic, are distinct from adaptation more generally. Insofar as The Lion King (1994) is an adaptation of Hamlet, it seeks to stand on its own as a film on its own terms, and for many viewers who have initially seen the film without an awareness of its adaptive status, this is certainly the case. Any time I teach a Shakespeare and film course, a healthy proportion of the class is discovering this connection for the first time, a revelation that is part of the pleasure of teaching the film in the first place because it offers an opportunity to both defamiliarize and recontextualize a movie that many students are already intimately familiar with. By contrast, fanfic assumes that the reader is there in the first place because of that connection, because, as Sheenagh Pugh argues, these readers—and writers, too— are motivated by a desire to see either (or both) ‘more of’ or ‘more from’ established characters and narratives.18 Again, recognition is key, and it is expected by the writers because fanfic is not just written by fans, it is written for fans. Allusions to other authors, texts, and fandoms abound in individual fics that may or may not be recognized by all readers, but if you 16  Deborah Kaplan, “Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 136. 17  Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 14. 18  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 19.

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are reading Star Wars fanfic, it is expected that you recognize its world and characters. Otherwise, why are you reading it? Readers who have never encountered fanfic before are likely to be overwhelmed at first not just by the sheer volume of texts available but in its own unique subgenres and tropes, all of which is accompanied by a community-­specific set of terms that are not in wide use outside of fanfic archives and yet which are used with ease and currency within that community. Indeed, some tropes are tied to a specific fanfic community and may find little use outside of that community, so when experienced readers first encounter a new fandom, they may be knowledgeable about general fanfic conventions but not about all of the community-specific ones. While there are certainly plenty of ‘missing scene’ fics that seek to fill in narrative gaps in Shakespeare’s plays (what is Benvolio up to when he is not on stage in Romeo and Juliet, or what exactly did Hamlet do with Polonius’ body?) or fics set either before or after the narrative of a given play (what would Kate and Petruchio’s marriage be like following the events of Act 5?), readers will also quickly encounter other types of writing as well. In addition to those fics that stick to the canonical narratives of the plays, there are many alternative universe (AU) fics that take characters from one play and transplant them into other narratives and temporalities. In some cases, these AUs can take a very recognizable form that mirrors trends in film and theater adaptations, such as transposing a play to a modern setting as megvad does with Romeo and Juliet in “Romance and Justice,” reimaging Prince Escalus as the principal of Verona High School and Tybalt as a brooding goth, characters that could be at home in the films 10 Things I Hate About You or She’s the Man.19 Other AU fics alter plots or characterizations (i.e., Mercutio is not killed, or Romeo pursues a relationship with Rosaline instead of Juliet), sometimes in very novel ways. In “Toys of Desperation” by TheHazardsofLove13, Horatio is a vampire who revives Hamlet with his own blood following the duel at the end of the play.20 In crossover fics, characters are transported from one play to interact with characters from other plays, such as when Romeo meets Nick Bottom in Gardenostalgic’s “To Mar the Foolish Fates.”21 In many crossovers, 19  megvad, “Romance and Justice,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 7, 2017, accessed July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/10848702/chapters/24086955. 20  TheHazardsofLove13, “Toys of Desperation,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 10, 2018, accessed July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14893634. 21  Gardenostalgic, “To Mar the Foolish Fates,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 6, 2016, accessed July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6475003.

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Shakespeare’s characters find themselves interacting with characters from Star Trek, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or from any other world (or combination of worlds) of characters. Nayoky’s “The Twelfth Trap,” for example, crosses over Twelfth Night with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Lindsay Lohan film The Parent Trap (1998).22 Whereas some crossover fic writers blend together a minimal number of texts and characters that speak to each other in thematic or novel ways, others bring together a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated characters that reflect the individual reading and viewing practices of the fic author. And although such wide-ranging crossovers can feel anarchic and absurdist, they also lay bare the diverse reading habits of both fans and the population at large. As individual readers, we all bring a unique constellation of interests and experiences to any text, sparking connections that might arise from re-­ reading a play after having watched an episode of a favorite television show. Crossover transforms that often passive, epiphanous individual moment of recognition into an active textual encounter. When assessing fanfic, it is also important that we do not generalize too broadly about what it is and why it is because nothing we come up with will be wholly accurate, as evidenced by some of the core debates about fanfic. On one extreme, fanfic is dismissed as unoriginal, derivative, and obsessive, a stigma against which fan scholars have been pushing for three decades, a pejorative understanding of what motivates those who want ‘more of’ their fan objects that ties back to the property theft paradigm discussed in Chap. 3. On another extreme, fan fiction is invested with revolutionary potential through its subversive politics as it demands ‘more from’ its fan objects that mainstream culture fails to provide. It is quite easy to find dozens, hundreds, or thousands of examples to support both perspectives, that fanfic is either reiterative or radical. Consequently, we must be careful not to proclaim that fanfic predominantly does one or the other. In Shakespeare fanfic, we can find numerous examples of fic authors seeking to extend the lives and worlds of specific characters or plays without offering much in the way of critical commentary. Fics proliferate that seek to round out the indistinct Benvolio or give readers more scenes featuring the witty Mercutio, to breathe a little more life into them or to grant them a little more time to play. Perhaps with these sorts of fics in mind, Graham Holderness characterizes fan fiction as “playful and 22  Nayoky, “The Twelfth Trap,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 28, 2015, accessed July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/4442354/chapters/10093139.

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i­nnocuous,” arguing that it seeks to “imitate, emulate, and extend Shakespeare’s own creative and fiction-making practice,” “an innocence that is part of its charm but also limits its utility.”23 Other Shakespeare critics have been more forgiving of fanfic but still struggle with how to categorize it according to conventional notions of authorship and genre. Andrew Hartley suggests that much Shakespeare fan fiction “belongs in a field which barely existed in its present incarnation twenty years ago: young adult [YA] fiction.”24 Although he does not suggest that all fan fiction be categorized in this way, YA is the seemingly the default genre of the genre, suggesting that it is not for adults in the same way that other Shakespeare adaptations are.25 The genres within fanfic, however, are very much their own beasts, and while there are certainly plenty of fics that conform to YA conventions, there are also many that do not. For every ‘Hamlet goes to high school’ fic on AO3, there is a Hamlet/Horatio slash fic. And while slash certainly is not restricted to a particular age group or demographic (or degree of explicitness), it is difficult to imagine the Hamlet/Horatio necrophilic masturbation of ElwritesFanworks’ “No Forgiveness Under Heaven” appearing in anything shelved as YA in the local bookstore.26 Associating fanfic with a primarily juvenile reader- or authorship, however, largely dismisses the ways in which fan fiction often does the work of literary criticism (albeit, in a much more abbreviated form than Holderness’ novels). Consider, for example, MacBeth’s “Beshrew My Heart,” described in the author’s summary thusly: “This fic is especially for those who might find The Taming of the Shrew a bit … problematic, even through a historical

23  Graham Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26. As I discuss in Chap. 1, this is part of Holderness’ defense of his own Shakespeare novels as decidedly not fan fiction because of their roots in literary criticism and historical scholarship. 24  Andrew Hartley, “Introduction: ‘Reason Not the Need!’,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5. 25  Pugh generally affirms this sentiment when she suggests that Shakespeare fanfic—especially fics inspired by Romeo and Juliet—is often “written by young people studying the play at school.” While this is probable, it is difficult to determine with any degree of certainty. See Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 62–63. 26  ElwritesFanworks, “No Forgiveness Under Heaven,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 29, 2017, accessed August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/11030331.

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lens, unless heavy doses of mitigating subtext are projected into the mix.”27 The author is referring to Kate’s about-face at the end of the play in which she seems to trade in her strength and vibrancy for wifely submission, a change of character that has troubled readers and audiences for years. In this verse post-Shrew scene, Kate and Petruchio go home not to a stifling, conventional, and repressive marriage but to their own mutual BDSM fantasy in which Kate is the ‘dom’ (dominant partner) to Petruchio’s ‘sub’ (submissive partner). After the couple laughs at the purposefully absurd advice Kate gave to Bianca to “meeken up/ And kiss her puling husband’s flabby arse,” Petruchio proclaims that “now, I hope, we’ll turn our double backs/ On all such loathsome posturings and airs/ And turn back to our rightful, best-loved ways.” MacBeth convincingly carries over the quick wit and wordplay of Shakespeare’s characters to Petruchio’s willing submission to Kate’s teasing, hair pulling, spanking, and whipping (Petruchio: “I am naught but a hound dog. Whiter is thy cat?” Kate: “’Tis in the toy chest. Shall the cat chase thee, dog?/ List, and you may hear it waving its nine tails”). The fic addresses the troubling—especially for contemporary readers and audiences—gender politics of the play and the whittling down of Kate by the end of Act 5 by literalizing the desire to see Kate’s submission in Act 5 as purely performative and recasting Petruchio as the one who submits and allowing Kate to retain the spark that makes her so appealing throughout the play. The author does this by applying the logic of BDSM, offering the following note for further clarification at the end of the fic: “For those less familiar with BDSM as practiced in real life: In a couple with a D/s relationship, the dominant partner is not always who you might expect based on public behavior. With the roles clearly set in private life, a couple can present a completely different and entirely convincing public face.”28 Although brief, “Beshrew My Heart” effectively engages with longstanding critical and cultural debates about The Taming of the Shrew, a refashioning of Mary Pickford’s wink in 1929. As one reader, campylobacter, commented, “‘The Taming of the Shrew’ was the very first Shakespeare play I’d ever read. And yes, even at the tender age of 13 I found the domestic abuse problematic. Thanks for ret-conning the subtext so that I can re-read & ‘interrogate’ it from a new perspective.”29 27  MacBeth, “Beshrew My Heart,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 28, 2014, accessed August 3, 2018, https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/2033745. 28  MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.” 29  MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.”

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The fic thus serves simultaneously as wish fulfillment and critical intervention. By contrast, tinypurplefishes’ “The Shrew of Padua,” also written in verse, provides a brief soliloquy by Kate prior to Bianca’s wedding in which she contemplates Petruchio’s manipulations and vowing that “one day, some day, the shrew will/ Lead the brute to its perdition.”30 Although “The Shrew of Padua” picks up on a similar critical thread as “Beshrew My Heart”—the desire to see Kate retain her strength of character—it does so in a much less radical, revisionary way. Elsewhere, in cheshireArcher’s “The Perfect Nurse,” Hotspur marvels at his newborn daughter and introduces her to the family dog, Lady, in a fic that, rather than offering a critical intervention into 1 Henry IV, simply presents the reader with a moment of domestic bliss and simplicity, tagged as ‘fluff’ and ‘This family is just precious.’31 As noted, tagging plays an important role in fan fiction, offering not just a way to categorize texts, but a way to guide the reader’s experience of a given fic as well as related fics across the archive through active paratextual and hypertextual engagement. Tags might identify the fandom (e.g., ‘Shakespeare’ in general and/or ‘Hamlet’ specifically), plot points or narrative expectations (‘character death,’ ‘unrequited love’), fic genre and tropes (‘kid fic,’ ‘alternative universe’), and so forth. Additionally, tags are sometimes used to identify content that might be objectionable, controversial, or desirable, depending on the reader (‘suicide,’ ‘rough oral sex’). Some authors do not include tags, whereas others go to comic excess and offer playfully obscure or hyperspecific tags (‘Claudius/Pringles® Can’), or ones that are self-referential (‘I’m experimenting with how I write magic’).32 In some cases, tagging itself becomes a metatextual discussion amongst authors about the conventions of tagging. AO3 allows readers to click on or search by tags so if you just want to read Romeo and Juliet fics 30  tinypurplefishes, “The Shrew of Padua,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 19, 2015, accessed July 16, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827707. 31  cheshireArcher, “The Perfect Nurse,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 4, 2017, accessed July 16, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/11994462. 32  While the previous examples of tags are common enough not to require a specific citation, the ‘Claudius/Pringles® Can’ tag appears with: ilikeituptheass, “The Kingdom of Denmark Is Run by a Gay Stoner’s Father but It Sounds Like the Author Is on Crack by Fall Out Boy,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 19, 2018, accessed July 23, 2019, https:// archiveofourown.org/works/14975120. ‘I’m experimenting with how I write magic’ appears with: NathanieloftheSky, “To Where the Wind Blows,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 24, 2018, accessed July 23, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 15028202/chapters/34838825.

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featuring unrequited love and crossed over with Doctor Who, you can filter your searches or click through tag combinations/exclusions to suit your desires. Thus, regardless of the presence of over five million fics on AO3, the presence of tags highlights an important characteristic of fan fiction in that it commonly seeks to meet readers’ expectations and fulfill their desires, offering readers the ability to customize and individualize their experience like they are ordering from a restaurant menu. Just as fanfic frequently aims to offer recognizable characters acting and speaking in recognizable ways, tags—and summaries—serve as content warnings, content descriptions, and tantalizing allusions that allow readers to tailor their reading to their own tastes or to knowingly pursue new avenues without being surprised. The issue of content warnings is an important one in a form of writing in which very little is seen as off-limits, and readers have to be prepared to encounter nearly anything imaginable. It is not uncommon, for example, for individual fics to include explicit descriptions of sex in general or specific sex acts/fetishes (‘kinks’), scenes of rape or torture or graphic violence, underage sex, and so forth. I do not intend to overstate how prevalent these things are in fanfic in general. Indeed, fan studies has sometimes been criticized for its disproportionate emphasis on sex-centric fanfic, which many fic writers view as a misrepresentation of their community.33 Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that explicit sex and violence do pop up from time to time, and while some readers may seek out fics that, for example, feature bondage, others choose to avoid them altogether, and still others remain wholly indifferent. MissTantabis’ “Ganymede and Jupiter,” for instance, pairs up William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (specifically, the versions of the playwrights from the short-lived 2016 television series Will) and is tagged with, among other things, ‘Blood Kink,’ ‘Knife Play,’ ‘Cum Play,’ and ‘Power Play.’34 And while the fic offers an intriguing take on Shakespeare’s dramatic debt to the more experienced Marlowe, culminating in Marlowe carving his initials into Shakespeare’s chest, the graphic content is not going to be to every reader’s tastes. Other tags highlight narrative or thematic content, such as ‘Major Character Death’ (often with an indication of which 33  Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 178; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91. 34  MissTantabis, “Ganymede and Jupiter,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 6, 2018, accessed June 12, 2018, https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/14863355.

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c­haracter dies, and sometimes by which method), ‘Genderswap,’ or ‘Angst’ (among hundreds of other possibilities). Additionally, tags can serve as trigger warnings. There are numerous Hamlet fics, for example, tagged as ‘Implied/Referenced Suicide’ (or something similar), as well as Richard III and Measure for Measure fics tagged as ‘Rape/Non-Con’ (Non-Con: non-consensual sex), or Othello fics tagged as ‘racism.’ Such tags do no indicate that suicide, rape, or racism are reveled in or glorified by the fic but rather that they are alluded to or are part of the narrative, so readers can choose to avoid such issues if they wish. Insofar as fan fiction serves as wish fulfillment for both author and reader, the tags allow readers to decide which wishes are explicitly fulfilled and to search out, relatively easily, fics that meet an individual reader’s desired criteria. As such, the experience of reading a tagged fic for the first time is quite dissimilar from the experience of reading a novel or short story for the first time in that the reader expects the fic to be ‘spoiled’ by the tags, often to the extent that the reader is actively seeking out those spoilers in the pursuit of a specific reading experience. Whereas the blurbs on the backs of novels typically seek to give away just enough to tantalize the reader to want to read (or at least purchase) the novel, fanfic tags tempt readers by telling them they can have exactly what they want, exactly how they want it. And although the conventions of fanfic tagging might be dissimilar to conventional and contemporary publishing practices, there is something to be said for the way tagging works in relation to traditional conceptions of genre. ‘Shakespearean comedy’ enables us to prepare for the text and align our expectations (no one will die, we will get a happy ending) in the same way that ‘tragedy’ leads us to expect death and despair. Arguably, some of the longer titles of Shakespeare’s plays—and indeed in printed texts from the period—serve a similar purpose as tagging in fanfic archives; a fic tagged as ‘mpreg’ and ‘character death’ leads us to expect certain things, but not much differently than do many early print texts. Consider the title page of the 1597 publication of Richard III, which reads The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephews: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death.35 Or we have The Merchant of Venice’s more informative title, The most excellent historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in ­cutting a iust pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia, by the choyse of  William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (London, 1597).

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three chests.36 Fanfic tags and early modern title pages serve similar purposes by simultaneously intriguing prospective readers and generating a set of expectations regarding the content of the text. Indeed, this titling practice did not end with the early moderns, as is evident in the original title of Robinson Crusoe, which was The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.37 Such titles served as advertising for the book in hand, replaced more recently in publishing with paratextual blurbs and endorsements on the covers of commercial publications. In the absence of a modern physical, bookstore text, tagged online fanfic mimics its paratextual apparatuses by, intentionally or not, returning to the early history of the book but also updating it to a cross-­ indexed hypertextuality. One imagines a titillated reader of Robinson Crusoe intrigued by the ‘delivery by pirates’ trope clicking on the title to find more texts of a similar nature only to find Hamlet similarly tagged. Shakespeare fanfic occupies a respectable space on AO3. As of July 2019, approximately 3500 fics are tagged as belonging specifically to the Shakespeare fandom (SHAKESPEARE, William—Works, up from nearly 3000 in July 2018), with a total of roughly 9250 texts showing up in a general search for ‘Shakespeare’ (up from about 8000 in the same span). Other popular ‘Books & Literature’ fandoms surround Jane Austen (1660 fandom, 2660 tagged), but neither Shakespeare nor Austen hold a candle to the number of fics inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (122,000 fandom, 123,160 tagged), which rivals or exceeds the most productive fandoms in the archive, which are typically focused on fantasy and science fiction books, movies, and television series. Looking at these numbers, what becomes clear immediately is that, not unexpectedly, Shakespeare has a greater currency outside of his specific fandom than do many other canonical writers such as Austen. In the examples above, Shakespeare is tagged in more than triple the number of fics that are specifically devoted to his fandom, compared to 1.6:1 for Austen and 1.001:1 for Doyle. The disproportion is indicative of Shakespeare’s canonical status and writers’ 36  William Shakespeare, The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice (London, 1600). 37  Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719).

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familiarity with his works and the expectation that fic readers will likewise be able to make sense of the references. For the approximately 6000 fics that refer to Shakespeare but are not purposefully identified as belonging to the fandom, the relevance of Shakespeare to the fic varies considerably, ranging from the use of a quotation for the title of the fic, to the inclusion of the act of reading, studying, discussing, or attending a performance of Shakespeare (which appears frequently in such fics, indicative of the pervasive experience of grappling with the playwright, particularly in a school setting), to a brief or extended allusion to his works. In such instances, it is worth noting that by refraining from identifying the fic as belonging to the Shakespeare fandom, these writers are asserting his secondary importance to the text at hand, and this may have very little to do with how brief or extended the Shakespeare allusion is. In these cases, Shakespeare serves as a narrative or thematic device to develop, in some way, a fic purposefully devoted to another fandom. 720418mb’s “Standing Ovation” is a Harry Potter fic in which the Hogwarts students put on a production of Romeo and Juliet and offers an extended engagement with the play, but the fic is not identified as part of the Shakespeare fandom.38 Killtheselights’ Star Wars fic “Conceal Me What I Am” is tagged for its reference of Shakespeare, which consists of a title and an epigraph from Twelfth Night.39 As is the case for all other fandoms in the database, Shakespeare fics vary considerably in terms of length and style. One of the shortest is “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare” and consists of just four words, “The rest is silence.” Although the text is simply a short quotation from Hamlet, the quotation functions as a playful ‘collaboration’ with the avant-garde composer whose 1952 composition 4’33” instructed the musicians not to play their instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds (the fic is tagged as “4’33”—John Cage”).40 Although extremely brief, this fic is, in many ways, the epitome of fan fiction as it playfully and  720418mb, “Standing Ovation,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 7, 2017, accessed July 30, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619868/chapters/21733892. 39  Killtheselights, “Conceal Me What I Am,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 7, 2018, accessed July 30, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14242881/chapters/ 32843100. In the Notes, the author indicates “I studied Shakespeare internationally on a scholarship so yeah, this how I chose to use that knowledge.” 40  republic, “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 20, 2016, accessed July 18, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/ works/8092441. See also: Michelle K. Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in TwentyFirst-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 206. 38

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unexpectedly combines and crosses over two instances of creative and structural silence. The apt cleverness of the juxtaposition is heightened by the fact that, by solely quoting Shakespeare, the fic’s author has not technically written anything and thus also remains silent, thus adapting Cage’s high concept non-music to write non-writing that makes silence speak. At the other extreme of length lies mcrshank’s “Auric Idolatry” which, as of this writing, spans nearly 350,000 words and crosses over Romeo and Juliet with the Chronicles of Narnia while drawing inspiration from Stacey Jay’s novel Juliet Immortal (2011).41 Fics of this length are relatively uncommon in Shakespeare fan fiction, with the majority of fics consisting of fewer than 3000 words, and a high proportion of those coming in at under 1500 words.42 The brevity of many fics—Shakespearean or otherwise—is a function of the genre as a whole, which is allusive by nature. Fic authors can write 100-word drabbles because a lot of narrative background, details of characterization, and interpretive history can be imported into the fic simply using a specific character, an importation that—especially in media fandoms—allows fic authors to avoid character description that would otherwise be necessary.43 Stylistically, Shakespeare fics are diverse: many are written in prose or as plays, some mimic the style of a distinctive author, some are written in the form of text messages exchanged between characters.44 Perhaps not surprisingly, many also adopt a pseudo-­ Shakespearean style of writing, which itself takes a number of forms, ranging from adopting sufficiently archaic (and thus ‘Shakespearean’) diction or adding the suffix ‘-eth’ to words in order to achieve a broadly archaic tone, to concerted efforts to write dramatic verse in iambic pentameter and mimic an authorial Shakespearean voice.45 41  mcrshank, “Auric Idolatry,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 30, 2018, accessed July 18, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14141649/chapters/32591031. 42  I am basing these numbers on my own impressions of an AO3 search for ‘Shakespeare’ filtered by length. Given the sheer number of relatively short fics—half of the 9250 results were shorter than 2000 words in length—providing an average length would give the misleading impression that fics tend to be longer than they actually are. 43  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 175–84. 44  For a text-message Hamlet, see: planet_plantagenet, “Wild and Whirling Words: Hamlet in Texts,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 9, 2017, accessed July 18, 2019, https:// archiveofourown.org/works/11149473/chapters/24876822. 45  Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction,” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 280. See: Raggdoll_101, “Shakespeare Crack-eth,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 2, 2018, accessed July 23, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/13713543.

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Assessing Shakespeare fanfic poses a number of challenges, some of them endemic to the form in general, and some more specific to Shakespeare. Pseudonymous authors remain largely anonymous, making identifiers such as age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth difficult to determine for the vast majority. While I am not suggesting that these identifiers should serve as the criteria for assessing an individual fic, it means we do not have things like author interviews or discussions about things like influence to provide a window onto the text. Most importantly, this affects how we understand the tone of a fic and thus its intended effect. As anyone who has frequented comment and message boards online can attest to, statements that seem obviously ironic and satiric to the writer can often be received as serious and heartfelt by the reader. This issue undoubtedly surfaces from time to time when reading fan fiction, especially—in my experience—when reading short fics in which the author does not have much space to develop a clear tone. In some cases, the writer’s tags for the fic provide much needed clarity, but it is quite possible to leave a fic without certainty regarding its tone. In “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare,” does the author strive for metatextual postmodern poignancy? Or are they simply making a silly joke? Four words hardly provide enough tonal context for the reader to form a clearly defensible opinion. In the case of Shakespeare fan fiction specifically, the demographics and genesis of authorship potentially complicate some of the assumptions and guiding principles of fan studies. Fanfic authorship has traditionally been gendered female, with its roots in the largely female community of scifi fic writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and those scholars who have studied fanfic in the most detail have consistently found that it is predominantly written by women and often with a female readership in mind.46 Writing about fan fiction in general, Jenkins notes that, historically, “the practice of fan writing, the compulsion to expand speculations about characters and story events beyond textual boundaries, draws more heavily upon the types of interpretive strategies common to the ‘feminine’ than to the ‘masculine.’”47 Shakespeare fanfic, however, potentially breaks with the conventions because some of it was written as a class assignment 46  Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 44. 47  Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 44.

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and then later posted online. Princehamlet’s “Suddenly, Pirates!” is tagged as “me getting a grade to write hamlet fanfiction,” for example, while 1f_ this_be_madness indicates that “Hamlet and the Pirates” was inspired by a 1975 article published in Shakespeare Quarterly.48 When searching AO3 for fics originally written as school assignments, the results start to skew away from the broader media fandom that characterizes the archive as a whole, and toward authors and texts we expect to see in a classroom: plenty of Shakespeare, but also The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye; works by Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, F.  Scott Fitzgerald, Dante; characters from Greek and Roman mythology. When specifically identified as class projects, Shakespeare starts to compete with Harry Potter in the number of search results. For fics originating as class projects, it would probably be better to assume, then, that the authors follow the demographics of a typical classroom, but even that assumption can be easily problematized. This is particularly true when we do not know where these schools are, what segment of the population they serve, or how many instructors are offering these kinds of assignments (and how many of those instructors are encouraging their students to post their work on AO3 or other archives). The motives and pedagogical practices of the instructor and the individual assignment are also relevant. While some such assignments will stem from a desire to have fun with a class text and let students simply run with their imaginations and with no overarching interest in fan cultures and practices, some instructors will offer such assignments to “authorize … students to respond and engage in an academic world saturated with gatekeeping, jargon, and required curricula,” presenting students with an opportunity to “respond to, adapt, and resist canonical knowledge.”49 Likewise, whereas fan fiction is generally written by people who self-identify as fans of a particular object, class assignment fics will be written by a range of indifferent, enthusiastic, and resistant readers. Additionally, fics that are or stem from class assignments complicate the often organic nature of 48  princehamlet, “Suddenly, Pirates!,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 17, 2018, accessed July 15, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14688603/chapters/33939147; 1f_this_be_madness, “Hamlet and the Pirates,” Archive of Our Own, Published October 2, 2015, accessed July 15, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/ works/4914781?view_full_work=true. 49  Katherine Anderson Howell, “Invitation: Remix Pedagogy in the Fandom Classroom,” in Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, ed. Katherine Anderson Howell (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 2–3.

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fandom more generally in which fanfic authors are writing their fics because they choose to, and with the expectation that they will be read by other fans, not that they will be assessed and graded by their course instructors. This introduces another layer of power and authority in which the fanfic writer is writing not just in response to a cultural producer—be that a movie studio or canonical author—but also in response to an educational, institutional authority. And, importantly, an educational context removes one of the key features of fanfic: the anonymity of its authors. Embodied authors and readers who know each other by name and by face is atypical of online fanfic communities. Even though AO3 readers are encountering a pseudonymous author/text, fics written in or for the classroom were not necessarily produced with the expectation of anonymity. What someone might write for a class and what that same person might write with no concern for grades, perceived appropriateness, or self-censorship might be very different indeed. When deciding between writing sex pollen wingfic or missing scene fic, the latter will presumably be more likely. The tags, notes, or summaries on AO3 will sometimes indicate that a fic was initially written for a class, but we must logically assume that not all such texts will be tagged in this way. In many cases, fan fiction operates within the parameters of the internal logic of a given text by exploiting the fact that, from a narrative point of view, no matter how much is written about a given set of characters and events, there will almost inevitably be vastly more that is left unexplored than that which can be explored. Indeed, the paradox is that the more detail that is supplied by the author, the more gaps in the world are created as a result. Characters are introduced who haves lives of their own within the world of the text, even if their role in the original text is to serve as a plot device (say, in delivering a message to the protagonist, advancing the plot through actions, serving to round out a character, and so forth). What the text offers up as a fragment of the unified whole, however, the fan takes up as a path to explore. For example, for the purposes of the development of the play, we know that Hamlet was at school in Wittenberg when his father died. In the context of the play, this point only matters insofar as it establishes a portrait of our character: Hamlet is a student (and therefore youngish); he was absent when his father died suddenly, preventing him from sharing final words/moments with his father and from being immediately present for his family’s grief; his absence means that he has missed things (such as the marriage of his mother to his uncle), that life has gone on without him at Elsinore. We might supply any number of

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ways in which this information helps us understand the character we see before us throughout the play, the play that comprises entirely of the world of Hamlet. For many readers and audiences, however, these details, bits of information, and minor characters offer up tantalizing questions. What was Hamlet’s life in Wittenberg like? What was he studying at school, and what did he do in his spare time? Was he a rebellious class clown or a studious scholar? What was his school like? Did he spend his time pining for Ophelia, or was he engaged in other romantic pursuits? Did anything happen to him to encourage the seeds of his “To be or not to be” soliloquy before he speaks it in the play? Going farther back, what was Hamlet’s relationship with Yorick like before he died? Lesley Goodman sees fan fiction as expanding on Marie-Laure Ryan’s notion of “the principle of minimal departure” in fictional worlds in which readers supply necessary, logical information borrowed from our own sense of the world around us.50 For example, we know that a given character has two arms and two legs even if the text does not specify this information. As such, the reader is necessarily and continually “contribut[ing] to the formation of a fictional universe that is created by the text.”51 We should note, though, that the nature of this contribution is significantly impacted by the medium of the text: the type of details supplied will be different for the reader of a novel (we assume the character has two legs) than for a film (we see the actor’s legs, along with other corporeal details) than for the audience of a play (a character will be embodied by different actors across different productions, not all of whom will necessarily have two legs) than for the reader of a play. What exactly constitutes minimal departure will depend significantly on the text itself. And fan fiction, when its authors seek to adhere to the canonical narrative of the original text, typically follows this principle in general terms, although its departures might range from the minimal to the maximal. Although fan fiction frequently does the work of criticism, one of the fault lines that separate comes down to speculating about minimal departures and textual silences. This is a debate that can separate fanfic from criticism, but also teachers from students, popular Shakespeare from academic Shakespeare, and even literary critics from other literary critics. Broadly speaking, criticism focuses on Shakespeare’s words themselves 50  Quoted in: Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 665. 51  Goodman, “Disappointing Fans,” 665.

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and their relation to a performance of those words, whereas fan works like fan fiction often focus on the space between those words, with the former being the proper work of the scholar and the latter the work of the fool. Jennifer Flaherty has recently drawn our attention back to L. C. Knights’ 1947 mockery of the ‘character-based criticism’ that treats Shakespeare’s characters as embodied individuals with off-stage lives when they are purely and solely “the means of expressing Shakespeare’s words”52 and thus have no life outside of those words. From this point of view, to seriously ponder questions regarding what Hamlet was up to while in Wittenberg, how many children Lady Macbeth had, or the infinite references to events outside of a given play is seen as misguided and foolish. As Hamlet proclaims at the end of his life and the end of his play, “the rest is silence” (5.2.336), a proclamation of pragmatic currency in literary criticism of the L. C. Knights school. While Hamlet’s comment serves as the endpoint of his play-long philosophical contemplation of life, death, and the afterlife, and the cessation of a voice that will not stop talking for five Acts, it is also literarily and theoretically true of the play itself: outside the words of the play, there is no more Hamlet and no more Hamlet. The stage is empty, and the characters cease to exist. For many literary critics, to speculate about what could or might happen in this vacuum is simply intellectually irresponsible, a scholarly ideal that many of us subscribe to in theory, if not in practice. Speculation—even when textually grounded— can be fun, but it is intellectually suspect and naïve, as academically unproductive as counterfactual speculation about how Romeo and Juliet would have been different if Romeo had actually received Friar Laurence’s message. We do not know how the play would be if it were different because it is not different—get over it. A critical abhorrence of narrative speculation is akin to the admonition against anachronism that becomes an important pedagogical tool for scholars in training. Time and time again we tell our students to strive to assess Shakespeare according to the historical, social, cultural, and literary within which he worked. He did not write with a twenty-first-century cultural paradigm in mind, so it is irresponsible to assess him purely according to the concerns and priorities of that paradigm. We have all, I would hazard to guess, responded to student 52  Jennifer Flaherty, “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 101, 102.

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comments or paper with some version of this criticism from time to time. Additionally, we can read fanfic as the antithesis of—or an addendum to— John Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability,’ when a writer like Shakespeare “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”53 For readers who appreciate Shakespeare because of the intellectual and creative productivity embedded in the ambiguities and silences of his plays, writing that seeks to resolve ambiguities by irritably reaching after fact and reason could be seen as diminishing Shakespeare, closing down paths of inquiry rather than opening them up. Just how deeply committed an individual scholar is to these academic ideals will likely determine that scholar’s reception of texts that traffic almost exclusively in counterfactualism and anachronism, and of authors who pay little attention to what we should do with Shakespeare and prioritize what we can do with him. In his discussion of the Hogarth series of novels published around the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death, Douglas Lanier discusses the notion of literariness and the popular response to Shakespeare’s relevance today, noting that “where the literary ‘essence’ of Shakespeare was once located in his language, now, under the pressure of postmodern practice, it is being located in his narratives, which can float free of specifically Shakespearean language and readily cross cultural barriers,” part of the contemporary renegotiation of Shakespearean cultural capital.54 This debate is by no means insignificant, as anyone who has attended a recent, or even not-so-recent, performance can testify to. Regardless of what we as scholars would prefer to be true, Shakespeare’s language is often seen as an impediment rather than an invitation, and this is nowhere more evident than when sitting in the audience. While attending RSC performances of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in ­Stratford-­upon-­Avon in May 2018, I spent a great deal of time eavesdropping on the conversations of my fellow spectators, hearing numerous times some version of the refrain, ‘I didn’t understand a word of it.’ For many members of the audience, it was the updating of the setting, the 53  The Letters of John Keats, vol. 1, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 193–94. 54   Douglas M.  Lanier, “The Hogarth Shakespeare Series: Redeeming Shakespeare’s Literariness,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 237.

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stylistic flourishes, the stage presence of individual actors, and, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, the gender- and race-blind casting that determined whether or not many members of the audience enjoyed this particular version, and it had very little to do with the impact of the language itself. As scholars, it behooves us to take this issue seriously because it identifies how many contemporary readers and audiences assess Shakespeare, not just how we want them to assess him: that is, in terms of relatability, the ability—and desire—to see oneself and one’s experiences mirrored in the text. Regardless of what we might prefer to be the case, many readers locate Shakespeare’s significance in the circumstances of his plots and the specifics of his characters rather than in the beauty of his poetry. As such, we have to recognize the necessary release that takes place in the classroom or the theater or in other venues for encountering Shakespeare. When we release him, he becomes what those who consume him want him to be and not always what we tell them he is. For adaptations such as fan texts that focus on plot or characterization, or which embrace counterfactualism or anachronism, we must consider the extent to which these adapters see themselves as liberating Shakespeare from his language in order to maintain his relevance, just as Dryden—and many eighteenth-century adapters of Shakespeare after him—felt he was doing in his reworkings of the plays 350 years ago. While many fics strive to adhere to the canonical narrative of the original text—whether through minimal departure missing scene fics, slash fics that push homoerotic subtexts to the surface, or fics that spiral off into elaborate adventures that eventually find their way back to the canonical plot—there are numerous genres and individual fics that do not aim to run parallel to that canon. The aforementioned genres of alternate universe, crossover, wingfic, genderswap, and many others purposefully depart from the established narrative while still prioritizing a roughly canonical form of characterization. Whether Hamlet sprouts wings or finds himself in an American high school, he is usually some combination of mopey, verbose, contemplative, close with Horatio, or in a contentious relationship with Ophelia. Still other genres and tropes revel in non-canonical characterizations and plots. ‘Crack fic,’ for example, is purposefully absurd, demolishing notions of canonical plausibility and delighting in the incongruity of it all. In Ambrose’s “Food and Cheer,” the author uses Mercutio, Tybalt, and Benvolio to write a fic in response to the prompt “Imagine Person A being held hostage by C unless B forks over the last slice of pizza they

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have.”55 In SanSese’s “The Game of Seats,” the cola-addicted celebrity Mercutio becomes furious that someone—Sir Montague, a noted playwright—is sitting in his VIP seat at the Globe, a fic focused primarily on his preference for sitting in that particular seat that ends with Mercutio making plans to sleep with Sir Montague’s nephew, Benvolio.56 In jlaw13’s “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” tagged as “The Shakespeare/Harry Potter crossover everyone has been waiting for,” numerous Shakespeare characters cavort in a post-Deathly Hallows Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.57 And in marruman’s “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian Talk Show,” the central characters of Hamlet appear on a Jerry Springer-­ style daytime talk show, during which Hamlet and Claudius accuse and fight with one another on the stage (only to have the security guards intervene) as Geraldus Spring brings on a string of surprise guests to respond to the various shocking revelations. After Hamlet reveals he has accidentally killed Polonius, Geraldus proclaims, “Is it not a curious twist of Fate that she is in the wings of our theatre, and has heard all that you have to say? Ophelia, will you grace us with your presence on stage?”58 Ophelia runs on stage and slaps Hamlet before the guards take her to her chair. As many of the fics discussed in this chapter demonstrate, play is a key element of fan fiction, in the sense of playful rather than solely as the antithesis of work in a labor/economic sense. As discussed in Chap. 2, ‘fan’ derives from ‘fanatic,’ connoting obsessive reverence for the fan object, an over-serious fixation akin to religious extremism that has frequently been used to characterize fans when we want to mock their affective engagement. But from David Garrick through to fanfic authors, fans are self-aware, with proclamations of obsession serving as knowingly hyperbolic gestures. As a significant body of fan fiction demonstrates, reverence is frequently counterbalanced with irreverence, the desire to play with the fan object rather than simply bow before it. And rather than 55  Ambrose, “Food and Cheer,” Archive of Our Own, Published October 17, 2015, accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/5016358. 56  SanSese, “The Game of Seats,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 16, 2016, accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6875281. 57  jlaw13, “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 14, 2019, accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/18104915/chapters/ 42799271. 58  marruman, “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian Talk Show,” Archive of Our Own, Published August 2, 2015, accessed July 18, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 4482794.

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functioning as an act of sacrilege, fan play democratizes access to a canonical author like Shakespeare by authorizing all readers to play in his worlds and with his characters, and by incorporating him and his works into our contemporary media and cultural environment. Particularly in crossover fics, but also in fan fiction more generally, Shakespeare becomes part of a postmodern pastiche, blending—and leveling—high and low culture in a way that, through play, “is certainly capable of extending or enriching the meaning of Shakespeare’s text.”59 In this way, the play of fanfic operates in ways similar to those identified by Douglas Lanier in his discussion of objects of Shakespearean material culture such as action figures and rubber ducks. Lanier argues that “The suggestion of cultural superiority communicated by Shakespeare is ironically infantilized, the heart of each item’s appeal its ironic distance from mainstream pop capitalism.”60 While fanfic does not necessarily ironically infantilize Shakespeare, the juxtaposition of ironic distance and proximity between Shakespeare and modern popular culture established by many fics ultimately contemporizes Shakespeare in a way that complements scholarly criticism. And through its frequent playfulness, fan fiction can be serious and critical by addressing the perceived problems with the fan object, Shakespearean or otherwise (whether the lack of representation or inclusivity, its employment of undesirable tropes, etc.). In these cases, fan fiction does the work of criticism—pointing to the misogyny, victim blaming, or other prejudices of a text—through different means. Such fan critiques undoubtedly emerge partly from the paradoxical reluctance of academic criticism to embrace anachronistic readings of the plays, for example, even as theory and criticism are frequently anachronistic. One of the core strengths of fan fiction and one of the primary reasons that we should be studying it more—whether it does the work of criticism or refutes it, whether it is derivative or creative, whether it is playful or serious, whether it is ideologically and politically radical or not—is because of the way in which it insistently situates individual readers and writers, and their individual responses to and interpretations of a text, at the center of a text’s meaning. Whereas academia prioritizes consensus readings, theoretical approaches, and peer judgment that gravitate around a collective understanding of what constitutes an appropriate burden of proof, fan  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 86.  Douglas Lanier, “Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98. 59 60

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readings, and responses prioritize—or at least grant equal weight to—the subjective, readerly ‘I,’ whether anachronistic, counterfactual, or not. Perhaps the most radical feature of fan fiction lies not in the economics of its production and labor, its refutation of traditional notions of ownership, or its ideological and hegemonic subversiveness, but in its elevation of the reader to pride of place. Fan fiction offers a space in which all ideas, opinions, and interpretations matter, and where any text or fan object can mean—or be made to mean—anything you want it to mean, to speak to any concerns or desires you want it to speak to. In this sense, fanfic is the epitome of postmodern relativism and hypersubjectivity in which authors are dead and readers are empowered to collaborate with them, and to speak for and through them. Hellekson and Busse see fanfic as operating in this way, the “fictional embodiment” of Barthes’ and Foucault’s notion that “meaning always exceeded the author’s intent,” and is frequently “coproduced between author and reader.”61 As should be evident to readers familiar with the wide range of Shakespeare adaptations currently and historically available, fan fiction shares considerable common ground with a number of commercially available texts produced for stage, screen, and bookstore. From Mary Cowden Clarke’s nineteenth-century The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines series of tales to Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Claire McCarthy’s film Ophelia (and Lisa Klein’s novel which it adapts), authors have been writing Shakespearean missing scene fics for some time 61  Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Fiction as Literature,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 20. More recently, Busse has also explored the ways in which contemporary reading practices and the fanfic community at large has renegotiated the postmodern death of the author through a focus on identity politics, emphasizing that “authors and their intents have indeed been reincorporated and become central to various modes of discourse. The old question of ‘What does the author mean?,’ however, has been replaced with an identity question as to ‘Who is the author?’ In other words, a focus on authorial intention and how thoughts and beliefs create meaning has shifted to a focus on authorial identity and how cultural situatedness shapes meaning.” She likewise stresses that “Authorial identity remains a central concern for marginal subjects—that is, those who do not occupy uppermiddle-class, white, male, straight, able-bodied, cisgendered, Western positions.” This is an incredibly important and theoretically productive issue, but one that is worked out in fandoms primarily in relation to contemporary, living authors situated—in general—in the same ideological and cultural debates as the reader. See: Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 19, 26.

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(even as far back as Dryden’s interventions into his versions of Shakespeare’s plays). Fix-it fics have persisted from Fletcher, through Tate, and down to Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). This final play in particular speaks to the fannish desire to see both more of and more from the fan object, with a narrative focused on fulfilling a young academic’s vision of Desdemona and Juliet as feministic, sexually progressive in spite of the benevolent and dismissive misogyny of her older male colleague. Additionally, a distinct sense of fannish play—of reverent irreverence and intertextual hide-and-go-seek—permeates texts such as Ryan North’s choosable-path adventures, To Be or Not to Be (2013/2016) and Romeo and/or Juliet (2016). The difference between commercial Shakespeare fan fiction and online or noncommercial Shakespeare fan fiction lies not in genre but in the parameters of form, the apparatuses of production, and the conception of audience, metatextual concerns that nevertheless shape the text and determine its cultural position and the ways in which it can be consumed. Even though online fan fiction is accessible to all and appears in massive digital databases, an individual fic might be written as a gift for a single individual and read by a select few people with parallel interests. By contrast, commercial texts—whether performed or published in the traditional sense—are written with a larger, paying audience in mind, with production costs footed by publishers, movie studios, and so forth, and with an awareness of the dictates and demands that accompany such apparatuses. Extreme brevity or length—outside of a niche or avant-garde market—are not commercially viable, so the four-­ word “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare” is as unlikely as the 4.1-million-word—and counting—“The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest” to share shelf space with the above-mentioned texts.62 However, the different ways in which we access or consume commercial and online fan fiction, and their often differing relation to editorial p ­ ractice or materiality, should not be the basis for separating adaptive texts that are fundamentally—ideologically and generically—similar.

62  AuraChannelerChris, “The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest,” FanFiction, Published March 5, 2008, accessed July 24, 2019, https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4112682/1/TheSubspace-Emissary-s-Worlds-Conquest. Although it does not appear on AO3 and is not Shakespeare fanfic, this work stands as the longest available fic, approximately five times as long as Shakespeare’s complete body of work.

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Bibliography 1f_this_be_madness. “Hamlet and the Pirates.” Archive of Our Own. Published October 2, 2015. Accessed July 15, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/4914781?view_full_work=true. 720418mb. “Standing Ovation.” Archive of Our Own. Published February 7, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619868/ chapters/21733892. a_t_rain. “The Great Danish Crocodile Cook-Off.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 18, 2019. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 18875281. Ambrose. “Food and Cheer.” Archive of Our Own. Published October 17, 2015. Accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/5016358. AuraChannelerChris. “The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest.” FanFiction. Published March 5, 2008. Accessed July 24, 2019. https://www.fanfiction. net/s/4112682/1/The-Subspace-Emissary-s-Worlds-Conquest. beacandy. “Exit, Katherine.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 19, 2015. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827524. benvoliio. “Patience Perforce.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 6, 2018. Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225991/ chapters/32798499. Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. cheshireArcher. “The Perfect Nurse.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 4, 2017. Accessed July 16, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 11994462. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 41–59. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Coppa, Francesca. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, 1719. Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ElwritesFanworks. “No Forgiveness Under Heaven.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 29, 2017. Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown. org/works/11030331. Fazel, Valerie and Louise Geddes. “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction.” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 274–86.

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fiftysevenacademics. “Antonio Evens the Score.” Archive of Our Own. Published: April 23, 2015. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 3808588. Flaherty, Jennifer. “‘How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?’” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 101–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Gardenostalgic. “To Mar the Foolish Fates.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 6, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 6475003. Goodman, Lesley. “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author.” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662–76. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. hamlets_scribe. “Hamlette.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 21, 2014. Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668677. Hartley, Andrew. “Introduction: ‘Reason Not the Need!’” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Fiction as Literature.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 19–25. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 5–32. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Hills, Matt. “Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgments in Media and Cultural Studies.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington, 33–47. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007. Holderness, Graham. “Shakespeare and the Undead.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 207–28. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Howell, Katherine Anderson. “Invitation: Remix Pedagogy in the Fandom Classroom.” In Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, edited by Katherine Anderson Howell, 1–15. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. ilikeituptheass. “The Kingdom of Denmark Is Run by a Gay Stoner’s Father but It Sounds Like the Author Is on Crack by Fall Out Boy.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 19, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://archiveofourown. org/works/14975120. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013.

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Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006. jlaw13. “The Heart Wants What It Wants.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 14, 2019. Accessed July 17, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 18104915/chapters/42799271. Kaplan, Deborah. “Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 134–52. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Killtheselights. “Conceal Me What I Am.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 7, 2018. Accessed July 30, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 14242881/chapters/32843100. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 93–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lanier, Douglas M. “The Hogarth Shakespeare Series: Redeeming Shakespeare’s Literariness.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 230–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 28, 2014. Accessed August 3, 2018. https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/2033745. marruman. “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian Talk Show.” Archive of Our Own. Published August 2, 2015. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/4482794. mcrshank. “Auric Idolatry.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 30, 2018. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14141649/ chapters/32591031. megvad. “Romance and Justice.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 7, 2017. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/10848702/ chapters/24086955. MissTantabis. “Ganymede and Jupiter.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 6, 2018. Accessed June 12, 2018. https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/ 14863355. NathanieloftheSky. “To Where the Wind Blows.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 24, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/15028202/chapters/34838825. Nayoky. “The Twelfth Trap.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 28, 2015. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/4442354/ chapters/10093139. planet_plantagenet. “Tempest/Star Trek Crossover.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 6, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown. org/works/7401964.

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planet_plantagenet. “Wild and Whirling Words: Hamlet in Texts.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/11149473/chapters/24876822. princehamlet. “Suddenly, Pirates!” Archive of Our Own. Published May 17, 2018. Accessed July 15, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14688603/ chapters/33939147. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Raggdoll_101. “Shakespeare Crack-eth.” Archive of Our Own. Published February 17, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 13713543. republic. “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 20, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2019. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/8092441. Rollins, H. E., ed. The Letters of John Keats. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Sandvoss, Cornel. “The Death of the Reader?: Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 61–74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. SanSese. “The Game of Seats.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 16, 2016. Accessed July 17, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6875281. Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. London, 1600. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. London, 1597. TheHazardsofLove13. “Toys of Desperation.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 10, 2018. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 14893634. tinypurplefishes. “The Shrew of Padua.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 19, 2015. Accessed July 16, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 4827707. tvecking. “Just this once.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 6, 2018. Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13890330. Whyman, Erica. “Queering the Pitch.” Romeo and Juliet Program. Stratford-­ upon-­Avon: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2018. Yost, Michelle K. “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 193–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 5

“There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare, RPF, and Parody

Although Shakespeare has a sizable fandom on archiveofourown.org (AO3), he and his works are not always of primary significance in fan fiction. As noted in Chap. 4, fics that reference Shakespeare outnumber those tagged as belonging to the Shakespeare fandom approximately 3:1. In these cases, Shakespeare serves a secondary, allusive function as a general cultural signifier of taste and sophistication, the embodiment of a ‘classic’ author or hegemonic canonicity, a high-culture writing style that is inspiring or boringly obtuse, and a whole range of other meanings that are employed in the service of fics written primarily for other fandoms. This conforms generally to one of the two types of ‘Shakespeare users’ identified by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes. While some users are “deliberate seekers of Shakespeare,” others are “incidental tourists, visitors whose interest in something other than Shakespeare—an actor, a new film adaptation, an adjacent discipline, or a culturally eclectic website—drives them circuitously to the corpus. Their use may be occasional, spontaneous, offhand, drawn to the text for the length of time it will take to satisfy [a] related interest.”1 In this chapter, I examine a range of texts that treat Shakespeare as secondary, partly through a continued discussion of crossover fics but primarily through a discussion of Real Person Fic (RPF) 1  Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 8.

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focused first on Shakespeare himself and then on celebrity actors who have played prominent roles in Shakespeare productions and films as well as in the objects of other popular fandoms. Tom Hiddleston, for example, has appeared in a number of Shakespeare projects in addition to portraying Loki in the immensely popular Marvel superhero films, and he has been a popular focus of RPF that frequently comments on his affinity for Shakespeare. In many of these fics, Shakespeare is incorporated as a significant feature of the actor’s identity, but one that is dealt with according to varying degrees of familiarity and interest by the fics’ authors. I move from there into a discussion of the incorporation of Shakespeare into other fandoms and fan texts, both noncommercial and commercial, particularly the growing body of Shakespearean ‘parodies’ of popular films that reimaging them as plays written by the Bard. In the process, I return to some of the issues raised in Chap. 3 regarding the ownership of Shakespeare, as ‘parody’ is a term that carries both generic and legal significance. Both connotations of parody are of paramount importance when discussing texts such as Ian Doescher’s series of Shakespearean Star Wars plays. Taken together, these texts illuminate how fans frequently operate as participants in multiple fandoms, as well as how fannish forms of engagement serve to negotiate Shakespeare’s status in contemporary popular culture by challenging or resisting that status. The appearance of fan-centric actors in Shakespeare films is relevant to Jeffrey Bussolini’s notion of “intertextuality of casting” and Alyson Buckman’s related notion of “hyperdiegetic casting.”2 Although both of these critics are discussing Joss Whedon’s work in particular and the way in which his use of an ensemble of actors to offer a special pleasure and “a collective, specialized fund of knowledge available specifically to those who have watched (and rewatched) his fictions,”3 the idea works in terms of how casting, say, Daisy Ridley in Ophelia or casting Doctor Who or Avengers actors in Shakespearean film and stage productions is received by the audience, as fans bring that other fandom with them to these Bard projects. This can be intentional, as in, putting Daisy Ridley in Ophelia serves a metatextual function as the strength and independence of her 2  Bussolini quoted in: K. Brenna Wardell, “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of the Joss Whedon Ensemble,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2016): para. 11–13; Buckman quoted in: J. Douglas Rabb and J. Michael Richardson, Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist: Narrative Ethics of the Bard and the Buffyverse (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 15. 3  Buckman, quoted in: Rabb and Richardson, Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist, 15.

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character Rey from Star Wars impinges upon Ridley as Ophelia, and the audience—rightly or not—expects a kind of Rey-ness from the character, with some audiences seeing Rey playing Ophelia more so than Ridley playing Ophelia. For example, in Peter Rabbit (2018), Ridley lends her voice to Cotton-Tail, whose intensity and physicality undoubtedly read as Rey-­ esque to viewers who are aware that Ridley is the voice behind the rabbit. Intertextual casting connections can be unintentional and anachronistic, which is relevant because, as we saw in the previous chapter, fandoms can be cheerfully anachronistic and counterfactual. During a recent screening of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010), one of my students exclaimed “Jyn Erso!” when Felicity Jones first appeared on screen as Miranda, a reference to Jones’ character in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). In the discussion that followed Taymor’s film, this student expressed disappointment that Jones’ wispy fragility in The Tempest stood in stark contrast to Jyn Erso’s strength, assertiveness, and capability in Rogue One. Although Taymor’s film predates Rogue One by approximately six years, some fans will see the character wherever the actor’s body appears and see all performances as in dialogue with the fan text. However, these fans are not naïve in assuming that there is some essential connection between Miranda and Jyn Erso or that the six-year deficit does not matter. Rather, it is the pleasure evoked by the fan object—in this case, Star Wars—that encourages the juxtaposition of the two roles. This functions a little differently in Whedon’s work because he is largely responsible for the casting of his films and television shows, so having Nathan Fillion play both Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Captain Mal in Firefly is not a coincidence. As K. Brenna Wardell notes, Whedon’s use of an ensemble encourages in-­ the-­know audiences to see the roles as in dialogue with one another: “A Whedon newcomer may find individual Fillion roles rewarding in their own right, but for frequent Whedon viewers there are distinct pleasures in recognizing Fillion, connecting each role to previous roles and texts, seeing him work with Whedon plays from non-Fillion texts, and reveling in the radically varied ways in which Whedon showcases him.”4 So while the 4  Wardell, “Actors Assemble!,” para. 11. A number of Whedon critics have argued that Whedon’s use of ensembles links him to Shakespearean theatrical practice in the playwright’s use of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men (Wardell, “Actors Assemble!,” para. 3–4; Rabb and Richardson, Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist, 11–12). While this comparison has merit, the use of ensembles has been and is such a common practice in theater that there is nothing specifically Shakespearean about it, even though Shakespeare’s acting companies are famous examples of it. And as Wardell notes, directors such as Martin Scorsese,

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intertextuality of casting might be more explicitly intentional in diverse projects overseen by the same creative team than it is in different projects overseen by different people, fans often establish that intertextuality on their own. And we would be naïve to ignore the fact that studios undoubtedly count on this draw to attract existing fans to something else by virtue of such casting. Likewise, it is a point often made by film and television critics in their reviews and commentary. In his piece on Ophelia for CNN, Brian Lowry spends as much time discussing Star Wars as he does Ridley’s new film “which trades in the lightsaber for Shakespeare,” noting the “balancing act for those featured in blockbuster franchises—choosing roles that allow them to stretch as actors, and getting people to see them separately from the iconic characters they play.”5 Audiences, and fans in particular, engage in intertextual viewing. Such intertextual viewing is undoubtedly connected to aspects of celebrity culture and fandom, but it is often less about following a specific actor from project to project (such as watching the newest Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt vehicle) than it is about seeing the ghost of a particular character across different projects. This can be manifested in fan fiction in both crossover fic or RPF, or in a combination of the two. In crossover fic, characters from two or more fandoms interact with one another (e.g., Doctor Who meets Luke Skywalker), or characters from one fandom either find themselves in the imaginative worlds of other fandoms (Iron Man finds himself aboard the Death Star) or the specifics of that world intrude on their own (Iron Man discovers he can use the Force in an otherwise normal Marvel version of New York City). Crossovers can be novel in that they strive for a sense of both playfulness and disorientation, pursuing the pleasure of unexpected combinations and also serving as a demonstration of the author’s ability to find points of contact across disparate imaginative worlds and sets of characters. Crossovers also reflect the multidirectional nature of fandom in general in that fans are rarely fans of a single television series or movie but are rather fans of numerous things— John Ford, and Judd Apatow have also used the same actors across numerous films (Wardell, “Actors Assemble!,” para. 12). Additionally, some movie and television studios have longstanding relationships with specific actors, whether through MGM’s long-term contacts for actors in the 1930s and 1940s or more recently in Pixar’s repeated hiring of John Ratzenberger as a voice actor. 5  Brian Lowry, “Daisey Ridley trades ‘Star Wars’ for Shakespeare in ‘Ophelia,’” CNN, Published July 2, 2019, accessed July 30, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/ entertainment/daisy-ridley-ophelia-column/index.html.

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to varying degrees—at once. Although the imaginative worlds of each of these objects might be hermetically sealed off from one another within the worlds themselves and as separate intellectual properties, fans—and audiences more generally—are transtextual. While crossover fic commonly brings some of the dominant fandoms into contact with one another, it is also often reflective of the specific transfandom of a particular author, thus offering a unique constellation of intersections. As discussed in Chap. 4, fan fiction’s pleasure lies in recognition, that readers and writers can read recognizable characters circulating in recognizable worlds and behaving in recognizable ways. Crossover fic requires, at minimum, a double recognition. If Harry Potter and Star Trek are crossed over but the reader is unfamiliar with one of those two worlds, the fic loses its coherence and impact as a crossover. You can still read it, but as Anne Jamison reminds us, that’s not the point.6 As crossovers multiply or become more esoteric, the size of the ‘in-the-know’ readership diminishes and coalesces around the authors themselves who are hailing a potentially small group of similarly disposed transfans. HouseGameOfPotter’s lengthy “The Room” crosses over Harry Potter and Game of Thrones in detail, merging two of the largest contemporary media fandoms.7 By contrast, in “The Quidditch Match,” TheGryffindorBookworm crosses over Harry Potter with the MASH television series, a less obvious pairing, while other crossovers are substantially more wide-ranging.8 Arken_Stone1’s “The Librarian, the Doctor and the Tardis” crosses over Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, Sherlock, Star Trek, Lucifer, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit.9 Still others cross Harry Potter over with a wide range of films, television series, novels, anime, videogames, and so forth all in a single fic, limited only by an author’s reading and viewing practices. In Shakespeare fanfic, characters are crossed over between the plays and outside Shakespeare’s body of work. In “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel,” fresne crosses over A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado  Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 14.  HouseGameOfPotter, “The Room,” Archive of Our Own, Published November 13, 2017, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/12710496/chapters/ 28986447. 8  TheGryffindorBookworm, “The Quidditch Match,” Archive of Our Own, Published August 15, 2018, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688266. 9  Arken_Stone1, “The Librarian, the Doctor and the Tardis,” Archive of Our Own, Published November 28, 2017, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/ works/12851208/chapters/29347227. 6 7

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About Nothing, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Othello, imagining Titania and Oberon as the architects of fate for the various plays and altering their details, often to slash and genderfluid purposes.10 In “Pathstone,” WhimsicallyWiddershins crosses over Othello and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which Iago and Gawain find themselves exchanging stories in an inn over drinks, whereas “Rendezvous” by Elsinore_and_ Inverness crosses over Doctor Who and Richard II.11 All such crossovers—Shakespearean or otherwise—require audiences who are comfortable reading in all of the grafted fandoms. Intertextual viewing also takes on a complex dimension when we consider the case of Shakespeare. Indeed, the very nature of Shakespeare— and theater more generally—introduces some ideas that fan studies have not sufficiently dealt with, particularly as it pertains to casting and performance. As Sheenagh Pugh notes, “Characters, except in purely book-­ based fandoms, necessarily go about behind the faces of real people, actors.”12 As such, media fans typically imagine and discuss characters as they appear on screen: Luke Skywalker looks and behaves like actor Mark Hamill and is imagined as such in Star Wars fanfic or fan works. Despite originating in book fandoms, fan works dealing with Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings tend to draw on the characterizations offered by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Ian McKellen, and Elijah Wood, or else they are specifically and explicitly grounded in details from the novels.13 In some cases, characters are embodied by multiple actors, such as Star Trek’s James Kirk as played by both William Shatner and Chris Pine. With the exception of characters like James Bond, Batman, or The Doctor, characters are rarely embodied by more than one or two different actors. The options open up a bit more when discussing works that have been 10  fresne, “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel,” Archive of Our Own, Published December 24, 2014, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/2841458. 11  WhimsicallyWiddershins, “Pathstone,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 9, 2018, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14595411; Elsinore_and_ Inverness, “Rendezvous,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 24, 2017, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/12180159/chapters/27649740. 12  Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 158. 13  In many cases, fandoms related to an object that has both book and film iterations, for example, will make it clear which version they are dealing with. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fanfic, for example, will frequently delineate whether an individual fic belongs to the book or the film fandom.

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f­ requently adapted, especially ones that are out of copyright, from Hercules to Elizabeth Bennet to Sherlock Holmes. By contrast, Shakespeare’s character appears in no fixed form, and with very few physical descriptions given in the plays: the Duke of Gloucester has a hunchback; Rosalind is relatively tall; Katherine Minola might have a limp. Shakespeare fans might be purely ‘book’ fans in that they prefer the texts of the plays, or they might be fans of particular performances, the diversity of which means a wide range of potential foundational imaginings. For some fans, Hamlet will be imagined as Laurence Olivier, David Tennant, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, or any one of the thousands of actors who have played the role. Some fans of Romeo and Juliet might be inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) but be entirely unaware of the existence of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film. Some fans will be inspired by the gender- and race-blind casting of London stage performances while others will never experience Shakespeare outside of a classroom or film production. In short, while the media fans that come to mind when we think of ‘fans’ are typically working from a limited number of sources and embodiments, Shakespeare fans are choosing from near infinite possibilities. Say ‘Hermione Granger’ and a set menu of imaginative choices appears before the Harry Potter fan. Say ‘Juliet’ and the Shakespeare fan stands before an unlimited international buffet of options. Real Person Fic shares some ground with crossover and other styles of fanfic, but it also breaks with many of fanfic’s conventions as a whole. RPF takes as its focus the actors, musicians, authors, athletes, and so forth who are the objects of fandom, a kind of celebrity fan. While RPF often dovetails with fanfic of all types, it is distinct in that it explicitly acknowledges performance and fictionality rather than fleshing out an established fictional world. Whereas, for example, film-based Harry Potter fanfic typically maintains the reality of the Wizarding World and its characters, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson RPF acknowledge that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger are roles played by these actors. In other words, whereas fanfic generally prioritizes character and world, RPF often makes clear the distinction between the fictional and the real. Although, as Pugh notes, a lot of RPF can also blur the distinction between actors and the characters they play,14 related to what Murray Pomerance characterizes as a strong “actor-character bond,” “the tenuousness between actors and the

 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 161.

14

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characters they play.”15 Of course, celebrity fandom and media fandom are by no means wholly separate, and one might emerge from the other: one could become a fan of Daniel Radcliffe because of his portrayal of Harry Potter. Following Pugh, in RPF, it is not uncommon to see actors represented as strikingly similar to the characters they portray (emphasizing that they are perfect for the role) or, sometimes, strikingly dissimilar to those same characters (emphasizing the strength of their acting ability). RPF frequently involves speculating about what the ‘real’ actor is like, or what the authors might wish them to be like, detailing a fictional private life beyond both the performance of a character and the public performance of their own celebrity persona.16 Although frequently connected to contemporary celebrity culture, it is important to note that RPF is by no means a new genre linked solely to fan fiction, just as fanfic is not a wholly new phenomenon. Indeed, Shakespeare himself arguably wrote some, most obviously in the Plantagenet and Tudor RPF of his history plays, but likewise in some of the tragedies, namely King Lear and Macbeth, which serve simultaneously as RPF and Holinshed fix-it fic. We might also look to Christopher Marlowe’s RPF slash, Edward II, but we need not limit ourselves to Elizabethan and Jacobean examples, as RPF theater alone stretches back at least to Aristophanes’ The Frogs (405BC), an originary example of Euripides-Aeschylus RPF. In short, online RPF is tied to the long history of historical and biographical fiction. RPF is stylistically notable within fan fiction on a number of fronts, many of which are related. First, whereas fanfic in general is sometimes sexual and sometimes not, RPF tends toward romantic, erotic, or sexually explicit encounters. Pugh contends that RPF evolved specifically from slash, which could help explain the preponderance of erotic narratives,17 but we should also consider the influence of celebrity culture more 15  Murray Pomerance, “Doing Dumbledore: Actor-Character Bonding and Accretionary Performance,” in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, eds. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 166. 16  Here, I am slightly modifying Busse’s discussion of real person slash (RPS). She argues that “RPS deals with at least three different versions of the celebrity: the real star whom we can never know, the public performance of the star, and the extrapolated star where the writer fictionalizes a supposed private life.” See Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 172. 17  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 159.

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­ enerally and the long history of related fan practices such as writing letg ters—confessional, desirous, or otherwise—and sending gifts, pictures, and other tokens to celebrities.18 Second, fanfic in general often avoids original characters (OCs) inserted by the author, preferring instead to develop, expand upon, and play with established fictional characters. By contrast, RPF frequently employs OCs who interact with the celebrities in the fics. When established characters do appear, they tend to be other celebrities rather than fictional characters, such as in the large body of work tagged as ‘British Actor RPF’ on AO3. Third, RPF is more likely than other forms of fanfic to be written from a second-person perspective. This is perhaps not surprising. A genre that is frequently grounded in desire will logically include stand-ins for the author as part of the fantasy fulfillment, either by writing that stand-in in as a named third-person OC, by encouraging readers to insert themselves through the use of secondperson narration, or through the use of y/n inclusions (‘y/n’ is a fanfic prompt for the reader to insert ‘your name’ wherever ‘y/n’ appears, so ‘He smiled at y/n’ is meant to be read as ‘He smiled at John,’ or whatever your name might be). Fourth, the standard notion of canon does not always operate in RPF in the same way as it does in other genres of fanfic because, rather than the officially sanctioned continuity and consistency of a fictional world, “the observable moments of RPF are a random jumble of marketing ploys and happenstance, crafted constructs and slips of actual personality, about which fandom at large comes to a consensus,” repudiating the singular narrative of fictional characters.19 Thus, canon in RPF is more difficult to access because no fan has total access to the complete and authentic narrative of a celebrity’s life, which can only be glimpsed in fragments—if at all—and coalesces around specific moments or apparent character traits: an actor working on a specific film on location at a specific time; pictures of vacations captured by the paparazzi or posted by the actor to Instagram; tabloid stories about relationship or financial troubles; the hints of an actor’s real sense of humor or personal politics conveyed during an interview. All of these are the disparate points that can be stitched together to form the foundation of canon on which RPF authors build. 18  Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5–8. 19  V. Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, ed. Anne Jamison (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 328.

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Although RPF is a well-established genre within fanfic, it has not attracted a great deal of published scholarship. Pugh, for example, writes broadly about RPF in The Democratic Genre, noting that she avoids quoting from RPF “for obvious legal reasons,” namely a fear of ending up “on the wrong end of a libel suit.”20 Nevertheless, some critics have published work on some subgenres of RPF, such as Coppa’s and Busse’s work on popslash (i.e., RPF focused on boybands, typically the Backstreet Boys or ∗NSYNC and originating in the early 2000s). Busse, for example, argues that popslash fics “foreground the way subject positions are not only chosen but also consciously created and shaped by the audience even as they address a desire for an imaginary core identity,” and therefore share a thematic focus on the performance of postmodern selfhood.21 Additionally, Coppa suggests that popslash helped break the taboo within fandom more generally which held that “writing fanfiction, particularly romantic or sexual fiction, about ‘real people’ (actors, musicians, celebrities) was disrespectful or in bad taste.”22 Likewise, V.  Arrow notes that, in spite of popslash, RPF is still “a world in some ways completely apart from the rest of fanfiction subculture,” derided within the fanfic community as ‘creepy.’23 Arrow also argues that most RPF consists of slash pairings of musicians in the popslash tradition but that, in contrast to the assumptions made by critics of RPF, much of it aims to be respectful of its subject by probing for the truth of that individual, even if that truth often comes across during scenes of intimacy.24 As we will see, however, Shakespeare— or Shakespearean actor—RPF departs form some of these assumptions. Busse discusses identification and desire as it is articulated in RPF by distinguishing between “insertion and observer fantasy as recurring modes of fannish narratives. In the former, writers may directly insert themselves into the narrative or mold one of the characters to become their representative, while in the latter they voyeuristically fantasize a reality in which the stars remain undisturbed by outside observers.”25 Both insertion and observer fantasy are prevalent in Shakespeare RPF. Additionally, it is noteworthy that RPF occupies a paradoxical space within fan culture more  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 161.  Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 42–43. 22  Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 101. 23  Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” 323. 24  Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” 331. 25  Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 44. 20 21

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broadly, especially when it is focused on celebrity actors and musicians. While it might be marginalized within the broader fanfic community, RPF is also connected to the most mainstream, socially acceptable forms of fandom, as celebrity and music fandoms have numerous commercial venues that legitimize their fans. Indeed, Coppa goes so far as to suggest that these fandoms are perhaps “too close to mainstream culture,” with the end result that they “never had much of an organized subcultural presence.”26 But while buying magazines featuring photo spreads and interviews with a favorite actor, reading and watching tabloid stories about their spending habits and personal lives, or seeking them out for autographs are activities that are legitimized and encouraged in popular culture, RPF is seen as crossing the very hazy line of appropriateness, even within the fanfic community. RPF relevant to Shakespeare comes in two forms: fics featuring Shakespeare himself, and ones focused on actors who have played Shakespearean roles on stage or screen. Fics focused on Shakespeare himself serve to complicate some of the predominant assumptions about RPF. For example, is it accurate to consider the playwright a celebrity or star in the same sense as we would an actor or even a famous contemporary author? If, as Busse suggests, RPF is grounded in the fan’s knowing recognition of the celebrity’s multivalent performance of self, then we are missing comparable performances from Shakespeare himself such talk show appearances, magazine profiles and interviews, tabloid stories about off-camera antics, Twitter and Instagram posts, and so forth. Nevertheless, Shakespeare is still anachronistically wrested into our own understanding of celebrity, which is clearly evident in Shakespeare in Love, a film that maps a turn-of-the-millennium sense of showbiz and fame onto Shakespeare’s world of Elizabethan theater in order to encourage the audience to identify with him by refashioning him according to our own sense of celebrity. This version of Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is driven by passion and sexual desire that is grounded in identification: Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) loves him as a nobody playwright and identifies with his artistic sensibilities when everyone else is blind to his talents and more smitten with Christopher Marlowe. Such pre-fame recognition of talent and the mutual affection that arises prior to wealth and celebrity is an extremely common 26  Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 56.

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trope in RPF focused on today’s celebrities. Michelle K. Yost notes that “Shakespeare’s celebrity and iconography are the fuel of fannish imagination, remaking him into their own folk hero. His life is an incomplete story that some authors yearn to fill because missing puzzle pieces are a source of irritation. Others want to see the object of their admiration reflect (and embody) their own desires for success, love, and acceptance.”27 In this sense, the details of Shakespeare’s biography are as tantalizingly ellipsistic as any media text, and from the ghost of Shakespeare that appears in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida to Kenneth Branagh’s speculations about a post-London Shakespeare in the film All Is True (2018), authors have used Shakespeare to reflect their own desires or to playfully fill in the ‘missing scenes’ of his life. In some cases, Shakespeare RPF is blended with crossover and other fanfic genres. In a tantalizing summary for “Bed Time Story About Master Luke,” a fic that still remains unwritten, JadeEyedMonster explains their ambitious plan for a crossover between The Last Jedi and Shakespeare: [The] basic concept is that there are two time-travelers who travel from different timelines into 16th century Europe and fall in love. One of them is Rey, who is devastated from the death of Master Luke [at the end of The Last Jedi] so tries to use the Force astral projection to contact him but instead ends up in the body of Mary Arden who is just taking care of little baby William and starts telling him a bed time story about Luke. The other one is the Anne Hathaway who from childhood since she can remember did switch between her 16th century body and her 21st century body and is just trying to control it and live this confusing life. So the way they meet is probably going to be really cute but at the end of the day Will is going to have his kids with Anne and leave to London. So Mary and Anne are going to raise all of these new kids in their family home in Stratford and have adventures on the farm and its [sic] all going to be cute and dreamy.28

Fics such as these merge the loose biographical details of Shakespeare with the playful irreverence that characterizes much of crossover fic in general. While narratives such as Shakespeare in Love and All Is True strive, if 27   Michelle K.  Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 200. 28  JadeEyedMonster, “Bed Time Story About Master Luke,” Archive of Our Own, Published January 17, 2018, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/ works/13401843.

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s­ omewhat tongue-in-cheek or anachronistically, toward an overall sense of historical plausibility, fics like “Bed Time Story About Master Luke” treat Shakespeare as no different than any other media text or pop culture character. In this vein, there are numerous examples of Shakespeare/Marlowe slash fic on AO3, some deriving from Shakespeare in Love, Will, or other recent filmic depictions of the two playwrights, and some tagged more generally as ‘Historical RPF’ or ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre & Literature RPF.’ Many of these fics play on Shakespeare’s admiration for the more established and admired Marlowe as well as the homoerotic possibilities and queer readings of both writers’ works. Shakespeare frequently plays the role of the fan and Marlowe of the celebrity in which Shakespeare’s veneration of Marlowe becomes the foundation for a sexual encounter. In Ashmole’s “A Man in Hue,” a fresh-faced Shakespeare is awestruck when Marlowe, “This man known already by reputation, … The writer of Tamburlaine” joins him for a drink.29 Shakespeare’s sexual and authorial inexperience is matched by the more seasoned and knowing—in both regards—Marlowe. The blending of professional and sexual apprenticeship is also evident in “The Chimes at Midnight” by nitpickyabouttrains in which Shakespeare is desperate to have Marlowe read Two Gentlemen of Verona, detailing an encounter between the two that results in both sex and their decision to collaborate with each other in the future.30 Not all RPF featuring Shakespeare is overtly erotic. In “Lent,” a_t_rain focuses on Shakespeare’s relationship with his daughters, Susanna and Judith, during a visit back to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1599. Will talks to them about his work, with Judith in particular lamenting the paucity of compelling female characters in history and in history plays. This fic focuses almost entirely on the family’s reading habits and the playwright’s ruminations about a new tragedy he might write—what would become Hamlet—as he reads Nicholas Breton’s The Miseries of Mavillia to his daughters over the course of his holiday visit. Ultimately, the author flips the prevalent autobiographical reading of the genesis of Hamlet by suggesting that the play was inspired not by Shakespeare’s son but by his daughters. “I wanted to explore the possibility that Hamlet may have started off as a girl, even if theatrical practicalities ensured that he didn’t 29  Ashmole, “A Man in Hue,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 30, 2016, accessed July 30, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6406762. 30  nitpickyabouttrains, “The Chimes At Midnight,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 31, 2017, accessed July 30, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/11665209.

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end up that way,” writes a_t_rain in the fic’s Notes.31 In “Words Words Words,” one of the most intriguing Shakespeare RPFs, author La Reine Noire writes in response to the news in 2016 that Oxford University Press would be claiming that the Henry VI plays were collaborations between Shakespeare and Marlowe in their most recent edition.32 Drawing inspiration from the tavern scenes in Shakespeare in Love, La Reine Noire speculates about how that collaboration might have played out by contemplating the concept of collaboration through the lens of fan fiction. In the Notes, the author explains: If you’ve been following the early modern news circuit (and if you’re reading this fic, odds are you do), you might have heard about the newly fashionable theory that the three parts of Henry VI were the collaborative effort of Shakespeare and Marlowe. My main issue with this theory hinges on the definition of the word ‘collaboration,’ which we as fan authors know can mean so many different things. This fic operates on the assumption that the Marlowe-Shakespeare collaboration on the three parts of Henry VI worked more or less like a collaboration between fan authors, where Marlowe was the beta-reader33 on Parts 2 and 3 and a co-author on the prequel, Part 1, where his primary contribution was the Joan of Arc storyline. Shakespeare then wrote Richard III on his own shortly after Marlowe’s murder. That assumption is mine and is not based on extant scholarship.34

This fic encapsulates the often blurry distinction between scholarship and fan criticism, offering a productive, creative analysis of a contentious 31  a_t_rain, “Lent,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 18, 2015, accessed July 31, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3387269. 32  The author does not identify which specific news story inspired the fic, but a number of stories appeared in the news media in the months immediately prior to the publication of the fic. See Dalya Alberge, “Christopher Marlowe Credited as One of Shakespeare’s Co-writers,” The Guardian, Published October 23, 2016, accessed July 31, 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christopher-marlowe-credited-as-one-ofshakespeares-co-writers. 33  ‘Beta reading’ is the fanfic equivalent of peer review where an early version of a fic is read and commented on by, usually, other fanfic authors. Beta reading differs from peer review, however, in that authors are not compelled to act upon the feedback and suggested revisions in order to achieve publication. 34  La Reine Noire, “Words Words Words,” Archive of Our Own, Published December 18, 2016, accessed July 31, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888116.

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authorship controversy. When Shakespeare appears as a character in RPF, he is frequently of primary importance to fic authors who are Fazel and Geddes’ “intentional and deliberate seekers of Shakespeare.”35 Shakespeare, however, also appears in RPF dedicated to other fandoms and other celebrities, and in these fics, the playwright becomes associated with a loose array of shifting significations, serving a more allusive function. In SHADOWSQUILL’s “Is This a dagger?,” for example, the author crosses over Doctor Who with the actor who played the Ninth Doctor in 2005, Christopher Eccleston, and who also played Macbeth in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth in 2018. In this fic, the Doctor is the real person—or real extraterrestrial being—who is trying to convince his companion, Rose, that he is a competent actor, but she laughs at his seriousness as he delivers his lines. To convince her and satisfy his bruised ego, the Doctor takes Rose ahead in time: “He ran to the console room and entered the coordinates for Stratford-upon-Avon on Earth. Year 2018. Period, anytime from March to June as long as there was a performance where he was on stage.” The Doctor stays aboard the TARDIS while Rose attends a ‘Christopher Eccleston’ performance, and when she returns to the TARDIS following the play, her attitude has changed completely. “You’ll be a breath-taking Macbeth,” she tells the Doctor, and she asks him to recite some more lines—this time, she does not laugh.36 This fic implicitly addresses the draw, for some, of the RSC casting Eccleston in the play, giving Doctor Who fans an opportunity to see a former Time Lord in the flesh. In this intertextual viewing, the fan sees the Doctor first and Eccleston second, offering up the playful fantasy that anyone who attended one of these performances in 2018 was unknowingly in the presence of one of the most powerful entities in the universe. Additionally, Rose’s reactions serve to validate both Eccleston and Doctor Who (or, perhaps more broadly, genre roles): that she initially finds the thought that the Doctor can really act humorous because she can only see him as a particular, quirky type of character is reflective of audiences’ inability to see past an iconic character and view the actor separate from that role, the point that Lowry makes about Star Wars actors in his CNN article. That Rose is sufficiently cowed and brought to awe of the Doctor’s performance of Eccleston performing Macbeth serves as proof that it is  Fazel and Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” 8.  SHADOWSQUILL, “Is This a Dagger?,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 8, 2018, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14878235. 35 36

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the audience’s perspective that is limited rather than the Doctor-Eccleston’s range. Paradoxically, however, even as the author encourages us to see that Eccleston is more than just a single role, by reimagining the actor as the Doctor’s performance, we see that the role still dominates the actor’s identity by virtue of its primacy in the narrative. This testifies to the fannish imperative to see such actors’ work as always in dialogue with the object of their fandom, the strong actor-character bond discussed by Pomerance.37 In some RPF that intersects with Shakespeare, the playwright is clearly of secondary importance. In “Is This a Dagger?,” the author devotes more attention to the inner workings of the TARDIS than to an engagement with Macbeth beyond a few references to some of the play’s most well-­ known lines, invoking the conventional status of Shakespearean tragedy as the stuff of real acting. In SailorLestrade’s “Shakespeare in Love,” an RPF focused on Tom Hiddleston, Shakespeare serves as a plot device more than anything else. In this second-person narrative, you are a young woman attending school at the same time as a not-yet-famous Hiddleston, and you are tasked with reading an unnamed Shakespeare play for class, a frustrating task because you do not understand the play. While in the library working to understand the play, you see Hiddleston embodying the stereotypical nerd, wearing “[t]hick framed glasses and a Doctor Who shirt” and who is in the library to do some reading in advance of a new— again, unnamed—Shakespeare film adaptation.38 Significantly, it is not a film that Hiddleston is in himself, but as a Shakespeare fan, he is presumably excited to refamiliarize himself with the playtext before viewing the film. Following this chance encounter, he becomes your Shakespeare tutor, and “[h]e gave you tips and movie suggestions that helped you understand it better.”39 Over the course of the remaining brief paragraphs, you and Hiddleston date, engage in a successful long-distance relationship, get married, and get pregnant, and the narrative concludes with 37  Having attended one of Eccleston’s performances in May 2018, I unsurprisingly overheard a lot of discussion of Doctor Who among the audience, as is presumably the case for any performance in which an actor from another fan object appears. To wit, when I attended a 2016 performance of Doctor Faustus starring Kit Harrington at the Duke of York in London, the audience was filled with Game of Thrones fans, some of whom were wearing homemade ‘I love you Jon Snow’ shirts. 38  SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 14, 2015, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3939745. 39  SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love.”

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Hiddleston eagerly picking out Shakespeare-inspired baby names. Shakespeare fandom is clearly central to the story, but it is Hiddleston’s fandom, not the author’s or central character’s, playing on the actor’s well-established affinity for Shakespeare both in the press and through his involvement with a number of Shakespeare projects. In this fic, no mention is made of Hiddleston’s involvement with, say, The Avengers or his other film roles, nor do we observe him reading Thor comics: his t-shirt and general appearance mark him as nerdy and fannish in general, and his words mark him as a Shakespeare fan in particular, and he is desperate to share that fandom with anyone. Indeed, the fact that the only thing he talks to you about is Shakespeare implies that it is the reader’s willingness to be receptive to his fandom that is the foundation of their relationship, a gesture that aligns him with a Mandella-like fan quality from 10 Things I Hate About You. In much of Hiddleston RPF, the actor’s well-documented relationship with Shakespeare is key to the fic. He has appeared as Prince Hal in The Hollow Crown (2012) and as Coriolanus in a 2013 Donmar Warehouse production, and he was cast by another noted Shakespearean, Kenneth Branagh, for the role of Loki in Thor (2011), with Branagh again directing him in a limited stage run of Hamlet in 2017. Hiddleston has also frequently discussed his love of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean aspects of Loki in media interviews.40 While it is certainly not uncommon for actors to have extensive stage experience with Shakespeare, this aspect of Hiddleston’s history and personality has become one of those ‘observable moments’ identified by Arrow that fans accept and rewrite as core to the actor’s canonical persona from which they can extrapolate while remaining true to the ‘real’ Hiddleston. Significantly, the actor’s love of Shakespeare is often depicted as predating his celebrity, validating its connection to the ‘real’ Tom Hiddleston. As many of these fics also focus OCs who knew him pre-fame, the truthfulness of this authenticity is verified and does not lie in the actor simply claiming ‘I’ve always been a fan of Shakespeare’ because it makes him sound sophisticated. His love is real, observed, and substantiated by these women firsthand. As noted earlier in the chapter, Busse characterizes these types of fics as insertion fantasies in which “the 40  See, for example, Jenelle Riley, “Stagecraft Special Edition: Tom Hiddleston Talks Shakespeare, ‘Avengers,’” Variety, Published April 25, 2018, accessed August 12, 2019, https://variety.com/2018/film/features/tom-hiddleston-avengers-infinity-war-lokihamlet-1202783878/.

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text envisions the author entering the story, usually to meet the stars and often to become romantically involved with them.”41 In contrast to SailorLestrade’s fic in which Shakespeare fandom is key but the Shakespearean text is largely irrelevant, cloj’s “Talk Shakespeare to Me” (another second-person narrative) blends together Shakespearean dialogue and the events of the text. You, a woman named Mia, are a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts participating in a festival of productions feature old and new grads. Tasked with playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, you unexpectedly find yourself acting opposite Hiddleston’s Benedick. Although Hiddleston begins admiring your legs before rehearsals begin, running lines together brings the two of you closer and closer together. In addition to including the text of the relevant lines of the play they rehearse, cloj demonstrates a comfort and familiarity with the text as Hiddleston proposes that they rehearse Act 5, scene 4: “You gulped. It’s where your characters declare their love, then kiss. Then kiss!”42 This is a marked contrast to SailorLestrade’s vague reference to “a Shakespeare play.”43 As cloj’s fic progresses and Mia’s encounter with Hiddleston grows more sexually explicit, the actor transitions from gentlemanly politeness to speaking in affected Shakespearean language, such as when he sees you naked and you move to cover yourself: “Prithee doth not encave from me lovely. Thou hast nothing to be asham’d of and thy corse is nothing but beautiful to mine eyes,” he says.44 Similarly, in holdingtorches’ “Petrified Heart,” you are a woman who unexpectedly finds herself rekindling a relationship with Hiddleston during a snowstorm, a relationship that had begun before he was famous, thus emphasizing the authenticity of the relationship. The narrator finds herself taking a bath at the actor’s cottage and coming face to face with a Shakespeare rubber duckie, proof that “Tom’s sense of humour and love for all things Shakespeare had remained unchanged through the years.”45 During the bath, the duckie becomes your object of contemplation about how to handle the present circumstances, with the scroll it holds reading “To be or not to be” evoking the narrator’s own introspection that plays on  Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 45.  cloj, “Talk Shakespeare to Me,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 20, 2015, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3786895. 43  SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love.” 44  cloj, “Talk Shakespeare to Me.” 45  holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 3, 2018, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14835426. 41 42

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Hamlet’s own soul searching. In addition to this explicit reference, the fic is suffused with other Shakespearean allusions. Addressing the duckie, the narrator laments, “I don’t even know why he’s being so kind to me even though I’m being so cruel,” playing on Hamlet’s comment that “I must be cruel only to be kind.”46 When Hiddleston declares his affection for the narrator, he says, “the moment I met you, I knew I was born to beg for you,” a probable allusion to Richard II’s comment that “We were not born to sue but to command.”47 In Marylebone221’s “Oscar Speech,” another second-person narrator, you (his wife) beam with pride as Hiddleston delivers a speech after winning an Oscar, using the speech as a platform to praise women and address #MeToo and to chastise inaction in Hollywood via Shakespeare. The actor concludes his speech with “Hashtags and Clothes are statements nothing more. Only paving the way is pretending you stand for this but do not want to change a thing. Shame on them who only pretend. I’ll end this with Shakespeare’s word: Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”48 In VenlaMatleena’s “It All Began from Shakespeare” (one of the longest Hiddleston RPFs at thirty-one chapters and nearly 62,000 words), you are a University College London student taking a special course on Shakespeare that happens to be taught by Hiddleston, your favorite actor. The course begins as “Tom spoke about his love for Shakespeare,” and soon, he asks to sit with you at lunch: “You were sitting alone again but this time one certain Shakespeare– fan insisted on sitting with you.”49 Eventually, you and Tom rehearse Romeo and Juliet’s first kiss in front of the class, and your relationship develops from there, moving beyond the Shakespearean starting point into more typical RPF territory. In addition to het RPF, the Hiddleston-Shakespeare connection appears in plenty of slash RPF. In “That Most Ingrateful Boy,” missdibley puts a teenaged Hiddleston—“an English exchange student” in New York—in a production of Twelfth Night playing Antonio while the central female

 holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Hamlet, 3.4.179.  holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Hamlet, 1.1.196. 48  Marylebone221, “Oscar Speech,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 5, 2018, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/13880457. 49  VenlaMatleena, “It all began from Shakespeare,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 23, 2016, accessed, July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6943414/ chapters/15834985. 46 47

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character, Teddy Gonzalez, plays Sebastian.50 The fic draws on readings of the play that posit homoerotic longing between Antonio and Sebastian, a sexual tension that spills over from the play into the Tom-Teddy sexual encounter. As in cloj’s “Shakespeare in Love,” missdibley uses the text, rehearsal, and performance of the Shakespeare play as a form of foreplay that invigorates Hiddleston and becomes the venue through which sexual tension becomes sexual encounter. In MiloBettany’s “Shakespeare in Love,” Tom Hiddleston and William Shakespeare magically share the same dream across centuries, which finds the actor gushing “You are my biggest inspiration, master Shakespeare” and feeling his first rush of “homoerotic tendencies” as the two nearly share a kiss before both men wake up in their own times.51 When Shakespeare wakes up, he weeps, brokenhearted that he has lost the man in his dreams, and with tears in his eyes pens Sonnet 15, playfully implying that Hiddleston is the anonymous Fair Youth of the sonnets. In this fic, fandom is explicitly emphasized as the actor is meeting his fans following a performance of Coriolanus before he himself becomes the fan when encountering Shakespeare in the dream/ vision. Regardless of whether the RPF is het or slash, Hiddleston- or Shakespeare-focused, power and authority or an imbalanced power relationship are recurring themes across numerous authors, and these power relationships are frequently articulated in institutional or educational terms as teacher-student or master-apprentice in which the novice is initiated into the realm of expertise. In this sense, RPF reiterates and engages in some of the core debates surrounding fanfic and the dialectical relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers, as master-­ apprentice themes acknowledge the debt of the fan to the fan object while also seeking to overcome that debt through the process of initiation that often blends sexual and creative energies. In recent years, a range of commercially available texts have been published that are rooted in fan culture and the genres of fan fiction—notably crossover fic—that incorporate Shakespeare into other popular fandoms, often by mashing up a Shakespearean style of writing and formality of diction with recognizable media properties. As we saw in the previous ­chapter, adopting a Shakespearean ‘voice’ is a recurring feature of numerous fics, 50  missdibley, “That Most Ingrateful Boy,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 24, 2016, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6645466. 51  MiloBettany, “Shakespeare in Love,” Archive of Our Own, Published January 17, 2015, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188078.

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the antithesis of an approach to Shakespeare that strives to ‘translate’ him into a more contemporary—and thus accessible—voice, an approach that has persisted from at least Dryden, through the eighteenth century, and down to the present in the form of alternative universe (AU) films, fics, and other adaptations. Rather than seeking to modernize Shakespeare, these texts seek to Shakespeare-ize the modern. This approach is undoubtedly connected to the spirit of irreverent play that characterizes fan culture and fan fiction, the “juxtaposition of dissimilar texts,” of “the stuffy and the contemporary.”52 Relevant here is also Christy Desmet’s discussion of YouTube Shakespeare mash-ups that serve to critique “Shakespeare’s place on the border between high art and popular culture.”53 Douglas Lanier rightly discourages us from dismissing such pop culture mash-ups as passing fads or purely as objects of postmodern irony, arguing that “Pop parody of Shakespeare often coexists with the conviction that Shakespeare is a valuable aesthetic touchstone or ethical resource—the object of parody is typically not Shakespeare at all but the stultifying decorum that surrounds him,” and these works free Shakespeare from the institutional, academic, and cultural traditions that have since stifled him.54 It is also important for us to recognize, as Lanier does, that Shakespeare scholars or fans are not necessarily the primary intended audiences for these texts, which is partly why fanfic crossover serves as a productive venue through which to interpret texts in which Shakespeare is of secondary importance. While the history of Shakespeare allusions and adaptations is long indeed, the current spate of fan-centric crossovers can be traced back to The Klingon Hamlet (1996), prepared by the Klingon Language Institute (with a similar translation of Much Ado About Nothing following in 2001). The text is the embodiment of a fannish engagement with popular culture and the epitome of a fanfic intervention into and 52  Jennifer Holl, “Shakespeare Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 124; Douglas Lanier, “Will of the People: Recent Shakespeare Film Parody and the Politics of Popularization,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana E. Henderson (Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 177. 53  Christy Desmet, “YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention,” in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 64. 54  Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17–18.

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extrapolation on a popular media text that mobilizes a fan’s in-depth knowledge of that text to exceptional ends. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Chancellor Gorkon comments that “You have not experienced Shakespeare, until you have read him in the original Klingon.” This is, no doubt, a joke made in the context of a franchise that has frequently cited Shakespeare throughout its—to that point—twenty-five-year history, up to and including the Hamlet quotation that forms the title of the film.55 The translators playfully take Gorkon’s utterance as a statement of canonical fact regarding Klingon literary culture, that Shakespeare was, in fact, a Klingon playwright, maintaining and expanding upon the coherence of that fictional world. In their discussion of Shakespearean authenticity that touches briefly on The Klingon Hamlet, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson emphasize that the text is one that—knowingly—“clearly exceeds current limits of acceptability … precisely because the existing archive and the various investments that we have made in that archive over the last four centuries, preclude there ever being a Shakespeare who was a Klingon. Hence, the Klingon Hamlet is, and currently remains, inauthentic.”56 While this may be true in the context of Shakespeare, it is not so in the context of Star Trek wherein the translation heightens the authenticity of that fictional world by expanding the Klingon canon in both cultural and linguistic terms. The official language that exists in the franchise consists—not surprisingly—of words related primarily to space travel and conflict, so extrapolating on the available vocabulary to incorporate the verbose musings on mortality and family in Hamlet is no small task. The resulting text is as much a crossover as it is a missing scene fic that develops the fictional Klingon language for a complete translation of

55  There is, undoubtedly, much to be said about how the notion of an ‘original Klingon Shakespeare’ intersects with some of the key concepts discussed in Shakespeare’s Fans regarding the authority of an original text, whether it is the original or an originary experience. Despite the fact that Shakespeare has obviously been translated into Klingon, the Klingon prioritization of their Shakespeare over an English Shakespeare speaks to the ownership paradox discussed in Chap. 3. Belonging to everyone and no one at the same time, Shakespeare can be appropriated or poached by Klingon culture without the need to acknowledge debt, to the point that that debt has effectively been erased from the culture that now claims complete ownership of the playwright. 56  Kim Fedderson and J.  Michael Richardson, “Shakespeare’s Multiple Metamorphoses: Authenticity Agonistes,” College Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 14.

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Hamlet, accompanied by a fictitious scholarly and editorial introduction.57 As in many of the notes that accompany AO3 fics, Lawrence M. Schoen’s preface to The Klingon Hamlet explains the logic and intent of the text, emphasizing that, since its founding, “the Klingon Language Institute has grappled with the warrior’s tongue, embracing the willful suspension of disbelief necessary to study an artificial language originally created as little more than a prop. The volume you hold should be ample evidence of Klingon’s evolution, from the sound stage to popular culture, from a back lot at Paramount Pictures to Klingon and Star Trek fans throughout the world.” Schoen concludes by imploring the reader to “join us in our suspended disbelief; accept for a moment that this is the original version of the play. Don’t concern yourself with temporal anomalies of how you can be reading this play from the future.”58 Two points are clear from this preface: first, that this is a text by and for fans of Star Trek, particularly the small subset of fans who can read or speak a fictional language; second, Shakespeare is simply the venue through which this fandom is expressed, a test case to demonstrate the translators’ skills working in a language with a very limited official vocabulary while simultaneously intersecting with the canonical Star Trek narrative. In terms of the first point, the translation epitomizes the ‘by fans, for fans’ nature of fanfic that can be gleefully unconcerned with reaching a wider audience beyond the fandom itself. Like many Shakespeare scholars with an interest in popular culture, I own a copy of The Klingon Hamlet that I trot out as an example of Shakespeare’s cultural prevalence, but I cannot read or pronounce a single word of the Klingon language, rendering it as a prop or kitsch object used primarily for pedagogical purposes or as a conversation piece. Akira Okrent estimates that there are probably only twenty or thirty people in the world capable of carrying on a conversation in Klingon.59 Consequently, the potential readership of the text is incredibly small, even though the editors provide a facing-page translation—Shakespeare’s play—and a brief English-­ language introduction. Without these apparatuses, it is unlikely that the 57  For a compelling discussion of the postmodern politics of language and translation apparent in the text, see: Karolina Kazimierczak, “Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation,” Studies in Popular Culture 32, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 35–55. 58  Klingon Language Institute, The Klingon Hamlet, trans. Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), ix. 59  Akira Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 273.

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text would be commercially viable or available. To the second point, Shakespeare is simply a—difficult—mountain to be climbed in this fan text. As Sarah Ekstrom notes in her foreword, since the initial publication of Hamlet, the play “has earned the distinction of being one of the most often quoted works in the English language, second only to the Bible, and has been translated into spoken and written languages worldwide.”60 Having already translated books of the Bible, Shakespeare’s play thus represents the next logical challenge. As Lanier notes, the introduction to The Klingon Hamlet parodies or “gently sends up” typical scholarly editorial practice, emphasizing the merits of the present edition and the deficiencies of previous ones.61 The editors even engage in their own version of the authorship controversy, claiming that Federation propaganda during their prior war with the Klingon Empire meant that “certain individuals resorted to crude forgeries of Shex’pir, claiming him as a conveniently remote mediaeval Terran, a certain Willem Shekispeore, and hoping by this falsification of history to discredit the achievements of Klingon culture.”62 By providing the facing-page translation, the reader is invited to compare the turgid and clunky verse of this human pretender with the vibrant lyricism of the Klingon Bard. Ultimately, The Klingon Hamlet epitomizes the incorporation of Shakespeare into other fandoms through crossover. A similar fannish engagement with Shakespeare as secondary is apparent in the numerous Shakespearean versions of popular films that have appeared in recent years that rewrite the films as Shakespearean plays. Unlike The Klingon Hamlet which is presented as part of the Star Trek canon, the majority of these texts are non-canonical crossovers that do not aim to be consistent with established narratives (at least, not in the terms that these narratives are developed in the original films), although they do frequently strive to maintain consistency of characterization, albeit filtered through Shakespearean language and style. Adam Bertocci offers up a Shakespearean retelling of Joel and Ethan Cohen’s film The Big Lebowski (1998) in The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (2010), and Jordan Monsell takes a similar approach to Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984) in Ministers of Grace: The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of Ghostbusters (2016). The most  The Klingon Hamlet, xi.  Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 13. The Klingon Hamlet is even accompanied by nearly twenty pages of endnotes and appendices. 62  The Klingon Hamlet, xiii. 60 61

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­ rolific such author, however, is Ian Doescher. Beginning with William p Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope (2013) and continuing to the present, Doescher has written Shakespearean versions of all of the core Star Wars films including the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and sequel trilogy. In a similar spirit, he has also written William Shakespeare’s Get Thee … Back to the Future! (2019) and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls (2019), versions of Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985) and Mark Waters’ Mean Girls (2004), respectively. Doescher also wrote an issue of Deadpool for Marvel Comics entitled Much Ado About Deadpool (2016), which transports Marvel’s meta antihero back to Shakespeare’s England where Deadpool interacts with both the playwright and his characters.63 Beyond Shakespeare, Doescher also contributes a short story to Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View (2017), a collection of forty brief missing scene stories commissioned by Disney to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars (1977), with proceeds of sales going to charity. Like The Klingon Hamlet, many of these texts mimic the style of modern critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays commonly encountered in the classroom. In some cases, this mimicry is extremely precise. The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski is formally identical to the Folger editions of the individual plays, with the main text of the play on one page and relevant glosses and images appearing in a box on the facing page. Even the page layouts and headers are identical, with page number appearing at the top left, play title in the top center, and Act/scene number at the top right of each page. Bertocci’s glosses are impressively thorough and work to give texture to the fiction that what we are reading is a real Shakespeare play: the meaning and etymology of obscure words are explained, pertinent Elizabethan (and earlier) cultural and political history is offered as context, classical allusions are illuminated, and there are numerous references to both scholarly works and points of contact between this and other Shakespeare plays so the reader can better understand where the present work fits in with the oeuvre as a whole. The tone of the glosses ranges from serious to mock-serious to playful (“lance: euphemism for penis; see also most nouns in Shakespeare”).64 Monsell pursues a generally similar 63  Doescher’s Deadpool (issue #21) is included in the Deadpool Does Shakespeare collection released in 2017. 64  Adam Bertocci, The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 116.

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aesthetic in Ministers of Grace, with a variety of public domain images interspersed throughout the text (along with some drawn by the author), but no glosses or editorial interventions are included. Unlike The Klingon Hamlet and The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, this crossover between Shakespeare and Ghostbusters is not presented as a ‘scholarly edition.’ Doescher’s works are unique in this group as they include original faux-­ woodcut images depicting key scenes from the Star Wars films that mostly maintain the scifi aesthetic of the films, although some of the images blend scifi and vaguely Elizabethan aesthetics: while the duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi aboard the Death Star is illustrated to include lightsabers and electric lighting, Admiral Ackbar is depicted aboard a sailing vessel complete with a spoked wooden wheel.65 Doescher’s texts contain no glosses and are instead presented as ‘old’ volumes: beneath the dustjackets, the hardcover editions are printed to look like worn, leather-­ bound books from an earlier time that could share shelf space with those dusty tomes undetected, a paratextual passing that reflects the intent of the texts as a whole. As with other fan fiction that crosses over Shakespearean language and style with contemporary fan objects, the results are mixed and depend heavily on the author’s level of comfort with such a writing style. Both Bertocci and Doescher strive, as much as possible, to emulate the blank verse of Shakespeare’s plays which contributes to the pleasures of the texts, especially for the transfan familiar with both Shakespeare and the adapted film. Doescher makes use of asides to humorous effect, such as having the droid R2-D2—who communicates in beeps and boops in the film—speak directly to the audience like a cross-dressing Viola or Rosalind: “Yet not in language shall my pranks be done:/ Around both humans and the droids I must/ Be seen to make such errant beeps and squeaks,/ That they shall think me simple.”66 These asides are also employed to anachronistically rewrite the films from the perspective of a fan who has seen all of the films. In both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Darth Vader is a largely irredeemable villain whose origins and motivations are unknown to the audience. During the open65  Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2013), 131; Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2014), 121. Similarly, characters are sometimes—but not always—depicted wearing pseudo-Shakespearean clothing. Both Get Thee … Back to the Future! And Much Ado About Mean Girls contain significantly fewer images, but in much the same spirit. 66  Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 15.

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ing pages of Verily, A New Hope, however, Vader appears as a morose and contemplative character. After crushing Rebel Leader 1’s throat during an interrogation, Vader—echoing Macbeth—addresses his hand: “O that the fingers of this wretched hand/ Had not the pain of suff ’ring ever known./ But now my path is join’d unto the dark,/ And wicked men— whose hands and fingers move/ To crush their foes—are now my company.”67 Such comments allude to the characterization of Vader in Return of the Jedi (1983), retroactively applied here to the earlier film. Additionally, the use of a formal Shakespearean style and diction serves to humorously emphasize and parody the melodrama of the Star Wars films, and to juxtapose the canonical author with the canonical fan franchise. Doescher undoubtedly plays on the fact that many readers will be more familiar with the films than with Shakespeare’s plays, with the fan’s pleasure of recognition arising from how the Star Wars we know and love remain recognizable as archaic stage plays.68 Although Shakespeare fans are of secondary importance in the texts, the author offers them numerous allusive Easter eggs, such as when Luke Skywalker resumes his attack on the Death Star by proclaiming “Once more unto the trench, dear friends, once more!”69 Numerous similar examples of tweaked Shakespearean quotations appear throughout the series to very clever effect—Doescher clearly knows his Shakespeare. However, that knowledge is deployed in the service of Star Wars fandom rather than the other way around in his tragicomic crossovers. Bertocci similarly includes a number of allusions to Shakespeare’s work, such as when The Knave (i.e., The Dude from The Big Lebowski) echoes Jaques’ seven ages of man soliloquy from As You Like It: “I am one man, of several persons./ For each man in his time plays many parts,/ His acts being two voices.”70 Bertocci’s incorporation of Shakespeare, however, is less thorough than Doescher’s, and the author frequently abandons blank verse to write in prose. By contrast, Monsell only occasionally flirts with iambic pentameter, preferring archaic diction and syntax to signal ‘Shakespearean,’ along with a few allusions to the plays. When Ray takes out a loan to fund their ghost-busting business, Egon invokes The Merchant of Venice  Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 12–14.  Doescher overcomes the limitations of the stage in adapting a scifi epic through the generous use of a Chorus that narrates action such as space battles not easily translated to the stage. 69  Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 160. 70  Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 81; As You Like It, 2.7.139–66. 67 68

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by proclaiming “an interest/ Of seventy thousand ducats wilt thou owe./ Surely a pound of flesh ’twould be a fate less cruel.”71 This is not an indictment of Bertocci and Monsell or an aesthetic judgment of their work as compared to Doescher’s. Rather, these varying levels of engagement with Shakespeare indicate his fluctuating significance in the service of other fandoms, of which all three authors demonstrate their in-depth knowledge. All of these authors also employ a chorus or choral characters. In the case of Doescher, the Chorus primarily serves the aforementioned pragmatic function of making sense of the chaos of space warfare and the transitions between the films’ disparate terrestrial and stellar settings. More importantly, choral characters are employed as embodiments of the playful spirit of fan fiction and in the process find common ground with Shakespeare’s transgressive and irreverent fools. At the conclusion of The Jedi Doth Return, the other characters freeze as R2-D2 addresses the audience:      Even thus, or tale is finish’d.      Pardon if your hope’s diminish’d—      If you did not find the sequel     Satisfying. If unequal      Our keen play is unto others,      Do not part in anger, brothers.      Ears, attend: I know surprises,      Visions of all shapes and sizes.72

Both Ministers of Grace and Two Gentlemen of Lebowski conclude with epilogues that cite and refashion Puck’s metatheatrical address to the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:                              

If we shadows of offended, Think but this and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear. And all wrapp’d up be this idle theme, A noble and a pretty story-dream

71  Jordan Monsell, Ministers of Grace: The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of Ghostbusters (Los Angeles: Shadowcut Press, 2016), 30. 72  Doescher, The Jedi Doth Return, 159.

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Made me laugh to overtake the band, Parts, in sooth; and others less so scann’d. … If we be friends, I’ll catch thee down the trail And we shall share sarsaparilla ale.73

                                       

If we spirits have offended Think on this and all is mended That you have but slumbered here Whilst these visions did appear So dream on custard, and do not frown For how could you not love this towne? And clap thy hands if we be friends For Winston shall restore amends.74

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As the transgressive trickster who crosses the boundary between divinity and humanity to play a game with mortals by magically refashioning their narratives, Puck is embraced as the spiritual predecessor to these fan crossovers. All three authors address their potential to offend or disappoint, to fail to live up to the audience’s expectations of the mash-up of Shakespeare and popular culture, but in doing so, they advocate the playful fantasy of fan fiction that encourages readers to pursue texts that fulfill their desires and avoid those that do not. All of these crossovers engage with the dual significance of ‘parody’ that reflects back on the contentious issue of ownership and intellectual property discussed in Chap. 3. From a generic or stylistic perspective, ‘parody’ describes a work that imitates the distinctive style of another work or author to comic effect. In this sense, the parodic work of these texts operates in both directions, as the high-culture formality of Shakespeare is employed to parody pop culture texts, while those same pop culture texts parody Shakespeare by removing him from his elevated status to incorporate him into contemporary popular culture. Writing specifically about film, Lanier draws on Don Harries’ work to argue that Shakespeare parodies “have been most concerned with incongruities of stylistic register,” a blending of high and low culture that oscillates between similarity and difference.75 Such oscillation is clearly evident in the texts discussed above. Similarly, Bitely rightly argues that parody works to make Shakespeare less  Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 193.  Monsell, Ministers of Grace, 133. 75  Douglas Lanier, “Will of the People,” 178. 73 74

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alien and intimidating: “parody familiarizes Shakespeare by removing an uncomfortable distance between the author, the text, and the reader.”76 In crossover fics—especially in those that are commercially available—parody also serves an equally important legal function. Generally speaking, parody falls under the category of ‘fair use’ in copyright law wherein copyrighted intellectual properties can be imitated for the purposes of humor or ridicule without obtaining the permission of the copyright holder. While this matters little in relation to Shakespeare because his works fall outside the temporal limits of copyright, it is of utmost importance in relation to the films he is crossed over with. Monsell explicitly flags this distinction in his title: Ministers of Grace is The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of Ghostbusters, and it is not legally authorized by the filmmakers or studio. The same goes for Bertocci’s Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. Bertocci sees himself as working in the tradition of Shakespeare: “The vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays … can be linked to prior sources: history, classic stories, even the original work of other writers …. In Shakespeare’s simpler, happier, plague-ridden times, plots and ideas were freely shared and adapted and reworked. Shakespeare thrived in a entertainment industry obsessed with remakes, adaptations, and mashups—just like Hollywood today.”77 While this may be so, it is the text’s legal status as a parody that protects Bertocci from charges of copyright infringement and allows him to profit from the work. By contrast, Doescher’s Star Wars plays were written with the permission of Lucasfilm and Disney, meaning that the plays fall under the authority of the copyright holders (the same goes for Get Thee … Back to the Future! And Much Ado About Mean Girls, where the copyright is held by Universal and Paramount, respectively). All of these texts can live in the world of commercial fiction, which is not the case for the vast majority of unpaid fanfic. This underscores Pugh’s definition of fan fiction as “writing, whether official or unofficial, paid or unpaid, which makes use of an accepted canon of characters, settings and plots generated

76  Amelia R. Bitely, “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare,” in Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, vol. 1 (2007), 63. Likewise, as noted at the outset of this chapter, Lanier argues that “Pop parody of Shakespeare often coexists with the conviction that Shakespeare is a valuable aesthetic touchstone or ethical resource—the object of parody is typically not Shakespeare at all but the stultifying decorum that surrounds him,” and these works ‘free’ Shakespeare from the traditions that have since stifled him. See Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 17–18, 106–09. 77  Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 199.

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by another writer or writers.”78 Doescher’s texts are not fundamentally different than Bertocci’s or Monsell’s texts, but the work of all three authors is fundamentally similar to the body of work available on AO3. Working under the umbrella of copyright undoubtedly impacts what Doescher can and cannot do with the characters of Star Wars. The droids C-3PO and R2-D2 are lightly slashed, for example, alluding to popular, tongue-in-cheek fan readings of their odd couple relationship as queer. In their fluctuating relationship with fan fiction, Lucasfilm has remained consistent in protecting the PG-nature of its relationships, taking exception to erotically charged depictions of its characters, queer or otherwise.79 This is not to say that Doescher wanted to explicitly slash the droids, just that such a choice would not likely be approved for inclusion. Regardless, I do not believe that the presence of a legal relationship between author and studio denies the status of the texts as fan fiction even if it influences the final product. Of greater interest in the present work is what happens to Shakespeare in this transaction between author and studio by appropriating him into a copyright relationship that would not otherwise apply. In the Frequently Asked Questions section on his website, Doescher answers the inevitable question: how can I get permission to stage one of these plays? He answers: Several theater companies and schools have expressed interest in performance rights, but those rights are owned by the respective movie studios [who are] … allowing only a few scenes to be read/performed at book events where I appear. When I say “a few scenes,” I don’t mean specific scenes—I just mean that at my book events I read a few speeches and often will have audience members join me in reading some scenes. These movie studios have been clear and consistent that public performances or readings of any kind—whether for money, for free, or as part of a fundraiser—are not allowed. You may have heard of theaters or other groups doing readings or performances of my licensed books; up to this point, none of those have been authorized by anyone. While I appreciate the enthusiasm of people who write me and say, “I know your website says performances aren’t allowed, but…” my answer is the same: the copyright for these books are in the movie studios’ names, so performance permission is not mine to give.80  Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 25.  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 150. 80  Ian Doescher, “Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed August 15, 2019, https://iandoescher.com/frequently-asked-questions/. 78 79

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Ironically, Shakespeare’s lack of copyright protection has led to a different outcome of the all/none ownership paradox discussed in Chap. 3: because his works belong to no one, they can be claimed by Lucasfilm, completely exiled from the stage in the process. More than serving a fan’s secondary crossover purpose, the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars transforms the playwright into property wherein “Once more unto the trench, dear friends” is not just a playful allusion to Henry V but a restricted-access extension of a media franchise that has inspired fandom for over four decades. From RPF to parody, Shakespeare has been crossed over into other fandoms with varying degrees of importance, but often in ways that foreground issues of authority. This might be articulated through a slashed depiction of Shakespeare as a playwright-in-training, in awe of and inspired by the superior Marlowe in which Shakespeare himself becomes the smitten fan. Whether in RPF or crossover fics that emphasize Shakespeare’s own adaptation of prior sources and narratives in order to validate their own approach to Shakespeare—in adapting him, I am only doing what Shakespeare himself did to other writers—these authors participate in the paradoxical interpretation of Shakespeare that asserts that he is simultaneously exemplary and no different from us, both imitative and worthy of imitation. In his discussion of Shakespeare fanfic, Lanier suggests that “In a way, these works return Shakespeare’s plays—which themselves adapt earlier materials—to their place in a long tradition of imitation and adaptation from which their status as literary monuments has tended to isolate them.”81 In the process, these adaptations—parodic or otherwise—often preserve and rely on a status or even mythos of Shakespeare as “author-­ god” even if they seek to challenge it.82 Sometimes an indicator of taste and sophistication, sometimes a boring relic, sometimes the test of theatrical skill, sometimes a vague signifier of authenticity, and sometimes simply a stylistic and formal challenge, Shakespeare means many different things to many different fans who work to incorporate him into everything from celebrity culture to a galaxy far, far away. But exactly what he means depends on the individual transfan who alludes, either incidentally or extensively, to Shakespeare in the service of other fandoms.

 Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 85.  Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 32. 81 82

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Bibliography a_t_rain. “Lent.” Archive of Our Own. Published February 18, 2015. Accessed July 31, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3387269. Alberge, Dalya. “Christopher Marlowe Credited as one of Shakespeare’s Co-writers.” The Guardian. Published October 23, 2016. Accessed July 31, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christophermarlowe-credited-as-one-of-shakespeares-co-writers. Arken_Stone1. “The Librarian, the Doctor and the Tardis.” Archive of Our Own. Published November 28, 2017. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12851208/chapters/29347227. Arrow, V. “Real Person(a) Fiction.” In Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, edited by Anne Jamison, 323–32. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Ashmole. “A Man in Hue.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 30, 2016. Accessed July 30, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6406762. Bertocci, Adam. The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Bitely, Amelia R. “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare.” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference 1 (2007): 58–77. Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. cloj. “Talk Shakespeare to Me.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 20, 2015. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3786895. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 41–59. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Coppa, Francesca. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Desmet, Christy. “YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention.” In OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, edited by Daniel Fischlin, 53–74. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Doescher, Ian. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed August 15, 2019. https://iandoescher.com/frequently-asked-questions/. Doescher, Ian. Get Thee … Back to the Future! Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2019a. Doescher, Ian. Much Ado About Mean Girls. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2019b. Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2013. Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2014. Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

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Elsinore_and_Inverness. “Rendezvous.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 24, 2017. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 12180159/chapters/27649740. Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes. “Introduction: The Shakespeare User.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M.  Fazel and Louise Geddes, 1–22. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Fedderson, Kim and J.  Michael Richardson. “Shakespeare’s Multiple Metamorphoses: Authenticity Agonistes.” College Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 1–18. Finn, Kavita Mudan and Jessica McCall. “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe.” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 27–38. fresne. “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel.” Archive of Our Own. Published December 24, 2014. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/2841458. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. holdingtorches. “Petrified Heart.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 3, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14835426. Holl, Jennifer. “Shakespeare Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play.” In The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 109–27. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. HouseGameOfPotter. “The Room.” Archive of Our Own. Published November 13, 2017. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 12710496/chapters/28986447. JadeEyedMonster. “Bed Time Story About Master Luke.” Archive of Our Own. Published January 17, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13401843. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006. Kazimierczak, Karolina. “Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation.” Studies in Popular Culture 32, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 35–55. Klingon Language Institute. The Klingon Hamlet. Translated by Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. La Reine Noire. “Words Words Words.” Archive of Our Own. Published December 18, 2016. Accessed July 31, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 8888116.

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Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lanier, Douglas. “Will of the People: Recent Shakespeare Film Parody and the Politics of Popularization.” In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, edited by Diana E.  Henderson, 176–96. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Lowry, Brian. “Daisey Ridley Trades ‘Star Wars’ for Shakespeare in ‘Ophelia.’” CNN. Published July 2, 2019. Accessed July 30, 2019. https://www.cnn. com/2019/07/02/entertainment/daisy-ridley-ophelia-column/index.html. Marylebone221. “Oscar Speech.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 5, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13880457. MiloBettany. “Shakespeare in Love.” Archive of Our Own. Published January 17, 2015. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188078. missdibley. “That Most Ingrateful Boy.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 24, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6645466. Monsell, Jordan. Ministers of Grace: The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of Ghostbusters. Los Angeles: Shadowcut Press, 2016. nitpickyabouttrains. “The Chimes at Midnight.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 31, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 11665209. Okrent, Akira. In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Pomerance, Murray. “Doing Dumbledore: Actor-Character Bonding and Accretionary Performance.” In Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, edited by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer, 166–83. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Rabb, J.  Douglas and J.  Michael Richardson. Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist: Narrative Ethics of the Bard and the Buffyverse. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015. Riley, Jenelle. “Stagecraft Special Edition: Tom Hiddleston Talks Shakespeare, ‘Avengers.’” Variety. Published April 25, 2018. Accessed August 12, 2019. https://variety.com/2018/film/features/tom-hiddleston-avengers-infinitywar-loki-hamlet-1202783878/. SailorLestrade. “Shakespeare in Love.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 14, 2015. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3939745. SHADOWSQUILL. “Is This a Dagger?” Archive of Our Own. Published June 8, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 14878235. TheGryffindorBookworm. “The Quidditch Match.” Archive of Our Own. Published August 15, 2018. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688266.

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VenlaMatleena. “It All Began from Shakespeare.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 23, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/ works/6943414/chapters/15834985. Wardell, K.  Brenna. “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of the Joss Whedon Ensemble.” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 44 paragraphs. WhimsicallyWiddershins. “Pathstone.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 9, 2018. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/ 14595411. Yost, Michelle K. “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Fanfiction.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 193–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Shakespeare is an essential part of the history of fandom. Assessing his cultural, literary, and adaptive legacy from the perspective of fan studies not only expands our understanding of that history but also complicates many of the longstanding assumptions of the field, especially those regarding the amateur status of fan creators, the understanding of fan work as a form of unpaid labor of love, and the relationship between fans and cultural producers. Shakespeare’s copyright status alone has enabled audiences and readers to reimagine his plays and characters in ways that are seen today as fannish forms of revision and expansion, long before the appearance of Star Trek fanzines. This consideration of Shakespeare demonstrates the limitations of viewing fan works primarily through the lens of copyright and the relationships between producers and consumers that result from legal definitions of intellectual property and fair use. Shakespeare fan fiction, for example, proliferates not just in free digital archives but on the stage, in cinemas, and in bookstores. Shakespeare’s Fans demonstrates the importance of Matt Hills’ call for “proper distance” between fan scholars and fandom, the need to overcome the selection bias that leads scholars to prioritize their own preferred fan objects or forms of engagement at the expense of the true range, diversity, and history of fandom.1  Matt Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms: Between Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?,” in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, eds. Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 20–21. 1

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Shakespeare is not unique as a fan object, although he plays an important role in the history of fandom, especially in the context of eighteenth-­ century debates about his cultural status and the legal and moral right that other authors had—and have—in adapting and reworking his narratives and characters. From the early 1700s onward, we can observe an ongoing debate about what constitutes an appropriate form of engagement with the playwright. In the absence of actionable copyright, moral and interpretive authority has most often been appropriated by the purveyors of official Shakespearean culture who have asserted their informal and yet tangible ownership over him. These debates anticipate and mirror many of the ongoing debates between fans and cultural producers regarding just what they are allowed to do with their fan objects that have shaped fandom as it has moved into the mainstream of popular culture in recent decades. While the copyright debates that shape fan studies are largely irrelevant to Shakespeare, his works still circulate in the context of ownership and authority paradigms that parallel intellectual property concerns. Paradoxically, Ian Doescher’s Star Wars texts demonstrate that Shakespeare does not remain permanently immune to the reach of copyright. Just as the cultural and education institutions of official Shakespeare can claim an informal moral ownership over him, Lucasfilm and Disney can claim legal ownership over aspects of his work through the publication of fan fiction that brings the playwright into the orbit of contemporary intellectual properties. Lawrence Lessig argues that our copyright laws are designed so that “no one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm.”2 Doescher’s work and legal restriction of access to it indicate the extent to which copyright can still matter in relation to Shakespeare fan texts. But again, Shakespeare is not unique in this regard, and I expect that scholars in a diverse range of fields can see points of contact between the history of fandom via Shakespeare and a plethora of other authors and texts. Shakespeare is simply a very visible feature of the history of fandom, in no small part due to the cultural, educational, and institutional prevalence of his work. From the perspective of fan studies, it is essential that we work to delve more deeply into the history of fandom, especially in relation to authors and texts that predate contemporary notions of copyright and intellectual property. Exciting work has already been done on Jane 2  Quoted in: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York; London: New York University Press, 2006), 137–38.

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Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle and some of the fandom-specific engagements with those authors that have emerged. In the case of Austen, one online fan group—the Republic of Pemberley—offered rigid guidelines for tone, style, and content, insisting that writers adhere to canon and avoid explicit content in their contributions to the Bits of Ivory archive.3 Sherlock Holmes fandom is home to one of the first fan societies, the Baker Street Irregulars established in 1934, and Sherlock fanfic authors often participate in the so-called Great Game in which they pretend that the Sherlock stories are factual and written by John Watson, Holmes’ biographers, wherein “the fans play exaggerated versions of themselves, taking their obsession seriously and ironically at the same time.”4 Regardless of what we can say about fandom in general, individual fandoms or niches within those fandoms continually emerge to express their fandom in ways that can be idiomatic of the group, so it is important that we do not let one fandom speak for them all. What is unique about the case of Shakespeare, however, is that he provides a venue through which to incorporate into fan studies theatrical performance and the proliferation of dramatic adaptations of existing plays. Throughout the evolution of Shakespeare’s Fans, I have often been asked, “why would you want to write about something like fan fiction?” The easy answer is, “because it’s there.” Shakespeare scholars follow him wherever he goes and wherever he is taken as a traveling companion, so I am simply doing my due diligence by following him into digital fanfic archives. Drawing on Derridean notions of the archive, Abigail Derecho convincingly argues in favor of accepting fan fiction as “archontic literature” wherein there are no borders to violate: instead, these texts only add to the original text’s archive, “becoming a part of the archive and expanding it. An archontic text allows, or even invites, writers to enter it, select specific items they find useful, make new artifacts using those found objects, and deposit the newly made work back into the source text’s

3  Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 37. The Republic of Pemberley transitioned to a more dispersed Facebook presence in 2017. The Bits of Ivory archive is still accessible but static at Pemberley.com. 4  Roberta Pearson, “It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 49; Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 8.

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archive.”5 The real reason, though, is that understanding fandom gives scholars a window onto contemporary reading and viewing practices that foreground identity politics and empower readers to refashion culture to make it speak to them in whatever way they see fit. While often dismissed as overly affective, fandom offers a critical space for audiences to both adore what they love and to demand more from it, to make it do things that its creators may never have intended or even approve of. The results can be playful and effervescent or critically engaged—or both simultaneously. In some cases, fan works repudiate the subtle winking of academic criticism and theory by liberating interpretation from the text and from history through its embracement of anachronism and counterfactualism. Whereas the critic teases out and contextualizes the hints of homoeroticism in Twelfth Night’s Antonio, fans explicitly slash him. Fan culture approaches Shakespeare as no different than any contemporary media text, celebrity author, or film director. Additionally, Shakespearean fan works are part of the long history of Shakespeare adaptation and criticism, a continuation of rather than a split from. As much as we might like to claim fan fiction, for example, as a radically new approach or as the antithesis of traditional academic or pedagogical interpretations, any such claim is ignorant of the diversity of those interpretations which, like fan works, have continually refashioned Shakespeare according to the desires of a particular readership. And just as scholarship and pedagogy can range from politically and ideologically conservative to radical, so to have fan works tread similarly diverse grounds, endlessly constituting and exploring interpretive questions in response to alternately unsatisfying or inspiring interpretations. Kylie Mirmohamadi argues that fan fiction helps create a “sense of reading in the present tense,” transforming reading from passive spectatorship into active participation.6 Such active participation is becoming increasingly common as fans have come to expect to be able to talk back to the objects of their fandom and to those who have created those objects. A testament to this is the fact that in August 2019, archiveofou5  Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 65. 6  Kylie Mirmohamadi, The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 39.

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rown.org received the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, a category that has historically been dominated by published science fiction and fantasy criticism. For the Shakespeare scholar, engaging with fandom and fan works forces us to confront and reconsider our own assumptions about our relationship to the playwright and the extent to which we view ourselves as part of the Shakespeare fandom or apart from it. To what extent do we really embrace the notion that Shakespeare belongs to all? Can we—or should we—make more pedagogical room for affective responses that sometimes ignore accepted ideals of academic rigor and close reading? Fandom is most radical in that it validates individualized readings of Shakespeare, allowing you to consume the corpus as you like it, and to make of it what you will. This poses some obvious existential threats to many academic approaches to Shakespeare by taking postmodern relativism and hypersubjectivity to the extreme. By what criteria do we assess such works? Scholars are in the process of grappling with these issues. As I write, Douglas Lanier is organizing a panel for the 2020 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America focused on the “largely neglected the question of principles by which we assign value to Shakespeare adaptations.”7 Such work promises to offer productive models for our engagement with fan works. There is still considerable work to be done to more fully explore the range and history of Shakespeare fandom. The case of published versus online fan fiction has obvious parallels to traditional Shakespeare film adaptations and the Bard on YouTube.8 Likewise, collecting various objects of Shakespearean material culture from rare books to mulberry relics to film posters to action figures should be brought into dialogue with fan collecting. One of the most fruitful avenues for future research lies in our engagement with anti-fandom. In these cases, Shakespeare is the focus, but not in a reverent—or irreverent—celebratory way, and he and his works (and those who enjoy them) are, implicitly or explicitly, mocked and ridiculed. These texts mobilize a fan’s in-depth knowledge of  “2020 Seminars and Workshops,” The Shakespeare Association of America, accessed August 21, 2019, http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminarsand-workshops-2/. 8  See: Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 7

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and familiarity with a text in order to mock or deride the playwright and antagonize his fans. Such anti-fandom offers a productive critical lens through which to interpret films such as Tromeo and Juliet (1996) and Anonymous (2011). Rather than the irreverence that characterizes a significant number of fan works, films such as these are gleefully sacrilegious, aimed particularly at provoking a response from custodians of official Shakespeares.9 Anti-fandom can help us understand the authorship controversy and approach anti-Stratfordians from a new perspective. Ultimately, the better we understand fan culture and the myriad forms of fan engagement, the better we will understand what Shakespeare means to cultural consumers today.

Bibliography “2020 Seminars and Workshops.” The Shakespeare Association of America. Accessed August 21, 2019. http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annualmeetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/. Alters, Diane F. “The Other Side of Fandom: Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and the Hurts of History.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 344–56. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 61–78. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006. Goodman, Lesley. “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author.” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662–76. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. 9  See: Derek Johnson, “Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington (New York: New  York University Press, 2007), 285–300; Diane F. Alters, “The Other Side of Fandom: Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and the Hurts of History,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 344–56; Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662–76. While these scholars deal primarily with spoiler culture and anti-fandom in relation to television fandom, their work is clearly relevant to adaptations and engagements that mock or attack Shakespeare.

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Hills, Matt. “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms: Between Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?” In Fan Culture: ­Theory/ Practice, edited by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, 14–37. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Jamison, Anne. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006. Johnson, Derek. “Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington, 285–300. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Mirmohamadi, Kylie. The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and YouTube. London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pearson, Roberta. “It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 44–60. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 10 Things I Hate About You, 26, 33–63, 68, 108, 149 A Actor, 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 26, 28, 34, 46, 48, 54, 58, 62, 79, 83, 104, 121, 124, 133–136, 136n4, 138–143, 147–152, 148n37 Adaptation, 9–11, 13–17, 19, 33, 36, 61, 67, 68, 77–79, 80n45, 88–90, 94, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110, 124, 127, 133, 148, 153, 162, 164, 171–173, 174n9 Affect, 26, 33–63, 85, 118 The Alchemist, 8 All is True, 144 Allusion, 47, 61, 80, 107, 113, 116, 151, 153, 157, 159, 164

Amateur, 7, 8, 11, 16, 27, 46, 46n17, 52, 54, 60, 69, 72, 72n14, 74, 82–84, 87–89, 169 Anachronism, 26, 34, 122–124, 172 Anonymity, 120 Anonymous, 71, 72, 91, 174 Anti-fandom, 74, 173, 174, 174n9 Anti-Midas, 55n57 Appropriation, 33, 40n8, 67–69, 81n47, 85 Arcadia, 76 Archive, 3, 24, 25, 71, 87, 100, 101, 105, 108, 112, 114, 115, 119, 154, 169, 171, 171n3, 172 Archive of Our Own (AO3), 100, 101, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117n42, 119, 120, 128n62, 133, 141, 145, 155, 163 Aristophanes, 140 Arthurian literature, 19 As You Like It, 79, 138, 159 Atwood, Margaret, 17, 18

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J. H. Pope, Shakespeare’s Fans, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1

177

178 

INDEX

Austen, Jane, 23, 75, 115, 170–171 Authenticity, 41, 54, 81, 106, 149, 150, 154, 164 Authority, 16, 21, 27, 38, 39, 41–44, 67, 70, 73, 74, 91, 92, 94, 95, 120, 152, 154n55, 162, 164, 170 The Avengers, 20, 21, 134, 149 B Back to the Future, 157, 158n65, 162 Bardolatry, 2, 26, 34, 46, 80 Batman, 138 BDSM, 111 Beaumont, Francis, 46n17 Bertocci, Adam, 156–160, 162, 163 The Big Bang Theory, 9 The Big Lebowski, 156, 159 Bikini Kill, 42 Black and Deep: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter, 17, 68 Branagh, Kenneth, 139, 144, 149 Breton, Nicholas, 145 Brony, 8 Bullock, Christopher, 78, 79, 81, 82 C Cage, John, 116–118, 128 Canon, 38, 61, 62, 76, 106, 124, 141, 154, 156, 162, 171 Celebrity culture, 2, 10, 136, 140, 164 Censorship, 77 Changing Places, 1 Character-based criticism, 122 Cheap Trick, 44, 44n13 Chorus, 159n68, 160 The Chronicles of Narnia, 117, 137 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 127 The Clash, 42 Clopton, Hugh, 47, 54

The Cobler of Preston (Charles Johnson), 78 The Cobler of Preston (Christopher Bullock), 78 Cohen, Ethan, 156 Cohen, Joel, 156 Collectors/collecting, 2, 7, 21, 173 Colman, George, 52, 62n84 Comic books, 10 Commemoration, 17, 55, 58, 62, 69, 70 Commodity/consumer culture, 69, 82, 86, 87 Communal property, 71 Congreve, William, 50 Copyright, 11, 14, 15, 23, 27, 74, 77, 82–84, 88, 91, 139, 162–164, 169, 170 Coriolanus, 149, 152 Cosplay, 6, 25, 57 Counterfactualism, 93, 95, 123, 124, 172 Crosby, Sidney, 7 Cushman, Charlotte, 104 D Defoe, Daniel, 48–50 Devotion, 7, 8, 41, 54, 56, 63 Disney, 23, 91, 157, 162, 170 Diversity, 6, 12, 25, 38, 39, 87, 139, 169, 172 Doctor Who, 15, 109, 113, 134, 137, 138, 147, 148n37 Dodd, James, 51 Doescher, Ian, 28, 134, 157–160, 158n65, 159n68, 162, 163, 170 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 10, 75, 115, 171 Drury Lane, 54, 57, 59, 62, 63, 78, 79 Dryden, John, 79–82, 80n45, 81n47, 124, 128, 144, 153

 INDEX 

E Eccleston, Christopher, 147, 148, 148n37 Edward II, 140 Elizabeth Bennet, 139 Emmerich, Roland, 71 F Fair use, 11, 162, 169 Fan aca-fans/ scholar-fans, 3, 4, 11, 24 community, 6, 7, 10, 24, 63, 86, 88, 93, 105 culture, 2, 4, 11, 26, 29, 56, 73, 74, 76, 119, 142, 152, 153, 172, 174 definition of, 4, 14, 18, 22, 74, 76, 83, 146, 162 economic status, 27 enthusiasm, 4, 8, 56, 94 folk culture, 85 gender, 90, 139 immaturity, 8, 37 religious obsession, 7, 9 reverence, 17, 63, 125 sacrilege, 47, 63, 126 self-identification, 119 sexual obsession, 8, 37 stereotypes, 8, 21, 26, 33 transfandom, 137 Fan art, 11, 24, 25 Fan fiction 5+1 things, 15, 15n46 alternative universe (AU), 108, 112, 153 anonymity, 120 body swap, 15 canon, 76, 106, 124, 162 crack, 124

179

crossover, 15, 28, 29, 108, 109, 124–126, 133, 136, 137, 144, 152, 162, 164 databases, 15, 27, 84, 100, 101, 116, 128 definition of, 14, 18, 75, 76, 162 explicit sex in, 113 fluff, 15, 102, 112 genderswap, 15, 15n46, 103, 104, 114, 124 genres, 15, 15n46, 28, 42, 56, 62n84, 75, 76, 101–104, 110, 112, 114, 117, 124, 128, 140–142, 144, 147, 152 giftfic, 15, 15n46 het, 15, 15n46, 103 history of, 6, 12, 14, 15, 18, 85, 127 kudos, 101 legal status of, 74, 162 length of texts, 100, 102 metadata, 101 original characters, 107, 141 plagiarism and, 13 popslash, 142 PWP, 15, 102 RPF, 28, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143 slash, 15, 16, 22, 24, 103, 104 tropes, 15, 28, 102, 103, 108 Yuletide, 15, 15n46, 105 Fantasy, 2, 5, 8, 26, 37, 63, 72, 73, 111, 115, 141, 142, 147, 149, 161, 173 Feminism, 13, 34, 38, 40, 40n8, 42–45, 91 Fillion, Nathan, 23, 135 Fletcher, John, 75, 128 Folger Shakespeare Library, 25, 69, 70 The Frogs, 140

180 

INDEX

G Game of Thrones, 15, 25, 76, 83, 109, 137, 148n37 Garrick, David, 26, 27, 33–63, 76, 82, 125 The Jubilee, 49, 61, 62 King Lear, 82 ode, 53, 55, 55n54, 55n57, 58–61 Romeo and Juliet, 82 Shakespeare Jubilee, 26, 34, 46 Shakespeare Temple, 54 Garrick’s Vagary, 55 Gastrell, Francis, 47 Gatekeeping, 73, 74, 119 Geeks/Nerds, 9, 73, 148 Gender, 15n46, 18, 33, 34, 34n2, 39, 41, 43, 45n13, 88, 103, 104, 111, 118 General Hospital, 6 Gentleman, Francis, 52 Get Thee . . . Back to the Future!, 157, 158n65, 162 Ghostbusters, 156, 158 Gibson, Mel, 139 Gift economy, 11, 67–95 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 127 Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), 128 Gower, Lord Ronald, 71 Grateful Dead, 4 Green Bay Packers, 4 Gregg, Clark, 20 H Hag-Seed, 17 Hamill, Mark, 138 Hamlet, 1, 19, 99, 107, 112, 114– 116, 121, 122, 125, 145, 149, 154–156

Harry Potter, 2, 4, 7, 10, 24, 76, 88, 90, 94, 100, 104, 106, 109, 116, 119, 125, 137–140, 138n13 Hello Kitty, 7 Henry IV, 112 Henry V, 164 Henry VI, 146 Hercules, 139 Hiddleston, Tom, 28, 134, 148–152 The History of King Lear, 76 Holinshed, Raphael, 46n17, 76, 140 The Hollow Crown, 149 I Identity/representation, 3–5, 7, 9, 33, 36, 38, 40, 61, 62n84, 72n14, 87, 88, 90, 93, 104, 106, 126, 127n61, 134, 142, 148, 172 Idolatry, 50, 55, 56 Iliad, 12, 13 Imagined subjectivity, 3 Intellectual property, 23, 24, 27, 34, 67, 74, 76, 77, 81, 84, 91, 94, 137, 161, 162, 169, 170 J James Bond, 138 Jay, Stacey, 117 Jett, Joan, 44, 44n13 Johnson, Charles, 78, 79 Johnson, Samuel, 50–53, 50n35, 59, 60 Jones, Felicity, 135 Jonson, Ben, 8, 69, 74 Juliet Immortal, 117 Junger, Gil, 26 K Keats, John, 123 King, Stephen, 18

 INDEX 

Kiss Me Kate, 36 The Klingon Hamlet, 153–158, 156n61 The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 46n17 Kurosawa, Akira, 19 L Labor/work, 1–4, 3n2, 5n9, 9–15, 17, 18, 20–23, 25–29, 33, 35, 42, 45n13, 46n17, 49, 50, 50n35, 59, 60, 67, 68, 70–73, 72n14, 76–88, 85n56, 90, 91, 94, 99–101, 105–107, 105n12, 110, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122, 125–127, 128n62, 133–135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 148, 153, 156–164, 162n76, 169– 174, 174n9 Letters to Cleo, 41–44 Licensing of the Press Act (1662), 77 Licensing Order (1643), 77 The Lion King, 107 Livejournal.com, 100 Lodge, David, 1 Love in a Forest, 79 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 46 Lucasfilm, 23, 91, 162–164, 170 Luhrmann, Baz, 139 M Macbeth, 19, 36, 37, 61, 79, 123, 140, 147, 148, 159 MacDonald, Ann-Marie, 128 Man and Wife, 52, 53, 53n49, 61, 62n84 Marlowe, Christopher, 113, 140, 143, 145, 146, 164 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), 20, 28, 109

181

Marvel Comics, 20, 76, 157 MASH, 137 McCarthy, Claire, 19, 127 McKellen, Ian, 138 Mean Girls, 157 Measure for Measure, 114 Media fandom, 2, 26, 28, 45, 75, 85, 103, 117, 119, 137, 140 The Merchant of Venice, 114, 159 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 47 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 46, 79, 92, 104, 137, 160 Minimal departure, 121, 124 Ministers of Grace, 156, 158, 160, 162 The Miseries of Mavillia, 145 Misogyny, 18, 126, 128 Monsell, Jordan, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163 Montagu, Elizabeth, 60 Montreal Canadiens, 6 Much Ado About Deadpool, 157 Much Ado About Mean Girls, 157, 158n65, 162 Much Ado About Nothing, 135, 137–138, 150, 153 Much Ado About Nothing (2013 film), 20 Mulberry tree, 47–49, 51, 53, 54 My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, 8 N Negative capability, 123 New Place, 47–49, 54 North, Ryan, 19, 23, 24, 128 O Odyssey, 12 Olivier, Laurence, 139 Open access, 11, 72

182 

INDEX

Ophelia, 19, 121, 124, 125, 127, 134–136 Othello, 114, 138 Ovid, 46n17 P Parody, 16, 23, 28, 133–164 Participatory culture, 3, 5, 51, 58, 93 Peter Rabbit, 135 Pez dispensers, 7 Pickford, Mary, 111 Pirates, 115 Plagiarism, 13, 80n45 Plautus, 46n17 Play, 1, 6, 8–11, 15, 19–22, 27, 28, 35, 37–39, 41–47, 46n17, 51–57, 53n49, 59–62, 62n84, 68, 75, 78–84, 87–94, 99, 102, 104, 108, 109, 110n25, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 120–128, 134–141, 145–148, 150, 152, 153, 155–159, 161–164, 169–171 Postmodernism, 16, 75, 118, 123, 126, 127, 127n61, 142, 153, 155n57, 173 The Prince of Denmark, 17, 68 Professional, 8, 9, 11, 17, 24, 27, 52, 54, 68–70, 72n14, 82–84, 88, 89, 91, 95, 145 Proper distance, 3, 4n6, 11, 169 Pseudonyms, 118, 120 The Public Ledger, 55, 60 PWP, 15n46, 102 Q Quidditch, 7, 94

R Race, 57, 73, 88 Radcliffe, Daniel, 138–140 The Raincoats, 42 Recognition, 19, 36, 57, 58, 61, 63, 107, 109, 137, 143, 159 Reitman, Ivan, 156 Religion, 56, 88 Republic of Pemberley, 171, 171n3 Rhys, Jean, 14 Richard III, 54, 114, 146 Richardson, Samuel, 48–50, 77 Ridley, Daisy, 134–136 Riot Grrrl, 40, 40n8, 42, 44, 45 Robinson Crusoe, 115 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 135 Romeo + Juliet, 1, 2, 139 Romeo and Juliet, 15, 19, 82, 82n50, 104, 108, 110n25, 112, 116, 117, 122–124, 138, 139, 151 Romeo and Juliet (1968 film), 139 Romeo and/or Juliet, 19, 23, 128 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 14, 19, 127 Rowe, Nicholas, 47–49 Rowling, J. K., 94 Royal Shakespeare Company, 70, 147 S San Diego Comic-Con, 3 Scalzi, John, 73, 74 Science fiction, 2, 4, 10, 73, 75, 106, 173 Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee, 51 Sequels, 14, 78, 157, 160 The Sex Pistols, 42 Shakespeare, Judith, 145 Shakespeare, Susanna, 145 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 8–10, 33–63, 67–95, 99–128, 133–164, 169–174

 INDEX 

as character, 19, 22, 27, 48, 57, 61, 68, 75, 76, 89, 91, 93, 109, 111, 122, 124–126, 137, 139, 147, 169 copyright status, 15, 27, 83, 88, 164, 169 cultural status, 170 education/pedagogy, 22, 92, 170, 172 material culture, 126, 173 official culture, 27, 71 ownership of, 27, 69, 72, 72n14, 74, 80, 134, 164, 170 as secondary, 28, 133, 148, 153, 156, 159 theft from, 68, 82 writing style, 133, 158 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), 1, 2, 25, 70, 173 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 70, 71 Shakespeare in Love, 143–146 Shakespeare’s Globe, 25 Shakespeare studies, 11, 33, 35, 46, 67, 89 Shakesploitation, 34, 68 Shakespop, 16, 68, 69, 71 Shatner, William, 10, 138 Sherlock Holmes, 10, 56, 103, 115, 139, 171 She’s the Man, 16, 19, 108 The Shining, 18 Sidney, Sir Philip, 76 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 138 Squee, 1–29 Star Trek, 4, 7, 10, 12n38, 13, 25, 58, 75, 88, 90, 93, 103, 109, 137, 138, 154–156, 155n57, 169 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, 154 Star Wars, 2, 6, 10, 15, 22–24, 28, 76, 91, 92, 108, 116, 134–136, 138, 147, 157–159, 162, 163, 170

183

Star Wars: A New Hope, 14 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, 158 Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 14 Star Wars: The Last Jedi, 144 Statue of Anne (1710), 77 Stoppard, Tom, 14, 15, 19, 127 The Stratford Jubilee, 52 Stratford-upon-Avon, 25, 27, 34, 35, 46–51, 57, 58, 61, 71, 123, 145, 147 Supernatural, 9, 29 T The Taming of the Shrew, 33, 36, 38, 68, 75, 78, 99, 110, 111 Tate, Nahum, 76, 128 The Tempest, 19, 99, 135, 138 The Tempest (2010 film), 135 Tennant, David, 139 Tetracentenary, 17, 69, 123 Theater, 8–10, 23–25, 34, 46, 46n17, 47, 51, 54, 58n64, 78, 90, 108, 124, 135n4, 138, 140, 143, 163 Theft, 67, 80, 81, 109 Thor, 149 The Three Conjurors, 79 Throne of Blood, 19 To Be or Not to Be, 128 Tourism, 9, 25, 47, 49, 52, 54, 70, 133 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 48 Translation, 153–156, 155n57 Troilus and Cressida, 79, 81, 82 Troilus and Cressida (Dryden play), 144 Tromeo and Juliet, 174 Trpcic, Shawna, 23 Twelfth Night, 8, 19, 93, 99, 109, 116, 137, 151, 172

184 

INDEX

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 157, 158, 160, 162 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 145 V Valli, Frankie, 41 Vandalism, 72 Victor, Benjamin, 47 Voltaire, 60 W Warner Brothers (WB), 94 Waters, Mark, 157 Watson, Emma, 138, 139 Wattpad.com, 100 Web 2.0, 2 Wendig, Chuck, 91

Whedon, Joss, 4, 20–24, 54, 134, 135, 135n4 Whyman, Erica, 104 Wide Sargasso Sea, 14 Wilkes, John, 79 William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, 157, 164 The Winter’s Tale, 137 The Woman’s Prize, 75 Wood, Elijah, 138 Y YouTube, 23–25, 84, 89, 153, 173 Z Zeffirelli, Franco, 139 Zemeckis, Robert, 157