Shakespeare and Media Allegory

Abstract

Within the large and generically diffuse corpus of adaptations, spin-offs, backstage or biographical dramas, and other cinematic reworkings of Shakespeare’s life and art, there have been a number of films that are also concerned with media history, transitions from one medium to another, or media systems and regimes. I call these films Shakespeare media allegories when such concerns are sustained throughout the work and when they become, in effect, a second narrative in addition to the play being adapted or the story being told.¹ Such films are often also parables of authorship and cultural origin in which Shakespeare is variously present as the paradigm of authorship, as a figure for the literary past as it encounters the vicissitudes of modern and postmodern styles and technologies, and even as the patron or inventor before the fact of cinema, multimedia hypertext, and other media that were only developed centuries after his death.