Recent Book: Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

Authors:  Christina Wald

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Available in hardcover and as an ebook

Full details at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4

Traces Shakespearean influences on, and engagements in, contemporary TV series

Demonstrates how the serial complexity of current TV shows helps us understand the dramaturgical serialisations in Shakespeare’s plays

Discusses a range of adaptational strategies that range from deliberate rewritings to ‘non-adaptations' (i.e. to unintentional returns of Shakespearean plots, characters, and motifs)

Part of the book series: Reproducing Shakespeare (RESH)

About this book

This book examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring together The Tempest and the science fiction-Western Westworld, King Lear and the satirical dynastic drama of Succession, Hamlet and the legal thriller Black Earth Rising, as well as Coriolanus and the political thriller Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.