Shakespeare and Superman? Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone? Shakespeare and romance novels? What is Shakespeare doing in modern popular culture? In the first book-length study to consider the modern 'Shakespop' phenomenon broadly, Douglas Lanier examines how our conceptions of Shakespeare's works and his cultural status have been profoundly shapes by Shakespeare's diffuse presence in such popular forms as films, comic books, TV shows, mass-market fiction, children's books, kitsch, and advertising. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture offers an overview of issues raised in Shakespeare's appropriation in twentieth-century popular culture, amd argues that Shakespeare's appearances in these media can be seen as a form of cultural theorizing, a means by which popular culture thinks through its relationship to high culture. Through a series of case studies, the book examines how popular culture actively constructs, contests, uses, and perpetuates Shakespeare's cultural authority.

From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.

This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between the 1580s and 1630s. Natália Pikli approaches this study with a thorough and interdisciplinary examination of hobby-horse references, with commentary on the polysemous uses of the word, offers an informative background to reconsider well-known texts by Shakespeare and others, and provides an overview on the workings of cultural memory regarding popular culture in early modern England. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture, cultural memory, and iconography.

Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to the literary, historical, cultural and performative aspects of Shakespeare works.

This book offers a collection of essays on Shakespeare's life and works in popular forms and media.

Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

By connecting Shakespeare's language to the stunning artwork that depicted the end of the world, this study provides not only provides a new reading of Shakespeare but illustrates how apocalyptic art continues to influence popular culture today. Drawing on extant examples of medieval imagery, Roger Christofides uses poststructuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of how language works to shed new light on our understanding of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He then links Shakespeare's dependence on his audience to appreciate the allusions made to the religious paintings to the present day. For instance, popular television series like Battlestar Galactica, seminal horror movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Carrie and recent novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All draw on imagery that can be traced directly back to the depictions of the Doom, an indication of the cultural power these vivid imaginings of the end of the world have in Shakespeare's day and now.