Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated 'Shakespeare' constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Making an important new contribution to rapidly expanding fields of study surrounding the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity. The collected essays approach ethics from a rich variety of perspectives: some explore how ethical issues in Shakespeare's plays have been received and interpreted, some investigate the ethical commitments of Shakespearean appropriations, and some interrogate the ethical tenets that underlie the processes of adaptation and appropriation. As a whole, the volume suggests that appropriations are always on some level comparative and that their work has value in generating sites of discussion between otherwise strongly divergent frameworks of understanding.

Introduction; Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin
1. Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value; Doug Lanier
2. Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation; Christy Desmet
3. Ethics and the Undead: Reading Shakespearean (Mis)appropriation in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula; Adrian Streete
4. Adaptation Revoked: Knowledge, Ethics, and Trauma in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres; Elizabeth Rivlin
5. Double Jeopardy: Shakespeare and Prison Theater; Courtney Lehmann
6. Theatre Director as Unelected Representative: Sulayman Al-Bassam's Arab Shakespeare Trilogy; Margaret Litvin
7. A "whirl of aesthetic terminology": Swinburne, Shakespeare, and Ethical Criticism; Robert Sawyer
8. "Raw-Savage" Othello: The First Staged Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism; Yukari Yoshihara
9. The Bard in Bollywood: The Fraternal Nation and Shakespearean Adaptation in Hindi Cinema; Gitanjali Shahani and Brinda Charry
10. Multilingual Ethics in Henry V and Henry VIII; Ema Vyroubalová
11. In Other Words: Global Shakespearean Transformations; Sheila T. Cavanagh
Afterword: "State of Exception": Forgetting Hamlet; Thomas Cartelli
Appendix: For the Record: Interview with Sulayman Al-Bassam; Margaret Litvin