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is an Author?,” a founding text for appropriation studies, begins with the assumption that all “discourses are objects of appropriation” (1984:108). The author, no longer regarded as the origin of writing, becomes simply a proper name by which we describe a piece of discourse. Shakespeare therefore becomes the author-function “Shakespeare.” If Shakespeare is really ‘‘Shakespeare,” then his name can be pried loose from the discourses he names and circulated through culture and time. Ivo Kamps explains the process by which Shakespeare accumulates what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls “cultural capital” with the metaphor of Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon, the stuffed body of the utilitarian philosopher who, in his present state, functions as a kind of patron saint for University College, London, as Shakespeare has functioned for several centuries as an Anglo-American literary saint. As Bentham’s body is stolen and returned in a yearly ritual between rival universities, it accrues symbolic value and legendary status—in short, “cultural capital.” In a comparable way, “Shakespeare” is circulated through different ages and social strata, in turn accruing and conferring symbolic value on cultural projects from both highbrow and lowbrow culture—to use Lawrence Levine’s (1988) seminal construct—and sometimes both together.

When Shakespeare’s name, face, and words are used to sell beer or plane tickets on British Airways, “Shakespeare” obviously participates in the kind of social economics that Michael Bristol (1996), Barbara Hodgdon (1998), and in this volume, Richard Finkelstein and Gary Taylor describe. He becomes a commodity, “an article of commerce exchanged with a view to purely economic advantage among people who remain strangers to each other” (Bristol 1996: 36). Postmodernist critiques of modernist, postmodernist, or late capital culture are concerned less with such blatant theft of Shakespeare’s commercial potential than with the more subtle machinations of what, in the 1940s, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer identified as the “culture industry.” (See Finkelstein’s essay.) Cultural critics worry specifically about the way in which technology, including the technologies by which Shakespeare is disseminated to a wide audience, eradicates the “human”—the personal, the local, the different. While appropriation may situate us in history—a consummation devoutly to be wished—it may also perform the less benign work of shaping and organizing the most private aspects of experience. In Cultural Selection (1996), for instance, Taylor anatomizes the ways in which memory itself is produced and reminds us that

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