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structures, and conservative cultural ideologies. “Small-time Shakespeare,” which emerges from local, more pointed responses to the Bard, satisfies motives ranging from play, to political commitment, to agonistic gamesmanship. But big-time and small-time Shakespeare cannot always be so easily separated from one another, for even the corporate films of Disney bear the personal stamp of its powerful leaders. In her exploration of nineteenth-century representations of Lady Macbeth, Georgianna Ziegler shows the complex way in which literary and cultural climate, the opinions of prominent actresses, and visual representations of both the Shakespearean heroine and the actresses come together to refashion Lady Macbeth as a model of Victorian femininity. Robert Sawyer’s essay traces the process by which Robert Browning’s personal identification with Shakespeare ends with the canonization of Browning himself as a Victorian bard. Sudipto Chatterjee and Jyotsna Singh, who remind us that Shakespearean appropriation is a world phenomenon, show how high the political stakes can be in acts of appropriation. In the collaboration between James Barry and Bustomchurn Addy to put on a Native production of Othello in nineteenth-century Calcutta, we can see at work the profit motive, an act of resistance against colonial definitions of the Native as Other, and finally, the possibility/impossibility of defying political power through art. The essays in Shakespeare and Appropriation, in their dual focus on big- and small-time Shakespeare, at once challenge the idea that Shakespeare must always already be co-opted by the dominant culture and caution against the easy assumption that Shakespeare can set us free.

Shakespeare and Appropriation is divided into two parts. Part 1, “ Appropriation in Theory,” considers broadly the appropriation of Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon: the contexts for this interpretation include the current Anglo-American academic scene (Kamps); the historical interface that links the birth of English studies in British academe with Liberal politics, cultural nostalgia, and scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays (Hawkes); the appropriation of Shakespeare’s “cultural capital’’ by a specific class of authors working in a particular genre, the romance (Osborne); and the importance of lost historical moments from locales far away from the Avon and its swans to the understanding of Shakespeare’s role within the colonialist project (Chatterjee and Singh). Part 2, “ Appropriation in Practice,” focuses on specific, local acts of appropriation. It describes the dynamics of appropriation in the novel (Cakebread and Andreas), in film (Starks and Finkelstein), and in

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