Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

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.

1. Introduction.- 2. Coriolanus and Homeland: The Return of the Soldier.-   3. The Tempest and Westworld: The Return of the Dead.- 4. King Lear and Succession: The Return of the Predecessor.- 5. Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots.- 6. Conclusion.- 

Christina Wald is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She is the author of The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction (2014) and Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007). She has edited Medieval Shakespeare (2012) and co-edited The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern (2011).