Shakespeare Lives!: Anniversary Revivals and Exhumations of Shakespeare
Shakespeare Lives!: Anniversary Revivals and Exhumations of Shakespeare

Summary/Abstract: The British Council Project Shakespeare Lives! launched as part of the events celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death exemplifies the continuing investment in Shakespeare as a cultural brand and commodity. The project translates Shakespeare into contemporary culture, offering Instagram versions of his plays, “Mix the play” application in which users are invited to direct their own scenes from the original plays and short films, reinventing Shakespeare in a variety of forms and contexts. My major focus will be on these short video clips, each presenting a different perspective and investigating new thematic and formal possibilities inherent in Shakespeare’s drama, ranging between self-referential deconstruction of race and intertextuality in Othello, the celebration of the comic and carnivalesque potential of Hamlet, the exploration of alternative/disabled corporealities in A Midsummer Night's Dream, old age in King Lear or using the technique of the Manga cartoon to present Lady Macbeth’s transformation in Macbeth. Referring to the concepts of spreadable media and digimodernism, my aim is to investigate how the British Council makes Shakespeare a spreadable commodity, combining the technologically advanced popular cultural aesthetics with a degree of updated yet re-circulated controversy and subversion. Such strategies involve, for example, the use of computer-generated imagery or cartoon techniques, kitsch aesthetics, the grotesque humour, on the one hand, and the problems of race, gender, old age or disability, on the other.

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