One can hardly have a conversation about significant stories in modern western literature without mentioning Shakespeare. Why we obsess about a 16th-century poet is the question that haunts our discipline. We spout clichés about Shakespeare’s universality or its deep and inherent artistic merit. Really, Shakespeare is a known quantity that can be adjusted contextually in the service of an agenda: it is a franchise, like the Purge movies. This paper will examine the cultural fixation on Shakespeare, including its perpetual placement on stage and as an academic subject, through the lens of media franchises.
About the presenterKelsey Ridge
Kelsey Ridge received her PhD at the Shakespeare Institute of University of Birmingham. She earned her MA at University College London and her BA at Wellesley College, where she studied English and East Asian Studies. Her research interests include pop Shakespeare, trauma theory, and adaptations. Her book Shakespeare’s Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare came out from Routledge in Sept 2021.