The Really Real, Authentic, Original Shakespeare

• Authors: Marcela Kostihova
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This essay considers the question of how original/new interpretations help redefine (or reify) the original/old perception of Shakespeare and the work its cultural capital performs, demonstrating the inherent impossibility of reconciling an “original” Shakespeare with contemporary performances of his plays through a reading of Twelfth Night, and address some of the ideological implications of trying to conflate the two. It then takes a detour into contemporary marketing and consumer-psychology literature to explore the crucial roles which the concepts of “authenticity” and “originality” have come to play in contemporary consumer culture, circling back to Shakespeare, to ruminate on the implications of the use of his cultural capital as an ultimate positional good in the 21st century.

Keywords

EN

authenticity; consumer capitalism; consumerism; identity; individuality; originality; Shakespeare; „Twelfth Night”

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 28
• Pages: 11-23

Dates

published

2016-04-22

Contributors

author

Marcela Kostihova

• Hamline University

References

• Bray, Alan. The Friend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Bristol, Michael and Kathleen McLuskie, eds. Shakespeare and Modern Theater: The Performance of Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
• Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. 2nd ed. Cornell University Press, 1985.
• Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
• Holderness, Graham. Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare myth. University of Hertfordshire Press, 1988.
• Howard, Jean E. and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Kastan, David Scott and Peter Stallybrass. Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Lewis, Cynthia. Particular Saints: Shakespeare’s four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays. Delaware University Press, 1997.
• Lewis, David and Darren Bridger. The Soul of the New Consumer. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2001.
• Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1958.
• Orgel, Stephen. Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Pine II, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
• Pine II, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
• Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night: Or What You Will. Smith, Bruce, ed. Bedford, 2001.
• Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled-and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Free Press, 2006.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/mstap-2016-0002