Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama by Elisabeth Bronfen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama by Elisabeth Bronfen Sarah Hatchuel Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama. By Elisabeth Bronfen. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. 256 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–5261–4231–3. Serial Shakespeare is a timely addition in a series of recent books, such as Kinga Földváry's Cowboy Hamlets and Zombie Romeos (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), which explore audiovisual fictions with loose and implicit links to Shakespeare. Elisabeth Bronfen cogently analyses the aesthetic and political stakes of appropriations in serial TV dramas that use Shakespeare as a 'point of reference', turning him into something very different and affecting the way we then perceive Shakespeare's plays and characters. Via a methodology of 'crossmapping' (p. 9), Bronfen apprehends the seriality both sets of texts share, identifying the connection between a set of 'pathos formulas' (p. 16) and working through the consequences of this relation. The dialogue between Shakespeare and TV series is sometimes explicitly prompted by quotations or encouraged by common plot structures, themes, or dramatic devices such as interrelated narrative arcs, multiple perspectives, and open endings. The idea is then to look back at the early modern plays through the lens of their subsequent appropriations. Chapter 1 examines Westworld (HBO, 2016–), in which androids reach self-awareness through the quoting of The Tempest, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. The show, which reactivates the convention of seeing the world as a stage, reveals how these three plays are serially linked by one theme—the resistance of daughters against paternal sovereignty. Tyrannical Dr Ford appears as a new Prospero, controlling and surveilling his small heterotopia, facing Dolores and the other androids' rebellion and eventually abdicating his power at the end of season one, but only to trigger a new regime in which violence will prevail once more. The spectral reiterability of the android hosts offers a self-reflexive comment on Shakespeare's revitalization and on the format of serial TV itself. Chapter 2 revisits The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) in the light of the first tetralogy (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III). Just as Shakespeare's history plays transform the chronicles of the Wars of the Roses, showrunner David Simon has tapped into news and his own documentaries on Baltimore. The chess game which is used to explain the rules of the drug dealers becomes the metaphor shared by the plays and the TV series. In both cases, the pawn, having arrived at the other end of the chessboard, can proclaim itself royalty. The Wire's serial structure echoes the first tetralogy's in its inclusion of us-and-them battles but also us-versus-us division and rivalries of dynastic conflict, in an environment where everyone plays a part: knowing they are being surveilled, the gangsters self-reflexively put on a show for the police. Chapter 3 explores House of Cards (Showtime, 2013–18), in which Claire Underwood cannot decide whether she is Lady Macbeth or Macbeth. She first, like Lady Macbeth, encourages her husband Frank to rise to power through bloody machinations. Frank regularly breaks the fourth wall by looking at the viewers and making them his accomplices. In the last season, Claire goes from First Lady to President and starts looking at us too, making us understand that she had her own [End Page 484] agenda all along. Claire is a Lady Macbeth who, having survived all self-doubt and guilty conscience, is ready to overtake and replace her husband. This first female president's hands get dirty even as she attempts to escape male control. Just as Shakespeare's plays implicitly raised the issue of Elizabeth I being a female ruler, House of Cards both debunks and reasserts the demonization of female political power, revealing how the idea of the first female president remains so distressful that US culture has to address it serially in different TV shows. Precisely, Chapter 4 sees Veep (HBO, 2012–19), Homeland (Showtime, 2011–20), and Scandal (ABC, 2012–18) as series in which the figure of the rogue queen Cleopatra resurfaces, challenging the dominant patriarchal power of...