The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis. By Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes

Abstract

Is canon really fanon? This is one of the many provocative questions posed by Louise Geddes and Valerie M. Fazel in their co-written book, pop-topically entitled The Shakespeare Multiverse (2021). As its title suggests, the work ranges across a great variety of cultural discourses and landscapes: from the Detective Comics “52” series (which presents 52 different worlds its characters inhabit simultaneously), to the instability of the 1623 Folio as a “core text,” to the hair extensions David Tennant used when he played Richard II and the fanfic erotica that that hair inspired. It always helps to read Shakespearean scholarship with a dictionary close by, but this is the first time I recall repeatedly having to consult urbandictionary.com. Geddes and Fazel argue that fandom is a necessary non-hierarchical force, one that decentralizes authority, absorbs marginal or outsider voices, and conceives of “Shakespeare” as a multiverse of floating, shifting fragments, bits, and debris in an ever-expanding space that accommodates a more sustaining democratic field of creativity and investigation, unmoored from the governing fantasy of a central core text. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Geddes and Fazel argue that invested fans participate in a kind of “cyborg reading”: “a process of textual engagement that pre-consciously accommodates affective pleasure and the materialist conditions of a text’s production and dissemination, and defines this hybridization as meaning” (11). Crucial as well to their argument is the recognition of the power of the object or paratext as—to use Jane Bennett’s term from her book of the same title—“vibrant matter” whose meanings shift over time and space depending on the user’s or fan’s perspective. In the multiverse then, these paratexts proliferate, creating an “archontic,” non-hierarchical multiverse, “where all Shakespeares—all adaptations, all archives, all bits and pieces of Shakespeare data—circulate” (9).