“It's All a Bit Harry Potter”: The Bard, The Doctor and The Cultural <scp>TARDIS</scp> in <i>Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code</i>

Jones, Kelly V.

doi:10.1111/jpcu.12254

Cited by 2 publications

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References 6 publications

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“…Finally, the Doctor quotes Dylan Thomas's 'rage, rage against the dying of the light' from his 1951 poem Do not go gentle into that good night but, after Shakespeare signals his approval, warns him against its use due to it being 'someone else's' (Roberts 2007). Jones suggests that 'Shakespeare is here portrayed as a potential plagiarist, scavenging for inspiration at all times' (Jones, 2015) and, moreover, with this quip, Doctor Who returns to the point that Shakespeare was 'not actually the "original", but rather a culturally big link in a chain of narratives' (Hansen and Wetmore, Jr., 2015: 20) and destabilises ideas of cultural hierarchy and precedence in order to emphasise the role of the playwright as both borrower and lender.…”

Section: Doctor: That's It They Used You They Gave You the Final Womentioning

confidence: 99%

‘That’s One of Mine’

Hatfull¹

2020

EIRJ

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In televisual representations of William Shakespeare’s life which blend biographical fact with fictionalised fantasy, contemporary writers often utilise the trope of the playwright colliding with characters and scenes recognisable from plays which he has yet to create and, consequently, finding inspiration. Others construct a reciprocal loop of influence, whereby Shakespeare is shown to have written or been informed by works that did not exist during his lifetime and which his plays themselves instigated. It has become fashionable in the metamodern era to depict these forms of metaphorical cannibalism in a parodic manner which oscillates between sarcastic rejection of Bardolatry and sincere appreciation for Shakespeare’s ‘genius’. Gareth Roberts satirised the notion of Shakespeare’s originality in Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code (2007), through the depiction of the playwright being fed and consuming his own works and specific references. In 2016, the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death, a number of commemorative BBC programmes also exhibited cannibalistic features, including the reverent (The Hollow Crown), the irreverent (Cunk on Shakespeare), and those which combined both registers (Upstart Crow). I will explore how these writers construct their portrayals of Shakespeare and, by interlacing fact and fiction, what portrait of the playwright these cannibalistic representations produce.

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Section: Doctor: That's It They Used You They Gave You the Final Womentioning

confidence: 99%

‘That’s One of Mine’

Hatfull¹

2020

EIRJ

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“…11 Kelly Jones maintains that focusing on Shakespeare as a writing genius, creating masterpieces on his own, diminishes the importance of the players with which he worked. 12 It is unlikely Shakespeare would have written his plays entirely on his own, so why do these texts perpetuate this myth? Marjorie Garber, in Shakespeare After All, argues that "Every age creates its own Shakespeare."…”

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“…Early Modern Acting Aspirations 12 A second trope commonly seen in the popular culture conscious fictions of Shakespeare and his actors is that acting was a profession to which others aspired. This is also predicated on 21 st -century notions of the cultural cache attached Shakespearean actors, rather than Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes.…”

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Memes, Screens and Broadway Scenes: Popular Culture Representations of Shakespeare’s Actors in the Age of Participatory Media

Merchant¹

2021

shakespeare

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In a recent Broadway musical featuring William Shakespeare, the actor and poet tells his audience, through song, "I've got many fans with so many demands / I can hardly go take a piss [...] / Be it theatre freak or the autograph-seeker / They all want a piece of this." 1 It is notable that representations of Shakespeare in popular culture have multiplied since the rise of participatory media. Shakespeare on Twitter (@Shakespeare) has more than 40,000 followers, while William Shakespeare (@WilliamShakespeareAuthor) on Facebook has over 16 million "likes". Shakespeare memes proliferate on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit and there are tens of thousands of Shakespeare fanfictions to be found online. The rise of these types of participatory media platforms has not only given us new outlets for artistic expression, as well as new ways to create and disseminate cultural artefacts, it has also given us new ways of theorising Shakespeare. Today, we can construct our own Shakespeares and disseminate them globally, an example of what Jennifer Holl terms "YouShakespeare," where "online Shakespeares speak not only the poet's verse, but as the poet himself ." 2 In this, we can see Shakespeare as meme. Richard Dawkins originally proposed meme theory in the 1970s, when theorising about how genes replicate; he suggested an alternative to DNA that he called memes, things that behave like a gene in human culture, which can replicate. 3 According to Mike Ingham, within popular culture and participatory media, "A meme spreads and [...] transforms itself in accordance with the conditions of the new habitat in order to survive." 4 Shakespeare Memes, Screens and Broadway Scenes: Popular Culture Representations of Shakes... Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare | 2021 médias participatifs.

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“It's All a Bit Harry Potter”: The Bard, The Doctor and The Cultural TARDIS in Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

‘That’s One of Mine’

‘That’s One of Mine’

Memes, Screens and Broadway Scenes: Popular Culture Representations of Shakespeare’s Actors in the Age of Participatory Media

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