Shakespeare's Fans: Adapting The Bard in The Age of Media Fandom

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE
Shakespeare’s
Fans
Adapting the Bard
in the Age of
Media Fandom
Johnathan H. Pope
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of
text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its
focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a
vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive
understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger
phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not
singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural
forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations,
remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes
studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and
these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on
aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as
connected to various forms of visual culture.
Advisory Board:
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Université de Bourgogne, France
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654
Johnathan H. Pope
Shakespeare’s Fans
Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom
Johnathan H. Pope
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Corner Brook, NL, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-33725-4 ISBN 978-3-030-33726-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1
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Acknowledgments
I would like to begin by thanking Andrew Hartley and Peter Holland for
organizing the ‘Shakespeare and Geek Culture’ panel for the 2017 meet-
ing of the Shakespeare Association of American. My work on Ryan North
for that session became the foundation and inspiration for Shakespeare’s
Fans. Writing for and participating in that panel helped me connect a
whole range of disparate thoughts and ideas that had been knocking
around in my head for many years, so I am forever grateful to Andrew and
Peter, as well as to my fellow panelists.
I would also like to thank everyone at Palgrave who has had faith in and
supported this project. From the moment I proposed the book through to
the completion of the manuscript, Palgrave has been a joy to work with.
Thanks especially to Lina Aboujieb, Ellie Freedman, and Emily Wood, as
well as all of the anonymous reviewers who gave constructive and encour-
aging feedback at every stage of production.
Many thanks are due to those at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland (Grenfell Campus) who supported the research for this
monograph. The staff at the Ferriss Hodgett Library ensured that every-
thing went smoothly from start to finish, no matter how strange a docu-
ment I requested. Heather Strickland, Nicole Holloway, Catherine Stone,
Krista Howell, Anita Park, Crystal Rose, and Louise McGillis work won-
ders every day. Thanks also to Jennifer Butler Wight for her good humor
and feedback on funding proposals and to Sarah Levita for her assistance
with research at a very early but essential stage. Thanks to Jeff Keshen for
his unwavering support for research activities at Grenfell. Finally, to any
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
student who got trapped in a conversation with me about Shakespeare fan

fiction: thank you, and I am sorry!
I am eternally grateful to Mary and Howard Pope for their many years
of optimism, encouragement, and emotional support. Many frustrations
and doubts about this book were vented over numerous Sunday dinners,
and the patience and drinks helped get me through this process. Most of
all, thank you to Bonnie White. You are my first and best editor, my daily
motivator, and my academic idol. I promise that I will now stop regaling
you with excerpts of Tom Hiddleston erotica.
Finally, thank you Jack for your love and enthusiasm and for being a
willing recipient of my own fannish nature.
Contents
1 Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee? 1
2 “My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the

Shakespeare Fan from 10 Things I Hate About You to
Garrick’s Jubilee 33
3 “my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the

Gift Economy 67
4 “the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction 99
5 “There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare,

RPF, and Parody133
6 Conclusion169
Index177
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee?
At a recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), I

participated in a conversation with some fellow panelists about why we all
chose to study Shakespeare in the first place. Some spoke about the intel-
lectual rewards offered by texts, while others told more personal stories
about reading the plays as a child with their parents. While some of us did
not contribute to the conversation, others held back until someone postu-
lated that in trying to answer the question, many of us were probably
looking for the ‘right’ answer, one that was suitably scholarly or poignant
enough that it would not compromise our standing with our peers in the
room, a room which was filled—as SAA sessions often are—with junior
scholars through to the titans of our field. This person joked that none of
us wanted to say, “I got interested in Shakespeare because I had a crush on
Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.” We laughed, and the conversation
soon moved in a different direction. The whole discussion reminded me
of the game of Humiliation played by a group of professors in David
Lodge’s Changing Places (1975) in which the participants admit which
famous work of literature they have never read. The ‘winner’ of the game
is an English professor who admits to having never read Hamlet, a revela-
tion so ghastly that he loses his job because of it. Saying that you came to
Shakespeare because of Leo seemed to be the equivalent of being ignorant
of Hamlet: there are just some things you do not say, no matter how true
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. H. Pope, Shakespeare’s Fans, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and
Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1_1
2 J. H. POPE
they are. In the case of Romeo + Juliet (1996), the fear being danced
around was of being seen by your peers as immature and overly affective
rather than appropriately serious and academic. In fan cultures, ‘squeeing’
describes excessive “emotional exuberance” when discussing a favorite
film or meeting the actors from a favorite television series.1 It is also a term
that is almost always used in a pejorative sense, the suggestion of shame-
lessly overdoing it by gushing, by getting too excited. Many of us are at the
SAA because we love Shakespeare or because we love talking about his
works with other people who love talking about the same thing. But we
are scholars and critics. We do not confuse infatuation with critical inquiry.
We do not squee, not when we are talking about Shakespeare, and not
when we are meeting our academic idols at the conference.
When we think of fans, Shakespeare does not come immediately to
mind. Rather, we tend to think of media fandom, particularly fans of sci-
ence fiction and fantasy, that image of the fan that has come to dominate
popular culture depictions of the fan, whether they be Trekkies or fans of
Star Wars or Harry Potter. Images of enthusiastic individuals dressed up as
a favorite character while waiting in line to buy a movie ticket or the new-
est book in a series might spring to mind. We might also think of sports
fans devoted to a favorite team, decked out officially licensed gear, and
proclaiming that ‘this is the year!’ Or we might think of fans of a particular
band who are continually saving for plane tickets and concert tickets.
Maybe we think of collectors of sports or film memorabilia, passionate
proponents of a particular videogame console or cellphone manufacturer,
or adherents of celebrity culture. Shakespeare, however, tends to remain
on the margins of our conception of fandom in spite of—or, perhaps,
partly because of—his cultural and educational pride of place as the canon-
ical author. This also in spite of the fact that, as I argue throughout this
book, Shakespeare’s fans have been around for centuries, even if they have
not often been written about or conceptualized as fans. Rather, we have a
different name for Shakespeare fandom: bardolatry.
For Shakespeare scholars unfamiliar with it, fan studies has grown sub-
stantially as a field of study over the past three decades, especially since the
publication of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), exploding further
with the advent of Web 2.0 in the late 1990s when fan practices became
both more visible and more accessible. Jenkins wrote in response to the
1
Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan
Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 46.
1 INTRODUCTION: TO SQUEE OR NOT TO SQUEE? 3
popular perception of fans as socially inept, sexually immature, and obses-

sive consumers of popular culture who were mindlessly uncritical of the
media they consumed. Writing as both a fan and a scholar, Jenkins’ “eth-
nographic account” of fandom theorized it not as a form of passive, brain-
less media spectatorship, but rather as a “participatory culture” that was
engaged and critical, receptive but responsive, and frequently constructing
new meaning from a text rather than operating solely as an ideological
mirror to it.2 And, equally important, Textual Poachers is a self-reflective
work that contemplates Jenkins’ role as a participant-observer, what has
become known in the field as an ‘aca-fan,’ the combined identities of an
academic and a fan.3 Jenkins’ work has evolved considerably since 1992 in
tandem with changes in the way media is consumed and the fluctuating
relationship between cultural producers and the fans they court, as well as
the changes in the ways fans communicate with and disseminate their
work to each other.4 Fandom—and the mainstream acceptability of it—
has come a long way from the homemade fanzines and small conventions
of the late 1960s to the massive digital archives of fan fiction and the
newsworthy, cultural pervasiveness of the annual San Diego Comic-Con
today. Following Jenkins, Matt Hills has done considerable work on how
we reconcile and theorize those dual identities of fan and scholar, as well
as the tensions and contradictions within and between them that emerge
from differing “imagined subjectivity” that establishes criteria for ‘good’
and ‘bad’ fans/academics.5 And while Hills has often written about the
similarities between academia and fandom, he has also cautioned against
overly celebratory models of analysis. He argues instead in favor of, first,
studying fandom as it is and not just according to the media tastes of like-
minded scholars and, second, of maintaining a necessary “proper distance”
from the object of study. Ideally, “proper distance” is achieved when the
scholar is neither “too close” to nor “too distant” from the object of
study. Being too close “can problematically give rise to academic work
2
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 20th anniver-
sary edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 1. Although Jenkins was not the
first fan scholar, Textual Poachers stands as the most influential early work in the field.
3
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, vii.
4
In particular, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and
Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New
York and London: New York University Press, 2013).
5
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 3–5.
4 J. H. POPE
which replays scholar-fans’ pre-theoretical investments in specific fan cul-

tural practices, and non-investments in other fan practices,” whereas being
too distant can result in “a symbolic annihilation or exnomination of fan
practices beyond the scope of the scholar’s pre-theoretical affective
relationships.”6 As will become evident, Hills’ arguments about the fan
objects we choose to write about are of paramount importance to the
present work.
Oftentimes, trying to define fan feels like trying to catch the wind in a
butterfly net. It is an identity or label that many of us feel that we under-
stand as it applies to ourselves or to others and our general likes and dis-
likes. We use phrases such as ‘I’m a fan of’ or ‘I’m not a fan of’ as our daily
vernacular in reference to almost anything, to the point that the term loses
appreciable stability and meaning. ‘I’m a big fan of summer,’ I might say,
or ‘I’m not a fan of mushrooms.’ Colloquially, we invoke our fan status to
denote everything from mild indifference or inclination to passionate
enthusiasm or support. When applied to specific cultural texts or objects,
the term tends to coalesce into something slightly more precise, although
still elusive. We are or know fans of Star Trek, the Grateful Dead, Harry
Potter, the Green Bay Packers, and Joss Whedon, and in these examples,
we apply labels to those fans (Trekkies, Deadheads, Potterheads,
Cheeseheads, and Whedonites, respectively). We know of fans of specific
actors, tech companies, clothing brands, and so forth. Seemingly, anyone
or anything is capable of spawning its own fandom.
In her overview of fan culture (particularly as it relates to science fic-
tion), Karen Hellekson offers useful general definitions of two key terms:
“Fans are people who actively engage with something … and fandom is
the community that fans self-constitute around that text or object.”7 In
this, Hellekson addresses two of the dominant elements of the fan identity
that have emerged in the critical literature, particularly since Jenkins’
6
Hills is drawing on Roger Silverstone’s concept of ‘proper distance’ from Media and
Morality (2007). See Matt Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-
Fandoms: Between Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?,” in Fan Culture: Theory/
Practice, eds. Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2012), 20–21; Matt Hills, “Forward,” in Understanding Fandom: An
Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture, ed. Mark Duffett (New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), vi–vii.
7
Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction, eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 153.
Textual Poachers: fan is a necessarily active identity, and oftentimes a com-

munal one as well. For Jenkins, characterizing fan activity as ‘participatory
culture’ served as a way to “differentiate the activities of fans from other
forms of spectatorship.”8 Jenkins also reminds us that although all fan-
doms are made up of fans, not all fans are part of fandoms: “Individual
fans can be thought of as parts of audiences, while fandoms start to dem-
onstrate some traits of publics, bound together through their ‘shared soci-
ality’ and ‘shared identity.’”9 Additionally, fans are typically characterized
by their emotional investment in the object of their fandom. As Mark
Duffett asserts, “To become a fan is to find yourself with an emotional
conviction about a specific object.”10 Fans are passionate and enthusiastic,
and it is this passion and enthusiasm that encourages them to do more
with a cultural text than simply consume it passively. Fan is also a fre-
quently gendered category that—especially when used in the pejorative
sense catalogued by Jenkins—feminizes and infantilizes its participants, in
no small part due to its association with stereotypically feminine emotional
(over)reactions and responses, as opposed to, say, stereotypically mascu-
line logic and objectivity.11 Women and children are more likely to turn
their interests into infatuations, to lose sight of the distinction between
fantasy and reality, to become so emotionally invested in a narrative or
character that they are moved to tears. Indeed, Francesca Coppa has
pointed to the ways in which some seemingly innocent terms related to
media spectatorship—and often central to the fan identity—carry misogy-
nistic undertones, such as when we ‘binge watch’ multiple episodes of a
television show: “the experience of binge watching, binge reading, binge
eating, has historically been cast as female, and as indubitably bad … One
of the most derided figures in Western culture is the woman in sweatpants
watching television and eating ice cream out of the carton.”12 Fans do not
know when to stop, when enough is enough, and thus engage in unhealthy
8
Jenkins, Spreadable Media, 2.
9
Jenkins, Spreadable Media, 166. Jenkins here is drawing on Daniel Dayan’s work on
audiences and publics as distinct from one another. Whereas an audience is largely passive and
unaware of or uncaring of the parameters of its engagement with media industries (an audi-
ence offers attention), a public is more actively involved in establishing or inviting a discourse
with those media industries and its messages (a public calls for attention).
10
Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 30.
11
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10.
12
Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2017), x.
6 J. H. POPE
behaviors as a manifestation of their lack of control. At the same time, fan

scholars have understood fandom as a feminine sphere in a much more
positive sense, wherein fan activities such as the writing of fan fiction have
historically been dominated by women.13 Abigail Derecho, for example,
argues that fan fiction is the “literature of the subordinate, because most
fanfic authors are women responding to media products that, for the most
part, are characterized by an underrepresentation of women,” and repre-
sents an “act of defiance of corporate control and a reclamation of women
viewers’ rights to experience the narratives they desire by creating them
for themselves.”14 Over the past two decades in particular, however, the
authorship of fan fiction has become more diverse, such that it “can no
longer be considered the aegis of straight white women.”15
As fan studies scholars have noted, one of the challenges in writing
about fans stems from their diversity, the fact that there is no single fan-
dom within which all fans operate.16 Each fan community operates with its
own set of rules and terms of engagement, such that fans of soap opera
and fans of Star Wars and fans of the Montreal Canadiens do not cohere as
a unified group of Fans. While Star Wars fans might cosplay at a conven-
tion and Canadiens fans might paint their faces during a playoff game,
very little costume play takes place amongst fans of General Hospital; while
fan fiction might be a prevalent feature of soap opera and Star Wars
13
Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 178; Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media
Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006),
44; Ross Haenfler, Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115–18; Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre:
Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 91; Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish
Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 116;
Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek
Zines,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 102.
14
Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of
Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen
71–72.
15
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction
Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2014), 80.
16
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Fan Fiction
and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse
(Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 6.
fandoms, most diehard hockey fans are likely unaware of the existence of
Sidney Crosby erotica on hockeyfanfiction.com. Whereas amateur muggles
might express their Harry Potter fandom by participating in the US
Quidditch Cup and amateur hockey players might roleplay as favorite
players during a game of pick-up, Hello Kitty fans have no sport to call
their own. Likewise, each fan community comprises numerous expressions
of fandom that not all fans participate in. Not all Star Trek cosplayers write
fan fiction, and not all fan fiction writers collect action figures, and not all
collectors collect Pez dispensers. Likewise, although passion and emo-
tional investment are hallmarks of fandom in general, how that passion is
expressed and received can differ greatly between fandoms. As Duffett
notes, although excessively exuberant responses—the aforementioned
squeeing—are frowned upon in many fan communities, we fully expect
music or sports fans to cheer, yell, dance, or be visibly moved in a number
of ways as spectators of performances or games.17 Suffice it to say that
there is considerable variation both between and within fan communities,
with new forms of engagement emerging in step with new technologies,
and because fandom in general is continually changing, “any discussion of
it is always already obsolete.”18 Additionally, fans are rarely fans of just one
thing, often circulating with varying degrees of comfort and engagement
within a number of fandoms. Insofar as fandoms operate as, as Jenkins
argues, communities, those communities have porous and overlapping
boundaries and do not “maintain any claims to self-sufficiency.”19 Fandom
is—and always has been—part of a multifaceted identity.
Another challenge of writing about fans involves the pejorative conno-
tations of fan. The term is rooted in the Latin fanaticus, which carries
with it a derogatory sense of religious obsessions—a form of madness or
possession that is closed-minded, irrational, and overzealous.20 It is devo-
tion taken to an extreme. The term ‘fanatic’ rose to prominence in
seventeenth-century England to describe religious fanatics, retaining its
derogatory sense: you might call others ‘fanatics,’ but it is not a term you
would willingly apply to yourself—except in a self-deprecating way—
because of its implied lack of critical thought and perspective.21 Fanatics
17
18
Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” 9.
19
20
21
Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5; Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 12–15.
8 J. H. POPE
pursue the object of their devotion without entertaining possible alterna-

tives, deviations, or logical exceptions, and with a near total blindness to
its faults or hypocrisies and to the way that their own fanaticism marks
them as the deserving objects of scorn or ridicule by rational, logical peo-
ple. Importantly, fanaticism is associated with a lack of a baseline self-
awareness that is presumably possessed by those around them. Think of
Shakespeare’s treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night or Ben Jonson’s
mockery of Puritan extremes and hypocrisies in The Alchemist. Although
fan is largely devoid of the explicitly religious or political connotations of
fanatic, it still carries with it the sense of irrational, embarrassingly unself-
conscious, unhealthy obsession that goes beyond the bounds of ‘normal’
enjoyment, appreciation, and spectatorship. As Jenkins notes, this has led
to the emergence of numerous popular stereotypes about fans: they are
“brainless consumers,” they are devoted to the pursuit of “worthless
knowledge” about something unimportant, their obsession has made
them socially, sexually, and intellectually immature and thus childlike, and
they are “unable to separate fantasy from reality.”22 Paradoxically, although
perceived as sexually immature (or perhaps because of this immaturity),
fans are often perceived as turning their obsessions into sexual fetishes
wherein enthusiasm becomes indistinguishable from—or transforms
into—abnormal erotic fixation. Read: bronies, the adult male fans of My
Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the popular target of much online
mockery and derision. Urban Dictionary, for example, scornfully defines a
brony as “a way to keep your virginity.”23 Consequently, fan comes loaded
with an awful lot of pejorative baggage that has as much to do with one’s
perceived personal deficiencies as one’s media preferences.
The earliest use of fan to describe fandom in terms recognizable today
came in relation to baseball in the late nineteenth century, and then to the
theater and those patrons who would follow the performances of particu-
lar actors, especially the ‘Matinee Girls’ who were accused of going “to
admire the actors rather than the plays.”24 Since then, fans have come to
embrace many different objects from celebrities to musicians, professional
sports teams to amateur athletes, specific authors and artists to whole
media franchises, commercial goods to particular websites, the epicenter

22
“Brony,” Urban Dictionary, accessed August 5, 2019, https://www.urbandictionary.

23
com/define.php?term=Brony.
24
of popular culture to fringes that many of us cannot begin to imagine. Up

until the 1990s, many fandoms were still viewed through the derogatory
patina of religious obsession: fans took their enjoyment of an object to an
enthusiastic and thus distasteful level, paralleled with geek and nerd identi-
ties and viewed as inherently childish. Some fandoms have been largely
exempt from these negative stereotypes and are more widely accepted in
the culture at large, namely, sports and music fandoms, wherein proclaim-
ing one’s passionate enthusiasm for a football team or rock band does not
automatically make one a social outcast. With the exception of these fan-
doms and despite the increased mainstream acceptability of fandom in
recent years, the popular image of the media fan is still dominated by the
obsessive, socially and sexually inept weirdo whose fandom either makes
other people laugh or feel uncomfortable. The characters on The Big Bang
Theory are lovable losers, but they are still losers.25
Shakespeare does not often find his way into many of the debates and
case studies where we are more likely to encounter the television show
Supernatural than we are Shakespeare. When Shakespeare is discussed in
fan studies, he is usually brought up briefly in an effort to historicize fan-
dom, typically stranding Shakespeare’s fans in the past. Mark Duffett, for
example, notes Shakespeare’s popularity during his own lifetime, his
enduring literary celebrity, and the tourist draw of the Shakespeare home-
stead since the mid-eighteenth century.26 Abigail Derecho and Francesca
Coppa briefly consider adaptations of Shakespeare as fan fiction, but with-
out offering a sustained discussion of this possibility.27 Coppa, though,
offers a broadly inclusive take on membership into Shakespeare’s fan col-
lective, from fan fiction authors to professional theaters to literary critics,
all of whom—by staging, adapting, rewriting, or interpreting Shakespeare’s
plays—are doing the work of the fan.28 Hills presumably sees Shakespeare
fans as the embodiment of cult fandom, which he discusses in terms of
temporality rather than intensity: what separates cult fans from fans is “the
25
Margaret A. Weitekamp, “‘We’re Physicists’: Gender, Genre and the Image of Scientists
in The Big Bang Theory,” Journal of Popular Television 3, no. 1 (2015): 82.
26
27
Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 69; Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in
Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities
in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London:
McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 236.
28
Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space,” 238.
10 J. H. POPE
absence of ‘new’ or official material in the originating medium.”29 Thus,

Shakespeare fans are cult fans in the same sense that fans of the original
Star Trek series (1966–69) are cult fans: because no new Shakespeare
plays/poems or William Shatner episodes are being produced and “the
original artifact has left mainstream culture,” fans necessarily become cult
fans.30 This distinction helps us articulate how we are engaging with
Shakespeare as fans because his temporal distance introduces numerous
factors that complicate how we assess Shakespeare as a fan object.
Nevertheless, the temporal distinction is indistinct in some regards.
Although Shakespeare is not writing any new plays at the moment, his
‘cult’ works are continually being adapted and generating new fans—of
either Shakespeare or of that specific adaptation—in the process.
Certainly, as mentioned, fan studies has often attempted to historicize
fandom by indicating that fan activities are not entirely new, stretching
back to early science fiction fan publications and conventions, to Arthur
Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, to the early celebrity cul-
ture of fan letters written to silver age screen stars, to theater enthusiasts
who followed the careers of particular actors, to perhaps even the portrai-
ture culture of European nobility throughout the centuries that encour-
aged the population to view royals as the earliest celebrities.31 Indeed,
Duffett notes that “In most research there is a tendency to talk about the
phenomenon as if it has always existed, fully formed, in society,” but the
history of fandom is much more complex and varied than ‘it has always
existed.’32 Although these efforts to historicize fandom do much to illumi-
nate the existence and promotion of fannish activities through history,
most fan scholars focus on contemporary or very recent fan objects, espe-
cially when considered in relation to a playwright who died over 400 years
ago. Indeed, fan scholars frequently write about those cultural objects that
come readily to mind when one thinks of fans: videogames, sports teams,
soap operas, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, and a slew
of media franchises that have elicited a passionate response from fan com-
munities that emerge continually in response to new cultural objects. Why
do we see so much work on Star Wars fans but so little on Shakespeare
29
Hills, Fan Cultures, x. Italics in original.
30
Kristin M. Barton, “Introduction,” in Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Culture in
the 21st Century, eds. Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley (Jefferson and
London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014), 5–6.
31
Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 5–7.
32
fans? As Hills argues in his discussion of ‘proper distance,’ I believe it is

because Shakespeare simply falls beyond the margins of the fan cultures
and activities that scholar-fans engage in, nearly resulting in the “symbolic
annihilation” of Shakespeare in the field.33
Thus, the contemporary focus of fan studies is as invigorating as it is
limited, skewed toward certain media texts and fan practices while ignor-
ing others, acknowledging the potentially long history of fandom while
also leaving it there. Indeed, as Jenkins’ work has demonstrated since the
publication of Textual Poachers, advances in technology, dramatic changes
in the ways in which we consume media, the ever shifting relationship
between media producers and media consumers, and the fluid cultural and
legal attitudes toward copyright, fair use, and open access mean that fan-
dom on the whole is in a constant state of flux, even as scholars strive to
articulate and respond to new or changing forms of fan engagement.
Undoubtedly, the work on contemporary fan objects and fan activities is
both exciting and enlightening. However, such work is frequently
focused—out of necessity—on the legal and economic relationships
between producers and consumers. While Shakespeare’s fans engage in
similar activities as contemporary media fans by writing fan fiction, creat-
ing fan art, and traveling to his birthplace, the temporal distance of his
plays and poems and the absence of copyright attached to them compli-
cates many of the most salient debates and assumptions within fan studies
such as the professional or amateur status of fan writers, whether their
works are creative or derivative, the extent to which fans operate within a
gift economy, the extent to which fans are associated with play and child-
ishness, and even the misogynistic feminization of affective fan responses.
Likewise, when we approach Shakespeare as a fan object, we can find new
perspectives on questions that are central to Shakespeare studies in the
twenty-first century: who owns Shakespeare? Who determines the accept-
able parameters for engagement with this playwright? What is at stake
when we as academics, scholars, and educators denigrate affective and sub-
jective responses to Shakespeare from our students, colleagues, and the
general public? What does a fan work even look like in the context of
Shakespeare?
This last question is a difficult one to answer, especially in the context
of our understanding of adaptation so that it does not water down the
notion of adaptation by suggesting that every adaptation is automatically
33
Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms,” 21.
12 J. H. POPE
a fan work. This debate is most frequently taken up in studies of fan fic-
tion, which—in its most inclusive varieties—argue that “fan fiction
originated several millennia ago, with myth stories, and continues today,
encompassing works both by authors who identify themselves as fans and
those who do not write from within fandoms.”34 Along these lines,
Hellekson and Busse suggest that if fan fiction is conceived as “a form of
collective storytelling, then the Iliad and the Odyssey might be tagged as
the earliest versions of fan fiction.”35 Similarly, discussing fan fiction’s his-
tory, Anne Jamison reminds us that “Reworking an existing story, telling
tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship
until very recently.”36 At its core, fan fiction represents the desire to see
narratives and characters from a prior work continue past the pages or
scenes of that prior work, a desire for more that is not fully satisfied by the
original text. Fan fiction emerges when readers and audiences feel like they
are not yet done with these texts and take it upon themselves to keep them
going. Sheenagh Pugh stresses that the fannish desire for more is not
always a desire for more of the same. While it is common for fan fiction writ-
ers to seek to spend more time in these worlds and with these characters,
it is also quite common for fan fiction to demand more from these worlds
and characters, recognizing faults and seeking to address or fix them.37 In
this sense, fan fiction sometimes does work that runs parallel to scholarly
criticism, often by repudiating, for example, the lack of diversity in a text
by making it more diverse.38 Nevertheless, fan works—whether fan fiction
or otherwise—have often been dismissed as childish, derivative, and
unoriginal or without creative merit because they are grounded in existing
characters and worlds. If these writers were talented enough, the logic
34
Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 62.
35
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader,
eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 6. See
also: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Fiction as Literature,” in The Fan Fiction
Press, 2014), 22–23.
36
Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013),
18.
37
Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 19.
38
Such is the case, for example, in early Star Trek fan fiction that sought to carve our more
diverse and representative space for female and queer characters, perspectives, and experi-
ences. See: Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 41–54; Pugh, The Democratic
Genre, 20; Lamb and Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” 97–115.
goes; then they would write their own stories rather than piggybacking on
or, worse, stealing from the work of others. Insofar as we accept that
Homer is the precursor to fan fiction, we would balk at dismissing the
Iliad for the reasons listed above. The difference, perhaps, is that no fan
fiction work “pretends to be an autonomous work of art,” even if it can
stand on its own.39 It wants you to see and revel in the connections, the
shared worlds and characters, and the persistent dialogue between the
texts. As Jamison emphasizes, some fan fiction can be read as an indepen-
dent narrative by readers unfamiliar with the source text or texts, “but
that’s not its point.”40 At this point, it should be obvious that fan fiction
and adaptation overlap in significant ways, to the point that we are better
served by considering fan fiction as a form of adaptation where the pri-
mary concern is breathing new life into established characters and estab-
lished worlds in a way that is both allusive and citational. If you are not
engaged in the active intertextuality of fan fiction, then you aren’t read-
ing it right.
Whether or not we consider fan works to be adaptations is a persistently
contested issue: what is accepted as a self-evident truth in fan studies is
anything but in adaptation studies. In her influential and wide-ranging
transmedial theorization of adaptation, Linda Hutcheon rejects the subor-
dination of adaptations to the adapted text, emphasizing that “an adapta-
tion is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without
being secondary.”41 However, Hutcheon lumps fan fiction in with plagia-
rism and sequalization as “not really adaptation,” because “There is a dif-
ference between never wanting a story to end … and wanting to retell the
same story over and over in different ways.”42 Perhaps ironically, Hutcheon
dismisses fan fiction as adaptation on similar grounds that adaptation has
sometimes been dismissed and which she argues against. There are some
implicit problematic assumptions about fan fiction at work here, namely,
that it continues or expands stories but does not retell, recast, or reinter-
pret them. This may be true in some cases, but certainly not by default:
consider the aforementioned feminist and queer revisions of Star Trek.
Additionally, I am not convinced that Hutcheon’s comments about
39
Jamison, Fic, 14.
40
Jamison, Fic, 14.
41
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013), 9.
42
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 9.
14 J. H. POPE
sequels work, either: take, for example, the case of Star Wars: The Force
Awakens (2015), which serves simultaneously as a sequel to the original
trilogy, as well as both an adaptation and remake of Star Wars: A New
Hope (1977). One of the problems here, as well, is that Hutcheon posi-
tions the fan as passionate but lacking agency in relation to adaptation,
which is important because her discussion of fan fiction excludes fans from
participating in the adaptive process. This casts fans as passive media spec-
tators, a position that fan studies has convincingly argued against for over
three decades. Hutcheon rightly characterizes fans as part of the “knowing
audience” for whom adaptations are received as adaptations because they
oscillate between the adapted and the adapting texts; however, these fans,
she implies, are the consumers of a unidirectional adaptive process, empha-
sizing the inherent risks of adapting: “The more rabid the fans, the more
disappointed they can potentially be.”43 By excluding fan works from her
definition of adaptation, Hutcheon ignores the way in which fans will
often use their passion or disappointment to offer a response in the form
of adaptation.
Furthermore, fan studies does not quite know what to do with
Shakespearean transformative works. As noted, fan scholars consistently
point to the potentially unlimited history of, particularly, fan fiction to
note that it potentially stretches back to Homer, and by pointing to Jean
Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) as examples of the widespread acceptability
of essentially fan fiction retellings of popular narratives. This is a tantaliz-
ing possibility because of the way in which it implies that all adaptations—
for as long as they have been around—can be thought of through the lens
of fan fiction. However, it has become something of a trope in fan studies
to raise this possibility before choosing a more restrictive definition. In
their introduction to The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, which helpfully col-
lects many of the key critical texts of the field, two of the leading fan schol-
ars, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, choose to restrict the definition
to rewritings of shared media (particularly television and film) grounded
in communities of fans and based on works under the legal protection of
authorial (or corporate) copyright.44 Francesca Coppa further emphasizes
the central importance of copyright to any definition of fan fiction because
“It is only in such a system—where storytelling has been industrialized to
43
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 120, 123.
44
Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 6.
the point that our shared culture is owned by others—that a category like
‘fanfiction’ makes sense.”45 By this logic, no retelling of Shakespeare could
be considered a work of fan fiction purely because of the copyright status
of his works. A few problems come to mind. Although Hellekson, Busse,
and Coppa mention commercially produced texts/performances like
Stoppard’s play, they mostly strand the possibility of Shakespearean fan
fiction in the historical past and limit it to traditional genres such as theat-
rical or novelized adaptations. However, visit archiveofourown.org—one
of the largest online databases of fan fiction—and you will see plenty of
examples of Shakespearean retellings sharing digital shelf space with Doctor
Who and Game of Thrones fan fiction. Likewise, these authors rewrite
Shakespeare according to the widespread conventions, tropes, and genres
of fan fiction: Shakespearean slash, het, hurt/comfort, fluff, crossover,
alternate universe, PWP, body swap, genderswap, podfic, and dozens—
hundreds—of other fanfic tags proliferate. There are Shakespeare drab-
bles, flashfic and Yuletide challenges, gift fics, 5+1 things, and Real Person
Fics (RPFs).46 As Pugh notes in her effort to sketch the generic parameters
of fan fiction, copyright issues or whether or not authors were paid for
their work do not fundamentally determine, from the standpoint of genre,
how fanfic is written.47 If the only substantive difference between Star
Wars fan fiction and Romeo and Juliet fan fiction is the copyright status of
the characters when the texts share substantial stylistic and generic simi-
larities, are those grounds enough to mark one as fan fiction and one as not
45
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 7.
46
These tropes and genres will be dealt with and defined in more detail as relevant and
especially in Chap. 4, but briefly, their meaning is as follows. Slash: focused on queer pairings
of characters; het: focused on straight pairings; hurt/comfort: characters are in physical or
emotional pain and are comforted by other characters; fluff: feel-good narratives often with-
out plot or sexually explicit content; crossover: characters from multiple fictional worlds
appear in the same text; alternate universe; characters and/or narratives are reimagined in a
different time and/or place; PWP: porn without plot (or plot, what plot?) texts normally
focused on sexual encounters but without concern for narrative; body swap: characters find
themselves in unfamiliar bodies; genderswap: a character’s gender is changed from what it
appears to be in the original text; podfic: an audio recording of a fanfic text; drabble: a text
that is exactly one hundred words long; flashfic: short texts longer than drabbles but typically
less than 2000 words; Yuletide: texts written upon request and exchanged around December
25; challenge: a text written in response to a prompt; gift fics: texts written as gifts for specific
readers or as a ‘thank you’ to a specific author; 5 + 1 things: five vignettes on a similar theme
followed by one on a related but different theme; RPF: real person fic in which the focus is
on real people (i.e., historical figures or celebrities) rather than fictional characters.
47
Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 11, 25–26.
16 J. H. POPE
fan fiction? Additionally, if we accept Hutcheon’s assertion that fan fiction

cannot be categorized as adaptation and Hellekson, Busse, and Coppa’s
implied exclusion of all rewritings and retellings of Shakespeare from the
fan fiction category, then where do we place Hamlet/Horatio slash?
To this point, only a handful of authors have focused on specifically
Shakespearean online fan fiction, beginning with Douglas Lanier’s chapter
on homage, adaptation, and parody in his ground-breaking articulation
and analysis of ‘Shakespop.’48 Although he spends little time on individual
texts, Lanier reads fan fiction as a playful form of postmodern pastiche that
“recognizes certain formal and ideological limits of its Shakespearian
source (or the limits of how that source has been traditionally interpreted)
and seeks to push against those limits, in a spirit of critique, anarchy, plea-
sure, recuperation, participation.”49 More recently, Valerie Fazel and
Louise Geddes have read online Shakespeare fan fiction as a form of ama-
teur communal and collaborative authority that negotiates and grapples
with the playwright “outside the hegemony of dominant institutional
structures,” leveling the distinction between the original text and the fan
text.50 Going further, Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall invest fan
fiction with radical, subversive ideological potential, operating not just
outside traditional institutions but by granting amateurs the platform “to
actively undercut the positivism of traditional approaches to interpreta-
tion,” challenging the stuffy academic elevation of Shakespeare to the sta-
tus of “author-god.”51 Michelle K. Yost reads Shakespeare fan fiction as
“Shakespeare-related amateur fiction” that “demands a lowbrow examina-
tion of Shakespeare as a folk product of twenty-first-century popular
culture.”52 Along with Yost, Amelia R. Bitely acknowledges the parallels
between fan fiction and more traditional, commercially available
Shakespeare adaptations such as the film She’s the Man (2006). Bitely
rightly argues that Shakespeare scholars ignore online fan fiction at their
48
Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 82–109.
49
Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 85.
50
Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative
Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction,” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 275.
51
Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom,
and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 28, 32.
52
Michelle K. Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century
Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), 193.
peril, suggesting that it has been largely ignored because it has not gone
through the tried-and-true peer review process that grants films and nov-
els “some cachet as revisionist responses.”53
While some authors are open to exploring such parallels, others are less
eager. Scholar and novelist Graham Holderness has recently pushed back
against and balked at the potential categorization of his novels The Prince
of Denmark (2001) and Black and Deep: William Shakespeare Vampire
Hunter (2015) as fan fiction, preferring instead the term “creative criti-
cism” and offering the following distinction:
The fan seeks to imitate, emulate, and extend Shakespeare’s own creative
and fiction-making practice. The creative critic, while also experimenting
with fictional forms, is engaged rather in devising new forms of literary criti-
cism. Fan fiction could be described as ‘uncritical fiction,’ an innocence that
is part of its charm but also limits its utility. Creative criticism proceeds with
the same resources of scholarly enterprise, critical understanding, and his-
torical information as formal discursive criticism, aiming to produce knowl-
edge by different means to a similar end.54
Whereas fan fiction is an uncritical emulative novelty, creative criticism is

the scholar’s imagination set free but guided by professional academic
rigor and intellectual accountability. By this logic, whether or not some-
thing is categorized as fan fiction hinges on the credentials of the authors
and the aesthetic merit and sophistication of the text. Good work is cre-
ative criticism, while bad work is fan fiction. By contrast, in a 2016 inter-
view about her novel Hag-Seed (2016), part of the Hogarth Shakespeare
series offering new adaptations by established writers in commemoration
of the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death, Margaret Atwood happily
acknowledges her novel as a work of fan fiction. Atwood draws an explicit
connection between fan fiction and adaptation of any kind going back to
classical literature, emphasizing that fan fiction necessitates simultaneous
reverence and irreverence toward the source text, ruminating on the
53
Amelia R. Bitely, “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare,” Selected
Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, vol. 1 (2007), 59.
54
Graham Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical
and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise
Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26.
18 J. H. POPE
meaning of ‘fan’: “What does fan mean? … It’s from the word fanatic,
someone with a passionate interest,” which she has in Shakespeare.55
While I do not wish to deny the validity of Holderness’ claims about
the redemptive intellectual value of his novels, it is worth noting that we
can see hints of some of the hotly contested debates within and about fan
fiction communities, particularly regarding gender and the categorization
of texts. Fan fiction authorship and readership has traditionally been gen-
dered female, and whether or not a piece of writing should be considered
fan fiction or something else has been debated as a gendered issue. The
point is succinctly made in Kaila Hale-Stern’s article for themarysue.com
sarcastically entitled “When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction
Because It’s ‘Academic.’”56 To be clear, Hale-Stern is responding to a
specific case that has nothing to do with Holderness, a Lithub interview in
which a male writer, Lonely Christopher, rejects categorizing his rework-
ing of Stephen King’s The Shining as fan fiction because of its academic
and theoretical roots.57 I am not in any way accusing Holderness of misog-
yny because of his preference for ‘creative criticism’ over ‘fan fiction,’ but
am rather pointing to the ways in which his discomfort—and Atwood’s
comfort—with the term intersects with longstanding debates within the
fan fiction community. Likewise, it raises an important question that
haunts Shakespeare’s Fans: does one have to self-identify as a fan or a fan
fiction author for us to categorize them as such? As will become clear over
the course of the present work, I do not believe such a proclamation is
necessary. Texts that foreground recognizable (recognizable to fans, any-
way) characters, characterizations, and fictional worlds are all part of the
history and present of Shakespeare fandom.
When it comes to Shakespeare, a broadly inclusive definition of fan fic-
tion raises numerous questions as Shakespeare has been both widely
adapted and has served an allusive function for centuries. In what follows,
I leave aside the question of just how far back the history of fandom and
55
Monica Heisey, “Writing Fan Fiction with Margaret Atwood,” Hazlitt, Published
October 14, 2016, accessed August 6, 2019, https://hazlitt.net/feature/writing-fan-fiction-
margaret-atwood.
56
Kaila Hale-Smith, “When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction Because It’s
‘Academic,’” The Mary Sue, Published March 1, 2018, accessed August 6, 2019, https://
www.themarysue.com/when-men-write-fanfiction-its-academic/.
57
D. W. Gibson, “Beyond Fan Fiction: Rewriting and Distorting The Shining,” Literary
Hub, Published February 28, 2018, accessed August 6, 2019, https://lithub.com/
beyond-fan-fiction-rewriting-and-distorting-the-shining/.
fan fiction goes because the case of Shakespeare demonstrates just how
complex and conflicted this history is. I leave it to the Arthurian and
Classical scholars, for example, to explore the viability of connecting their
fields to fan studies. In terms of Shakespeare, the prioritization of recog-
nizable characters and worlds helps us distinguish between fan texts and
other transformative adaptations. Unlike Yost and Bitely, I do not consider
films such as She’s the Man to be fan texts for this reason. While the film
adapts Twelfth Night, it does make a claim to standing on its own as an
independent narrative without requiring the audience’s participatory and
knowing experience of both the film and the play. Any time I have dis-
cussed She’s the Man in class, numerous students express surprise at its
adaptive status because they had previously watched the film as something
else. By contrast, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead largely requires
the audience’s awareness of Hamlet, explicitly announced in the title. Yes,
you can experience Stoppard’s play as an intelligible narrative independent
of Hamlet, but as Jamison emphasizes, that’s not the point. Akira
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) does not require our knowledge of
Macbeth, but Ryan North’s choosable-path adventure Romeo and/or
Juliet (2016) and Claire McCarthy’s film Ophelia (2018) hail, first and
foremost, those of us who want to see more of or more from the charac-
ters in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, respectively, by filling in miss-
ing scenes.
The question of what is and is not a fan text becomes much more
ambiguous, however, when we consider textual adaptations of the plays,
as any stage or film version of one of the plays also foregrounds recogniz-
able characters. If we attend a performance of The Tempest, for example,
we can reasonably expect to see Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban acting
and speaking in recognizable ways. By this logic, should we not consider
all stagings of the play to be fan texts? I do not believe so, and for the
similar reasons that I exclude She’s the Man: they are—or can be—experi-
enced as independent texts with required prior knowledge of the play. A
staging of The Tempest does not rely on our recognition of Prospero,
Miranda, and Caliban but can instead function as our first experience of
The Tempest, its world, and its characters. Certainly, because of
Shakespeare’s cultural ubiquity, many audiences do, in fact, possess prior
knowledge, but that is simply a function of that cultural ubiquity. In this
regard, a new staging of The Tempest is no different than the revival of a
comparatively obscure play by a comparatively obscure playwright: it has
to stand on its own.
20 J. H. POPE
There are undoubtedly exceptions that render the distinction less sta-
ble. What do we make of stuff like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About
Nothing (2013), which has its roots in a kind of Shakespeare fandom but
which, as a text, does not do anything explicitly fannish except to merely
exist? Is it a fan text, or the embodiment of formalized fan enthusiasm?
The method and timing of production of Much Ado are important from a
fan perspective. It was filmed at the same time as Whedon was working on
The Avengers (2012), was self-financed, and was filmed in just twelve
days.58 As such, it becomes inseparable from The Avengers, even as it serves
as a kind of fannish antithesis of that blockbuster. Whedon’s Much Ado
was made with a decidedly DIY ethos that takes advantage of the direc-
tor’s industry clout while working on The Avengers in a way that implies
that he parlayed it into promotion for an independent film that was the
culmination of a longstanding Shakespeare fandom. It also draws on the
director’s own established fandom as he draws on his cohort of ensemble
actors who have appeared in numerous projects of his. As such, it is also a
film that cannot be disentangled from other fandoms, those of Marvel
Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and those of Whedon him-
self, and these connections were presumably as likely to draw in viewers as
was the connection to Shakespeare. Part of the pleasure in watching the
film stems from the fact that the director used some of the same actors in
both The Avengers and Much Ado. The “intertextuality of casting” that is
common in Whedon’s work is heightened by the overlapping production
of both films as we are encouraged to playfully imagine these actors tra-
versing between two roles on two sets simultaneously, whether or not the
connection is made explicit in either film.59 Rather, it empowers the
Whedon fan to knowingly observe the metatextual and potentially subver-
sive exchange between the two films. Clark Gregg, for example, plays
Agent Coulson in The Avengers and Leonato in Much Ado. Philip Smith
argues that, in part, the similarities in Gregg’s costume and performance
as both Leonato and Coulson is part of a “deliberate strategy” to link the
two and thus invites critical intertextual analysis.60 And it is through
Coulson that Whedon explicitly addresses and incorporates fandom into
58
K. Brenna Wardell, “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of the Joss Whedon
Ensemble,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 2016): para. 13.
59
Bussolini quoted in Wardell, “Actors Assemble,” para. 11.
60
Philip Smith, “‘I Look’d Upon Her with a Soldier’s Eye’: The Normalization of
Surveillance Culture in Whedon’s Much Ado,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14,
no. 1 (Winter 2016): para. 9.
The Avengers. As Coulson operates from a position of authority to help

assemble the titular superhero team, we learn that he is a fan of—and in
awe of—Captain America and has been collecting a set of Second World
War–era trading cards that he desperately wants Captain America to auto-
graph. Upon meeting Captain America for the first time, Coulson becomes
flustered as he imitates the superhero’s movements and makes uninten-
tionally embarrassing statements that tease a pseudo-sexual stalkerly obses-
sion with him: Coulson is happy to meet him “officially,” noting that “I
watched you, while you were sleeping.” Similarly, when Black Widow talks
to Captain America about Coulson later in the film, she says, “I thought
Coulson was gonna swoon. Did he ask you to sign his Captain America
trading cards yet? … They’re vintage. He’s very proud.” Thus, the power-
ful government agent is gently mocked, feminized, or queered for his
fandom. Whedon himself has a history of acknowledging and engaging
with his own fans, and the depiction of Coulson serves as a knowing nod
to some of the prevalent stereotypes of fans without overtly diminishing
the authority of the character in the film. And, as Smith suggests, Whedon
invites the audience to see Coulson in Leonato.
The fan-ness of Much Ado is relevant in other ways as well in terms of
the work-versus-play dichotomy that is central to many discussions of fan
texts but in a way that inverts the underlying assumptions of work and play
in cultural terms. As Rhonda V. Wilcox notes, Much Ado bears metatextual
relevance to Whedon’s parallel production of two films. Don Pedro’s visit
to Leonato’s home is intended as a break—a vacation—from his successful
military pursuits, “a time of freedom not unlike the filming of Much Ado
was for Whedon after the almost military strategies required to make The
Avengers,” with Much Ado filmed after the completion of The Avengers’
principal filming but prior to final editing.61 We might extend this to note
that Shakespeare comedies typically involve a suspension or inversion of
the rules of social and political order, reveling in the transgressive space in
between what has to be and what could be. In this sense, for Whedon, the
superhero movie was work whereas the Shakespeare film was play—made
during “recreation time”—regardless of the fact that both were released
commercially, and regardless of the fact that the work text belongs to the
realm of costumed superheroes and the play text belongs to the realm of
61
Rhonda V. Wilcox, “Joss Whedon’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About
Nothing: Historical Double Consciousness, Reflections, and Frames,” Slayage: The Journal of
Whedon Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2014): para. 2.
22 J. H. POPE
the Bard.62 David Lavery likewise characterizes Whedon’s Much Ado as “a

relaxation project.”63 Although I am inclined to consider the film a fan
text, this inclination relies on meta- and paratextual concerns, as the film
itself is, according to the logic laid out above, ‘just’ a standalone film ver-
sion of Shakespeare’s play. In this project, however, it is also necessary to
embrace effusiveness as, in part, a defining characteristic of fan activity,
which is continually seeking to find new and novel expressions, often in
conjunction with emergent technologies. In some ways, to try to offer a
wholly stable definition of fan work is to erroneously deny its potential to
morph in unanticipated ways.
The issue of self-identification is a tricky one in relation to Shakespeare
in other ways as well, particularly because of the association between
Shakespeare, education, work, and cultural elitism. Whereas the growth
and increasing—if not fully established—intellectual legitimacy of pop cul-
ture studies is bringing things like Star Wars into academia, the inversion
of that trajectory is taking Shakespeare out of it. Hills writes about schol-
ars who work to make their own individual fandoms a part of their aca-
demic work, normalizing the acceptability of such work in the process. For
scholars of Shakespeare, however, the playwright’s work and status have
been central to academia for a very long time indeed. Amidst all of the
debates regarding whether fan fiction is derivative/unoriginal or creative/
original, we would do well to remember that, viewed through the same
lens, scholarship and literary criticism are inherently derivative and unorig-
inal, rooted as it is in the creative output of others.64 Without Shakespeare’s
words and characters, we Shakespeare scholars would not have much to
write about. Nevertheless, to ask many scholars to consider their work as
a kind of fan activity might be too much to ask, especially when we are
asking Harold Bloom to share mental shelf space with slash fan fiction.
Shakespeare scholars have never had to argue for why we should take the
62
Rhonda V. Wilcox, “Much Ado about Whedon,” in Reading Joss Whedon, eds. Rhonda
V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2014), 1.
63
David Lavery, “Dollhouse: An Introduction,” in Reading Joss Whedon, eds. Rhonda
V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery (Syracuse: Syracuse
64
Christine Handley, “‘Distressing Damsels’: Narrative Critique and Reinterpretation in
Star Wars Fanfiction,” in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, eds. Katherine Larsen and Lynn
Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 99. Handley here draws on
Joseph Harris to parallel scholarly criticism and fan fiction.
playwright seriously or to justify their interests as a valid field of academic

inquiry. Undoubtedly, an association with pop culture fandom, for some,
will mean taking a step down the ladder. However, I follow Juliette Wells’
conclusions about the value of Jane Austen fan fiction and its relation to
more traditional literary criticism: “Austen’s popular cultural currency, far
from threatening or undermining our literary criticism, benefits our work
very directly by bringing us students and readers who are curious to learn
more and to discover what academic perspectives have to offer them.
These are our fellow readers, and we share with them a commitment to
Austen, among other authors. Let us build on our common ground, and
begin by cultivating new perspectives on Austen’s popular readers.”65 The
same is equally true of Shakespeare.
The challenge of determining what is and is not a fan text is even fur-
ther complicated by that nagging copyright issue that traditionally sepa-
rates the fan text from the fan object. With the exception of parodies, the
only people who can make Star Wars films or write Star Wars fiction are
those approved by Disney, Lucasfilm, and their lawyers, people who have
been officially invited to contribute to the Star Wars universe by those
people and companies who control the intellectual property and relevant
copyright. By contrast, anyone can conceptualize, produce, and sell any
kind of Shakespeare book, film, or other product without such an invita-
tion. I can make a video in which I dress up as Titus Andronicus and host
a cooking show on YouTube where I sell Titus-themed pie pans, and Joss
Whedon can make his Much Ado film with his friends and release it in
theaters, and there are very few legal impediments to prevent either of us
from doing this work. At the same time, Whedon cannot simply choose to
make his own Star Wars film unless he is invited to do so. Shakespeare fan
texts can be produced by film industry insiders and first-time vloggers and
disseminated through any venue within the producer’s realm of influence.
A Shakespeare fan film might employ homemade costumes and be filmed
on a smartphone, or it might star Nathan Fillion and employ the talents of
a costume designer, Shawna Trpcic, with dozens of film and television
credits to her name. A Shakespeare fan text might be a 1500-word piece
of fiction uploaded to archiveofourown.org, or it might be Ryan North’s
Romeo and/or Juliet and be available for purchase at your local bookstore
65
Juliette Wells, “New Approaches to Austen and the Popular Reader,” in Uses of Austen:
Jane’s Afterlives, eds. Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), 88.
24 J. H. POPE
alongside the author’s other publications. Whedon’s film and North’s

book bear the traditional markings of ‘official culture’: they are dissemi-
nated in traditional ways (theater, DVD, bookstore), they were made with
access to professional film and book editors, graphic designers and market-
ing departments, and so forth. In short, a Shakespeare fan text is not
always recognizable as such because of what it looks like and where or how
you can access it. In other contexts and other fandoms, the fan text is often
assumed to carry with it the markers of DIY amateurism, partly due to
some of the necessary circumstances of its production.
Perhaps as a consequence of our cultural consumption of fandom pre-
dominantly in relationship to contemporary intellectual properties, the
aesthetics and the means of production and dissemination have become
the assumed markers of the fan text. We know a Shakespeare fan text when
we see it because it looks like other fan texts that emerge from other fan-
doms. Thus, if we want to find Shakespeare fan films, we look to YouTube;
if we want to find Shakespeare fanfic, we look to online archives; if we
want to find Shakespeare fan art, we look to Tumblr. And we do this
because these are the places where we find fan films, fiction, and art for
Star Wars, Harry Potter, and so forth. Notions of contemporary intellec-
tual property have served to establish the assumed parameters of fandom
and have heavily influenced how we engage with Shakespeare fandom.
Assumptions and labels such as amateurism, oppositional readings, and
the fan’s rebellious resistance to academic discourse proliferate. While
these are certainly all aspects and artifacts of Shakespeare fandom, we have
to acknowledge that Shakespeare fandom also exceeds these limits to
include a wide range of sources and not just those typically associated with
fan output. As Duffett and Pugh have noted about slash fan fiction more
generally, its visibility in fan studies has perhaps led to a disproportionate
assessment of its prevalence and relative proportion within actual fan com-
munities, which has led to a kinda selection bias amongst fan scholars.66
They write about slash because they find it interesting, and readers thus
come away from fan studies with the sense that slash is a—if not the—pre-
dominant form of fan discourse, when it actually occupies a relatively small
corner of fan fiction output. But scholars read about it, go looking for it,
then write about it more. Likewise, Hills notes that certain fandoms pre-
dominate in fan studies because of scholar-fans who might be writing in
66
Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 178; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91.
relation to their own chosen fan objects.67 Thus, it is quite common in fan
studies to read work on Star Trek and Game of Thrones that have cultural
cachet as appropriately ‘cool’ objects of fandom, but it is less common to
read about soap opera or country music fandom despite their cultural
prevalence, as “Interest in relatively ‘uncool’ or regressive kinds of texts
goes underrepresented.”68 Similarly, there are certain fan practices that are
well-represented in fan studies (such as the writing of fan fiction) while
others are underrepresented, particularly practices that involve building or
crafting objects, even such commonplace fan practices as building prop
replicas or making costumes for cosplay, as distinct from the cosplay per-
formance itself. In deciding where to look for Shakespeare fan text and
what they look like, there is an obvious selection bias at work: we are
aware of fan fiction as a category of writing, go looking for it in its expected
places, and then write about it, paying less attention to other expressions
of fandom that do not conform to those expectations in the process.
The sheer diversity of fan texts means that it is impossible to address
them all. The two most obvious examples that come to mind are the fan
fiction available via online archives and fan-made videos uploaded to
YouTube. There is, of course, considerable stylistic and generic variety
within these two categories, but we also have fan art available through
Tumblr; fan-made material objects available through Etsy; numerous
Shakespeare-inspired tattoos that have been photographed and uploaded
to Instagram; webcomics and graphic novels; Shakespeare cosplayers at
Renaissance festivals; Shakespeare cookbooks and culinary experiments;
and parodic social media accounts such as @Shakespeare on Twitter, to
name a few. There are those who collect Shakespeare ephemera and mem-
orabilia from rare books to kitsch. Moving beyond the stereotypical con-
nection between the fan’s amateurism and folk practices, we can also see
fan practices connected to aspects of the Shakespeare industry and tourism
to places such as Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s Globe in London,
the many annual or semi-annual Shakespeare theater festivals across the
globe, or the Folger Shakespeare Library, all of which offer some kind of
Shakespeare experience to potential visitors. And in place of the fan con-
vention, Shakespeare enthusiasts travel to academic conferences such as
the SAA to discuss his works, cosplay as professors, and to meet or listen
to some of the celebrities within that academic community. Shakespeare’s
Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms,” 19–20.

67

68
26 J. H. POPE
Fans touches on some of these objects and activities, but there remains
much work to be done if we are to capture the full range of Shakespeare’s
fans as fans.
The following chapters are organized thematically and embrace the
anachronism inherent in fan works as, in part, an organizing principle. On
the whole, I attend primarily to two broad historical moments in order to
contextualize Shakespeare fandom as an ongoing practice rooted in the
longstanding negotiation of the playwright’s cultural meaning and signifi-
cance. First is our own contemporary culture in which media fandom is
both prominent and visible, the culture in which fan studies has flour-
ished, from the late 1990s through to the present. Second is the early
through mid-eighteenth century when Shakespeare fandom was articu-
lated and debated in its early form, what scholars often refer to as bardola-
try. Through such a temporal focus, I do not mean to suggest that
Shakespeare fandom began entirely in the eighteenth century, or that
nothing happened to it between then and the late twentieth century.
Rather, I argue that the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s
Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, is a key period in the history of fandom,
regardless of its connection to Shakespeare, the precursor to our contem-
porary understanding of fan cultures. Focusing on affect and the pejora-
tive stereotypes often applied to fans, Chap. 2 traces the history of
Shakespeare fandom backward through an analysis of Gil Junger’s film 10
Things I Hate About You (1999) that links back to David Garrick. Although
10 Things has attracted considerable attention from scholars since its
release, very little attention has been paid to the relatively minor character
Mandella, who is explicitly identified as a Shakespeare fan in the film.
Mandella embodies the negative perception of fans as feminized, emo-
tional, and obsessive social outcasts whose fandom renders them incapable
of separating fantasy from reality and which often takes the form of sexual
fixation. As one of the few fictional characters in popular culture identified
as a Shakespeare fan, Mandella demonstrates the hurdles to be overcome
for fandom to be taken seriously and not dismissed out of hand.
Additionally, her Shakespeare fandom ties into a more widespread depic-
tion of gendered fandom that is evident in the protagonist’s music fandom
in which women’s passions are infantilized and men’s passions are repre-
sented as rational and critically discerning. I connect this back to Garrick’s
Shakespeare Jubilee, particular in relation to public and scholarly recep-
tion and interpretation of not just the event, but of Garrick’s motives.
Many of these criticisms either mocked the esteemed actor for an excessive
infatuation with Shakespeare that was inappropriately idolatrous or accused

him of stealing from Shakespeare, of leeching glory in order to inflate his
own public standing and reputation. As I argue, these criticisms anticipate
many of the core debates regarding fans that would emerge more clearly
and repeatedly two centuries later, making Garrick and his Jubilee an
important part of the history of fandom in general. Part of the criticism
leveled at the Jubilee came from the perception that Garrick was trying to
profit off of Shakespeare while claiming he was doing what he was out of
love. Affective and financial gain are seen as antithetical in this respect, as
the desire to turn a profit is seen as hypocritical and exploitive rather than
reverent and celebratory. Additionally, this chapter considers the
eighteenth-century contemplations of Shakespeare’s cultural and literary
status in conjunction with the growing number of pilgrimages to Stratford-
upon-Avon as part of that same history.
In Chap. 3, I take up the contentious question of who owns Shakespeare
in the context of debates within fan studies regarding copyright and intel-
lectual property. Although Shakespeare scholarship and popular culture in
general have embraced the idealistic notion that Shakespeare belongs to
everyone, this ideal of collective ownership—and, thus, responsibility—is
in ideological conflict with the playwright’s status as an intellectual prop-
erty in which he legally belongs to no one. In this conflict, scholars and
other purveyors of ‘official culture’ or the “Shakespeare industry” have
become the pro bono defenders of an informal Shakespearean intellectual
property.69 This paradigm of authority is illuminated by the ongoing
debates within fan studies regarding the economic status of fan works, the
often blurry distinction between amateurs and professionals, and whether
or not fan works should be considered work or play, labor or gifts.
Additionally, I explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s copyright status
complicates many of the assumptions about the relationship between cul-
tural producers and cultural consumers that are based on contemporary
legal distinctions.
Chapters 4 and 5 offer a detailed examination of two types of
Shakespeare fan works. In Chap. 4, I draw on the rich scholarship on fan
fiction to delve into Shakespeare-specific fan fiction available through the
archiveofourown.org database, focusing primarily on texts that make use
of Shakespeare’s characters. This chapter strives to assess fan fiction on and
69
Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 155.
28 J. H. POPE
in its own terms, attending to the diverse range of genres and tropes that
are common to fan fiction but which may be unfamiliar or wholly alien to
the novice reader. I aim to avoid sensationalizing its extremes or argu-
ments that seek to claim that fan fiction is either wholly derivative and
unoriginal or that it is ideologically and politically radical. Rather, fan fic-
tion is part of the diverse critical and adaptive approach to Shakespeare
that is too wide-ranging to be pinned down to any one perspective. Unlike
the majority of fan studies approaches that strand Shakespeare fan fiction
and fan works in the past, this chapter foregrounds Shakespeare’s presence
in the contemporary fan fiction community. Chapter 5 builds on the work
of the previous chapter through an exploration of slanderous and second-
ary Shakespeares that ties back to many of the issues raised throughout
Shakespeare’s Fans. Although fan fiction has attracted a great deal of critical
attention, one genre that has often been left out of these scholarly discus-
sions is RPF, fan fiction focused—usually—on celebrity actors and musi-
cians, a genre that is marginalized even within the fan fiction community
as inappropriate or creepy because of its often erotic and potentially slan-
derous content. In addition to briefly discussing RPF focused on
Shakespeare himself, I examine RPF in which Shakespeare is of secondary
importance, taking as a case study the RPF focused on Tom Hiddleston,
an actor who has appeared in a number of Shakespeare film and stage pro-
ductions but who is also the focus of his own celebrity fandom as well as
fandoms associated with his other projects, notably the Marvel Cinematic
Universe films. In many of these text, Hiddleston is depicted as a
Shakespeare fan himself, a fandom that is core to his fictionalized esca-
pades but which is not often of primary importance to the RPF author.
Here, Shakespeare fandom is crossed over with Hiddleston or Marvel fan-
dom. From there, I move on to other instances of fandom crossover, par-
ticularly Ian Doescher’s series of Shakespearean Star Wars plays and other
similar commercially available texts that mash up Shakespeare with a vari-
ety of pop culture objects. I consider these texts in the context of generic
and legal definitions of parody, calling back to the issues of ownership
raised in Chap. 3.
Shakespeare’s Fans stems from my own love of popular culture and
involvement in various media fandoms, combined with an academic and
pedagogical interest in Shakespeare and early modern English literature. I
am, therefore, prone to my own selection biases, and the texts I have cho-
sen to discuss reflect my own comfort and expertise within specific fan-
doms. But as Jamison emphasizes, although it is possible to read in fandom
that you do not belong to, that is not the point. I do not possess a fan’s
knowledge—or even passing knowledge, for that matter—of the long-
running series Supernatural (which is extremely popular in fan culture), so
any discussion of Shakespeare-Supernatural crossover fan fiction would
ring hollow. As a result, I have undoubtedly excluded and overlooked
texts, especially fan fiction, that would be ideal for the present work. Such
is fandom. We all possess a unique and sometimes overlapping constella-
tion of media interests and passions that constructs and reflects us as read-
ers and audiences. The present work embodies mine, and I look forward
to work by others that is produced by the light of different stars.
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CHAPTER 2
“My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect

and the Shakespeare Fan from 10 Things
I Hate About You to Garrick’s Jubilee
One of the barriers to effectively integrating fan studies into Shakespeare

studies is the need to overcome the common predisposition among schol-
ars to view affective responses as the antithesis of academic rigor. Contrary
to the stereotype of uncritical emotional obsession, fans are typically both
self-aware and self-effacing, even if they are not often represented as such
in popular culture. In this chapter, I explore how fans of Shakespeare have
been both represented and received in popular culture and criticism
through a focus on two primary examples. First, I will examine how fan-
dom is represented, challenged, and largely denigrated in the film 10
Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew
that has become a staple in studies of Shakespeare film adaptations. While
existing scholarship tends to focus on the contentious issue of adaptation
versus appropriation or the gender politics at work in the representation of
the film’s central romantic couple, my analysis focuses on an oft-ignored
character: Mandella (Susan May Pratt), a self-professed Shakespeare fan.
Mandella embodies the most pejorative stereotypes about fans in general
and is depicted as a comical cautionary example of fannish obsession. This
Shakespeare fandom parallels the representation of music fandom in the
film, demonstrating how fandom itself is associated with blind affect
and gendered as uncritical feminine obsession. From this fictionalized
Shakespeare fan I jump back 250 years to Shakespeare’s first prominent

34 J. H. POPE
fan, actor and theater manager David Garrick, whose Shakespeare Jubilee
in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 established the parameters and discourse
for bardolatry, an event that can be read as the world’s first fan conven-
tion. In the process, I embrace the playful anachronism inherent in fan-
dom itself by tracing Shakespeare’s fans back to a period when ‘fan’ had
yet to enter the popular discourse to describe one’s relationship to a celeb-
rity or an intellectual property. However, as we will see, fandom and fan
studies provide a productive lens through which to view what Garrick
sought to do in Warwickshire, how he articulated and performed his own
love of Shakespeare, and how both his Jubilee and his proto-fandom were
received and interpreted by his contemporaries.
10 Things has inspired a great deal of scholarship since its release, even
as it has been dismissed by some critics as “condescending teen fodder”
that takes an “opportunistic” appropriative approach to Shakespeare that
exploits his cultural caché.1 This scholarship tends to focus primarily on
the film’s gender politics and its depiction of feminism as shrewish and
repulsive, the central element of Kat’s (played by Julia Stiles) character
that must be shattered in order to enable Patrick’s (played by Heath
Ledger) romantic conquest of her.2 Or, as is often the case in Shakespeare
1
Naomi C. Liebler, “‘So What?’: Two Postmodern Adaptations of Shakespearean
Tragedies,” in Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries,
eds. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2006), 176; Richard Burt characterizes the film as part of a spate of “Shakesploitation”
films of the late 1990s. See: Richard Burt, “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene
Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High,” in
Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, eds. Courtney Lehmann and
Lisa S. Starks (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 205.
2
My interpretation of 10 Things is more in line with the oppositional readings of the film
offered by L. Monique Pittman, Elizabeth A. Deitchman, and Jennifer Clement than it is to
Michael Friedman’s reading of the film’s gender politics as “progressive.” See: Michael
D. Friedman, “The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You,” Shakespeare Bulletin
22, no. 2 (2004): 46; L. Monique Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television:
Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011),
98–113; L. Monique Pittman, “Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the
Teenage Film Audience,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2004): 144–52; Elizabeth
A. Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style: Shakespeare, Julia Stiles, and American Girl
Culture,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon and
W. B. Worthen (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 478–93; Jennifer Clement, “The
Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Adaptation in 10 Things I Hate About
You and She’s the Man,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation
3, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1–24.
2 “MY LOVE ADMITS NO QUALIFYING DROSS”: AFFECT… 35
and film scholarship, critics focus on the adaptive relationship between the
film and the play, and the contentious critical debate over whether 10
Things I Hate About You adapts or appropriates Shakespeare. In the pro-
cess, however, we have ignored a prominent aspect of the film that consid-
ers the acceptable limits of cultural engagement and appreciation through
its depiction of fandom and affect. Additionally, this depiction of fandom
in the 1999 film embodies many of the critical challenges that have, I
would argue, undergirded Shakespeare studies’ general resistance to fan
studies as a productive field of inquiry. Certainly, I do not want to cast this
criticism of Shakespeare studies too widely because there has undoubtedly
been some strong work done recently on Shakespeare fan fiction in par-
ticular, but it is a fairly small body of scholarship. Such a general critical
silence is peculiar given Shakespeare studies’ penchant for intellectual col-
onization: any time a new critical field emerges, one of us inevitably walks
up with a copy of the Complete Works and says, “I can do that, too!” Fan
studies can help us better understand how the playwright has been dealt
with not just since the 1990s and the proliferation of fan studies, but
indeed over the past few centuries, at least since David Garrick led a band
of merry Shakespeare enthusiasts to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769.
Fandom comes in two flavors in 10 Things I Hate About You. The most
obvious one is presented via Kat’s friend Mandella who is obsessed with
Shakespeare, an obsession that is presented as creepy and thus funny in the
context of the film. Less obvious and yet more central to the plot, how-
ever, is Kat’s music fandom, quite separate from anything specifically
Shakespearean. In both cases, fandom is depicted as exploitable, feminine
emotional intensity, providing an inroad for sexual conquest to the men
pursuing them. As I have noted, Mandella is a fairly minor character in the
film. She speaks probably fewer than fifty words in the film, and she is
employed primarily as a sympathetic, but largely silent, sounding board for
Kat’s antisocial frustrations, giving Kat someone to complain to rather
than argue with, which is Kat’s dominant form of discourse throughout
the film. Mandella laughs at Kat’s witticisms and refrains from critiquing
her actions, unlike the majority of the other characters in the film who roll
their eyes at or angrily dismiss Kat’s comments about patriarchy and popu-
larity. From the perspective of the film, then, Mandella helps to soften Kat
for the audience, and Mandella’s association with Kat solidifies their out-
sider status in the context of the film: neither girl wants to conform to the
social and behavioral demands or expectations of high school, and both
find solace in each other on the social margins.
36 J. H. POPE
Mandella’s character comes more clearly into focus over halfway

through the film when she is approached at her locker by Michael (David
Krumholtz), who is interested in dating her. After a few feeble and failed
attempts to get Mandella’s attention, Michael notices the picture of
Shakespeare hanging in her locker and comments, “I know you’re a fan of
Shakespeare.” “More than a fan,” she scoffs, “we’re involved.” Although
this would seem to end the conversation, Michael responds by quoting
some lines from Macbeth, and this prompts an almost instantaneous
change in Mandella, who smiles with recognition and finishes the lines
that Michael has begun. She now gives Michael her full attention, looking
into his eyes and biting her lip as if aroused by the revelation of their
shared fandom. In what follows, Michael seems to embrace Mandella’s
fandom as a point of access. He asks her to the prom by putting a vaguely
Shakespearean dress in her locker with a note pinned to it in old timey
script that reads: “O fair one, Join me at the Prom. I will be waiting.
[L]ove, William S.” And Mandella responds to this invitation with excite-
ment as Michael has willingly subsumed his own identity in favor of
Shakespeare. This identity substitution is made most palpable at the end of
the film when we see Mandella wearing the dress, looking around for her
date, anxiously asking, “Have you seen him?” “Who?” Kat responds.
“William! He asked me to meet him here.” At this point, Michael shows
up in his own vaguely Shakespearean costume. Significantly, when asking
where he is, Mandella asks if anyone has seen ‘William,’ not ‘Michael,’ as
if to imply that she confuses the substituted identity with the real one,
poking fun at the stereotypical irrationality of fans and their presumed
inability to separate fiction from reality (and, true to this, Kat worries that
Mandella has “progressed to full-on hallucinations” as she frantically looks
for ‘William’).3 Because we see Michael in other contexts in the film as a
prime mover in the machinations of the plot, we see that he can separate
fiction from reality and that his donning of the ‘Shakespeare’ costume is
purely performative and used to exploit Mandella’s fannish, feminine irra-
tionality. That Michael can call forth lines from Macbeth at will in order to
woo Mandella at her locker implies a more masculine rationality and dis-
cernment that invokes a song from Kiss Me Kate (1953), another adapta-
tion of The Taming of the Shrew, the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,”
which implores men to “Brush up your Shakespeare/ Start quoting him
3
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 20th anniver-
sary edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 10.
now/ Brush up your Shakespeare/ And the women you will wow/ … /
Just recite an occasional sonnet/ And your lap’ll have honey upon it.”
Mandella’s excessive irrationality is further emphasized in a deleted
scene from the film in which Kat and Mandella discuss an unidentified ‘he’
in a restaurant. “By ‘he’ do you mean Shakespeare?” asks Kat. “Is there
anyone else worth starving for?” Mandella respond with a scoff, as if stat-
ing the obvious before she opines “Imagine, the things he’d say during
sex!” Although the scene did not make the final cut of the film, it provides
a window onto how the filmmakers intend to depict Mandella’s fandom in
stereotypically pejorative terms characteristic of the 1990s, as discussed by
Henry Jenkins and others, namely, that fandom is linked to an unhealthy
sexualized obsession or sexual immaturity, and the aforementioned inabil-
ity to separate fantasy from reality.4 Mandella’s insistence on the presentist
nature of her relationship with Shakespeare—‘we’re involved,’ ‘I’m starv-
ing myself to look good for him’—implies that she is unaware of or uncon-
cerned with the fact that Shakespeare has been dead for nearly 400 years
and is thus unlikely to reciprocate her affections and desires, or that she
has transferred those desires to the text itself—the copy of the Complete
Works that we see her carrying around—in the absence of Shakespeare’s
body. Indeed, in her sexual fantasy in the deleted scene, she prioritizes the
word over the body: “Imagine, the things he’d say during sex!” (in con-
trast to what he might do, or how he might look). Thus, when Michael
spouts lines from Macbeth to Mandella at her locker, he effectively becomes
Shakespeare for Mandella, most evident when she is looking for ‘William’
rather than ‘Michael’ at the prom. And as such, addressing one another
using quaintly archaic, and thus vaguely Shakespearean-sounding, forms
of address—“good sir” and “m’lady”—plays out as a kind of foreplay,
implying that Michael—as William—can and will proffer Shakespeare’s
words during sex, allowing Mandella to bring her fantasies to life. That is,
so long as Michael continues to adopt the William Shakespeare persona
that she craves.
4
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10; Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to
the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 38; Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction Studies
Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2014), 76; Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop,
2013), 18; Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction
Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 177–78.
38 J. H. POPE
Mandella’s feminine and irrational fandom is contrasted by Michael’s

masculine, rational discernment: he is playing a game, while she is not.
Michael, like other men in the film, demonstrates an awareness of and
appreciation for Shakespeare by quoting him occasionally in the film as
part of their normal conversations, quotations whose origin is not com-
mented on or discussed. Seeing Bianca for the first time upon his arrival at
his new school, Cameron—speaking to Michael—expresses his longing via
the line “I burn, I pine, I perish” from the play which the film adapts, The
Taming of the Shrew. Later, and again in a homosocial context, Michael
offers up a line from Sonnet 56 in the lunch line, “Sweet love, renew thy
force!” Both Cameron and Michael are able to engage with Shakespeare
in a way that does not compromise or overtake their own individual iden-
tities, an implied masculine rationality (at least in relation to Shakespeare)
that contrasts Mandella’s obsessive tangling of her own identity with the
playwright.
Mandella’s gendered fandom is also denigrated through its juxtaposi-
tion with the perspective of the students’ high school English teacher, Mr.
Morgan, whose critical voice invests him with more authority, which is
again gendered masculine. The only black teacher in a posh, white private
school, Mr. Morgan discusses the lack of diversity in the English curricu-
lum and later raps one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, concluding that “I know
Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his shit.” Thus, unlike
Mandella’s myopic and irrational fandom, her teacher’s appreciation of
Shakespeare is more nuanced and carefully considered. Mr. Morgan’s
astute intellectual authority is also emphasized early in the film in one of
the many instances in 10 Things wherein feminism is disparaged as juve-
nile, trivial, or (worse) unselfconsciously hypocritical.5 Kat has the audac-
ity, for example, to lecture her black English teacher about diversity in the
school curriculum, and while her question is valid—why do we have to
study the misogynistic Hemmingway when we could be bringing more
women into the literary canon?—Mr. Morgan’s response undercuts her
self-righteousness: “Kat, I want to thank you for your point of view. I
know how difficult it must be for you to overcome all those years of upper
middle class suburban oppression. Must be tough,” he says with mock
sincerity. But next time you storm the PTA, ask them why they cannot
“buy a book written by a black man.” The implication here is that Kat
5
Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and
Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 195–96.
does not actually understand oppression and diversity, unaware of the fact
that her English teacher is being forced to teach a whitewashed curriculum
whether or not he wants to.6 These comments are made in the opening
scenes of the film, and they influence how we read Mr. Morgan’s later
comment that “I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his
shit.” The implication is that even if he had free reign to teach what he
wanted, he would still teach Shakespeare. As such, both Mandella’s
Shakespeare fandom and Kat’s prioritization of women writers wither in
the face of patriarchal, academic authority.7
Quite separate—but by no means disconnected—from Shakespeare
fandom is the film’s depiction of music fandom, which subtly alludes to
both the informal hierarchies within and between fandoms while continu-
ing to pejoratively gender fandom. A subplot of the film involves Kat’s
love of music and her desire to start a band, and it is her fandom that is
recognized and exploited to enable Patrick’s romantic conquest of her, a
part of the updated psychological warfare used to tame the shrew. We
must keep in mind here the film’s connection to a play that revolves
around strategies for how to bring an unruly woman to heel through
mental and emotional games rather than physical coercion or violence. In
order for Joey to be able to date Kat’s sister, Bianca, he must first find
someone to date the undesirable Kat. The hypermasculine Patrick is
enlisted in this task and is offered money if he can get Kat to agree to date
him. Patrick accepts the challenge but is immediately rebuffed in his
efforts when he approaches Kat while she is playing soccer. “Hey there,
girlie,” he opens condescendingly, and Kat’s facial expression tells us she
is not impressed with the infantilization. It is implied that Patrick believes
his natural roguish desirability will be enough to draw her in so he can win
his fifty dollars from Joey, but Kat’s refusal to play along with this “screw-
head” indicates that she is not fooled by him. When he asks flirtily how she
is doing, she responds with “sweating like a pig,” an explicit refusal to be
objectified by him despite his best efforts as she lets him know in no
uncertain terms that she is not interested in whether or not he finds her
attractive. Their first interaction ends with Kat indifferently walking away
from a stunned and confused Patrick who clearly expected things to go a
6
Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 103.
7
Burt also emphasizes that Kat’s intelligence is part of a broader infantilization of teen girls
in the film that pits dumb and pretty against smart and less attractive. See: Burt, “T(e)en
Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks,” 206–07.
40 J. H. POPE
different way. If Patrick is going to earn the money, he will have to try a
different tactic.
This leads to Patrick enlisting Cameron’s help to find another point of
entry, and with the help of Bianca, Cameron goes on a fact-finding mis-
sion to Kat’s bedroom in order to find something that can be exploited.
As we follow Cameron and Bianca during their undetected invasion of
Kat’s room, we are given a glimpse of Kat’s supposedly true self, her likes,
dislikes, and desires. Some of these traits are problematically imposed
upon the absent Kat against her will, such as when Bianca rifles through
her sister’s underwear drawer and triumphantly proclaims “you don’t buy
black lingerie unless you want someone to see it” while holding out a pair
of nondescript black underwear. In addition to finding ‘proof’ of Kat’s
secreted sexual availability, Cameron also finds out that Kat likes “feminist
prose” and “angry girl music of the indie rock persuasion,” which he con-
veys to Patrick along with a list of CDs she owns. As the viewer, we see
proof of this in the bedroom: Bianca finds a pile of concert tickets in a
drawer, and the walls are covered with posters of bands like The Gits,
Seven Year Bitch, No Doubt, The Lovemongers, Ednaswap, and other
female-fronted bands active during the 1990s. While there are other post-
ers for predominantly male rock and grunge bands, they are secondary to
the “angry girl music,” a characterization that alludes to the feminist punk
‘Riot Grrrl’ music scene that, along with grunge, rose to prominence in
the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s (the film itself is set in Seattle).8 We
might also note here that, in a slightly different context, music fandom
becomes code for sexual identity. Prior to their incursion into Kat’s room,
Cameron uncomfortably tries to ask Bianca if her sister might be a lesbian.
“She’s not a …,” Cameron begins, which Bianca finishes with “… K. D.
Lang fan? No. I found a picture of Jared Leto in her drawer once, so I’m
pretty sure she’s not harboring same-sex tendencies.”
8
Deitchman offers a compelling and thorough discussion of the film’s tepid ‘Girl Power’
message that is proffered as a more palatable alternative to the confrontational and threaten-
ing Riot Grrrl politics. See: Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 479–85. Tim McNelis
likewise notes that in the Club Skunk scene, Patrick “exploits riot grrrl for financial gain, since
he is being paid to pursue Kat,” a financial exploitation that mirrors mainstream culture’s
appropriation and repackaging of riot grrrls as an aesthetic rather than political movement.
See: Tim McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music: Identity, Genre, and Musical Agency
(New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 32–33. Although the film namechecks—in both
the dialogue and mise en scene—feminist punk, its soundtrack is decidedly more commercial
alternative pop, in step with the film’s overall dilution and pacification of feminism.
In response to the information about her musical tastes, Patrick offers

a dismissive response to Kat’s preference for “chicks who can’t play their
instruments.” In this comment, he draws a connection between gender
and musical talent. He does not think such bands are real musicians, estab-
lishing himself as the arbiter of musical authenticity, in no small part imply-
ing that they cannot be true musicians because they are “chicks.” While
the audience is not given any overt indication of what kind of music Patrick
himself enjoys, we see him in a smoky biker bar, and his self-presentation
offers up a generic rock-and-roll aesthetic. When he wants to get Kat’s
attention later in the film, he croons Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes
Off of You” over the school PA system, showing off his apparently consid-
erable vocal talents. Patrick’s hard rock aesthetic, effortless knowledge of
standards, and choral ability all serve to prop up his status as an authority
on real music, and one that is more comprehensive and substantive than
Kat’s fannish devotion to a single subgenre. Here, Patrick is to music what
Mr. Morgan is to literature: critically discerning. When it is revealed to
Patrick that Kat’s favorite band, Letters to Cleo, are playing at Club Skunk,
providing him with an opportunity to run into Kat, he faces a conundrum
because “I can’t be seen at Club Skunk”; “assail your ears for one night”
if you want the opportunity, Michael tells him. As we see when Patrick
does swallow his pride to make the trip, Club Skunk is apparently an all-
ages venue for a predominantly female crowd. When he walks in, he is
greeted with numerous disapproving stares from the women in the hall-
way entrance, signaling to the viewer that he does not belong here. Why
does Patrick bristle at the thought of being seen at the club? Presumably,
he fears Club Skunk will tarnish his reputation by either feminizing or
queering him, or he worries that his presence there will imply his endorse-
ment (even enjoyment) of objectively terrible music that ‘assails the ears.’
The only thing worse than being seen as either girly or a fan of angry girl
music would be being seen as both.
When Patrick first sees Kat at the club (and, significantly, she is unaware
of his presence when he is looking at her in this moment), he sees some-
thing other than the “heinous bitch” that he is prepared to see. She dances
with and smiles at her friends, moved to an affective state by her favorite
band, communing with other fans in the process, and the voyeuristic
Patrick takes pleasure in her uninhibited expression of pleasure or fannish
affect. Still playing his game, however, Patrick goes to the bar where he
pretends not to notice Kat as he quietly sits and enjoys the music. When
Kat sees him, she rolls her eyes in disgust and confronts him—although it
42 J. H. POPE
is unspoken, it is clear that she thinks he is at Club Skunk in order to ask

her out, and she tells him to “get it over with.” In the conversation that
follows, Patrick explicitly works to exploit her music fandom by claiming
it as his own. “Would you mind? You’re kind of ruining this for me,” he
responds, implying that he is just trying to listen to Letters to Cleo. “You
know, these guys are no Bikini Kill or The Raincoats, but they’re not bad,”
he says before standing up and heading toward the stage. Throughout this
interaction, Kat’s demeanor changes significantly, a mirror to Mandella
and Michael’s initial interaction regarding Shakespeare fandom. Although
she is frowning and confrontational at the outset, Kat stares agape at
Patrick when he reveals his own unexpected appraisal of the band and she
begins asking him questions about himself. When he goes to the stage, Kat
follows him, her interest piqued for the first time, and as Patrick walks
away from her, we observe her undertake a quick mental appraisal of what
he just said before pursuing him. “You know who The Raincoats are?” she
questions, looking at him while he keeps his gaze unbroken on the band,
as if this is where he really wants to be. “Why, don’t you?” Patrick retorts
with a smirk.
What is important about this scene is the way in which Patrick performs
fandom in order to exploit it, positing himself as already a fan of the genre.
He plays the stereotypically masculine fan persona. Whereas Kat dances to
the music up close, Patrick sits at a distance and listens with his back to the
stage, a true audiophile rather than an enthusiastic girl, appreciating and
assessing the music rather than being possessed by it. More important
than his positive assessment of Letters to Cleo is his effort to present him-
self as an authority within the fandom by weighing this band against a
more comprehensive knowledge of the genre and its history. Letters to
Cleo was a fairly mainstream pop band, whereas their contemporaries
Bikini Kill were significantly less commercial and unapologetically femi-
nist, the epicenter of the Riot Grrrls. Likewise, The Raincoats were a semi-
nal female-led British punk band and contemporaries of the Sex Pistols
and The Clash. By namedropping two of the most influential bands in
“angry girl music of the indie persuasion,” Patrick rhetorically pulls rank
on Kat: Letters to Cleo are just fine, but real fans would prefer these other
bands whom Kat may not have heard before. We can assume that through
the list of CDs provided to him by Michael, Patrick is purposefully naming
bands that Kat knows of so that his mock pretension will serve to expose
their shared, independently formulated interests rather than to embarrass
Kat by successfully demolishing her sense of her own music knowledge.
His faux cockiness thus serves to build up her own self-esteem by giving
her an opportunity to not only experience fannish comradery but to prove
that she knows more than he thinks she does.
By giving Kat a false sense of authority in terms of her music knowl-
edge, Patrick—and thus the film—plays up a derogatory understanding of
feminism that sees feminists as wanting to dominate men. By presenting
himself as superior, he gives her the opportunity to feel superior to him
and his misogynistic assumptions. That she does not know—and never
learns—that this is a performance serves to grant Patrick an authority that
the audience is keenly aware of but which remains undetected by Kat. As
planned, Patrick’s manipulation of Kat’s fandom becomes an immediate
point of romantic or sexual access. As soon as his fannish foreplay con-
cludes, Patrick instantly transitions to sex as he offers Kat the unsolicited
compliment “I’ve never seen you look so sexy.” As L. Monique Pittman
notes, this exchange embodies the problematic gender politics of the film
as Kat’s enjoyment of her own “independent subjectivity” is hijacked and
sexualized by Patrick.9 As the unwitting object of the male gaze in a sup-
posedly safe space wherein she is not seeking to attract Patrick’s desiring
gaze, her body, movement, and pleasure are eroticized nonetheless. But
rather than being critical, Kat is flattered, the film’s way of telling us that,
deep down, all girls—even the ‘heinous bitches’—want to be objectified.
Just as Patrick’s exploitation of Kat’s fandom grants him his initial point
of romantic entry, it serves as his grand gesture when he arranges for
Letters to Cleo (or at least their vocalist) to perform at prom. “Oh my
God, it’s …!” Kat squeals and points as the singer, Kay Hanley, takes the
stage. In response to her stunned silence, Patrick tells her “I called in a
favor,” and while Kat gazes lovingly into Patrick’s eyes, Hanley descends
the stage and walks over to sing directly to the couple on the dance floor.
Kissing and dancing ensues. Here and elsewhere, it appears that Patrick
has some mysterious reach in the Seattle music scene. Although he implies
that he would never be caught dead in Club Skunk, the bartender greets
him by name when he arrives, and he is apparently owed favors by people
who can arrange for bands to appear at high school proms. Patrick and
Kat’s happiness, however, is interrupted when Kat learns about Patrick’s
bet with Joey and storms out. In spite of this falling out, the two realize
that their affections for one another are real, which leads to Kat’s in-class
recitation of her Shakespearean sonnet assignment, the titular “10 Things
9
44 J. H. POPE
I Hate About You” about how, in spite of all the things she dislikes about
him, she does not hate Patrick, “not even at all.” As Diana Henderson
notes, the poem serves as a public profession of Kat’s “emotional
submission”10 to Patrick and a disavowal of her aggressive feminism (com-
plete with a symbolic reigning in of her previously wild hair, now conser-
vatively braided).11 Kat leaves the classroom in tears, and at the end of the
school day, she finds Patrick’s gesture of atonement in her car, a new
Fender guitar (the very one he had seen her trying out in a store earlier in
the film) sitting in the passenger seat. “I thought you could use it, you
know, when you start your band,” he demures. The two finally engage in
some banter about him not being about to buy her a guitar every time he
makes a mistake in their relationship. Of course not: there are still drums,
bass, and tambourines to buy, he jokes, and the film concludes with Patrick
kissing Kat to shut her up while Letters to Cleo play a cover of Cheap
Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” on the roof of the school, a song that
serves as the antithetical counterpoint to the song blaring from Kat’s car
when she is first introduced in the film, Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.”
The conclusion of the film serves to blunt the sharp edges of Kat’s con-
frontational and thus undesirable feminism, marking her transition from a
strong-willed woman without the need for external validation (a la Joan
Jett’s song) into one who craves masculine desire (“I Want You to Want
Me”), trading in the Riot Grrrl for “defanged Girl Power.”12 Although the
gift of the guitar is meant to be understood as a positive romantic gesture
(Patrick is in tune with her feelings and desires), we can also read it as a
patronizing gesture of masculine authority and discernment.13 We are
10
Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 197.
11
Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 484. For a more positive and recuperative read-
ing of Kat’s poem, see: Rachael McLennan, “To Count as a Girl: Misdirection in 10 Things
I Hate About You,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9,
no. 1 (July 2014): 1–18. Kat’s poem also gives the Shakespeare fan or scholar an opportunity
to feel superior to Kat, although whether this is intentional or not in the film is unclear. Her
poem is the end result of an assignment requiring students to write a sonnet, but what she
recites is most definitely not a sonnet: four quatrains of, primarily, tetrameter that follow the
wrong rhyme scheme. As true students of Shakespeare, we can smirk with condescension that
Kat has likely sacrificed a passing grade in favor of emotional self-immolation.
12
Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 480.
13
Pittman and Hodgdon likewise discuss the negative implications and consequences for
female agency in both Patrick gifting Kat her independence and in the shift from Joan Jett to
Cheap Trick. See: Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television, 113; Barbara
Hodgdon, “Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of
never given any indication that Patrick grows to appreciate or enjoy “angry
girl music” (or “feminist prose,” for that matter), and after his manipula-
tive performance of Riot Grrrl appreciation at Club Skunk, the issue is not
raised again. Presumably, he persists in his belief that her favorite music is
without merit or proficiency. Additionally, the gift—and the film’s treat-
ment of Kat’s interest in music—are emblematic of her “distinct lack of
musical agency throughout the film,” which is also evident in the fact that,
despite her aspiration to start a band, we never see her perform music in
the film.14 As McNelis notes, “Whereas girls in some other youth films
play a role in their own musical exploration and performance, Kat must
ultimately wait for her boyfriend to provide the means, at least as far as
performance is concerned.”15 So what does the gift of the guitar imply
other than that he is content to let this “girlie” pursue her fantastical delu-
sion of emulating her talentless idols?
In terms of the film’s treatment of fandoms in general, we see evidence
of the implied hierarchy of music over media fandom wherein the former is
deemed cool and socially acceptable, while the latter is nerdy and socially
weird. At the prom, Michael appears before Mandella as ‘William S.,’ wav-
ing to her from the stage moments before Hanley takes the microphone.
In this instant, both Patrick and Michael simultaneously offer up the objects
of their dates’ fandoms, and both earn affection as their reward. However,
whereas the whole school enjoys and approves of the music, validating the
legitimacy of music fandom, Michael and Mandella’s costumes mark them
as outsiders unconcerned with popularity, happily lame in a sea of cool.
Genre,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. III: The Comedies, eds. Richard Dutton
and Jean E. Howard (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 260. Over the course of the film,
Kat is transformed into more conventional ‘girlfriend material’ in a way that “benefits, rather
than threatens, boys” (Deitchman, “Shakespeare Stiles Style,” 481). Alternatively, Alexander
Leggatt briefly discusses the guitar gift in his work on roleplaying and conformity in the film,
arguing that because the scene is preceded by Kat’s tearful recitation of her poem with
Patrick sitting—attentive and pained—in the classroom, and presumably because Patrick uses
Joey’s money to buy the guitar, the gift is not simply an effort to buy off Kat. See: Alexander
Leggatt, “Teen Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You and O,” in Acts of Criticism:
Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Paul Nelsen and June
Schlueter (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 249–50. As
Pittman, Hodgdon, and Deitchman’s works have demonstrated, the overall gender politics
of the film makes it difficult to view the gesture as purely reconciliatory, especially when
coupled with Patrick’s indifference to or disdain for Kat’s passions.
14
McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music, 35.
15
McNelis, US Youth Films and Popular Music, 36.
46 J. H. POPE
10 Things’ engagement with and treatment of fandom contributes to

the “quiet misogyny” of the plot16 by explicitly connecting it to female
naïve irrationality and uninformed opinions and to an emotional and sex-
ual intensity that is comically extreme and unpredictable. In contrast to
the gendered affective tunnel vision of Kat and Mandella, the two girls are
surrounded by men who know what they know, know more, and know
better about literature and music, men who are critically discerning rather
than childishly passionate. My sense is that Shakespeare studies has been
slow to engage with fan studies because we are still stuck in a largely out-
dated paradigm in which we view fandom as uncritical, amateurish, and
unnecessarily affective: that fans are a bunch of Mandellas, so to speak.
Shakespeare fandom, however, is much older than Mandella. To a cer-
tain extent, Shakespeare himself incorporated early modern theater fan-
dom into some of his plays, whether it be in Hamlet’s enthusiastic
reception of the players at Elsinore and his disruptive and affection specta-
torship of The Mousetrap, or in the metatheatrical ribbing of amateur play-
wrights and actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Love’s Labor’s Lost.17
For the clearest and most influential early example of fandom focused on
Shakespeare, however, we need only look to David Garrick’s Jubilee, held
in Stratford-upon-Avon over the course of three days in September 1769.
From a fan studies perspective, this is a ground zero event as the first liter-
ary festival that has all the markings of a proto fan convention in its con-
ception, deployment, and reception, with the famous actor and theater
manager playing the role of the devoted fan and organizer. The Shakespeare
Jubilee is widely regarded as the event that instigated bardolatry, elevating
the playwright from his prior status as largely a writer like the rest of his
theater contemporaries to a cultural, national, and devotional icon. The
event likewise established Stratford-upon-Avon as a site of literary
16
17
Indeed, we might push this idea further to comment on the Rude Mechanicals’ concerns
for their royal audience’s own potential affective response to Pyramus and Thisbe, especially
on two fronts: that they will be unable to distinguish between performance and reality, or
that the nuance of their work might be lost on the audience. Both contribute to create an
overly literal and comically amateur performance that is humorous largely because it lacks a
requisite self-awareness. The best example of this kind of affective, amateurish fandom from
the period comes not, however, from Shakespeare but rather from Francis Beaumont’s The
Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) in which a boorish group of theater patrons want to see
themselves reflected in the play so much that they literally insert themselves into it.
Additionally, there is the extent to which we might consider some of Shakespeare’s plays—
especially his earlier ones—to be Ovid, Plautus, or Holinshed fan fiction themselves.
ilgrimage, “the inaugural moment in the history of Shakespearian tour-

p
ism” that has persisted down to the present day.18 Nevertheless, Garrick
was not the first to contemplate visiting the birthplace or home of
Shakespeare. In 1756, Reverend Francis Gastrell, the owner of New Place,
the home Shakespeare had purchased in his home town following his suc-
cess in London, grew so irritated at the presence of ‘pilgrims’ showing up
to take sprigs from and languish in the shade of the mulberry tree that
Shakespeare had reputedly planted on the property that he had the tree
cut down and sold for firewood. Garrick himself had visited Stratford and
the New Place mulberry in 1742 when the property was owned by Sir
Hugh Clopton, so although there was, in 1769, little evidence of an offi-
cial Shakespeare tourist industry in the village, obtaining some regenera-
tive or inspirational sustenance from the playwright’s ghostly presence had
been drawing people there for decades with enough frequency to provoke
Gastrell’s spiteful response. According to Benjamin Victor’s received
account of the event, the townspeople were so aghast at the act of sacrilege
that they “vowed to sacrifice the Offender, to the immortal Memory of
the Planter,” eventually running Gastrell out of town.19 The reverend’s
irreverence for Shakespeare culminated in 1759 when, as a result of a dis-
pute over taxes, he decided to simply knock New Place down, leaving just
its foundation behind for Shakespeare devotees to gawk at alongside the
mulberry stump.20
Additionally, Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays
emphasizes the playwright’s connection to Stratford-upon-Avon during
his formative years and the influence his experiences there had on the
plays, such as Falstaff’s deer stealing in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which
Rowe reads as an allusion to a formative experience in Shakespeare’s youth
that compelled him to leave Warwickshire for London.21 Rowe also ele-
vates Shakespeare to a pride of place in the history of English drama, not-
ing the lamentable state of theater in 1709 and that “there is not one Play
before him of a Reputation good enough to entitle it to an Appearance on
18
Press, 2002), 32.
19
Benjamin Victor, The History of the Theatres of London, from the year 1760 to the Present
Time (London, 1771), 202.
20
Andrew McConnell Stott, What Blest Genius? The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare (New
York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 5.
21
Nicholas Rowe, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, vol. 1 (London: Jacob Tonson,
1709), xviii.
48 J. H. POPE
the present Stage.”22 The editor also notes the skilled actor Thomas
Betterton whose “Veneration for the Memory of Shakespear having
engag’d him to make a Journey into Warwickshire, on purpose to gather
up what remains he could of a Name for which he had so great a Value.”23
Recounting Shakespeare’s retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon and even-
tual death, Rowe includes an engraving of the monument that stands
above the playwright’s grave.24 Rowe ultimately says very little about
Shakespeare’s life and time in London, preferring instead to assert
Shakespeare’s geographical significance in his rural place of birth and
death. It is perhaps worth noting here that while Rowe describes and indi-
rectly endorses the earliest forms of Shakespearean literary pilgrimage, he
does not specifically address some of the key touchstones that would
become a central part of the narrative in the coming decades. No explicit
mention is made of New Place by name, which Rowe alludes to simply as
“an Estate equal to his Occasion” that Shakespeare had the “good
Fortune” to afford later in life, and no mention is made of the mulberry
tree.25 Exactly what ‘remains of a name’ Betterton and other early
Shakespeare pilgrims were looking for—and where they sought them—
was still in flux in the early eighteenth century. Later, in 1724 Daniel
Defoe briefly recounts his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon in A Tour thro’ the
Whole Island of Great Britain, where the sole notable feature was
Shakespeare’s monument in the parish church. He characterizes
Shakespeare as “the famous Poet, and whose Dramatick performances so
justly maintain his Character among the British Poets; and perhaps will do
so to the End of Time.”26 Although this description persisted in the
shorter Curious and Diverting Journies, Thro’ the Whole Island of Great-
Britain (1734) that appeared after Defoe’s death, Defoe’s editor, Samuel
Richardson, evidently saw fit to amend Defoe’s assessment of Shakespeare.
In the second edition of A Tour that was overseen and expanded by
Richardson in 1738, the vacillation disappeared from his account of
Stratford-upon-Avon: “The Parish Church of Stratford is very old. In it
we saw the Monument of the inimitable Shakespeare, whose Dramatick
Performances set him at the Head of the British Theatre, and will make
22
Rowe, vol. 1, xxvii.
23
Rowe, vol. 1, xxxiv.
24
Rowe, vol. 1, xvii–xviii.
25
Rowe, vol. 1, xxxv.
26
Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London, 1724), 63.
him renown’d to the End of Time.”27 In the elevation of Shakespeare

from ‘famous’ to ‘inimitable’ in the intervening fourteen years (or four
years, if we count the 1734 text), Shakespeare’s legacy and immortality
ceased to be a matter of ‘perhaps.’
This description of Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare would
remain unchanged in a number of the subsequent editions of A Tour until
the eighth edition of 1778 (in which Richardson’s work was expanded by
“Gentlemen of Eminence in the Literary World”).28 In this edition of the
text, the description of Stratford-upon-Avon was significantly expanded
for the first time and ballooned from two paragraphs into three pages. The
additions consist primarily of a firsthand account provided by an anony-
mous traveler who visited Stratford-upon-Avon in July 1777.29 This
account considers the village through the lens of Garrick, mentioning first
his visit to the White Lion Inn, the same one “represented in the enter-
tainment of [Garrick’s Play] The Jubilee.”30 He goes on to describe the
house Shakespeare was born in, making special note of a chair in which the
playwright supposedly once sat, which “has been pretty much cut by dif-
ferent visitors, who have been desirous of preserving a relict of something
belonging to the immortal bard,” sold off by the current occupants of the
house.31 Other Shakespeare—and Garrick—attractions around town are
described, and he notes that he was shown the grave and church by
a “guide.”32
Like Rowe, Defoe makes special note of the graveside monument with-
out mentioning New Place, the mulberry tree, or the Birthplace. And
although Richardson made some small but significant changes to Defoe’s
description, the grave and monument remained the central focus of the
first seven editions of A Tour, commemorating the resting place of a cel-
ebrated writer and emphasizing the physical location of his corporeal
remains. Following Garrick’s Jubilee, equal attention was paid to chasing
the vestigial presence of Shakespeare around Stratford-upon-Avon, and
one of the lasting contributions Garrick made to literary tourism more
generally was the attention given to birth and formative years, visiting
27
Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 2nd edition (1738), 266.
28
Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), title page.
29
Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 263.
30
Defoe, A Tour, vol. 2, 8th edition (1778), 263–64.
31
32
50 J. H. POPE
“context prior to text,” Shakespeare before ‘Shakespeare.’33 Certainly, the

persistence of Defoe’s original account for over five decades with changes
made solely to Defoe’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s status and legacy is
consistent with Richardson’s overall editorial approach which “rarely adds
any new information or makes any alterations of Defoe’s description of the
natural features or economic and social life of a locality.”34 There was no
urgent need to flesh out Defoe’s initial assessment of what was noteworthy
about Stratford-upon-Avon or Shakespeare’s relationship with it. But the
desire for fresh eyes emerged in the 1770s, indicating that the place of
Stratford-upon-Avon in the imagination of some was undergoing revision
and that it was more than just a resting place: it was a place of Shakespearean
provenance, inspiration, and reflected glory. While it had certainly been
this for some in decades past, the revision of A Tour reflects a more general
sense of Stratford-upon-Avon’s significance.
The Jubilee also came at a key moment in the struggle over the schol-
arly future of Shakespeare. In his 1765 edition of the playwright’s col-
lected work, Samuel Johnson—Garrick’s former teacher and an invitee to
the Jubilee—advocated for a critical and objective approach to the play-
wright as a necessary curative to “envious malignity” or the “superstitious
veneration” of Shakespeare that blinded readers to his true faults and
excellencies,35 a condemnation of the fan’s affective, idolatry response.
Besides, Johnson argued, William Congreve was the better writer anyway.
This response anticipates some of the most common threads in popular
critiques of fans by accusing them of being, in a pejorative sense, a version
of Jenkins’ ‘adoring audience,’ inflecting the criticism with implications of
religious fanaticism. Johnson made his comment in his 1765 preface to
Shakespeare’s collected work (years before the Jubilee had been initiated),
and he was by no means challenging Shakespeare’s merit as a poet and a
33
Nicola J. Watson, “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge
34
Godfrey Davies, “Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,” Modern
Philology 48, no. 1 (August 1950): 23–24.
35
Samuel Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (London,
1765), xix. In this passage, Johnson is writing specifically about the effect of the passage of
time (i.e., the century and a half since Shakespeare died) on helping achieve critical distance
from the text, which enables Johnson to more accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses
of the work in question. Affect and scholarship are antithetical notions, according to
Johnson’s preface, part of the reason Johnson refrained from attending the Jubilee, despite
Garrick’s invitation.
playwright but is rather positioning himself as a more discerning and

objective reader whose opinions emerge from careful consideration and
critical inquiry, unlike those who myopically venerate Shakespeare. By
labeling their admiration of and approach to Shakespeare as ‘supersti-
tious,’ Johnson rhetorically denies the possibility that anything worth-
while could come from it because their affect taints them. As with many
popular responses to a profession of fandom, being outed as a fan makes
one’s tastes and opinions suspect in all areas. Patrick Verona would approve.
Such critiques carried over into the activities of this eighteenth-century
Shakespearean participatory culture, and the supposedly exploitive rela-
tionship between cultural producers and cultural consumers that is also
central to pejorative assessments of fans. Throughout the summer leading
up to the Jubilee, for example, pieces written from the perspective of
Shakespeare’s mulberry tree—or its remaining stump—mocked the relic
hunters purchasing absurd mementos. James Dodd collected and reprinted
some of these letters in 1770. In one, the tree recalls being cut down by
profiteers, complaining that it would rather have been sold off in total to
Garrick rather than suffer the indignity of being “converted into tobacco-
stoppers, handles to knives and forks, and nutmeg-graters,” lamenting
that “Not a girl in our town but carries about her a tooth-pick, knitting-
sheath, or comb-case fabricated out of my ravaged entrails.”36 The con-
trast here between the “beauties of Shakespeare” and the base utility of
the relics emphasizes the discordance between the poet’s hand that wrote
the plays and planted the tree, and the anonymous hand that would smoke
a pipe or pick a tooth with the vestiges of Shakespeare.37 As the titular
character in Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee (1769) jokes in his account of the
Jubilee festivities, “I drank too—and now I a poet may be—/ From a
charming fine cup of the mulberry tree.”38 In another letter, a visitor to
Stratford-upon-Avon recounts a dream he had in advance of the Jubilee in
which the “venerable stump” is brought to the town hall and the pieces of
its “body” auctioned off in parcels large and small to make crutches, fan
sticks, and walking sticks for Garrick and other dignitaries of the theater
world who stake their claims over the woody corpse.39
36
Quoted in: James Solas Dodd, Essays and Poems, Satirical, Moral, Political, and
Entertaining (Cork, 1770), 255.
37
Quoted in: Dodd, Essays and Poems, 253.
38
Gentleman, Francis. The Stratford Jubilee. […] To which is prefixed Scrub’s Trip to the
Jubilee (London, 1769), np.
39
Quoted in: Dodd, Essays and Poems, 259.
52 J. H. POPE
That a single tree felled thirteen years prior to the Jubilee could not
have produced the number of relics ascribed to it was, in part, the point of
some of the mockery as these ignorant and uncritical Shakespeare devo-
tees were being comically exploited by people who knew better while the
more intelligent and discerning observers watched such exchanges with
amusement from the sidelines. As Andrew McConnell Stott notes, such
mockery “highlighted the way in which the veneration of relics replaced
any sensible discussion of literary merits with slack-jawed wonder.”40
“Lord! what monsters came to see,/ SHAKESPEARE’S house, and
SHAKESPEARE’S tree,” remarks the speaker of Edward Thompson’s
poem Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee (1769) of the motley crew of lords and
clowns “Running round and round the town,/ Swearing for the BARD’S
renown.”41 On a related note, Nicola J. Watson sees the denigration of
literary tourism in academic circles today as, in large part, a consequence
of New Criticism and post-structuralism, the prioritization of text and the
belief that “Purists and professionals should find the literary text in itself
enough, it should not need supplementing or authenticating by reference
to externals, especially to supposedly non-textual external realities, such as
author or place. Only the amateur, only the naïve reader, could suppose
that there was anything more, anything left, anything either originary or
residual, let alone anything more legitimate or legitimating, to be found
on the spot marked X.”42 Although Watson sees these points of view as not
emerging until about the 1920s,43 the comments by Johnson and the
broad mockery of visitors in search of traces of Shakespeare indicate that
similar demarcations between the intellectual and the naïve reader have
persisted for centuries. According to one song in Francis Gentleman’s
satirical The Stratford Jubilee (1769), those who arrived for the Jubilee are
those who “know Shakespeare’s name,/ And have heard of his fame,/
Though his merit their shallow conception escapes.”44 In George Colman’s
play Man and Wife; or, the Shakespeare Jubilee (1770)—written for
Garrick’s Covent Garden rivals for performance immediately after the
40
Stott, What Blest Genius?, 134.
41
Edward Thompson, Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee (London, 1769), 9.
42
Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian
Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6.
43
Watson, The Literary Tourist, 8.
44
Gentleman, The Stratford Jubilee, 5.
Jubilee in October 176945—a visitor to Stratford is simply sick of hearing

about the Jubilee throughout the summer of 1769: “I have heard nothing
but jubilees, and Shakespeares, and mulberry-trees, for these three months.
What the devil is this jubilee?”46 Shakespeare mania was as irritating to
some as it was invigorating to others. In Man and Wife, a Falstaff-esque
character, Buck, drunkenly sings a song Garrick wrote in praise of a cup
made of the mulberry tree, sung on the first day of the Jubilee. Certainly,
whatever solemnity Garrick had intended was rendered comic as the tispy
Buck sings (before calling for more wine), “All shall yield to the mulberry
tree,/ Bend to thee/ Sweet Mulberry!/ Matchless was He/ Who planted
thee,/ And thou like him immortal shalt be.”47 Where it is focused on the
Jubilee, much of this play mocks the quality, availability, and cost of food
and lodgings in Stratford, as the event afforded plenty of opportunities for
locals to drain the purses of the visitors. This seems to be largely accept-
able to many of the visitors, who are in Stratford not to celebrate
Shakespeare but to rub elbows with the social elite, as one Mrs. Cross puts
it in response to the suggestion that she does not care for Shakespeare:
“And what does that signify, as to going to the jubilee? Are not all the
people of condition round the country to be here? Shakespeare is nothing
to the purpose.”48
Likewise, Johnson and others objected to Garrick’s proposed dedica-
tory ode, which he dismissed as an inferior piece of writing. It was “an ode
without poetry,” too direct to be of literary merit.49 This criticism ties into
45
Peter Holland, “David Garrick: Saints, Temples and Jubilees,” in Celebrating Shakespeare:
Commemoration and Cultural Memory, eds. Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (Cambridge:
46
George Colman, Man and Wife; or the Shakespeare Jubilee (Dublin, 1770), 6.
47
Colman, Man and Wife, 3.
48
Colman, Man and Wife, 22–23.
49
Colman, Man and Wife, iv. This dismissal of the ode on grounds of its quality clearly
bothered Garrick. In the manuscript version of his play The Jubilee, he has written “This is
what Foote said of the Jubilee in his Devil upon Two Sticks,” referring to Samuel Foote, one
of Garrick’s most public critics (and a man who attended the Jubilee with the intent to
quickly satirizing it in writing). See: David Garrick, “The Jubilee,” in The Plays of David
Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes,
Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 2, eds. Harry William
Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1980), 106n37. The “ode without poetry” line, repeated in Colman’s play, comes from
Foote’s The Devil upon Two Sticks, staged mere days after Garrick’s Jubilee ended in
September 1769. See: Holland, “David Garrick,” 31.
54 J. H. POPE
the general questioning of Garrick’s motives in organizing the Jubilee in

the first place, and here we see a compelling paradox that represents
Garrick as simultaneously a Shakespeare fan and a cultural producer
exploiting fans like himself for financial gain. Add to this Garrick’s status
as a lauded actor, theater manager, and celebrity himself whom Stott
describes as “the most famous man in Britain after the king”50 and we have
a tangled web of financial and affective relationships. Unlike 10 Things’
Mandella or the contemporary writer of fan fiction, Garrick’s Shakespeare
fandom played out in public, he was an object of fandom himself, and he
stood to gain financially through his relationship with Shakespeare, both
through the performance of plays in Drury Lane (and, subsequently, the
maintenance or expansion of his own notoriety and cultural caché) and
through profits—direct or ancillary—garnered by the Jubilee. In this
respect, Garrick was like an eighteenth-century Joss Whedon, blurring the
distinction between amateur and professional as it relates to each man’s
relationship to Shakespeare and culture more generally.
Garrick’s personal and professional history with Shakespeare are largely
indistinguishable from one another. His London stage debut came in a
1741 production of Richard III, earning him immediate public praise for
his skill. Regardless of his personal affection for Shakespeare, Garrick evi-
dently felt indebted to him for his start, celebrating this early success by
visiting New Place in 1742 while the property was owned by Sir Hugh
Clopton and the sacred mulberry tree still stood, thirteen years before the
next owner had it removed.51 As Garrick’s fame and wealth increased, he
purchased a lavish villa in Hampton in 1754 and also immediately began
designing and building his Shakespeare Temple on the grounds, a struc-
ture that would become a tourist attraction itself for the visitors that
Garrick entertained.52 Two key objects contained in the temple were a
costly statue of Shakespeare commissioned in 1757 and a chair purport-
edly built from Shakespeare’s felled mulberry tree, wood that Garrick had
purchased—with a letter of authenticity—in 1762.53
Key in many critical assessments of Garrick’s relationship with
Shakespeare is the question of what motivated it, and what Garrick used it
to say about himself. The sense of religious devotion and excess was not
50
Stott, What Blest Genius?, xviii.
51
Watson, “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” 204.
52
Holland, “David Garrick,” 16.
53
Holland, “David Garrick,” 19; Stott, What Blest Genius?, 130–31.
simply applied to Garrick but was rather embraced and voiced by him. In
his dedicatory ode recited at the Jubilee, Garrick referred to Shakespeare
as “The god of our idolatry.”54 He had been using this phrase (one bor-
rowed from Juliet’s description of Romeo in 2.1) for years to describe
Shakespeare, sometimes when inviting them to his temple to bow before
the statue.55 As Peter Holland notes, The Public Ledger attack on Garrick’s
Ode in 1769 both mocked and criticized the ‘Christian’ Garrick for igno-
rantly but appropriately casting himself in a negative light—Garrick might
not understand what idolatry actually meant, but it was the perfect word
to describe what Garrick was doing.56 “Well said Christian! But it is no
wonder that he should endeavour to make a God of Shakespear, since he
has usurped the office of his High-priest; and has already gained enough
money by it, to make a golden calf, to be an object of that idolatry which
he recommends,” writes the anonymous author, ‘Longinus.’57
Similar attacks were leveled at Garrick for calling the event a ‘jubilee’ to
begin with because of its religious connotations as a particularly papist or
Jewish term of commemoration. The short satirical play Garrick’s Vagary
(1769) devotes its opening scene almost entirely to mocking Garrick—
“the Pope of Drury-Lane”58—for his choice of terminology and offering
an extended comparison between the Jubilee and popish practices.
Although the epilogue to Garrick’s Vagary claims to have offered a bal-
anced interpretation of the event with voices both in favor of and in oppo-
sition to it, the opening scene—which comprises nearly half of the total
play—clearly establishes the perceived inappropriateness of conceptualiz-
ing the event as a jubilee on nationalistic religious grounds, regardless of
whether or not Shakespeare was a deserving focus of adulation.59 However,
it is the next point in Longinus’ criticism of Garrick that should sound
familiar to fan scholars, as his critic notes that while the “extravagant
54
Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 188. All references to the ode are taken from Stott’s anno-
tated version that appears appended to What Blest Genius?.
55
56
57
Longinus, Letter in The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769. This letter, along with three
more, are reprinted for inclusion with the anonymous Anti-Midas: A Jubilee Preservative
from Unclassical, Ignorant, False, and Invidious Criticism, written and published as a refuta-
tion of Longinus’ criticisms and enthusiastic defense of Garrick’s ode, the Jubilee, and The
Jubilee play. See: Anti-Midas: A Jubilee Preservative from Unclassical, Ignorant, False, and
Invidious Criticism (London, 1769), 23.
58
Garrick’s Vagary (London, 1769), 13.
59
See also: Holland, “David Garrick,” 35.
56 J. H. POPE
expression”—‘the God of our idolatry’—might be “pardonable from the

mouth of a young girl distracted with love, and applied to her lover, he
uses [it] as his own serious sentiment.”60 Certainly, the author here is
alluding to the source of the phrase, the young girl who is distracted with
love: Juliet. In a grown man, though, the same sentiment becomes unpar-
donable. In the process, and, I would argue, purposefully, the author char-
acterizes Garrick’s affectation for Shakespeare as immature, uncritical, and
feminine, key notes in the criticism of fans in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. Although separated by a wide span of time, space, and
genre, Garrick’s engagement with Shakespeare is couched in similar terms
as the fandoms of both Mandella and Kat in 10 Things, relegated to a gen-
dered category of naïveté.
However, the critique of the Jubilee and Garrick’s adulation of
Shakespeare on the grounds of pseudo-sacrilege and fanatic obsession is to
miss what is now recognizable as fannish modes of discourse and devotion
as play. Writing specifically about Sherlock Holmes fan culture, Anne
Jamison comments on the ways in which “fans play exaggerated versions
of themselves, taking their obsession seriously and ironically at the same
time.”61 To ignore this aspect of fandom is to assume that fans are overly
serious and lacking in self-awareness, implying that they are, truly, fanatics.
But fandoms are frequently very self-aware, playfully employing the often
hyperbolic performance of affect and obsession as a rhetorical tool to
emphasize both their investment in their fan object and an awareness that
such enthusiasm could be interpreted as actual fanaticism. To suggest that
Garrick’s description of Shakespeare as ‘the god of his idolatry’ is anything
but an ironic and self-effacing way for him to say ‘I really like Shakespeare’
is to suggest he has no understanding of the meaning of ‘idolatry.’
‘Idolatry’ has purely negative connotations, a suggestion of inappropri-
ately and ignorantly mistaking the created for the divine to describe other
persons or religions. As a description of one’s own faith or devotion, ‘idola-
try’ can only be used ironically. Otherwise, to use it honestly would require
the speaker to paradoxically be simultaneously aware and unaware that
their devotion is misplaced and sacrilegious. As in the patronizing depic-
tion of Mandella in 10 Things who cannot distinguish between fiction and
reality as a result of her fandom, to take Garrick’s professed idolatry seri-
ously is to deny the intentional playfulness of his usage of the term as
60
Longinus, Letter in The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 24.
61
Jamison, Fic, 8.
appropriately inappropriate. After all, Garrick had built part of his career
on adapting Shakespeare’s plays to his own tastes and the tastes of his
eighteenth-century audiences rather than staging them with puritanical
fidelity. He had been playing with Shakespeare for a long time.
The Jubilee itself also bears a striking resemblance to a fan convention
in its eighteenth-century version of cosplay. Among the planned events
was a procession of Shakespeare’s most famous characters—from Garrick’s
perspective—taken from nineteen plays, accompanied by muses and satyrs.
Each of the nineteen groups was to perform a dumb show of a key scene
from their respective play while carrying an identifying banner.
Unfortunately, this pageant was canceled due to the persistent rain that
plagued the Jubilee as a whole.62 While the aborted procession of charac-
ters is frequently pointed to as one of the many comical absurdities that
beset the event, it looks perhaps somewhat different through the lens of
the fan, speaking to—as did the Jubilee as a whole—Garrick’s own fannish
perspective and what he saw as the most memorable characters and
moments from the plays, performed on a mute loop for the duration.
There is undoubtedly a financial angle to the choices as well: these are
plays that were popular not just with Garrick personally, but in his Drury
Lane theater as well, those that drew in audiences. Nevertheless, the pro-
cession bears a striking resemblance to what we might expect to see at a
fan convention, with many costumed attendees striving to mimic a favorite
character. In both Garrick’s procession and contemporary cosplay, it is the
spectator’s recognition or shared fandom—a knowing audience—that is
key to the pleasure derived from such costumed displays. The dumb show
snippets take a scene out of context, such that a spectator’s inability to
recognize the source of the dumb show would render it unintelligible—
context is provided by the spectator’s prior knowledge of the text. Whether
Juliet or Princess Leia, the pleasure that arises from such spectatorship is
one grounded in recognition. And the spectators themselves would be
invited to participate in cosplay themselves in the form of a masquerade
ball during the evening festivities.
Indeed, it is the fannish importance of recognition that helps us under-
stand another oft-noted aspect of the Jubilee: the conspicuous absence of
any actual performance of Shakespeare throughout its duration. For all of
the planned events in Stratford-upon-Avon, which ranged from fireworks
to singing to horse races, not a single play—or scene from a play—was to
62
Stott, What Blest Genius?, 139–41.
58 J. H. POPE
be performed. Such an absence has been described at worst as evidence of

Garrick’s vanity, and at best a curious oversight at an event paying homage
to a playwright. However, such an absence would not seem particularly
unusual at a fan convention (or academic conference, for that matter). In
one of his earliest efforts to define fans (specifically in relation to Star
Trek), Jenkins argues that “One becomes a ‘fan’ not by being a regular
viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some
kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the pro-
gram content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans who
share common interests,”63 a movement away from “passive media
spectatorship.”64 Attendees come armed with prior knowledge of the text
and in order to partake in paratextual engagements, such as meeting favor-
ite actors, purchasing memorabilia, interacting with like-minded fans, and
a plethora of other activities that do not involve re-watching favorite epi-
sodes. As Lanier notes, in subsequent nineteenth-century commemora-
tions of Shakespeare, particularly those initiated by small societies around
the tercentenary of 1864, “theatrical presentation was not a necessary
feature.”65 The Jubilee thus instigated the transformation—for those
involved and for those who would follow similar forms of engagement—of
Shakespearean “spectatorial culture into participatory culture” along simi-
lar lines that the objects of Jenkins’ study would take up Star Trek two
centuries later.66
The pleasure of recognition is also a key feature of the centerpiece of
the Jubilee: the dedicatory ode that Garrick prepared for the unveiling of
a new statue of Shakespeare that he had commissioned and then sold to
Stratford-upon-Avon. Undoubtedly, the ode enshrines Shakespeare—
“that demi-god!”67—as a semi-divine being, describing the playwright in
63
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2006), 41.
64
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2006), 3. I recognize here that theater spectatorship
and media spectatorship can involve varying degrees of passivity, with theater spectatorship
being inherently less passive than, say, television spectatorship, if for no other reason than the
fact that the illusory fourth wall in the theater does not segregate audience from performance
in the same way a screen does.
65
Douglas Lanier, “Commemorating Shakespeare in America, 1864,” in Celebrating
Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, eds. Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 150.
66
Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, 41.
67
Garrick, “Garrick’s Ode,” 188.
the devotional terms that irritated Garrick’s critics and served as partial
proof of his deficiencies as a poet and an intellectual. Sprung from the
banks of Avon, the Shakespeare of the ode is the immediate student of
both Fancy and Nature who, through his mastery of words, became a
divine creative force whose power surpassed the conquering sword of
Alexander: “He heav’d no sigh, he made no moan,/ Not limited to human
kind,/ He sir’d his wonder-teeming mind,/ Rais’d other worlds, and
beings of his own!”68 He is both a god and a magician, an immortal being
capable of granting immortality through poetry and using his “charms,
and spells, and incantations” to conjure both terror and delight, as his
imagination dictates.69 Directing the audience’s attention of the statue
that Garrick was dedicating, the final lines emphasize Shakespeare’s lon-
gevity: “The song will cease, the stone decay,/ But his Name,/ And
undiminsh’d fame,/ Shall never, never pass away.”70 Undoubtedly, the
ode voices an affective, ebullient praise for Shakespeare that is couched in
hyperbolic terms. In his preface to Shakespeare’s complete works, Johnson
is careful to emphasize that while Shakespeare was a playwright of consid-
erable skill, he was nevertheless beset with “faults sufficient to obscure and
overwhelm any other merit,” going on to criticize—among other things—
the apparent lack of “moral purpose” in the plays, the weaknesses of many
of his plots (particularly in the latter parts of many plays), and so forth.71
Sometimes, Shakespeare is simply too wordy when it comes to narration
and often “tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have
been more plainly delivered in few.”72 Acknowledging these weaknesses
avoids the ‘superstitious veneration’ of Shakespeare that Johnson detested
because the work of the critic is to ensure “that his virtues be rated with
his failings.”73 From a critical perspective like Johnson’s, Garrick’s ode is
embarrassingly one-sided, all blindly breathless hyperbole, a “love [that]
admits no qualifying dross” or moderation (as Cressida might say).74
Indeed, Garrick’s unselfconscious affect when performing the ode in
Drury Lane—which Garrick did repeatedly following the Jubilee—was
one of the many points of contention taken up by ‘Longinus’ in his lengthy
68
69
70
71
Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xix–xx.
72
Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxii.
73
Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxiv.
74
Troilus and Cressida, 4.4.9.
60 J. H. POPE
attack on the ode published in The Public Ledger in October 1769. For
Garrick “to repeat this Ode often in the face of the World, to repeat it with
that enthusiastic delight, which shews him enraptured with his own
wretched Composition” is the height of humor.75 Over the course of four
letters, Longinus undertakes a pedantic attack on Garrick’s weak diction,
poor grammar, and misunderstanding of the basic tenants of figurative
language, while also accusing Garrick of being a superficial reader of
Milton.76 And like any good critic, Longinus employs contemporary criti-
cal discourse to invalidate Garrick’s assertions about Shakespeare in the
ode, drawing from Elizabeth Montagu’s recent response to Voltaire, pub-
lished in 1769, in order to dismiss Garrick as “an ignorant zealot.”77 The
final letter concludes with the author’s mock exhaustion as he is unable to
complete his task: “Upon looking over the remainder of the Ode, I find so
many other passages equally obnoxious to Criticism, that, being heartily
tired of the task, I give it up, in utter despair of being able to finish it.”78
David Garrick: laughable amateur, feminine idolator, and glory thief.
Of additional interest, however, is Johnson’s defense of Shakespeare,
particularly regarding the playwright’s refusal to follow (or ignorance of)
the classical unities of time, place, and action. After dismantling the neces-
sity of the unities in the first place on the grounds that while an audience
suspends its disbelief it is not so naïve that it becomes unaware that it is
still watching a play (and can thus fill in the gaps between scenes), Johnson
emphasizes that Shakespeare did not write for the critics anyway: “We may
reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the
counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last delib-
erately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance.”79
Johnson stresses Shakespeare’s intended audience: if the playwright was
not writing for the approval of scholars and critics, then it is not entirely
appropriate to judge his work according to his adherence to their rules
regarding the unities. Likewise, our assessment of Garrick’s ode must be
attentive to its intended audience—the attendees of the Jubilee, the (ide-
ally) knowing audience.
75
Longinus, The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 23.
76
Longinus, The Public Ledger, November 2, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 30.
77
Longinus, The Public Ledger, October 30, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 26. Longinus quotes
from: Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London,
1769), 140.
78
Longinus, The Public Ledger, November 6, 1769; in Anti-Midas, 33.
79
Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, xxix–xxx.
The fan’s pleasure of recognition is key to the reception of the ode,

which is peppered with allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, direct quotations,
or slight adaptations of lines that are cleverly integrated into Garrick’s
praise. As such, it is productive to consider Garrick’s ode as a kind of fan
text wherein the fannish—as opposed to literary or hegemonic—notion of
‘canon’ comes into play. Sheenagh Pugh defines ‘canon’ as “the source
material accepted as authentic and, within the fandom, known by all
readers.”80 That is, the canon of Shakespeare’s words and characters,
known and accepted by the audience. And in the context of Garrick’s ode,
the author offers reflected knowledge to the knowing audience, pleasur-
able participation in the text by way of recognizing the various
Shakespearean ‘Easter eggs’ throughout, rewarding their own mastery of
that canon. Such recognition might come through Garrick’s slight rework-
ing of Hamlet’s comments about his father: “’A was a man, take him for
all in all;/ I shall not look upon his like again.”81 This becomes, in refer-
ence to Shakespeare, the “best of men,” “We ne’er shall look upon his like
again!”82 Recognition might also come in Garrick’s representation of
Shakespeare as a Prospero-esque magician who, “more inspired,/ By
charms, and spells, and incantations fir’d,/ Exerts his most tremendous
pow’r;/ The thunder growls, the heavens low’r,/ And to his darken’d
throne repair,/ The Demons of the deep, and Spirits of the air!”83 Longinus’
grammatical and technical quibbles ignore the participatory nature and
intent of the ode, which incorporates the audience into the text through
its playful interaction with the Shakespeare canon and subsequently map-
ping that canon onto Stratford-upon-Avon and the experience of the
Jubilee itself. Just as Mandella responds with pleasurable recognition to
Michael’s quoting of Macbeth in 10 Things, Garrick’s ode strives to evoke
a similarly affective reaction in his audience.
Garrick’s own simulacrum of the event appeared in his play The Jubilee
that same year. The centrality of the pageant to the event as a whole is
indicated by the fact that it appears in full in both Garrick’s play and the
satirical Man and Wife, where the procession passes in front of Shakespeare’s
80
Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend:
Seren, 2005), 26.
81
Hamlet, 1.2.187–88.
82
83
62 J. H. POPE
birthplace.84 While it may not have happened in Stratford, revisionist nar-

ratives made sure to include it: in Garrick’s case, “as it was intended for
Stratford-upon-Avon,” according to the Dramatis Personae.85 Garrick’s
‘intended’ version of the Jubilee staged at Drury Lane mocks the rustic
simplicity of Stratford’s native inhabitants and their concern that the
Jubilee is some sort of popish event before being frightened by the cele-
bratory canon fire marking the beginning of the event. This is surely a
response to Garrick’s critics who took issue with his choice of terminol-
ogy—only a simpleton would earnestly connect his Jubilee with popery.
And in the play, it is Stratford itself that becomes the primary impediment
that threatens to ruin the event, whether through their ineptitude or greed
in handling the influx of visitors or in the efforts of the “mulberry scoun-
drels” hawking pieces of “the true Mulberry Tree.”86 Despite the behind-
the-scenes hustle and bustle, the pageant goes off without a hitch this
time, with the rain only seeming to start after the procession has con-
cluded and before the festivities move into the rotunda. The Jubilee con-
cludes with the dedication of Shakespeare’s statue and a celebration of the
success of the Jubilee itself. Garrick omits the damage done to the rotunda
by the rain on the second evening, the cancellation of the planned fire-
works due to the same weather, and the soggy horserace for the Jubilee
Cup on the final day, in favor of ending on a high note with the dedica-
tion. In spite of the criticism of the Jubilee, Garrick was having none of it,
choosing instead to enshrine the event as a successful commemoration of
his love and reverence for Shakespeare that overcame rubes, critics, and
profiteers. At the close of the play, actors and audiences joined together to
cheer “Bravo Jubilee!/ Shakespeare forever!”87 And whatever the perceived
84
Colman, Man and Wife, 38–42. Once the pageant concludes, Man and Wife largely
abandons the Jubilee in favor of following the comedic romantic shenanigans of its central
plot, with the Jubilee offering the masquerade ball as a plot contrivance for comical mistaken
identity. As Colman’s play premiered before Garrick’s, it does not mimic the exact order of
procession as arranged by Garrick. Colman’s version of the procession is organized around
genre whereas Garrick’s follows, presumably, his own preferences without regard to genre.
Antony and Cleopatra bring up the rear in Garrick’s Jubilee, but they appear near the front
of the procession in Man and Wife. See: Garrick, The Jubilee, 115–21. Additionally, there are
some notable differences in the characters included in the individual dumb shows: although
Anne Boleyn does not appear in Garrick’s list of characters for Henry VIII, she is central in
Colman’s.
85
Garrick, The Jubilee, 101.
86
87
deficiencies of the Jubilee, the Drury Lane Jubilee ran for a record ninety-
one nights.88
Together, Mandella and Garrick represent the challenges facing
Shakespeare’s fans when fandom is collectively dismissed, especially
according to the caricature of it embodied by Mandella as idolatrous, sex-
ually confusing, ignorant of the boundary between fantasy and reality, and
simultaneously excessively emotional and emotionally immature. Such an
assessment of fans ignores their own self-awareness and misconstrues their
often playful approach to their fan objects, an approach that blends rever-
ence with irreverence rather than expressing blind devotion or actual
fanaticism. Looking back to Garrick’s Jubilee, the event is best understood
as the precursor to a modern fan convention rather than a comical and
failed devotional gesture that verged on actual sacrilege by seeking to deify
Shakespeare. Centuries before fandom become a predominant form of
cultural engagement, Garrick planned an event that sought to evoke the
pleasure of recognition and winking reverence inherent in fan communi-
ties today. Such an approach would not be possible from the position of
true fanaticism.
Bibliography
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Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction
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Colman, George. Man and Wife; or the Shakespeare Jubilee. Dublin, 1770.
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Gentleman, Francis. The Stratford Jubilee. […] To which is prefixed Scrub’s Trip to
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CHAPTER 3
“my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare,

Legitimacy, and the Gift Economy
One of the most salient issues that undergird fan studies—and which the
assessment of Shakespeare fandom both invigorates and complicates—is
one of power and authority. This issue of control has both intellectual and
economic facets that are often intertwined with one another. As such, in
considering Shakespeare as a fan object, it is necessary to consider him and
his works as property: that is, things that can be possessed, exchanged,
sold, and profited from. And when conceived of as an intellectual property
invested with considerable cultural caché whose works are continually
doing work (both intellectually and in terms of labor), Shakespeare, it
seems, can be exploited, stolen from, and copied for personal gain. In
Shakespeare studies, these issues come to the surface most frequently in
debates over adaptation versus appropriation, typically in relation to film
to distinguish between those films that offer an extended and announced
engagement with a text whether or not it pursues fidelity (adaptation),
and those that borrow from the same texts. Linda Hutcheon defines
‘appropriation’ as “taking possession of another’s story, and filtering it, in
a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and talents,” emphasizing
that all adaptations involve a certain amount of appropriation.1
‘Appropriation,’ however, simultaneously implies inferiority (it is ‘less
than’ an adaptation) and theft (taking something without permission to
1
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013), 8, 18.

68 J. H. POPE
adorn the present text), “a matter of a weaker party wresting something of

value from unwilling or hostile hands.”2
As it pertains to Shakespeare, the tension and blurred boundaries
between adaptation and appropriation are infused with assessments of
value and reciprocity. Richard Burt, for example, employs “Shakesploitation”
to describe films like 10 Things I Hate About You that ‘dumb down’
Shakespeare for a mass audience.3 In this consideration, the fact that the
film is both an extended and—largely—announced engagement with
Taming of the Shrew is secondary to the fact that it takes from the play
without giving much back. Similar ideas are at work in Graham Holderness’
preference for the term “creative criticism” rather than “fan fiction” to
describe his novels The Prince of Denmark (2001) and Black and Deep:
William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (2015) on the grounds that he sees
fanfic as emulative whereas creative criticism is rooted in professional aca-
demic and interpretive accountability.4 Rather than simply copying aspects
of—and thus taking from—Shakespeare, creative criticism offers some-
thing back in return in the form of intellectual compensation. Some critics
maintained more neutral ground in their assessments, such as Douglas
Lanier who acknowledges the connotations of theft/possession/property
in ‘appropriation,’ offering the term “Shakespop” to describe appropria-
tive relationships “that might better be explained in terms of negotiation,
collaboration, exchange, or other models.”5 More recently, Valerie
M. Fazel and Louise Geddes have posited ‘Shakespeare user’ to character-
ize a broad range of digital-age engagements with Shakespeare that helps
account for some of the technological and cultural shifts that have occurred
since Lanier published Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture in 2002.
Fazel and Geddes argue that “to use is not to create but re-create; use sug-
gests a recalibration, exploitation, and consumption of something that is
2
Press, 2002), 5.
3
Richard Burt, “T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late
1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical
Theory and Popular Cinema, eds. Courtney Lehnmann and Lisa S. Starks (Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2002), 206.
4
Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26.
5
3 “MY WORTHLESS GIFTS”?: SHAKESPEARE, LEGITIMACY, AND THE GIFT… 69
already there, and builds connections between the traditional conventions

of critical and creative practices that are deemed appropriative.”6
In this chapter, I consider the contentious issue of ownership as it per-
tains to Shakespeare. As Robert Shaughnessy notes in his discussion of
Shakespeare and popular culture: “The ‘popular’ is itself hardly a singular
or uncontested term or frame of reference: seen from some angles, it
denotes community, shared values, democratic participation, accessibility,
and fun; from others, the mass-produced commodity, the lowest common
denominator, the reductive or the simplified, or the shoddy, the coarse,
and the meretricious. When the transmission and appropriation of
Shakespeare are at stake, considerations of taste and aesthetic value are also
bound up with inevitably vexed questions of cultural ownership, educa-
tional attainment and class, and with issues of who the desired and actual
consumers of ‘popular’ Shakespeares may be, who these hope to include,
and who they don’t.”7 Shaughnessy here—and as Lanier does via
Shakespop—highlights the often palpable but difficult to define dividing
line between official, professional Shakespeares and informal, amateur
Shakespeares, with the quality and inherent value of the former surpassing
that of the latter.
Writing on the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, Michael
Whitmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote that “On
this 400th anniversary of his death, we celebrate Shakespeare’s staying
power as a poet, playwright, and cultural force. But we also celebrate the
nearly infinite adaptability of his stories and the fact that they sustain a
conversation across a truly diverse set of languages and cultural forms. The
conversation continues because of what we, every one of us, bring to it.
Shakespeare belongs to all of us.”8 Whitmore here echoes what is among
the first and most famous commemorations of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson’s
eulogizing of the playwright as “not of an age, but for all time!” in the
preface to the First Folio. Seen as transcending time and place from the
6
Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” in The
Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie
M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5.
7
Robert Shaughnessy, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and
Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
2.
8
Michael Whitmore, “Shakespeare Belongs to All of Us,” The Folger Shakespeare Library,
Published April 21, 2016, accessed June 17, 2019, https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.
edu/2016/04/21/shakespeare-belongs-us/.
70 J. H. POPE
seventeenth century to the present, the timelessness of Shakespeare means

that he can be claimed by everyone. The truth of this ideal, I would argue,
is in continual flux and a source of endless debate, an assertion that cer-
tainly sounds good but which is weighed down by numerous catches and
caveats when it comes to engaging with and interpreting Shakespeare.
While we are all theoretically permitted equal access to Shakespeare and
can do with him as we please, to also conceive of him as something that
can be exploited, stolen from, or even misinterpreted is to expose some of
the tensions at work in the assertion of accessibility and collective owner-
ship. Indeed, to appropriate George Orwell, we might suggest that in
practice, while all engagements with Shakespeare are equal, some are more
equal than others. Scholars and members of the Shakespeare industry
become, in this regard, the determiners of value. It is important to note
here, however, that I do not intend to suggest that there exists some shad-
owy, hegemonic, Shakespearean monoculture that these custodians
defend, as there are easily identifiable disagreements within and between
these groups regarding what Shakespeare ‘means,’ or why his works are
historically or contemporaneously significant. Indeed, it would be more
accurate to think of Shakespeare in the plural in this regard, as there are—
and have been—many Shakespeares since the late sixteenth century. Such
is the nature of popular culture, of criticism, of commemoration, of tour-
ism. Holderness points to the way in which texts and history are inter-
preted in the present as essentially presentist objects: “in reading an old
text we cannot disown our modern knowledge: consciously or uncon-
sciously, we can interpret the language of the past only by translating it
into a language we ourselves can understand.”9 Shakespeare is continually
being reinterpreted for a ‘now’ that is always in flux, a present that means
different things to different people, and which leads to many different
official (critical, historical, commercial) Shakespeares. And as Douglas
Lanier notes, the professionalization of Shakespeare scholarship had
birthed a “class of cultural professionals” “that wields considerable institu-
tional authority,” and which “lends its authority to a web of loosely affili-
ated institutions that comprise official Shakespeare-dom,” such as the
Shakespeare Association of America, Folger Shakespeare Library, Royal
Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and so forth.10 In
9
Graham Holderness, Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 168.
10
Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 139–40.
more recent years—and following on the ‘Shakespop’ phenomenon that

Lanier articulated—the multiplicity of Shakespeares has grown, often in
ways that do not purposefully seek to prop up the multifaceted
Shakespearean official culture. Regarding the ‘Shakespeare user,’ Fazel
and Geddes note that in the digital age, “Shakespeare is seized in service
of a potentially limitless archive of cultural memory, constructed through
its willful disregard for the traditional avenues of canonicity.”11 Running
throughout all of assessments of Shakespeare is the notion that insofar as
he and his works can be owned by us all, so too can he be kidnapped,
seized, and stolen from the purveyors of official and institutional
Shakespearean culture and put to—or exploited for—other unofficial uses.
This communal property paradigm illuminates the debates regarding
how Shakespeare can be used, as it is infused with notions of stewardship
and collective responsibility. Shakespeare’s garden is open to all, but that
does not mean we can pick all of the violets, litter on its footpaths, or call
its roses by another name. Instead, we have a responsibility to tend the
garden, pick sparingly from its blossoms, to acknowledge and appreciate
its beauty, so that our fellow co-owners can continue to enjoy the garden.
And the purveyors of Shakespearean official culture—scholars and other-
wise—serve as the most prominent stewards and caretakers of that garden,
even if they might disagree on the best practices for doing so. An illumi-
nating example of this is the response of official culture to the “sacrile-
gious thesis” of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous (2011) which loosely
follows the Oxfordian theory of authorship, depicting Shakespeare as an
illiterate buffoon in the process.12 In an act of protest against the film’s
premiere at the London Film Festival, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
symbolically covered Lord Ronald Gower’s Shakespeare Memorial (1888)
that stands in Stratford-upon-Avon, along with covering up street and pub
signs bearing Shakespeare’s name.13 Following the release of the film, the
Birthplace Trust and Paul Edmonson collaborated with Stanley Wells to
release the free e-book Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous (2011),
directed specifically at countering the anti-Stratfordian theory and
11
Fazel and Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” 3.
12
Sébastien Lefait, “Irreverence as Fidelity?: Adapting Shakespearean Reflexivity in
Anonymous (Emmerich 2011),” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 242.
13
“Shakespeare Trust Attacks New ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Film Anonymous.” The Telegraph,
Published October 25, 2011, accessed June 25, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cul-
ture/film/film-news/8848351/Shakespeare-trust-attacks-new-conspiracy-theory-film-
Anonymous.html.
72 J. H. POPE
utlining in detail the evidence in support of Shakespeare’s authorship.14

o
After lamenting the “dangerous and foolish” nature of the ideas promoted
by works like Anonymous, they lament that “from having been almost
entirely the province of amateurs, the topic has begun to infiltrate
academia.”15 And such conspiracy theories are grounded in a dangerous
form of willful ignorance: “Those who know virtually nothing about the
history of a particular period may enjoy engaging with and creating fanta-
sies about it.”16 It is the very antithesis of academic rigor or the pursuit of
objectivity, with ‘amateur’ coded as both silly and intellectually suspect,
with echoes of fanaticism—anti-Shakespeareans “hardly smile, perhaps
characteristic of an obsessive mind.”17 The rigorous scholar here is figured
as the rightful steward of Shakespeare’s garden, safeguarding it against
those who are “vandalizing the works themselves and the world’s appre-
ciation of them.”18 The concept of vandalism here is significant because it
refers to property crime, suggesting that the works are a finite property
that can be defaced, thus diminishing their overall value by obscuring our
view of the art that lies beneath the graffiti. It is also worth noting that in
Edmonson and Wells’ Stratfordian defense, they repeatedly deploy legal
rhetoric and approach the debate as a trial, arguing that “We have exam-
ined the anti-Shakespearians’ case with objective rigor and we reject it
totally. Any competent court of law would do the same.”19
Writing in response to the academic debate surrounding Anonymous
and in support of open-access publishing, Eleanor Collins rightly empha-
sizes that “Ownership claims on Shakespeare are often complex and mul-
tivalent, but they are endemic to this particular academic field; Shakespeare’s
name and reputation make him one of the world’s most ardently adored
14
I have no interest here in debating the authorship question. I take it as an established fact
that Shakespeare (historical figure) and ‘Shakespeare’ (authorial identity) are one and the
same. Rather, I am interested in how the ownership of Shakespeare is articulated as a conten-
tious struggle between amateurs and professionals. Edmonson and Wells’ work here would
also lead to the publication of their edited collection Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013) aimed
primarily at a scholarly audience as opposed to the imagined popular audience for Shakespeare
Bites Back.
15
Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous
(Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Misfit, Inc. 2011), 12–13. http://bloggingshakespeare.
com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Shakespeare_Bites_Back_Book.pdf.
16
Edmonson and Wells, Shakespeare Bites Back, 19.
17
18
19
authors, and one of its most marketable products …. A sense of academic

ownership has, for many decades, been inscribed within the exclusive insti-
tutions that scholars work in, which refuse access to non-members, vet
research according to predetermined academic standards and priorities
and guard their electronic resources with institutionally bought
passwords.”20 In the process, Collins employs a term that is central to
struggles over authority within fan cultures: gatekeeping. While the term
is employed broadly across many fields of knowledge, in fan cultures, gate-
keeping typically refers to the practice by which a fandom’s self-appointed
‘elders’ determine the parameters for membership in their exclusive club.
Gatekeeping is most prevalent in science fiction and fantasy fandoms: it is
almost always gendered and is often inflected with race and sexuality. ‘Real
fans’ tend to be straight, white men—as appointed by other straight, white
men—because they possess the right kinds of geek credentials or knowl-
edge about the fan object, whereas women, for example, are more likely to
be deemed pretenders, ‘fake fans’ who are latecomers to the fandom and
who do not like the right things in the right way and with the right ency-
clopedic knowledge applied. Writing for CNN in 2012, for example, Joe
Peacock lamented the influx of “pretty girls pretending to be geeks for
attention” at scifi/comic conventions, women “who have no interest or
history in gaming” who are simply playing at being models.21 These gate-
keeping efforts are routinely rejected. In response to Peacock, author
John Scalzi wrote, “If anyone tells you that there’s a right way to be a
geek, or that someone else is not a geek, or shouldn’t be seen as a geek—
or that you are not a geek—you can tell them to fuck right off.”22 While
these debates have ebbed and flowed, gatekeeping remains a hotly
contested issue within fan cultures. Gatekeeping regarding Shakespeare
20
Eleanor Collins, “Unlocking Scholarship in Shakespeare Studies: Gatekeeping,
Guardianship and Open-Access Journal Publication,” in Shakespeare and the Digital World:
Redefining Scholarship and Practice, eds. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge:
21
Joe Peacock, “Booth Babes Need not Apply,” CNN, Published July 24, 2012, accessed
June 30, 2019, http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/booth-babes-need-not-apply/.
22
John Scalzi, “Who Get to Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be,” Published July 26,
2012, accessed June 30, 2019, https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/07/26/who-gets-to-
be-a-geek-anyone-who-wants-to-be/. See also: Kate Gardner, “Viral Tweet About Fandom
Gatekeeping Proves We Still Have a Male Geek Problem,” The Mary Sue, Published
September 23, 2018, accessed June 30, 2019, https://www.themarysue.com/fandom-gate-
keeping-male-geeks/; “Geek Gatekeeping,” Geek Feminism, accessed June 30, 2019,
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Geek_gatekeeping.
74 J. H. POPE
has some parallels in kind but it has established significantly more formal-
ized criteria for inclusion wherein interpretive authority is localized in aca-
demic scholarship behind paywalls and in classrooms. See, for example,
Edmonson and Wells’ lamentations above regarding the know-nothing
amateurs who are beginning to infiltrate the hallowed halls of academia.
When we get down to contentious issues such as the authorship debate,
we see how collective ownership is negotiated and policed, as well as how
hierarchies within that collective are articulated. Writing about fan cul-
tures and gatekeeping, Scalzi proclaims that “Geekdom is a nation with
open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it.”23
Perhaps rather than conceptualizing anti-Shakespearianism as something
that “should be as much despised as any mainstream political or moral
taboo or ‘-ism’, such as sexism, racism, or homophobia,”24 we might look
at it as another door to Shakespeare. Anti-fandom is, after all, also a form
of fandom that paradoxically contributes to the tapestry that it seeks
to unravel.
In addition to an idealized intellectual or cultural collective ownership
of Shakespeare, his legal status as an intellectual property offers further
dimension to the question of possession. With no copyright applicable to
Shakespeare and no Shakespeare estate to request permissions from or pay
royalties to, the mirror of Whitmore and Jonson’s sentiment is empha-
sized. If intellectually Shakespeare belongs to everyone, legally and liter-
ally he belongs to no one. As such, we are all free to profit—financially,
intellectually, or otherwise—from our engagements with Shakespeare. It
is, in part, the all/none ownership paradox of Shakespeare that makes him
such a fascinating case for fan studies to consider because the terrain of the
field is traditionally spread with fan objects that are governed by copyright
and the evolving legal definitions of—and impinging upon—intellectual
property. For many fan scholars, it is the presence of the legalistic relation-
ship between cultural producers and cultural consumers that establishes
the parameters of fandom. Indeed, in their introduction to The Fan Fiction
Studies Reader (2014), two of the leading scholars in the field grapple
with how to define fan fiction and fan activity more generally. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse acknowledge the potentially lengthy history
of fandom but prefer to limit their discussion not just to the era of a uthorial
copyright beginning in the early eighteenth century, but more narrowly to
23
Scalzi, “Who Get to be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be.”
24
the 1960s and later when fan fiction first became most clearly recognizable
in its current generic forms, modes of production, and legal entangle-
ments.25 With the emergence of zine culture and science fiction media
fandom, fanfic becomes most recognizable as fanfic following the first Star
Trek television series that ran from 1966 to 1969. Their choice of such a
narrow definition is self-consciously convenient and controversial because,
as Hellekson and Busse recognize, defining fanfic becomes more and more
challenging the farther we get away from a postmodern media and cultural
environment. And they are writing specifically about fanfic in their Reader,
excluding other fan activities and forms of engagement which become
equally murky as we travel back to the early twentieth century and before.
Such definitions become even murkier when we consider fannish engage-
ments with Shakespeare (or Jane Austen, or Arthur Conan Doyle) that
have persisted for decades if not centuries before Star Trek and which
continue down to the present moment. As Sheenagh Pugh points out in
her examination of fan fiction as a literary genre, definitions that hinge on
a legalistic relationship between author and content, or on whether or not
the author was paid for the writing (paid writing is often referred to as
‘profic’), are problematic because the parameters of the genre become
entirely extratextual.26 This is especially problematic as it relates to
Shakespeare because, by any definition of the genre, John Fletcher’s The
Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (1611) is essentially Taming of the
Shrew fan fiction in that it seeks to extend the lives the characters beyond
Shakespeare’s play, killing off Katherine so that Petruchio can have the
tables turned on him by his new wife, Maria. Thus, Fletcher’s play both
expands upon and revises Shakespeare’s characters and plots, what Holly
A. Crocker describes as an effort to “recast,” “rewrite,” and reflect upon
Shakespeare’s characterizations, offering audiences both more of and
more from popular characters in the repertoire of the King’s Men.27 Or we
25
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader,
eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 6–7.
Francesca Coppa makes a similar point in the following: Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies
in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities
in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London:
McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 225–44.
26
Seren, 2005), 11.
27
Holly A. Crocker, “The Tamer as Shrewd in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize: Or, The
Tamer Tam’d,” SEL 51, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 410.
76 J. H. POPE
have Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear (1681) which revises and
tweaks Shakespeare’s tragedy to restore the happy ending of the narrative
that Shakespeare himself had revised from Holinshed, with Tate retaining
much of Shakespeare’s dialogue even as he cut key characters like the Fool.
And in this case, the fan text took the place of the original on the English
stage for decades. Although historically and technologically different,
these texts are similar to fics that explore Kate and Petruchio’s married life
following the conclusion of Shrew, or ones which intervene in and rewrite
the endings of the Harry Potter novels or Game of Thrones television
series. Pugh embraces a definition of fan fiction as “writing, whether offi-
cial or unofficial, paid or unpaid, which makes use of an accepted canon of
characters, settings and plots generated by another writer or writers.”28
With this definition in mind, Shakespeare fan fiction has existed since
Shakespeare’s own lifetime. Because fan fiction dominates fan studies
more generally, choosing a definition that restricts the temporal origin of
the genre based on a convenient, late-twentieth-century legal paradigm
simultaneously shifts our sense that fan cultures and activities share a
roughly contemporaneous point of origin, suggesting that fandom as a
concept and set of practices is a post-Star Trek phenomenon. As demon-
strated in Chap. 2, however, proto fan conventions have existed since at
least Garrick’s Jubilee in 1769. Quite separate from Shakespeare, Natasha
Simonova makes a convincing case for reading the “continuations” of Sir
Philip Sidney’s Arcadia following the poet’s death in 1586 as “an alterna-
tive originary moment” for fan fiction because of their efforts to “adopt
Sidney’s characters and settings in order to fill apparent gaps, propel the
story toward a happy ending, and recast it in a different mold.”29 Although
fan scholars frequently and readily allude to the historical possibilities for
a much deeper, pre-twentieth century starting point for fan practices, we
need to do more to take those possibilities seriously, even when—and per-
haps because—they complicate our assumptions about what fandom looks
like as grounded in and responding to contemporary media properties like
Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and Harry Potter.
The notion of intellectual property as it applies to Shakespeare is decep-
tively simple, and thus exceedingly messy. Shakespeare’s body of work pre-
dates contemporary notions of intellectual property, which can be traced
28
29
Natasha Simonoa, “Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Case of
Sidney’s Arcadia,” Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (2012): sec. 1, para. 1.
back to the 1710 Statue of Anne, the first effort to establish legal param-
eters for copyright. But as Elizabeth F. Judge notes, the Statute of Anne
was primarily aimed at protecting the rights of booksellers rather than
authors: it “significantly, did not protect individual elements of a fictional
work, such as fictional characters, and, as judicially interpreted, did not
grant authors the right to prevent others from creating new works derived
from the authors’ original books, such as adaptations and abridgments.”30
Busse sees the Statute of Anne as a key moment in the prehistory of fan
fiction because it “reconceptualized the role of the creator of a work of art
… that regarded the author as the sole owner of his work,”31 but as Judge
demonstrates, in practice, the law, rather than defending the author’s
exclusive ownership of characters and plots, “protected the proprietor
against a fairly narrow compass of potential infringements best described
as piracy of the verbatim text.”32 Nevertheless, 1710 certainly marked the
beginnings of legal steps toward our current understanding of intellectual
property, as eighteenth-century novelists in particular sought to assert a
moral right to their characters—often in vain—even as the law primarily
protected the economic rights of the sellers. The statute gave rights to the
authors for a set, and renewable, period of fourteen years, so long as they
remained alive. In practice, however, the author’s possession of copyright
was of intangible value: the copyright held by the author was typically
purchased by the publisher along with the manuscript, limiting the
author’s legal right to the work once it appeared in print. Subsequent
Copyright Acts in 1842 and 1911 expanded the protections and rights
granted to the author. Previous legal measures such as the Licensing of the
Press Act of 1662 and the Licensing Order of 1643, however, made little
mention of the authors of the works in question and focused exclusively
on regulating the book trade and censorship. Regardless of the general
silence of eighteenth-century law regarding an author’s ownership of his
or her characters as intellectual properties, Judge reminds us that such
discussions were still being had by authors such as Samuel Richardson
who were incensed by the appearance of their ‘kidnapped’ characters in
30
Elizabeth F. Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters: Eighteenth-Century Fan
Fiction, Copyright Law, and the Custody of Fictional Characters,” in Originality and
Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New
York: Routledge, 2009), 29.
31
Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction
Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 21.
32
Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 29.
78 J. H. POPE
other texts and unofficial sequels, debates that were often figured in
“parental and custodial, rather than proprietary or legal” terms.33
By the time the Statute of Anne was passed in 1710, Shakespeare had
been dead for nearly a century, making him incapable of asserting either a
legal or moral right to his works or characters. Nevertheless, other authors
and playwrights who adapted Shakespeare certainly addressed the permis-
sibility of what they were doing in legalistic terms. In the preface for
Christopher Bullock’s The Cobler of Preston (an adaptation of the Induction
frame of The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in 1716 at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields), the playwright defends his use and method of crediting Shakespeare
for the reading audience: “I believe it will appear I have the Story as it was
wrote by Shakespear in The Taming of the Shrew; and part of his Language
I have made use of, with a little Alteration (which, for the satisfaction of
my Readers, I have distinguish’d by this Mark “ before each Line) and I
hope I may be allow’d (without Offence) to take Shakespear’s Tinker of
Burton-Heath, and make him the Cobler of Preston, as well as another: for
no single Person has yet pretended to have a Patent for plundering Old
Plays, how often soever he may put it in practice.”34 Bullock goes on to
note that he does not wish to be accused of “endeavouring to acquire the
Name of a Poet by transcribing from other Men’s Plays.”35 Although, he
does note that he wrote the play in an effort to scoop Drury Lane when
he heard they were preparing a play of the same name adapting the same
part of the same Shakespeare play, so wrote his own version in a few days
to get it on stage first because “I thought it might be of as good service to
our Stage as the other.”36 Bullock defends this undercutting as a common
historical practice in the theater which some people have only now “urg’d
against me for a Crime,” but which he prefers to see as the “intercepting
of Ammunition going to the Enemy, and afterwards employing it against
them.”37 Bullock is referring here to Charles Johnson’s The Cobler of
Preston (1716), which premiered the following week, after Bullock’s play
was staged.38 What is interesting here is the way in which Bullock negoti-
ates his intellectual and moral debt—or lack thereof—to both Shakespeare
and Johnson. He makes a point to demarcate Shakespeare’s words with
33
Judge, “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters,” 37–41, 58
34
Christopher Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, a Farce (London: 1716), vi–vii.
35
Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, viii.
36
Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, ix–x.
37
Bullock, The Cobler of Preston, ix.
38
See: Charles Johnson, The Cobler of Preston (London, 1716).
quotation marks so as not to be accused of claiming them as his own. But

because, as he wryly puts it, no one has “a Patent for plundering Old
Plays,” his Drury Lane rivals have no legitimate claim of ownership over
the idea or even the title. We might owe an intellectual debt to Shakespeare
that should be acknowledged, but Bullock embraces the notion that
Shakespeare does not belong to anyone, a notion that extends from
Shakespeare to anything he or his works inspire, although, as Bullock
points out, not everyone is quite so open-minded about the issue as he is
as he alludes to new arguments about the potential criminality of intellec-
tual poaching in the wake of the Statute of Anne. In his prologue to Love
in a Forest (1723), an adaptation of As You Like It, Johnson represents
himself as simply modernizing Shakespeare, proclaiming that “His whole
Ambition does, at most, aspire/ To tune the sacred Bard’s immortal
Lyre;/ The Scene from Time and Error to restore,/ And give the Stage,
from SHAKESPEAR one Play more.”39 Despite his claims of fine-tuning
the play, Johnson does make a number of large-scale changes, not least of
all by having Duke Senior entertained by the Rude Mechanicals’ Pyramus
and Thisbe performance from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By contrast,
the full title page of The Three Conjurors (1763), an adaptation of Macbeth
dedicated to the embattled MP John Wilkes, identifies the play as “Stolen
from Shakespeare.”40 I would argue that ‘stolen’ here refers to the intent
of the adaptation and the anonymous playwright’s use of Macbeth to make
a political point about Wilkes, tyranny, and the freedom of the press, as
opposed to doing something with Macbeth for Macbeth: he or she is pur-
posefully taking from Shakespeare with no intention of giving something
back to him.
Prior to the Statute of Anne, John Dryden provides one of the most
detailed accounts of what it meant to be both inspired by and to adapt or
appropriate Shakespeare, and the balancing act between reverence and
revision, inspiration and imitation. In the preface to his Troilus and
Cressida (1679), Dryden expresses his reverence for Shakespeare but notes
the weaknesses in his writing, which Dryden ascribes primarily to the defi-
ciencies of the English language while Shakespeare lived. Furthermore, he
criticizes the First Folio, laying the blame for its deficiencies at the feet of
“the Actors, who printed it after Shakespeare’s death; and that too, so
Charles Johnson, Love in a Forest: A comedy (London, 1723), 70.

39
The Three Conjurors, a Political Interlude. Stolen from Shakespeare (London, 1763), title
40
page.
80 J. H. POPE
carelessly, that a more uncorrect Copy I never saw.”41 Consequently, he

sees his work as an act of restoration more so than alteration: “because the
play was Shakespear’s; and that there appear’d in some places of it, the
admirable Genius of the Author; I undertook to remove that heap of
Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d.”42 He
then goes on to outline exactly where he has inserted new scenes or altered
existing ones, what he has “borrow’d” from Euripides, and his overall
approach to modernizing Shakespeare’s “obsolete” language.43 The play
proper begins with a prologue spoken by the ghost of Shakespeare who
begins by addressing the audience, “See, my lov’d Britons, see your
Shakespeare rise./ … / In this my rough-drawn Play, you shall behold/
Some Master-strokes, so manly and so bold/ That he, who meant to alter,
found ’em such/ He shook; and thought it Sacrilege to touch.”44 Robert
W. McHenry Jr. reads this as “an early expression of Bardolatry.”45
Shakespeare’s presence here implies the playwright’s approval of Dryden’s
work and, importantly, his lack of carelessness when altering the original
play—Dryden’s reverent hesitation and fear of sacrilegious intervention
tells the audience that every change has been carefully considered and
would be approved by Shakespeare. Equally interesting is Dryden’s allu-
sion to the ownership of Shakespeare. The ghost addresses himself to the
audience as “your Shakespeare,” the author giving himself over to the col-
lective ownership of Britons. Dryden thus creates a literal Shakespeare of
his own to proclaim that Shakespeare belongs to all of us, himself included.
Earlier in the preface, Dryden cites Longinus to proclaim, “We ought
not to regard a good imitation as a theft; but as a beautiful Idea of him
who undertakes to imitate, by forming himself on the invention and the
work of another man.”46 Whether an imitation is to be deemed theft or
not theft hinges not on what or how much of the original is imitated but
rather on the perceived aesthetic or literary value of the finished product.
41
John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida (London, 1769), np.
42
Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, np.
43
Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, ar.
44
Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, Pro.
45
Robert W. McHenry Jr., “Plagiarism and Paternity in Dryden’s Adaptations,” in
Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald
McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 15. McHenry offers a detailed examination of
Dryden’s sometimes anxious articulation of his debt to Shakespeare in the prefaces to a num-
ber of his adaptations through the paradigm of plagiarism.
46
Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, av.
A bad imitation is a theft, but a good one is a collaboration between two

authors in which imitative impulse becomes a ‘beautiful idea’ that ulti-
mately elevates the imitator by virtue of his ingenuity.47 Categories of
exclusion based on aesthetic or literary quality, however, are inherently
unstable. What exactly distinguishes a ‘good’ imitation from a ‘bad’ one?
By justifying his process in detail in the preface to Troilus and Cressida and
by staging Shakespeare’s approval, Dryden implies that his work is done in
the spirit of Shakespeare, an ambiguous claim of authenticity that simulta-
neously proclaims the deficiencies of the original text and writing while
asserting that the changes he made are the kinds that Shakespeare himself
would have made had he been alive in the 1670s and benefited from their
better sense of the English language.
Paradoxically, even as he goes to great lengths to explain his alterations
and improvements on the play—delineating Shakespeare from
Shakespearean—Dryden also confesses that the process has blended their
two voices together: “I am willing to acknowledge, that as I have often
drawn his English nearer to our times so I have sometimes conform’d my own
to his: & consequently, the Language is not altogether so pure, as it is
significant.”48 Through the process of reverent revision, both Shakespeare
and Dryden come to speak via a unified voice and in a language that is
neither wholly Shakespeare’s nor wholly Dryden’s. Dryden takes posses-
sion of Shakespeare, but in so doing Shakespeare also takes possession of
Dryden, an animate intellectual property possessed of some intangible
agency that ultimately takes the active form of Shakespeare’s ghost.
Additionally, Dryden’s claim that it is his responsible handling of
Shakespeare that makes his work ‘not theft’ anticipates Holderness’ pref-
erence to categorize his novels as ‘creative criticism’ rather than ‘fan fic-
tion’ because they embody “a dialogue between the play and its sources,
attempting to mediate between two historical periods.”49 Both perspec-
tives are quite distinct from Bullock’s suggestion that all imitations of
Shakespeare are acts of plundering, ones which do not need to be justified
or apologized for because you cannot steal what does not belong to any-
47
What Dryden embraces here is very much akin to Diana E. Henderson’s preference for
“diachronic collaborations” rather than ‘appropriations,’ evident here in Dryden’s under-
standing of himself as working with Shakespeare. See: Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations
with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell
48
Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, ar.
49
Holderness, “Shakespeare and the Undead,” 209.
82 J. H. POPE
one: that is, an idea inspired by an ‘Old Play.’ And yet Bullock is simulta-
neously clear that he does not want to be accused of stealing Shakespeare’s
words, which is why he uses quotation marks to distinguish Shakespeare’s
writing from his own for the reader, perhaps an implicit acknowledgment
of the recent Statute of Anne’s prohibition against verbatim reproduction.
By contrast, adapters from Dryden to David Garrick sought to represent
themselves as collaborators with Shakespeare, whether through harmoni-
ous amalgamation of voices in Troilus and Cressida or through Garrick’s
removal of “the Jingle and Quibble” from Romeo and Juliet (1748) or by
“judiciously blending … TATE and SHAKESPEARE” in King Lear
(1756).50 In an era of the emerging sense—and legal definition—of copy-
right that primarily applied to living authors and the replication of text,
adapters of Shakespeare articulated their engagement with him through
an ambiguous and shifting paradigm of theft, property crime, and com-
munal ownership that was a form of reverentially justified tampering with
outdated but admirable writing. And the more reverential the approach,
the less it was an act of theft. The perception of noble intentions has come
to undergird the modern sense of the custodial approach to Shakespeare
that sees ‘good’ Shakespeare as professional, adaptive, and scholarly
responsible, and ‘bad’ Shakespeare as amateur, appropriative, or intellec-
tually suspect (even if we cannot all agree on what exactly belongs to one
category or the other).
A key element of fandom and the identification of fan texts lies in the
distinction between professional and amateur, as well as between work and
play, distinctions that are—intentionally or not—equally grounded in cul-
tural and economic hierarchies conceptually separate serious professional
work from affective amateur play, as well as in the traditional connection
between professional work and cultural/economic production, and ama-
teur play and cultural/economic consumption. As Mark Duffett points
out, many critics of fandom draw an inextricable connection between fan-
dom and consumer culture, suggesting that fan activity is often, if not
50
Garrick, “To the Reader” in Romeo and Juliet in The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete
Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations, Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays,
Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 3, eds. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis
Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 77; “Introduction,” in
The Plays of David Garrick: A Complete Collection of the Social Satires, French Adaptations,
Pantomimes, Christmas and Musical Plays, Preludes, Interludes, and Burlesques, vol. 3, eds.
Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
primarily, about consumption. But Duffett rejects the primacy of con-

sumption to fans, emphasizing that “first, fans often like things for free,
and, second, … they are always more than consumers. They are more than
buyers and their transactions are purchased with a cultural interest that
goes beyond merely practicing the process of buying.”51 Setting aside
Shakespeare for the moment, I will examine some of the important fea-
tures of the professional/amateur and work/play divisions as they are
articulated in fan studies that offer a productive lens through which to
view Shakespeare before demonstrating how Shakespeare also complicates
these divisions in ways that necessitate a reconceptualization of what we
mean by ‘fan works’ or ‘fan texts,’ in the light of ownership paradigms that
I have outlined thus far. Simply by virtue of his (lack of) copyright status,
Shakespeare threatens to undermine many of the working definitions of
various fan practices, even as those same discussions and definitions help
shed new light on how we have been engaging with Shakespeare over the
centuries.
Connected to the issue of copyright is the question of whether we con-
sider fan creators amateurs or professionals, and their creations to be a
form of play or work. On the surface, these categories of distinction seem
straightforward. In our contemporary media environment, professional
work comes from cultural producers: say, HBO and the directors, writers,
producers, and actors working on Game of Thrones. These are the people
who get paid for their work by the network that produces the show and
who are ultimately responsible for establishing and disseminating the offi-
cial, canonical narrative and characterizations that comprise the fan object
that is the Game of Thrones fan object. Some of these cultural producers
are also responsible for enforcing the copyright status of their work.
Invested fans whose affection for that object who are motivated and
inspired to transform that object in some way, such as by writing fan fic-
tion, are typically prohibited from receiving financial compensation for
their efforts because they do not own the copyright. Fans thus do what
they do for free, which becomes a key distinction that divides professionals
from amateurs: professionals get paid to do what amateurs will do for little
or no compensation. Equally important is the implication of skill and qual-
ity, that professionals get paid to do what they do because they are better
at it than everyone else. In part, however, this is also a legal necessity.
51
Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 21.
84 J. H. POPE
Karen Hellekson notes that “Fans’ fear of cease-and-desist orders … has

resulted in a fannish convention of making no money from their projects,
thus relegating fans to amateur status.”52 By explicitly refraining from
seeking remuneration and giving their works away as gifts (such as by
uploading a fic to an online database), fans are able to—largely—avoid
being subjected to the enforcement of copyright laws that could result in
their writing being quashed or in the fan themselves being sued for dam-
ages/infringement. When fans seek financial compensation, “Play is now
labor, and the product itself either, it is argued, competes with the original
copyholder’s work or represents a product in which s/he should benefit.”53
As Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth note, when copyright is enforced against
fan creative output, cultural producers are ultimately defending them-
selves against the very audience they have sought to create and for acting
on the adulation they have sought to cultivate.54 Relegated to the status of
a hobby, fandom becomes conceptually a form of play rather than work,
which the fans’ actual jobs or income support provide the means and free
time to pursue, tolerated so long as it remains harmless.
Many of these legal issues remain roughly consistent and straightfor-
ward, shifting in line with broader cultural debates about intellectual
property, whether debates about sampling in the music industry in the
1980s and 1990s, or the more contemporary practice of streaming or
uploading videos of people playing videogames on platforms such as
YouTube and Twitch. But fans and fan studies scholars have done much to
explore the theoretical/ideological implications and history of a binary
that situates playful, gift-giving amateur consumers on one end and work-
ing, paid, professional producers on the other, hinging on the ability—or
inability—of either to participate in the literary or media marketplace.
Some of this exploration involves one of the questions that permeate the
present work: who owns a story? And what is the distinction between
derivative and inspired work? As Francesca Coppa argues, fan fiction can
only exist as a category within a system “where storytelling has been
52
Karen Hellekson, “Fandom and Fan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction, eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 157.
53
Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction,
Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor,” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no.
6 (2014): 1096.
54
Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,” 1092.
industrialized to the point that our shared culture is owned by others.”55

Building on Henry Jenkins’ work in Convergence Culture, she goes on to
suggest that fan fiction is best understood as “what happened to folk cul-
ture: to the appropriation of fables and the retellings of local legends, to
the elaborations of tall tales and drinking songs and ghost stories told
round the campfire,” separate from any formal marketplace.56
Consequently, situating fan creativity in the gift economy makes prag-
matic sense. However, as a number of fan scholars have argued, doing so
recapitulates the gendering of work. As Jenkins and others note, contem-
porary media fandom (beginning in the 1960s) and the writing of fan
fiction has historically been dominated by women and, later, other mar-
ginalized groups, with fan labor generally viewed as ‘women’s work,’ and
fannish affect—as we saw in Chap. 2—gendered female.57 Doing work
without compensation because it is emotionally fulfilling—payment
55
University of Michigan Press, 2017), 7.
56
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 7. Speaking about the American example in particular,
Jenkins argues that in the twentieth century, folk culture was largely displaced by mass media
to generate the stories that mattered to people, pushing folk practices underground. Fan
works represent “the public reemergence of grassroots creativity.” See: Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2006), 135–37.
57
Jenkins addresses this history throughout Textual Poachers. See also: Henry Jenkins,
Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London:
New York University Press, 2006), 43–54; Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 178; Patricia
Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” in
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2014), 101–14; Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media
Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen
42–54; Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories
of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen
71–72; Ross Haenfler, Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115–18; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91;
Karen Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” Cinema Journal 48,
no. 4 (Summer 2009): 116; Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,”
1093; As Hellekson and Busse note, in more recent years, “Gay, lesbian, bi, and trans fans,
fans of color, queer fans—all are now vocal and visible, and fan fiction, particularly slash, can
no longer be considered the aegis of straight white women.” See: Karen Hellekson and
Kristina Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 80.
86 J. H. POPE
enough—reinforces the patriarchal stereotype that men’s work is econom-

ically valuable and thus deserving of pay, whereas women’s work is less so,
and women’s labor—or, in the case of fan fiction, women’s creative
labor—is a gift freely given. Some fan scholars see recognizing fan labor as
a legitimate form of work and creative interpretation that is accommo-
dated by copyright laws as an issue of gender equity,58 with Abigail De
Kosnik in particular arguing that fan creativity does not have to belong to
the gift economy, encouraging fan authors, especially women, to monetize
labor that does, in fact, generate income indirectly by serving as free
“advertising for mass-marketed media products,” prolonging the lives of
those products by encouraging continued engagement with them.59
Alternately, Hellekson suggests that gendered gifting that objectifies the
female fan “turns one role of woman and gift on its head: the woman is
still the gift, but now she can give herself. This permits women agency that
they lack under traditional patriarchal models.”60 As Jenkins notes, the
tensions between cultural producers and cultural consumers as it relates to
fan creativity and the dissemination of that creativity comes down to two
economies—two “different systems of appraising and allocating value”—
interacting with one another, where in “One (commodity culture) places
greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (the gift economy) on
social motives,”61 economies that are inflected with gendered ideologies.
Gifting has further significance within fan communities, particularly in
the writing of fan fiction that is separate from—but not entirely discon-
nected from—the broader property, legal, and ideological considerations
discussed above. As Coppa notes, fan fiction is frequently conceived of and
written as a gift for the fan community as an act of reciprocity, of giving
back to the very community that has inspired a fan fiction writer to write
and which involves more than purely marketplace considerations of gift
giving, a system of social rather than financial obligations.62 And while
many fics—especially first-time fics—are gifts written to give back to the
community at large, many others are written as gifts for specific authors or
58
Flegel and Roth, “Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free,” 1104–05.
59
Abigail De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (Summer
2009): 124.
60
Hellekson, “A Fannish Field of Value,” 116.
61
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York and London: New York University Press,
2013), 63.
62
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 9–11.
in response to specific requests. I will deal with fanfic in more detail in the
next chapter, but two examples here will suffice. GloriaMundi explains
that they wrote “The Triumphs of the Amazon” in response to a general
request made by another user, AriadnesThread: “Ariadne’s Thread asked
for ‘anything involving the fairies … I’m also fascinated by the dynamic
between Theseus and Hippolyta. He captured her in battle, yet the first
words we hear them say to each other are deeply sensual: how did that
happen?’. This is my answer to that question.”63 Likewise, aTableofGreen’s
“13th Night: Malvolio’s Revenge” is identified as “a Shakespeare Birthday
Exchange gift for the wonderful runecestershire based on his title
prompt.”64 Fan fiction archives are populated with numerous examples of
‘gift fic,’ which can also include fan fiction written as part of community-
driven challenges or games—a different form of play than that which is
evident in the work–play dichotomy—that require writers to be clever and
innovative within a set of generic, narrative, or structural limitations.65 Fan
fiction thus has a necessary legal and economic basis in a gift economy in
relation to commodity culture as a whole, but the circulation and recipro-
cation of gifts within the community is also one of the most vital forms of
interaction that takes place between community members. Likewise, gifts
of time and experience are also given in the form of beta reading, the fan
fiction version of peer review and editorial assistance that is offered on a
voluntary basis.
Relegating fan works to an inferior category of amateur play ultimately
downplays and diminishes their status as frequently progressive acts of
cultural engagement and criticism. In recent years, popular culture has
been engaged in a very public debate about diversity and representation—
both in terms of its necessity and its limitations—in media texts. This is,
however, a very old debate for fan creators, whose work has often
responded to the lack of diversity and representation by forcibly refashion-
ing cultural texts to be more diverse and representative, carving out spaces
for more female voices and characters, inserting non-white or non-
63
GloriaMundi, “The Triumphs of the Amazon,” Archive of Our Own, Published
December 20, 2009, accessed, July 8, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/32333.
64
aTableofGreen, “13th Night: Malvolio’s Revenge,” Archive of Our Own, Published
April 22, 2015, accessed July 8, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3802597.
65
23. It is tempting to read some of Shakespeare’s own writing as part of this history, particu-
larly his sonnets. What is “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” if not a sonnet chal-
lenge fic?
88 J. H. POPE
Christian characters into existing WASP-y fictional worlds, exploring queer

or non-binary identities, desires, and relationships, or by disrupting chaste,
shame-based propriety through the inclusion of sex-positive eroticism. As
Lev Grossman reminds us, “Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just some-
thing you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you con-
sume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work
carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions
might not be to only way things have to be.”66 In many cases, the current
cultural debates about what is lacking in or problematic about media texts
were anticipated and addressed—sometimes radically so—in fan commu-
nities years, sometimes decades, ago. Fan works are frequently at their
most radical and ideological when, rather than revising or changing a plot
or characterization, they exploit the subversive potential of the text’s gaps
and silences by “teasing out the subtext” to “appropriate and redefine the
empty spaces and read the text against its industrial and historical
context.”67 Why assume, for example, that all media texts are composed of
heteronormative worlds unless otherwise stated?
Of course, Shakespeare adaptations and criticism has been doing this
kind of work for a long time as well. Many critics and adapters have pro-
moted subversive readings and interpretations of the plays and have
addressed the gaps and lacks of the text by doing essentially the same thing
that fans have been doing with Star Trek or Harry Potter, frequently pro-
duced by the purveyors of official culture, achievable in no small part
because of Shakespeare’s (lack of) copyright status. There are an infinite
number of examples of race- and/or gender-blind casting in productions
of the plays, all-female productions, queer adaptations, or ones that cri-
tique the ideologies and stereotypes of gender, race, class, and religion
that appear in the original play, too numerous to list here. And many of
these objects of official culture are produced for the marketplace, to be
performed on stages, in cinemas, in classrooms, or in print.
The distinction between amateur and professional Shakespeares, or
between the Shakespeare fan and the Shakespeare critic, is more nebulous
than the common use of these terms suggests. In some cases, as in
Edmonson and Wells’ use discussed above, ‘amateur’ carries with it dis-
tinctly ‘less than,’ pejorative connotations of intellectual inferiority. Others
66
Lev Grossman, “Forward,” in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, ed. Anne
Jamison (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), xiii.
67
Hellekson and Busse, “Fan Identity and Feminism,” 76.
have been more forgiving in their use of the term, although it still carries
with it hedging about things like quality and intellectual significance.
Writing about videos created and uploaded to YouTube by The Geeky
Blonde (Rhiannon McGavin), Stephen O’Neill claims that her “one-
woman performances bear the characteristic attributes of what can be vari-
ously described as fan, amateur, or … YouTube Shakespeares,” while also
noting that his essay is not an effort “to valorize the category of the ama-
teur.” In this configuration, ‘fan’ and ‘amateur’ become largely synony-
mous.68 Michelle K. Yost characterizes Shakespeare fan fiction as unpaid
“Shakespeare-related amateur fiction,” in contrast to “the world of profes-
sional adaptation.”69 In Shakespeare studies, the amateur fan is typically
seen as separate and distinct from the professional adapter and critic,
although the basis of this distinction is unclear, contingent as much on the
perception of a given text’s aesthetic or intellectual value (and the creden-
tials of its creator), as it is on its platform of dissemination or potential
remunerative value, and a distinction that preserves academia’s role as the
gatekeepers of Shakespeare.
So whereas some Shakespeare critics have dismissed fanfic as mimetic
and simplistic, others have gone to the opposite extreme to proclaim it as
a radical space for pushing beyond the limits of institutional Shakespeare
in particular. Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall describe fanfic as a
renegade art form that serves as the refreshing antithesis of academic stuff-
iness and “offers a radical and safe space for students and amateur
Shakespeareans alike to stretch their wings through a ridiculousness that
only exists, and can only exist, in the unmonitored marginalia of
academia.”70 In the process, they posit a somewhat misleading dichotomy
between fans and academics by implying that contemporary Shakespeare
criticism is largely closed to alternative, subversive readings of the plays
and that it presents Shakespeare as an “author-god,” thus maintaining the
“hegemonic discourses of domination that infest all of Shakespeare’s
68
Stephen O’Neill, “Theorizing User Agency in YouTube Shakespeare,” in The Shakespeare
User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, eds. Valerie M. Fazel and
Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 130.
69
Cambridge University Press, 2018), 193, 195.
70
Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom,
and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 29.
90 J. H. POPE
work” while ignoring the fact that “Shakespeare is dated.”71 Going fur-
ther, they argue that “[t]he discourse of fanfiction operates opposite the
authoritative discourse” of academia, and that the two are so dialectically
opposed that it may not be possible to bring fan fiction to academia or vice
versa.72 There are a number of problems with this line of argument, pri-
marily because Shakespeare scholarship is not so universally conservative
and fanfic so universally radical as they suggest. To rehearse all of the
examples here would be tedious and tangential, but suffice it to say that
Shakespeare criticism has been mining the subversive potential of the plays
and poems for a number of decades and without finding a universal infes-
tation of hegemonic oppression in the process. While it may be tempting
to proclaim that Shakespeare is dated (which must literally be true in some
respects regarding someone who died 400 years ago), the proliferation of
alternative Shakespeares in criticism, theater, film, and adaptations more
generally—including fan fiction—indicates that this fact is perhaps not as
self-evident as Finn and McCall suggest. Indeed, criticism and fanfic can
often be seen doing similar work through different means and methods.
Fan works such as fan fiction are often written about as subversive or
countercultural texts produced to resist the hegemonic ideologies and
assumptions that are evident in the original text.73 Slash, for example, forc-
ibly carves out a space for queer representation in films and television
shows that are hesitant or unwilling to do so. Likewise, fan fiction that
focuses on under- or misrepresented gender, racial, or religious categories
serves as a political or activist intervention into whitewashed, patriarchal,
or homogenous fictional worlds. This approach is particularly evident in
early fan scholarship by Jenkins and others that typically focuses on the
subversive potential of fan activities. Certainly, such works proliferate in
the Shakespeare fan fiction community just as they do in the Star Wars,
Star Trek, and Harry Potter fan fiction communities. However, in the case
of Shakespeare, what culture is being countered is more difficult to pin
down. If, for example, academic discourse is what is perceived as being
resisted, it is important for us to keep in mind that Shakespeare has found
a home in numerous theoretical approaches that have consistently sought
to subvert dominant ideologies and to emphasize the multivalent potential
71
Finn and McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan,” 32–33.
72
Finn and McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan,” 36–37.
73
Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the
Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662.
of the texts. University students today will regularly encounter feminist,

queer, ecocritical, and many other approaches to Shakespeare’s plays and
characters (the extent to which such interpretations will be encountered
obviously depends heavily on the individual classroom or department
within which the encounter takes place). The location of the authority that
fans resist or play with is difficult to determine, especially when elements
of those resisted institutions are doing some of the same kind of work, and
especially when these subversive texts have been produced for the
marketplace.
In the absence of a copyright holder for Shakespeare, academics serve
as the pro bono defenders of his intellectual property, with the stakes
being their own professional and interpretive integrity. With no studio,
publisher, or family to assert control, Shakespeare scholars play that role,
as evident in their attacks against the film Anonymous, in which many
notable scholars denounced the film in terms that might sound familiar to
a lawyer trying to squash fan fiction. The issue of copyright and ownership
is important not just in terms of who profits and whether or not certain
stories can be told because of notions of intellectual property, but because
of how we experience the narrative world as unified or fragmented. This
gets to the issue of the multiplicity of ‘official’ Shakespeares in contrast to
the singularity of the official narrative of other media worlds/texts/films.
As Henry Jenkins has noted, “transmedia storytelling” is a dominant
mode of entertainment today, particularly in the context of franchise sto-
rytelling: “Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully
experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters
and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, com-
paring notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborat-
ing to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away
with a richer entertainment experience.”74 In transmedia storytelling, the
official, canonical narrative is widely dispersed across a variety of texts.
Important here is the centralized nature of transmedia storytelling, some-
thing that those in control of the Stars Wars universe have excelled at for
many years. In its current incarnation since Disney’s acquisition of
Lucasfilm in 2012, the canonical Star Wars narrative is dispersed across:
the core films (Episodes I–IX) as well as the spinoff ‘Star Wars Stories,’
Rogue One and Solo; a wide range of novels (Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath
novels) and comic books (Marvel’s Darth Vader and Princess Leia series)
Jenkins Convergence Culture, 20–21.

74
92 J. H. POPE
that fill in the narrative gaps of the films and the backstories or adventures
of minor and major characters; television shows (Rebels, Resistance); vid-
eogames (EA’s Battlefront series); character and vehicle encyclopedias;
websites (Holonetnews.com). The official Star Wars universe and narrative
is expansive and multifaceted, consumable as the core films alone or across
transmedia texts in as small or as large chunks as the individual wishes or
desires to invest time and money into. As expansive as that universe is, it is
also singular and hierarchical, with Episodes I–IX of primary importance
and everything else subservient to that narrative according to the indi-
vidual fan: some will read the novels but not the comics; some will play the
videogame but not read the novels; some will watch the television shows
but not visit the websites. All of this is done in varying configurations
according to tastes and preferences of the individual fan.
With Shakespeare, however, the fan experience can be similar, but it is
also very different due to the multiplicity of ‘official’ Shakespeares in
which Shakespeare as text/author is dispersed into an infinite multiplicity
of Shakespeares. As readers, students, and fans of Shakespeare, we experi-
ence him through the same modes of transmedia storytelling as we can/
do Star Wars: through the text and performance of the plays, through
films and novels, through class lectures, and so forth. However, these
transmedial Shakespeares are not unified by the same centralized narrative
canonicity, with narrative authority dispersed amongst them, with canon-
icity newly and repeatedly constituted by local clusters or individual
instances of texts, interpretations, performances, films, and so on.
Shakespeare fandom can thus be a response to a wide range of official
Shakespeares that are not accessible to or experienced by all fans. Very few
of you have likely seen the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in Corner Brook, Newfoundland that I saw as a teenager that first cap-
tured my own imagination about Shakespeare, but it is generally true that
Star Wars fans have all seen the same version—or versions, to include the
re-releases—of Return of the Jedi.
One of the challenges evident in evaluating Shakespeare as a fan object
is that it is increasingly rare for fans to initially find their way to Shakespeare
outside of some formal education system. Unlike other fan objects which
attract new fans through a web of individual discoveries, peer
recommendations, or cross-pollination from other fandoms, such an

organic discovery of Shakespeare is comparatively rare. While it is unlikely
that a new viewer will encounter Star Wars for the first time in a class-
room, it is probable that Shakespeare will indeed be encountered in this
context. Such first contact has implications for how the parameters and
dominant discourses of the fandom are articulated. In particular,
Shakespeare fandom is often articulated in relation—sometimes positively,
sometimes negatively—to academic discourse and didacticism. Thus, that
which can instigate fandom is also that thing which is responsible for sti-
fling it. Such paradox is central to participatory culture as a whole, just in
a slightly different form (a form which is also evident in Shakespeare fan-
dom). That is, the fan object is the focus of one’s adulation and desire to
play in its world, but to do so simultaneously recognizes that the object is
lacking in something that participation provides, a lack that may be col-
lectively or individually felt: more world building, more time spent with a
character or group of characters, more or different relationships, more
inclusive representation, alternative narrative choices, and so forth. To be
a fan is thus to have one’s desires stimulated without being fully satisfied,
necessitating a fan’s need to push beyond the perceived limits of the object
even as those limits might be part of what comprises the fan’s desires. Such
desire-lack is clearly evident in expressions of Shakespeare fandom as it is
in other fandoms: Viola/Olivia and Kirk/Spock ‘shipping’—the fannish
desire to see characters in a romantic relationship, whether or not the pair-
ing is ever offered by the text—each expresses a desire for the fan object
(Twelfth Night and Star Trek) and a desire for more—or more explicit—
queer pairings in that object to the point that the fan feels compelled to
provide what the object does not.
When Shakespeare fandom emerges from an academic context, the
desire-lack paradox extends beyond the text to the context of its convey-
ance. Academia might open Shakespeare up to the fan, but it is also popu-
larly perceived to denigrate emotional investment, counterfactualism, and
self-generated engagement. It does this by establishing rigid criteria for
how to engage with and interpret the plays, legitimizing some interpreta-
tions while shutting down others, offering a variety of authorized interpre-
tations and dismissing others as insufficiently researched or argued, making
claims that Shakespeare belongs to us all and is for all time while seeming
to contradict that claim by promoting prescriptive, exclusionary forms of
belonging (write this way, argue this way, research this way, theorize this
way, etc.). This is certainly not the case in all educational contexts (a
cursory search of universities across the globe reveals many exciting

approaches to teaching Shakespeare), but the perception within the fan
community is often that academia is as stifling as it is invigorating, opening
up Shakespeare to numerous possible readings but also determining
94 J. H. POPE
exclusionary parameters for how those readings should be conducted and

conveyed, legitimizing some because they play by the rules of academia
and invalidating others because they do not.
In many ways, this relationship between the academy and the student
of Shakespeare mirrors the fraught relationship between cultural produc-
ers and consumers that undergirds contemporary fandoms as authors,
filmmakers, publishing houses, movie studios, and a whole host of other
entities who own the constituent parts of an intellectual property dictate
the acceptable parameters for expressions of fandom and limits of accept-
able participation. ‘You can do this with Harry Potter, but not this,’ we are
told by J. K. Rowling and/or Warner Brothers (WB). In June 2018, for
example, Harry Potter fans learned that WB was becoming more active in
putting an end to unofficial fan festivals and gatherings such as a quidditch
tournament in Philadelphia. According to WB’s statement to the
Associated Press, “Warner Bros. is always pleased to learn of the enthusi-
asm of Harry Potter fans, but we are concerned, and do object, when fan
gatherings become a vehicle for unauthorized commercial activity.” In
response, one frustrated and disappointed organizer commented: “Magic
existed before Harry Potter, and you can’t put a trademark on enthusiasm
and creativity.”75
The difference within the academy, of course, is that the teachers and
professors of Shakespeare have no such legalistic claim of ownership over
the author or his works, and in many respects are doing the work of the
fan in the name of scholarship, establishing a hierarchy of academic objec-
tivism and theorization over fannish enthusiasm and speculation. The
apparent hypocrisy of this perspective emerges in high contrast when aca-
demics laud non-traditional and inventive adaptations of Shakespeare or
scholarly interpretations that students feel are themselves unfounded and
disconnected from the text as they have read or experienced it, but which
are accepted because such adapters speak to the critical or theoretical
desires of the scholar. Academics, it seems, are the self-selected group
dictating which interpretations matter and which ones do not, much to
the chagrin of readers and audiences who feel their interpretations and
desires are equally valid. Furthermore, this interpretive authority is decen-
tralized, constituted, and reconstituted in disparate classrooms every day
75
Kristen De Groot, “Warner Bros. Crackdown Puts Dark Mark Over Potter Festivals,”
AP News, Published June 16, 2018, accessed July 10, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/77
daf58afa7f4bf2a45f93a93a59cdc8.
under the tutelage of individual instructors: psychoanalytical insight

lauded in one classroom is anachronistic counterfactualism dismissed in
another (in this regard, we need look no further than the extent to which
Hamlet’s Oedipus complex is promoted or rejected). What is the
Shakespeare fan to do when confronted with the apparent didactic, arbi-
trary, self-fulfilling professional authority of institutional Shakespeare? The
answer for many is to write fan fiction.
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CHAPTER 4
“the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online

Fan Fiction
Remember the part in The Tempest when Kirk and the crew of the starship
Enterprise land on Prospero’s island?1 Or in Twelfth Night when Antonio
is spurned by Orsino, the man he loves, in the nineteenth-century gold-
mining town of Illyria, California?2 Or the dramatic crocodile cook-off
during which Claudius accidentally poisons himself that resolves the polit-
ical discord of Hamlet?3 Or Kate’s soliloquy at the end of Taming of the
Shrew during which she expresses regret for her too-convincing perfor-
mance of wifely submission to Petruchio who has left her feeling trapped
and afraid in an emotionally abusive relationship?4 In the chapter that fol-
lows, I delve into the multifaceted and ever-expanding world of online
Shakespeare fan fiction, which gives voice to all of these scenarios and
many more. Fan fiction grants readers an opportunity to participate in,
play with, and sometimes radically refashion the texts they consume
according to any criteria they deem fit. Although online, unpaid fan fiction
predominates discussions of the form, is it clear that such works are part of
1
planet_plantagenet, “Tempest/Star Trek Crossover,” Archive of Our Own, Published
July 6, 2016, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/7401964.
2
fiftysevenacademics, “Antonio Evens the Score,” Archive of Our Own, Published April
23, 2015, accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3808588.
3
a_t_rain, “The Great Danish Crocodile Cook-Off,” Archive of Our Own, Published May
4
beacandy, “Exit, Katherine,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 19, 2015,
accessed July 19, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827524.

100 J. H. POPE
the long history of Shakespeare adaptation and criticism, regardless of

whether these works are made available for free online or sold to consum-
ers and paying audiences. Paid or unpaid, fan fiction is primarily concerned
with established characters originating in prior works, written for a reader-
ship that shares a similar interest in and knowledge regarding those char-
acters as the author. Nevertheless, digital databases have created unique
environments wherein fan authors have generated idiomatic tropes and
reading practices to create texts unbound by considerations of length,
marketability, appropriateness, or courting a mass readership that can
undoubtedly lead new readers in particular to view them as entirely dis-
tinct forms of adaptation.
Although fan studies has covered considerable ground in illuminating
the wide variety of fan practices and works that are available across a diverse
range of fandoms, fan fiction remains as one of the predominant foci of its
interest. And for good reason: as of July 2019, archiveofourown.org
(hereafter AO3) houses over 207,000 fics on the Harry Potter books and
movies alone, a large number indeed, but only a fraction of the over five
million texts available on the site. Other popular sites and archives such as
wattpad.com, livejournal.com, and fanfiction.net push those totals even
higher, with new fics available every day. With few prohibitions against
posting fics on multiple sites simultaneously, the potential for the same fic
to be posted with different titles by different users, and the proliferation of
other archives in addition to the ones named above, it is impossible to
offer any definitive final tally of the number of fics available for even a
single fandom on the internet. Between July 2018 and July 2019 alone,
AO3 added approximately 500,000 users and 1,000,000 texts. The sheer
quantity of available texts poses challenges to any researcher seeking to
establish feasible parameters for an academic study because an exhaustive,
comprehensive study is impossible for all but the least vocal of fandoms. I
have chosen to focus on Shakespeare fan fiction available on AO3 for a
number of reasons. As one of the most popular archives, it offers readers a
wide and representative range of fan fiction that is immediately accessible
without requiring readers to register for an account. For each fic that is
uploaded to AO3, authors have the option to tag their stories with brief
descriptions of (and sometimes warnings about) the content and style of
the fic, and these tags appear both in the search results and the header
before the individual fic (tagging will be discussed in more detail later in
the chapter). Additionally, AO3 provides metadata and paratextual com-
mentary along with each text that makes it a particularly appealing archive
4 “THE REST IS …”: SHAKESPEARE AND ONLINE FAN FICTION 101
for researchers. Along with date of initial publication and last date updated,
each entry gives a word count, hit count, and kudos count (kudos are akin
to ‘likes’ on Facebook, typically left by readers who enjoyed the fic). The
ability of the reader to see both the date the fic was published as well as the
date it was last updated in important in a culture and community that
routinely posts and reads unfinished works and works that are uploaded
serially. All fics are thus living, malleable texts that can be altered or
removed entirely at the discretion of the author, whether in response to
reader feedback or their own inspiration and motivations.
Fics are preceded by a summary in which the author can tell readers
something about what they are about to read, and fics are often followed
by a ‘Notes’ section in which the author might provide further informa-
tion regarding something in the narrative or about the writing process.
Readers are permitted to leave comments at the bottom of the fic, and it
is not uncommon for authors to engage with and respond to these com-
ments. In contrast to the broader internet community, the comments sec-
tion for fan fiction tends to be a positive and supportive space where
readers leave encouraging or affective responses, express a desire to see the
work continue, or compliment the author’s style, and where the authors
say some version of ‘thank you’ or discuss either specific struggles or points
of pride they encountered while writing. AO3 contains standard ‘terms of
use’ policies regarding harassment and abusive comments, but encounter-
ing negative comments is relatively rare, especially when reading in the
various Shakespeare fandoms. While this is reflective of the overall sup-
portive and reciprocal culture of the fanfic community, it is also reflective
of how readers use the database, filtering results by genre, tags, and con-
tent warnings. Regular users read what they want to read and, when armed
with an understanding of fanfic terminology, can easily avoid specific texts
or whole genres they might find offensive or just not to their tastes.
Additionally, when comments and kudos are offered by registered users,
readers can click on their usernames to see what they have written or com-
mented on elsewhere on AO3. As such, AO3 was the most attractive
archive for me to work on, even though other sites use some of—or varia-
tions on—these types of metadata and paratextual information.
Before moving on to a more precise discussion of Shakespeare fan fic-
tion, it is important that we first map some of the terrain of fan fiction,
terrain that can feel very alien to a first-time reader. Throughout the book
as a whole, I have endeavored to engage with fan works and fandoms on
their own terms, and the terms of engagement become heightened in any
102 J. H. POPE
discussion of fanfic. On the most basic level, I use the synonymous terms
‘fan fiction’ and ‘fanfic’ to refer to the body of writing as a whole, insofar
as we can conceive of it as a genre unto itself with perceptible boundar-
ies—even murky ones—for inclusion and exclusion. Consistent with the
fan fiction community, I use ‘fic’ or ‘fics’ to refer to the individual texts
themselves, in no small part to avoid the awkward sound of writing about
‘a fan fiction’ or something cumbersome like ‘a fan fiction text.’ Using the
general term ‘fic’ also helps overcome the challenges posed by writing
about a group of texts that incorporate any imaginable genre, style, or
length. While it might be accurate to describe some of these texts as short
stories, poems, plays, novellas, novels, and so forth, such categories are
not applicable to every fic, regardless of length or style. These terms will
be used when relevant to discussions of specific fics, but—as will become
evident—it would be inaccurate and misleading to characterize every
4000-word prose fic as a short story, for example. Similarly, I aim to avoid
forcing fanfic to conform to the terminology we might be comfortable
with as Shakespeare scholars and rather to employ the terminology of the
community itself and of fan studies more generally. In his important
Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002), Douglas Lanier offered
one of the earliest efforts to address Shakespeare fan fiction, grappling
with it by disconnecting fanfic from its own terms of reference and recat-
egorizing it according to his own preferred classifications, grounded in
what he saw as the narrative strands of the genre: extrapolated narrative,
interpolated narrative, remotivated narrative, revisionary narrative, reori-
ented narrative, and hybrid narrative.5 Doing this, however, forces fanfic
into a false sense of overarching coherence that prioritizes narrative, even
though these categories certainly offer useful ways to assess a large body of
fanfic. So while narrative priority is certainly important for many fics, there
are also subgenres of fanfic that do not find easy homes in Lanier’s catego-
ries, such as ‘PWP’ (Plot? What Plot?, or Porn Without Plot) or ‘fluff’ fics
that are not narrative in any conventional sense, or ‘drabbles,’ fics that are
exactly one hundred words long.
As Francesca Coppa notes, fan fiction is accessible to all, but it is written
for a relatively small audience of readers and fellow writers who are well
versed—or who are in the process of becoming well versed—in the termi-
nology, genres, tropes, insider jokes, and modes of expression of the fanfic
5
Press, 2002), 83.
community. However, this “has resulted in a series of literary practices and

conceits that make perfect sense if you’re a part of the culture—and may
be incomprehensible to those outside of it.”6 Fanfic frequently employs
genres and tropes that will be unfamiliar to the novice reader. Some of
these genres have parallels in the rich history of Shakespeare adaptation,
which is part of what makes Shakespeare fanfic unique: it often has a tex-
tual or performative counterpart outside the world of fan fiction itself,
which is not often the case for the vast majority of media fandoms. The
fanfic genre that has garnered perhaps the most critical attention is ‘slash,’
which inserts or teases out male-male romantic or sexual relationships in
the fan object (female-female pairings are typically referred to as ‘fems-
lash,’ and straight pairings as ‘het’). The name ‘slash’ refers to the forward
slash between the names of the characters who are being ‘slashed’ in the
fic, whether Kirk/Spock in Star Trek (one of the preeminent slash couples
in fanfic), Holmes/Watson in Sherlock Holmes, or Romeo/Mercutio or
Olivia/Viola. Although some slash is quite sexually explicit, much of it—
especially in Shakespeare fanfic—focuses on emotional rather than physical
intimacy. Whereas tvecking depicts Romeo and Mercutio in an intimate
but non-explicit vignette in “Just this once,” benvoliio offers up a much
more explicit slashing of Mercutio and Tybalt in “Patience Perforce.”7 In
‘genderswap’ fics, the genders of key characters (sometimes one, some-
times more) are changed, such as in “Hamlette” by hamlets_scribe, which
swaps the genders of both Hamlet and Horatio (and femslashes them in
the process).8 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse suggest that the use of
insular terminology and categorization serves a community-building func-
tion: “This use of acronyms and cryptic terms deliberately excludes those
unaware of their meaning. Part of the task of the newbie is to sort through
the unfamiliar terms and come to an understanding of their meaning. The
exclusionary nature of the discourse enculturates the newbie and cements
6
University of Michigan Press, 2017), ix.
7
tvecking, “Just this once,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 6, 2018, accessed
August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/13890330; benvoliio, “Patience
Perforce,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 6, 2018, accessed August 7, 2018, https://
archiveofourown.org/works/14225991/chapters/32798499.
8
hamlets_scribe, “Hamlette,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 21, 2014, accessed
August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668677.
104 J. H. POPE
the online community.”9 While the community is open to all, its nomen-
clature forces new readers to adapt to its terms of engagement rather than
providing them with an expected, if modified, set of conventions or points
of reference.
Whereas genres such as slash and genderswap enable fanfic writers and
readers to explore alternatives that are unavailable in the official version of
the text, we do not have to look far to find queer or genderswapped adap-
tations of Shakespeare on screen or stage. The stage from Shakespeare’s
time (and before) down to the present has been a transvestive space in
which genderswapping has been a visceral and visible aspect of the history
of these plays, whether in the all-male companies of Elizabethan actors
that Shakespeare wrote for, Charlotte Cushman playing Romeo and
Hamlet in the nineteenth century, or Erica Whyman’s choice to cast a
female Escalus and Mercutio in her 2018 RSC production of Romeo and
Juliet and simultaneously swap the genders of the characters as well in
order to “delve deeper into questions of identity” by exploring how lines
spoken by women accrue different meanings than when those same lines
are spoken by men.10 Readers of Shakespeare fanfic who are themselves
familiar with the rich adaptive and critical history of the plays will likely
find genderswapping to be at least somewhat conventional and familiar.
Or at least more familiar than a first-time Harry Potter fanfic reader
encountering a genderswapped Harry, Hermione, or Dumbledore. By
contrast, fanfic genres that are well known within the community such as
‘wingfic’ (in which characters, sometimes suddenly and inexplicably,
sprout wings) or ‘mpreg’ (male characters become pregnant), or the ‘sex
pollen’ trope in which characters—frequently unlikely pairs or groups—
have sex with one another while under the influence of an ingested alien
or magical pollen (on closer inspection, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to
the effects of the love-in-idleness flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream),
may seem entirely alien and strange to the wandering Shakespearean.
However, such genres and tropes “and literally hundreds more are as
familiar to fans as the bildungsroman, lyric, tragedy, elegy, and epic are to
literary scholars.”11
9
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Fan Fiction
and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse
(Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 12.
10
Erica Whyman, “Queering the Pitch,” Romeo and Juliet Program (Stratford-upon-
Avon: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2018), np.
11
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 9.
I will emphasize here that I make very little effort to assess fanfic accord-
ing to my own subjective standards of quality, taste, or appropriateness to
establish criteria for ‘good’ or ‘successful’ fanfic, nor do I aim to critique
the talents of the individual writers. As noted in the previous chapter, such
criteria have the effect of arbitrarily hierarchizing texts, a problem that is
heightened when assessing online fic archives in particular.12 In fanfic com-
munities, authors might be writing for a general audience, to satisfy the
request of a specific, individual reader (the ‘gift fic’ alluded to in the previ-
ous chapter), or to satisfy their own personal desires to transform a text.
Some are writing in response to the many challenges issued within fanfic
communities, such as the Yuletide challenge in which pairs of writers are
assigned a set number of characters from a rare fandom (one deemed rela-
tively obscure by the fan community at large) by each other, with pairs
matched randomly based on what fandoms they are offering to write in
and which ones they are requesting fics from. The resulting fics are them
exchanged on December 25, secret-Santa style (or pseudonymous-Santa
style). Some fics are highly polished and edited, whereas others are pur-
posefully written within specific temporal or spatial constraints, and still
others are posted—and identified—as unfinished works in progress (WIP).
Some are written by grade school students, others by university professors.
Some fics contain shockingly graphic descriptions of sex and violence,
whereas other individual writers or communities conform to self-imposed
guidelines of perceived taste. In what follows, I strive to write about
Shakespeare fan fiction as it exists across the available spectrum, regardless
of length, style, or content in order to best assess the diverse ways in which
Shakespeare’s fans put him to work without casting aspersions on them for
how or why they do it.
12
Cornel Sandvoss offers a wonderful discussion of the contentious debate regarding aes-
thetic value in the assessment of fan works as texts, but also of fan studies (and, more broadly,
cultural studies) as a field, arguing that “we need to formulate aesthetic categories that avoid
the absolutism of traditional textual interpretation as much as the relativism of poststructur-
alism and deconstructionism.” See: Cornel Sandvoss, “The Death of the Reader?: Literary
Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture,” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds.
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 73–74. See
also: Matt Hills, “Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgments in Media and
Cultural Studies,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds.
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York and London: New York
106 J. H. POPE
Regardless of the presence of narrative development in a given fic, it is

also generally true that fanfic prioritizes character above all else and fre-
quently seeks to mine the authenticity of characters who exist in prior
works written by other authors in order to extrapolate on how those char-
acters might speak, behave, and respond to new situations. Expanding on
the work of Mary Ellen Curtain, Coppa articulates fanfic’s interest in char-
acter by contrasting it with science fiction. Whereas science fiction is spec-
ulative fiction that asks ‘what if?’ questions about the world (i.e., what if
the world was different in some essential way? What if we ran out of oil, or
could travel at the speed of light?), fan fiction is speculative fiction that
often asks ‘what if?’ questions about specific characters (i.e., what if Draco
Malfoy was in love with Harry Potter? Or what if Hamlet had killed
Claudius while his stepfather prayed?).13 The ‘what ifs?’ of fanfic range
from situational (how would a character react if y happened rather than x?)
to probing issues of class (what if Bruce Wayne was working class?) and
identity (what if Spock was queer?), to the fantastical (what if Romeo was
a vampire?). In many cases, then, fanfic aims to—playfully or seriously—
search out the supposed core of an individual character or group of char-
acters and to extrapolate on what we know—or think we know—about
them and to preserve what is authentic or recognizable regardless of the
changed context. I use terms like ‘authentic’ and ‘essential,’ however, with
some obvious caveats that render them largely meaningless insofar as they
are accepted as truly authentic or essential because what is regarded as
authentic about a character is highly subjective and varies from fan to fan,
and is often debated by factions within a fandom. In a comment about
narrative canon that extends equally to character authenticity, Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse note that “Complete agreement on what
comprises canon is rarely possible, even with repeated viewings of the pri-
mary source, because of the range of individual interpretations.”14 But
readers of fan fiction expect to see these essential, if also subjective, truths
represented or else the fic loses its coherence and pleasure as fan fiction.15
If an author reimagines Harry Potter as a sailor on a naval ship but the
character does not say or do anything that is recognizably Potter-esque, or
he is clean cut with no lightning bolt scar or need for corrective lenses,
13
Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader, 12–13.
14
Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction: Work in Progress,” 9.
15
Seren, 2005), 67.
then the fic will likely be deemed a failure by many readers regardless of
the merits of the piece of writing as a whole: fan fiction must “be in con-
stant dialogue with the source text’s characters, already fully realized and
well known to the story’s readers.”16 Narrative or other ‘literary’ consid-
erations certainly are not unimportant in fan fiction, but they are fre-
quently subservient to character considerations, emphasized by the fact
that many tags (discussed below) that accompany fics foreground issues of
characterization. The ability of readers to recognize those characters is key,
and the priority of character is evidenced by the general dearth of OCs
(original characters written by the fic author who interact with characters
and worlds of the fan object) in fan fiction, with the exception of Real
Person Fic (RPF) which will be discussed in the next chapter.
As Anne Jamison notes, “Fic makes no claims to ‘stand on its own.’ It
doesn’t need anyone to point out its props and sources because it doesn’t
hide them; it celebrates them. A work of fic might stand on its own as a
story—it might be intelligible to readers unfamiliar with its source—but
that’s not its point.”17 This is one of the ways in which fan works, not just
fanfic, are distinct from adaptation more generally. Insofar as The Lion
King (1994) is an adaptation of Hamlet, it seeks to stand on its own as a
film on its own terms, and for many viewers who have initially seen the
film without an awareness of its adaptive status, this is certainly the case.
Any time I teach a Shakespeare and film course, a healthy proportion of
the class is discovering this connection for the first time, a revelation that
is part of the pleasure of teaching the film in the first place because it offers
an opportunity to both defamiliarize and recontextualize a movie that
many students are already intimately familiar with. By contrast, fanfic
assumes that the reader is there in the first place because of that connec-
tion, because, as Sheenagh Pugh argues, these readers—and writers, too—
are motivated by a desire to see either (or both) ‘more of’ or ‘more from’
established characters and narratives.18 Again, recognition is key, and it is
expected by the writers because fanfic is not just written by fans, it is writ-
ten for fans. Allusions to other authors, texts, and fandoms abound in
individual fics that may or may not be recognized by all readers, but if you
16
Deborah Kaplan, “Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative,” in Fan
Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina
Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 136.
17
14.
18
108 J. H. POPE
are reading Star Wars fanfic, it is expected that you recognize its world and
characters. Otherwise, why are you reading it?
Readers who have never encountered fanfic before are likely to be over-
whelmed at first not just by the sheer volume of texts available but in its
own unique subgenres and tropes, all of which is accompanied by a
community-specific set of terms that are not in wide use outside of fanfic
archives and yet which are used with ease and currency within that com-
munity. Indeed, some tropes are tied to a specific fanfic community and
may find little use outside of that community, so when experienced readers
first encounter a new fandom, they may be knowledgeable about general
fanfic conventions but not about all of the community-specific ones. While
there are certainly plenty of ‘missing scene’ fics that seek to fill in narrative
gaps in Shakespeare’s plays (what is Benvolio up to when he is not on stage
in Romeo and Juliet, or what exactly did Hamlet do with Polonius’ body?)
or fics set either before or after the narrative of a given play (what would
Kate and Petruchio’s marriage be like following the events of Act 5?),
readers will also quickly encounter other types of writing as well. In addi-
tion to those fics that stick to the canonical narratives of the plays, there
are many alternative universe (AU) fics that take characters from one play
and transplant them into other narratives and temporalities. In some cases,
these AUs can take a very recognizable form that mirrors trends in film
and theater adaptations, such as transposing a play to a modern setting as
megvad does with Romeo and Juliet in “Romance and Justice,” reimaging
Prince Escalus as the principal of Verona High School and Tybalt as a
brooding goth, characters that could be at home in the films 10 Things I
Hate About You or She’s the Man.19 Other AU fics alter plots or character-
izations (i.e., Mercutio is not killed, or Romeo pursues a relationship with
Rosaline instead of Juliet), sometimes in very novel ways. In “Toys of
Desperation” by TheHazardsofLove13, Horatio is a vampire who revives
Hamlet with his own blood following the duel at the end of the play.20 In
crossover fics, characters are transported from one play to interact with
characters from other plays, such as when Romeo meets Nick Bottom in
Gardenostalgic’s “To Mar the Foolish Fates.”21 In many crossovers,
19
megvad, “Romance and Justice,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 7, 2017, accessed
July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/10848702/chapters/24086955.
20
TheHazardsofLove13, “Toys of Desperation,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 10,
2018, accessed July 19, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14893634.
21
Gardenostalgic, “To Mar the Foolish Fates,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 6,
Shakespeare’s characters find themselves interacting with characters from

Star Trek, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or from any other
world (or combination of worlds) of characters. Nayoky’s “The Twelfth
Trap,” for example, crosses over Twelfth Night with the Marvel Cinematic
Universe and the Lindsay Lohan film The Parent Trap (1998).22 Whereas
some crossover fic writers blend together a minimal number of texts and
characters that speak to each other in thematic or novel ways, others bring
together a hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated characters that reflect the
individual reading and viewing practices of the fic author. And although
such wide-ranging crossovers can feel anarchic and absurdist, they also lay
bare the diverse reading habits of both fans and the population at large. As
individual readers, we all bring a unique constellation of interests and
experiences to any text, sparking connections that might arise from re-
reading a play after having watched an episode of a favorite television
show. Crossover transforms that often passive, epiphanous individual
moment of recognition into an active textual encounter.
When assessing fanfic, it is also important that we do not generalize too
broadly about what it is and why it is because nothing we come up with
will be wholly accurate, as evidenced by some of the core debates about
fanfic. On one extreme, fanfic is dismissed as unoriginal, derivative, and
obsessive, a stigma against which fan scholars have been pushing for three
decades, a pejorative understanding of what motivates those who want
‘more of’ their fan objects that ties back to the property theft paradigm
discussed in Chap. 3. On another extreme, fan fiction is invested with
revolutionary potential through its subversive politics as it demands ‘more
from’ its fan objects that mainstream culture fails to provide. It is quite
easy to find dozens, hundreds, or thousands of examples to support both
perspectives, that fanfic is either reiterative or radical. Consequently, we
must be careful not to proclaim that fanfic predominantly does one or the
other. In Shakespeare fanfic, we can find numerous examples of fic authors
seeking to extend the lives and worlds of specific characters or plays with-
out offering much in the way of critical commentary. Fics proliferate that
seek to round out the indistinct Benvolio or give readers more scenes
featuring the witty Mercutio, to breathe a little more life into them or to
grant them a little more time to play. Perhaps with these sorts of fics in
mind, Graham Holderness characterizes fan fiction as “playful and
22
Nayoky, “The Twelfth Trap,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 28, 2015, accessed
110 J. H. POPE
innocuous,” arguing that it seeks to “imitate, emulate, and extend

Shakespeare’s own creative and fiction-making practice,” “an innocence
that is part of its charm but also limits its utility.”23 Other Shakespeare crit-
ics have been more forgiving of fanfic but still struggle with how to cate-
gorize it according to conventional notions of authorship and genre.
Andrew Hartley suggests that much Shakespeare fan fiction “belongs in a
field which barely existed in its present incarnation twenty years ago:
young adult [YA] fiction.”24 Although he does not suggest that all fan fic-
tion be categorized in this way, YA is the seemingly the default genre of
the genre, suggesting that it is not for adults in the same way that other
Shakespeare adaptations are.25 The genres within fanfic, however, are very
much their own beasts, and while there are certainly plenty of fics that
conform to YA conventions, there are also many that do not. For every
‘Hamlet goes to high school’ fic on AO3, there is a Hamlet/Horatio slash
fic. And while slash certainly is not restricted to a particular age group or
demographic (or degree of explicitness), it is difficult to imagine the
Hamlet/Horatio necrophilic masturbation of ElwritesFanworks’ “No
Forgiveness Under Heaven” appearing in anything shelved as YA in the
local bookstore.26
Associating fanfic with a primarily juvenile reader- or authorship, how-
ever, largely dismisses the ways in which fan fiction often does the work of
literary criticism (albeit, in a much more abbreviated form than Holderness’
novels). Consider, for example, MacBeth’s “Beshrew My Heart,” described
in the author’s summary thusly: “This fic is especially for those who might
find The Taming of the Shrew a bit … problematic, even through a historical
23
Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225–26. As I discuss in Chap. 1, this is part of
Holderness’ defense of his own Shakespeare novels as decidedly not fan fiction because of
their roots in literary criticism and historical scholarship.
24
Andrew Hartley, “Introduction: ‘Reason Not the Need!’,” in Shakespeare and Millennial
Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5.
25
Pugh generally affirms this sentiment when she suggests that Shakespeare fanfic—espe-
cially fics inspired by Romeo and Juliet—is often “written by young people studying the play
at school.” While this is probable, it is difficult to determine with any degree of certainty. See
Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 62–63.
26
ElwritesFanworks, “No Forgiveness Under Heaven,” Archive of Our Own, Published
May 29, 2017, accessed August 7, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/11030331.
lens, unless heavy doses of mitigating subtext are projected into the mix.”27
The author is referring to Kate’s about-face at the end of the play in which
she seems to trade in her strength and vibrancy for wifely submission, a
change of character that has troubled readers and audiences for years. In
this verse post-Shrew scene, Kate and Petruchio go home not to a stifling,
conventional, and repressive marriage but to their own mutual BDSM
fantasy in which Kate is the ‘dom’ (dominant partner) to Petruchio’s ‘sub’
(submissive partner). After the couple laughs at the purposefully absurd
advice Kate gave to Bianca to “meeken up/ And kiss her puling husband’s
flabby arse,” Petruchio proclaims that “now, I hope, we’ll turn our double
backs/ On all such loathsome posturings and airs/ And turn back to our
rightful, best-loved ways.” MacBeth convincingly carries over the quick
wit and wordplay of Shakespeare’s characters to Petruchio’s willing sub-
mission to Kate’s teasing, hair pulling, spanking, and whipping (Petruchio:
“I am naught but a hound dog. Whiter is thy cat?” Kate: “’Tis in the toy
chest. Shall the cat chase thee, dog?/ List, and you may hear it waving its
nine tails”). The fic addresses the troubling—especially for contemporary
readers and audiences—gender politics of the play and the whittling down
of Kate by the end of Act 5 by literalizing the desire to see Kate’s submis-
sion in Act 5 as purely performative and recasting Petruchio as the one
who submits and allowing Kate to retain the spark that makes her so
appealing throughout the play. The author does this by applying the logic
of BDSM, offering the following note for further clarification at the end
of the fic: “For those less familiar with BDSM as practiced in real life: In a
couple with a D/s relationship, the dominant partner is not always who
you might expect based on public behavior. With the roles clearly set in
private life, a couple can present a completely different and entirely con-
vincing public face.”28 Although brief, “Beshrew My Heart” effectively
engages with longstanding critical and cultural debates about The Taming
of the Shrew, a refashioning of Mary Pickford’s wink in 1929. As one
reader, campylobacter, commented, “‘The Taming of the Shrew’ was the
very first Shakespeare play I’d ever read. And yes, even at the tender age of
13 I found the domestic abuse problematic. Thanks for ret-conning the
subtext so that I can re-read & ‘interrogate’ it from a new perspective.”29
27
MacBeth, “Beshrew My Heart,” Archive of Our Own, Published July 28, 2014, accessed
August 3, 2018, https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/2033745.
28
MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.”
29
MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.”
112 J. H. POPE
The fic thus serves simultaneously as wish fulfillment and critical interven-
tion. By contrast, tinypurplefishes’ “The Shrew of Padua,” also written in
verse, provides a brief soliloquy by Kate prior to Bianca’s wedding in
which she contemplates Petruchio’s manipulations and vowing that “one
day, some day, the shrew will/ Lead the brute to its perdition.”30 Although
“The Shrew of Padua” picks up on a similar critical thread as “Beshrew My
Heart”—the desire to see Kate retain her strength of character—it does so
in a much less radical, revisionary way. Elsewhere, in cheshireArcher’s
“The Perfect Nurse,” Hotspur marvels at his newborn daughter and
introduces her to the family dog, Lady, in a fic that, rather than offering a
critical intervention into 1 Henry IV, simply presents the reader with a
moment of domestic bliss and simplicity, tagged as ‘fluff’ and ‘This family
is just precious.’31
As noted, tagging plays an important role in fan fiction, offering not
just a way to categorize texts, but a way to guide the reader’s experience
of a given fic as well as related fics across the archive through active para-
textual and hypertextual engagement. Tags might identify the fandom
(e.g., ‘Shakespeare’ in general and/or ‘Hamlet’ specifically), plot points or
narrative expectations (‘character death,’ ‘unrequited love’), fic genre and
tropes (‘kid fic,’ ‘alternative universe’), and so forth. Additionally, tags are
sometimes used to identify content that might be objectionable, contro-
versial, or desirable, depending on the reader (‘suicide,’ ‘rough oral sex’).
Some authors do not include tags, whereas others go to comic excess and
offer playfully obscure or hyperspecific tags (‘Claudius/Pringles® Can’),
or ones that are self-referential (‘I’m experimenting with how I write
magic’).32 In some cases, tagging itself becomes a metatextual discussion
amongst authors about the conventions of tagging. AO3 allows readers to
click on or search by tags so if you just want to read Romeo and Juliet fics
30
tinypurplefishes, “The Shrew of Padua,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 19,
31
cheshireArcher, “The Perfect Nurse,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 4,
32
While the previous examples of tags are common enough not to require a specific cita-
tion, the ‘Claudius/Pringles® Can’ tag appears with: ilikeituptheass, “The Kingdom of
Denmark Is Run by a Gay Stoner’s Father but It Sounds Like the Author Is on Crack by Fall
Out Boy,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 19, 2018, accessed July 23, 2019, https://
archiveofourown.org/works/14975120. ‘I’m experimenting with how I write magic’
appears with: NathanieloftheSky, “To Where the Wind Blows,” Archive of Our Own,
Published June 24, 2018, accessed July 23, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/
15028202/chapters/34838825.
featuring unrequited love and crossed over with Doctor Who, you can filter
your searches or click through tag combinations/exclusions to suit
your desires.
Thus, regardless of the presence of over five million fics on AO3, the
presence of tags highlights an important characteristic of fan fiction in that
it commonly seeks to meet readers’ expectations and fulfill their desires,
offering readers the ability to customize and individualize their experience
like they are ordering from a restaurant menu. Just as fanfic frequently
aims to offer recognizable characters acting and speaking in recognizable
ways, tags—and summaries—serve as content warnings, content descrip-
tions, and tantalizing allusions that allow readers to tailor their reading to
their own tastes or to knowingly pursue new avenues without being sur-
prised. The issue of content warnings is an important one in a form of
writing in which very little is seen as off-limits, and readers have to be
prepared to encounter nearly anything imaginable. It is not uncommon,
for example, for individual fics to include explicit descriptions of sex in
general or specific sex acts/fetishes (‘kinks’), scenes of rape or torture or
graphic violence, underage sex, and so forth. I do not intend to overstate
how prevalent these things are in fanfic in general. Indeed, fan studies has
sometimes been criticized for its disproportionate emphasis on sex-centric
fanfic, which many fic writers view as a misrepresentation of their com-
munity.33 Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that explicit sex and vio-
lence do pop up from time to time, and while some readers may seek out
fics that, for example, feature bondage, others choose to avoid them alto-
gether, and still others remain wholly indifferent. MissTantabis’
“Ganymede and Jupiter,” for instance, pairs up William Shakespeare and
Christopher Marlowe (specifically, the versions of the playwrights from the
short-lived 2016 television series Will) and is tagged with, among other
things, ‘Blood Kink,’ ‘Knife Play,’ ‘Cum Play,’ and ‘Power Play.’34 And
while the fic offers an intriguing take on Shakespeare’s dramatic debt to
the more experienced Marlowe, culminating in Marlowe carving his ini-
tials into Shakespeare’s chest, the graphic content is not going to be to
every reader’s tastes. Other tags highlight narrative or thematic content,
such as ‘Major Character Death’ (often with an indication of which
33
Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 178; Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 91.
34
MissTantabis, “Ganymede and Jupiter,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 6, 2018,
accessed June 12, 2018, https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/14863355.
114 J. H. POPE
character dies, and sometimes by which method), ‘Genderswap,’ or

‘Angst’ (among hundreds of other possibilities). Additionally, tags can
serve as trigger warnings. There are numerous Hamlet fics, for example,
tagged as ‘Implied/Referenced Suicide’ (or something similar), as well as
Richard III and Measure for Measure fics tagged as ‘Rape/Non-Con’
(Non-Con: non-consensual sex), or Othello fics tagged as ‘racism.’ Such
tags do no indicate that suicide, rape, or racism are reveled in or glorified
by the fic but rather that they are alluded to or are part of the narrative, so
readers can choose to avoid such issues if they wish.
Insofar as fan fiction serves as wish fulfillment for both author and
reader, the tags allow readers to decide which wishes are explicitly fulfilled
and to search out, relatively easily, fics that meet an individual reader’s
desired criteria. As such, the experience of reading a tagged fic for the first
time is quite dissimilar from the experience of reading a novel or short
story for the first time in that the reader expects the fic to be ‘spoiled’ by
the tags, often to the extent that the reader is actively seeking out those
spoilers in the pursuit of a specific reading experience. Whereas the blurbs
on the backs of novels typically seek to give away just enough to tantalize
the reader to want to read (or at least purchase) the novel, fanfic tags
tempt readers by telling them they can have exactly what they want, exactly
how they want it. And although the conventions of fanfic tagging might
be dissimilar to conventional and contemporary publishing practices,
there is something to be said for the way tagging works in relation to tra-
ditional conceptions of genre. ‘Shakespearean comedy’ enables us to pre-
pare for the text and align our expectations (no one will die, we will get a
happy ending) in the same way that ‘tragedy’ leads us to expect death and
despair. Arguably, some of the longer titles of Shakespeare’s plays—and
indeed in printed texts from the period—serve a similar purpose as tagging
in fanfic archives; a fic tagged as ‘mpreg’ and ‘character death’ leads us to
expect certain things, but not much differently than do many early print
texts. Consider the title page of the 1597 publication of Richard III,
which reads The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treach-
erous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent
nephews: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life,
and most deserued death.35 Or we have The Merchant of Venice’s more
informative title, The most excellent historie of the Merchant of Venice. With
the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in
cutting a iust pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia, by the choyse of
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (London, 1597).
35
three chests.36 Fanfic tags and early modern title pages serve similar pur-
poses by simultaneously intriguing prospective readers and generating a
set of expectations regarding the content of the text. Indeed, this titling
practice did not end with the early moderns, as is evident in the original
title of Robinson Crusoe, which was The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and
Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America,
near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore
by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account
how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.37 Such titles served as
advertising for the book in hand, replaced more recently in publishing
with paratextual blurbs and endorsements on the covers of commercial
publications. In the absence of a modern physical, bookstore text, tagged
online fanfic mimics its paratextual apparatuses by, intentionally or not,
returning to the early history of the book but also updating it to a cross-
indexed hypertextuality. One imagines a titillated reader of Robinson
Crusoe intrigued by the ‘delivery by pirates’ trope clicking on the title to
find more texts of a similar nature only to find Hamlet similarly tagged.
Shakespeare fanfic occupies a respectable space on AO3. As of July
2019, approximately 3500 fics are tagged as belonging specifically to the
Shakespeare fandom (SHAKESPEARE, William—Works, up from nearly
3000 in July 2018), with a total of roughly 9250 texts showing up in a
general search for ‘Shakespeare’ (up from about 8000 in the same span).
Other popular ‘Books & Literature’ fandoms surround Jane Austen (1660
fandom, 2660 tagged), but neither Shakespeare nor Austen hold a candle
to the number of fics inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
(122,000 fandom, 123,160 tagged), which rivals or exceeds the most pro-
ductive fandoms in the archive, which are typically focused on fantasy and
science fiction books, movies, and television series. Looking at these num-
bers, what becomes clear immediately is that, not unexpectedly, Shakespeare
has a greater currency outside of his specific fandom than do many other
canonical writers such as Austen. In the examples above, Shakespeare is
tagged in more than triple the number of fics that are specifically devoted
to his fandom, compared to 1.6:1 for Austen and 1.001:1 for Doyle. The
disproportion is indicative of Shakespeare’s canonical status and writers’
36
William Shakespeare, The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice (London,
1600).
37
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London,
1719).
116 J. H. POPE
familiarity with his works and the expectation that fic readers will likewise
be able to make sense of the references. For the approximately 6000 fics
that refer to Shakespeare but are not purposefully identified as belonging
to the fandom, the relevance of Shakespeare to the fic varies considerably,
ranging from the use of a quotation for the title of the fic, to the inclusion
of the act of reading, studying, discussing, or attending a performance of
Shakespeare (which appears frequently in such fics, indicative of the perva-
sive experience of grappling with the playwright, particularly in a school
setting), to a brief or extended allusion to his works. In such instances, it
is worth noting that by refraining from identifying the fic as belonging to
the Shakespeare fandom, these writers are asserting his secondary impor-
tance to the text at hand, and this may have very little to do with how brief
or extended the Shakespeare allusion is. In these cases, Shakespeare serves
as a narrative or thematic device to develop, in some way, a fic purposefully
devoted to another fandom. 720418mb’s “Standing Ovation” is a Harry
Potter fic in which the Hogwarts students put on a production of Romeo
and Juliet and offers an extended engagement with the play, but the fic is
not identified as part of the Shakespeare fandom.38 Killtheselights’ Star
Wars fic “Conceal Me What I Am” is tagged for its reference of Shakespeare,
which consists of a title and an epigraph from Twelfth Night.39
As is the case for all other fandoms in the database, Shakespeare fics
vary considerably in terms of length and style. One of the shortest is “John
Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare” and consists of just four
words, “The rest is silence.” Although the text is simply a short quotation
from Hamlet, the quotation functions as a playful ‘collaboration’ with the
avant-garde composer whose 1952 composition 4’33” instructed the
musicians not to play their instrument for four minutes and thirty-three
seconds (the fic is tagged as “4’33”—John Cage”).40 Although extremely
brief, this fic is, in many ways, the epitome of fan fiction as it playfully and
38
720418mb, “Standing Ovation,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 7, 2017,
accessed July 30, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619868/chapters/21733892.
39
Killtheselights, “Conceal Me What I Am,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 7, 2018,
accessed July 30, 2018, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14242881/chapters/
32843100. In the Notes, the author indicates “I studied Shakespeare internationally on a
scholarship so yeah, this how I chose to use that knowledge.”
40
republic, “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare,” Archive of Our Own,
Published September 20, 2016, accessed July 18, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/
works/8092441. See also: Michelle K. Yost, “Stratford-Upon-Web: Shakespeare in Twenty-
First-Century Fanfiction,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 206.
unexpectedly combines and crosses over two instances of creative and

structural silence. The apt cleverness of the juxtaposition is heightened by
the fact that, by solely quoting Shakespeare, the fic’s author has not tech-
nically written anything and thus also remains silent, thus adapting Cage’s
high concept non-music to write non-writing that makes silence speak. At
the other extreme of length lies mcrshank’s “Auric Idolatry” which, as of
this writing, spans nearly 350,000 words and crosses over Romeo and
Juliet with the Chronicles of Narnia while drawing inspiration from Stacey
Jay’s novel Juliet Immortal (2011).41 Fics of this length are relatively
uncommon in Shakespeare fan fiction, with the majority of fics consisting
of fewer than 3000 words, and a high proportion of those coming in at
under 1500 words.42 The brevity of many fics—Shakespearean or other-
wise—is a function of the genre as a whole, which is allusive by nature. Fic
authors can write 100-word drabbles because a lot of narrative background,
details of characterization, and interpretive history can be imported into
the fic simply using a specific character, an importation that—especially in
media fandoms—allows fic authors to avoid character description that
would otherwise be necessary.43 Stylistically, Shakespeare fics are diverse:
many are written in prose or as plays, some mimic the style of a distinctive
author, some are written in the form of text messages exchanged between
characters.44 Perhaps not surprisingly, many also adopt a pseudo-
Shakespearean style of writing, which itself takes a number of forms, rang-
ing from adopting sufficiently archaic (and thus ‘Shakespearean’) diction
or adding the suffix ‘-eth’ to words in order to achieve a broadly archaic
tone, to concerted efforts to write dramatic verse in iambic pentameter
and mimic an authorial Shakespearean voice.45
41
mcrshank, “Auric Idolatry,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 30, 2018, accessed
42
I am basing these numbers on my own impressions of an AO3 search for ‘Shakespeare’
filtered by length. Given the sheer number of relatively short fics—half of the 9250 results
were shorter than 2000 words in length—providing an average length would give the mis-
leading impression that fics tend to be longer than they actually are.
43
Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 175–84.
44
For a text-message Hamlet, see: planet_plantagenet, “Wild and Whirling Words: Hamlet
in Texts,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 9, 2017, accessed July 18, 2019, https://
archiveofourown.org/works/11149473/chapters/24876822.
45
Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes, “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’: Collaborative
Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction,” Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 280. See: Raggdoll_101,
“Shakespeare Crack-eth,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 2, 2018, accessed July
23, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/13713543.
118 J. H. POPE
Assessing Shakespeare fanfic poses a number of challenges, some of

them endemic to the form in general, and some more specific to
Shakespeare. Pseudonymous authors remain largely anonymous, making
identifiers such as age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth difficult
to determine for the vast majority. While I am not suggesting that these
identifiers should serve as the criteria for assessing an individual fic, it
means we do not have things like author interviews or discussions about
things like influence to provide a window onto the text. Most importantly,
this affects how we understand the tone of a fic and thus its intended
effect. As anyone who has frequented comment and message boards
online can attest to, statements that seem obviously ironic and satiric to
the writer can often be received as serious and heartfelt by the reader. This
issue undoubtedly surfaces from time to time when reading fan fiction,
especially—in my experience—when reading short fics in which the author
does not have much space to develop a clear tone. In some cases, the
writer’s tags for the fic provide much needed clarity, but it is quite possible
to leave a fic without certainty regarding its tone. In “John Cage collabo-
rates with William Shakespeare,” does the author strive for metatextual
postmodern poignancy? Or are they simply making a silly joke? Four
words hardly provide enough tonal context for the reader to form a clearly
defensible opinion. In the case of Shakespeare fan fiction specifically, the
demographics and genesis of authorship potentially complicate some of
the assumptions and guiding principles of fan studies. Fanfic authorship
has traditionally been gendered female, with its roots in the largely female
community of scifi fic writers in the 1960s and 1970s, and those scholars
who have studied fanfic in the most detail have consistently found that it
is predominantly written by women and often with a female readership in
mind.46 Writing about fan fiction in general, Jenkins notes that, histori-
cally, “the practice of fan writing, the compulsion to expand speculations
about characters and story events beyond textual boundaries, draws more
heavily upon the types of interpretive strategies common to the ‘feminine’
than to the ‘masculine.’”47 Shakespeare fanfic, however, potentially breaks
with the conventions because some of it was written as a class assignment
46
Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan
Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson
and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 44.
47
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2006), 44.
and then later posted online. Princehamlet’s “Suddenly, Pirates!” is tagged

as “me getting a grade to write hamlet fanfiction,” for example, while 1f_
this_be_madness indicates that “Hamlet and the Pirates” was inspired by
a 1975 article published in Shakespeare Quarterly.48 When searching AO3
for fics originally written as school assignments, the results start to skew
away from the broader media fandom that characterizes the archive as a
whole, and toward authors and texts we expect to see in a classroom:
plenty of Shakespeare, but also The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, The
Catcher in the Rye; works by Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Dante; characters from Greek and Roman mythology. When
specifically identified as class projects, Shakespeare starts to compete with
Harry Potter in the number of search results.
For fics originating as class projects, it would probably be better to
assume, then, that the authors follow the demographics of a typical class-
room, but even that assumption can be easily problematized. This is par-
ticularly true when we do not know where these schools are, what segment
of the population they serve, or how many instructors are offering these
kinds of assignments (and how many of those instructors are encouraging
their students to post their work on AO3 or other archives). The motives
and pedagogical practices of the instructor and the individual assignment
are also relevant. While some such assignments will stem from a desire to
have fun with a class text and let students simply run with their imagina-
tions and with no overarching interest in fan cultures and practices, some
instructors will offer such assignments to “authorize … students to
respond and engage in an academic world saturated with gatekeeping,
jargon, and required curricula,” presenting students with an opportunity
to “respond to, adapt, and resist canonical knowledge.”49 Likewise,
whereas fan fiction is generally written by people who self-identify as fans
of a particular object, class assignment fics will be written by a range of
indifferent, enthusiastic, and resistant readers. Additionally, fics that are
or stem from class assignments complicate the often organic nature of
48
princehamlet, “Suddenly, Pirates!,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 17, 2018,
accessed July 15, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14688603/chap-
ters/33939147; 1f_this_be_madness, “Hamlet and the Pirates,” Archive of Our Own,
Published October 2, 2015, accessed July 15, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/
works/4914781?view_full_work=true.
49
Katherine Anderson Howell, “Invitation: Remix Pedagogy in the Fandom Classroom,”
in Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, ed. Katherine Anderson Howell (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 2–3.
120 J. H. POPE
fandom more generally in which fanfic authors are writing their fics
because they choose to, and with the expectation that they will be read by
other fans, not that they will be assessed and graded by their course
instructors. This introduces another layer of power and authority in which
the fanfic writer is writing not just in response to a cultural producer—be
that a movie studio or canonical author—but also in response to an edu-
cational, institutional authority. And, importantly, an educational context
removes one of the key features of fanfic: the anonymity of its authors.
Embodied authors and readers who know each other by name and by face
is atypical of online fanfic communities. Even though AO3 readers are
encountering a pseudonymous author/text, fics written in or for the class-
room were not necessarily produced with the expectation of anonymity.
What someone might write for a class and what that same person might
write with no concern for grades, perceived appropriateness, or self-cen-
sorship might be very different indeed. When deciding between writing
sex pollen wingfic or missing scene fic, the latter will presumably be more
likely. The tags, notes, or summaries on AO3 will sometimes indicate that
a fic was initially written for a class, but we must logically assume that not
all such texts will be tagged in this way.
In many cases, fan fiction operates within the parameters of the internal
logic of a given text by exploiting the fact that, from a narrative point of
view, no matter how much is written about a given set of characters and
events, there will almost inevitably be vastly more that is left unexplored
than that which can be explored. Indeed, the paradox is that the more
detail that is supplied by the author, the more gaps in the world are cre-
ated as a result. Characters are introduced who haves lives of their own
within the world of the text, even if their role in the original text is to serve
as a plot device (say, in delivering a message to the protagonist, advancing
the plot through actions, serving to round out a character, and so forth).
What the text offers up as a fragment of the unified whole, however, the
fan takes up as a path to explore. For example, for the purposes of the
development of the play, we know that Hamlet was at school in Wittenberg
when his father died. In the context of the play, this point only matters
insofar as it establishes a portrait of our character: Hamlet is a student (and
therefore youngish); he was absent when his father died suddenly, pre-
venting him from sharing final words/moments with his father and from
being immediately present for his family’s grief; his absence means that he
has missed things (such as the marriage of his mother to his uncle), that
life has gone on without him at Elsinore. We might supply any number of
ways in which this information helps us understand the character we see

before us throughout the play, the play that comprises entirely of the
world of Hamlet. For many readers and audiences, however, these details,
bits of information, and minor characters offer up tantalizing questions.
What was Hamlet’s life in Wittenberg like? What was he studying at school,
and what did he do in his spare time? Was he a rebellious class clown or a
studious scholar? What was his school like? Did he spend his time pining
for Ophelia, or was he engaged in other romantic pursuits? Did anything
happen to him to encourage the seeds of his “To be or not to be” solilo-
quy before he speaks it in the play? Going farther back, what was Hamlet’s
relationship with Yorick like before he died?
Lesley Goodman sees fan fiction as expanding on Marie-Laure Ryan’s
notion of “the principle of minimal departure” in fictional worlds in which
readers supply necessary, logical information borrowed from our own
sense of the world around us.50 For example, we know that a given char-
acter has two arms and two legs even if the text does not specify this infor-
mation. As such, the reader is necessarily and continually “contribut[ing]
to the formation of a fictional universe that is created by the text.”51 We
should note, though, that the nature of this contribution is significantly
impacted by the medium of the text: the type of details supplied will be
different for the reader of a novel (we assume the character has two legs)
than for a film (we see the actor’s legs, along with other corporeal details)
than for the audience of a play (a character will be embodied by different
actors across different productions, not all of whom will necessarily have
two legs) than for the reader of a play. What exactly constitutes minimal
departure will depend significantly on the text itself. And fan fiction, when
its authors seek to adhere to the canonical narrative of the original text,
typically follows this principle in general terms, although its departures
might range from the minimal to the maximal.
Although fan fiction frequently does the work of criticism, one of the
fault lines that separate comes down to speculating about minimal depar-
tures and textual silences. This is a debate that can separate fanfic from
criticism, but also teachers from students, popular Shakespeare from aca-
demic Shakespeare, and even literary critics from other literary critics.
Broadly speaking, criticism focuses on Shakespeare’s words themselves
50
Quoted in: Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the
Death of the Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 665.
51
Goodman, “Disappointing Fans,” 665.
122 J. H. POPE
and their relation to a performance of those words, whereas fan works like
fan fiction often focus on the space between those words, with the former
being the proper work of the scholar and the latter the work of the fool.
Jennifer Flaherty has recently drawn our attention back to L. C. Knights’
1947 mockery of the ‘character-based criticism’ that treats Shakespeare’s
characters as embodied individuals with off-stage lives when they are
purely and solely “the means of expressing Shakespeare’s words”52 and
thus have no life outside of those words. From this point of view, to seri-
ously ponder questions regarding what Hamlet was up to while in
Wittenberg, how many children Lady Macbeth had, or the infinite refer-
ences to events outside of a given play is seen as misguided and foolish. As
Hamlet proclaims at the end of his life and the end of his play, “the rest is
silence” (5.2.336), a proclamation of pragmatic currency in literary criti-
cism of the L. C. Knights school. While Hamlet’s comment serves as the
endpoint of his play-long philosophical contemplation of life, death, and
the afterlife, and the cessation of a voice that will not stop talking for five
Acts, it is also literarily and theoretically true of the play itself: outside the
words of the play, there is no more Hamlet and no more Hamlet. The
stage is empty, and the characters cease to exist. For many literary critics,
to speculate about what could or might happen in this vacuum is simply
intellectually irresponsible, a scholarly ideal that many of us subscribe to in
theory, if not in practice. Speculation—even when textually grounded—
can be fun, but it is intellectually suspect and naïve, as academically unpro-
ductive as counterfactual speculation about how Romeo and Juliet would
have been different if Romeo had actually received Friar Laurence’s mes-
sage. We do not know how the play would be if it were different because
it is not different—get over it. A critical abhorrence of narrative specula-
tion is akin to the admonition against anachronism that becomes an
important pedagogical tool for scholars in training. Time and time again
we tell our students to strive to assess Shakespeare according to the his-
torical, social, cultural, and literary within which he worked. He did not
write with a twenty-first-century cultural paradigm in mind, so it is irre-
sponsible to assess him purely according to the concerns and priorities of
that paradigm. We have all, I would hazard to guess, responded to student
52
Jennifer Flaherty, “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?,” in Shakespeare and
Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 101, 102.
comments or paper with some version of this criticism from time to time.
Additionally, we can read fanfic as the antithesis of—or an addendum to—
John Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability,’ when a writer like Shakespeare
“is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irri-
table reaching after fact & reason.”53 For readers who appreciate
Shakespeare because of the intellectual and creative productivity embed-
ded in the ambiguities and silences of his plays, writing that seeks to resolve
ambiguities by irritably reaching after fact and reason could be seen as
diminishing Shakespeare, closing down paths of inquiry rather than open-
ing them up.
Just how deeply committed an individual scholar is to these academic
ideals will likely determine that scholar’s reception of texts that traffic
almost exclusively in counterfactualism and anachronism, and of authors
who pay little attention to what we should do with Shakespeare and priori-
tize what we can do with him. In his discussion of the Hogarth series of
novels published around the tetracentenary of Shakespeare’s death,
Douglas Lanier discusses the notion of literariness and the popular
response to Shakespeare’s relevance today, noting that “where the literary
‘essence’ of Shakespeare was once located in his language, now, under the
pressure of postmodern practice, it is being located in his narratives, which
can float free of specifically Shakespearean language and readily cross cul-
tural barriers,” part of the contemporary renegotiation of Shakespearean
cultural capital.54 This debate is by no means insignificant, as anyone who
has attended a recent, or even not-so-recent, performance can testify to.
Regardless of what we as scholars would prefer to be true, Shakespeare’s
language is often seen as an impediment rather than an invitation, and
this is nowhere more evident than when sitting in the audience. While
attending RSC performances of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in
Stratford-upon-Avon in May 2018, I spent a great deal of time eavesdrop-
ping on the conversations of my fellow spectators, hearing numerous
times some version of the refrain, ‘I didn’t understand a word of it.’ For
many members of the audience, it was the updating of the setting, the
53
The Letters of John Keats, vol. 1, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1958), 193–94.
54
Douglas M. Lanier, “The Hogarth Shakespeare Series: Redeeming Shakespeare’s
Literariness,” in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge:
124 J. H. POPE
stylistic flourishes, the stage presence of individual actors, and, in the case
of Romeo and Juliet, the gender- and race-blind casting that determined
whether or not many members of the audience enjoyed this particular ver-
sion, and it had very little to do with the impact of the language itself. As
scholars, it behooves us to take this issue seriously because it identifies how
many contemporary readers and audiences assess Shakespeare, not just
how we want them to assess him: that is, in terms of relatability, the abil-
ity—and desire—to see oneself and one’s experiences mirrored in the text.
Regardless of what we might prefer to be the case, many readers locate
Shakespeare’s significance in the circumstances of his plots and the specif-
ics of his characters rather than in the beauty of his poetry. As such, we
have to recognize the necessary release that takes place in the classroom or
the theater or in other venues for encountering Shakespeare. When we
release him, he becomes what those who consume him want him to be
and not always what we tell them he is. For adaptations such as fan texts
that focus on plot or characterization, or which embrace counterfactual-
ism or anachronism, we must consider the extent to which these adapters
see themselves as liberating Shakespeare from his language in order to
maintain his relevance, just as Dryden—and many eighteenth-century
adapters of Shakespeare after him—felt he was doing in his reworkings of
the plays 350 years ago.
While many fics strive to adhere to the canonical narrative of the origi-
nal text—whether through minimal departure missing scene fics, slash fics
that push homoerotic subtexts to the surface, or fics that spiral off into
elaborate adventures that eventually find their way back to the canonical
plot—there are numerous genres and individual fics that do not aim to run
parallel to that canon. The aforementioned genres of alternate universe,
crossover, wingfic, genderswap, and many others purposefully depart from
the established narrative while still prioritizing a roughly canonical form of
characterization. Whether Hamlet sprouts wings or finds himself in an
American high school, he is usually some combination of mopey, verbose,
contemplative, close with Horatio, or in a contentious relationship with
Ophelia. Still other genres and tropes revel in non-canonical characteriza-
tions and plots. ‘Crack fic,’ for example, is purposefully absurd, demolish-
ing notions of canonical plausibility and delighting in the incongruity of it
all. In Ambrose’s “Food and Cheer,” the author uses Mercutio, Tybalt,
and Benvolio to write a fic in response to the prompt “Imagine Person A
being held hostage by C unless B forks over the last slice of pizza they
have.”55 In SanSese’s “The Game of Seats,” the cola-addicted celebrity

Mercutio becomes furious that someone—Sir Montague, a noted play-
wright—is sitting in his VIP seat at the Globe, a fic focused primarily on
his preference for sitting in that particular seat that ends with Mercutio
making plans to sleep with Sir Montague’s nephew, Benvolio.56 In jlaw13’s
“The Heart Wants What It Wants,” tagged as “The Shakespeare/Harry
Potter crossover everyone has been waiting for,” numerous Shakespeare
characters cavort in a post-Deathly Hallows Hogwarts School of Witchcraft
and Wizardry.57 And in marruman’s “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian
Talk Show,” the central characters of Hamlet appear on a Jerry Springer-
style daytime talk show, during which Hamlet and Claudius accuse and
fight with one another on the stage (only to have the security guards inter-
vene) as Geraldus Spring brings on a string of surprise guests to respond
to the various shocking revelations. After Hamlet reveals he has acciden-
tally killed Polonius, Geraldus proclaims, “Is it not a curious twist of Fate
that she is in the wings of our theatre, and has heard all that you have to
say? Ophelia, will you grace us with your presence on stage?”58 Ophelia
runs on stage and slaps Hamlet before the guards take her to her chair.
As many of the fics discussed in this chapter demonstrate, play is a key
element of fan fiction, in the sense of playful rather than solely as the
antithesis of work in a labor/economic sense. As discussed in Chap. 2,
‘fan’ derives from ‘fanatic,’ connoting obsessive reverence for the fan
object, an over-serious fixation akin to religious extremism that has fre-
quently been used to characterize fans when we want to mock their affec-
tive engagement. But from David Garrick through to fanfic authors, fans
are self-aware, with proclamations of obsession serving as knowingly
hyperbolic gestures. As a significant body of fan fiction demonstrates, rev-
erence is frequently counterbalanced with irreverence, the desire to play
with the fan object rather than simply bow before it. And rather than
55
Ambrose, “Food and Cheer,” Archive of Our Own, Published October 17, 2015,
56
SanSese, “The Game of Seats,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 16, 2016, accessed
July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6875281.
57
jlaw13, “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 14,
2019, accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/18104915/chapters/
42799271.
58
marruman, “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian Talk Show,” Archive of Our Own,
Published August 2, 2015, accessed July 18, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/
4482794.
126 J. H. POPE
functioning as an act of sacrilege, fan play democratizes access to a canoni-

cal author like Shakespeare by authorizing all readers to play in his worlds
and with his characters, and by incorporating him and his works into our
contemporary media and cultural environment. Particularly in crossover
fics, but also in fan fiction more generally, Shakespeare becomes part of a
postmodern pastiche, blending—and leveling—high and low culture in a
way that, through play, “is certainly capable of extending or enriching the
meaning of Shakespeare’s text.”59 In this way, the play of fanfic operates in
ways similar to those identified by Douglas Lanier in his discussion of
objects of Shakespearean material culture such as action figures and rubber
ducks. Lanier argues that “The suggestion of cultural superiority commu-
nicated by Shakespeare is ironically infantilized, the heart of each item’s
appeal its ironic distance from mainstream pop capitalism.”60 While fanfic
does not necessarily ironically infantilize Shakespeare, the juxtaposition of
ironic distance and proximity between Shakespeare and modern popular
culture established by many fics ultimately contemporizes Shakespeare in
a way that complements scholarly criticism. And through its frequent play-
fulness, fan fiction can be serious and critical by addressing the perceived
problems with the fan object, Shakespearean or otherwise (whether the
lack of representation or inclusivity, its employment of undesirable tropes,
etc.). In these cases, fan fiction does the work of criticism—pointing to the
misogyny, victim blaming, or other prejudices of a text—through different
means. Such fan critiques undoubtedly emerge partly from the paradoxical
reluctance of academic criticism to embrace anachronistic readings of the
plays, for example, even as theory and criticism are frequently anachronistic.
One of the core strengths of fan fiction and one of the primary reasons
that we should be studying it more—whether it does the work of criticism
or refutes it, whether it is derivative or creative, whether it is playful or
serious, whether it is ideologically and politically radical or not—is because
of the way in which it insistently situates individual readers and writers,
and their individual responses to and interpretations of a text, at the center
of a text’s meaning. Whereas academia prioritizes consensus readings,
theoretical approaches, and peer judgment that gravitate around a collec-
tive understanding of what constitutes an appropriate burden of proof, fan
Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 86.

59
Douglas Lanier, “Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction,” in The Cambridge

60
Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge:

readings, and responses prioritize—or at least grant equal weight to—the

subjective, readerly ‘I,’ whether anachronistic, counterfactual, or not.
Perhaps the most radical feature of fan fiction lies not in the economics of
its production and labor, its refutation of traditional notions of ownership,
or its ideological and hegemonic subversiveness, but in its elevation of the
reader to pride of place. Fan fiction offers a space in which all ideas, opin-
ions, and interpretations matter, and where any text or fan object can
mean—or be made to mean—anything you want it to mean, to speak to
any concerns or desires you want it to speak to. In this sense, fanfic is the
epitome of postmodern relativism and hypersubjectivity in which authors
are dead and readers are empowered to collaborate with them, and to
speak for and through them. Hellekson and Busse see fanfic as operating
in this way, the “fictional embodiment” of Barthes’ and Foucault’s notion
that “meaning always exceeded the author’s intent,” and is frequently
“coproduced between author and reader.”61
As should be evident to readers familiar with the wide range of
Shakespeare adaptations currently and historically available, fan fiction
shares considerable common ground with a number of commercially avail-
able texts produced for stage, screen, and bookstore. From Mary Cowden
Clarke’s nineteenth-century The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines series
of tales to Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to
Claire McCarthy’s film Ophelia (and Lisa Klein’s novel which it adapts),
authors have been writing Shakespearean missing scene fics for some time
61
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Fan Fiction as Literature,” in The Fan Fiction
Press, 2014), 20. More recently, Busse has also explored the ways in which contemporary
reading practices and the fanfic community at large has renegotiated the postmodern death
of the author through a focus on identity politics, emphasizing that “authors and their
intents have indeed been reincorporated and become central to various modes of discourse.
The old question of ‘What does the author mean?,’ however, has been replaced with an
identity question as to ‘Who is the author?’ In other words, a focus on authorial intention
and how thoughts and beliefs create meaning has shifted to a focus on authorial identity and
how cultural situatedness shapes meaning.” She likewise stresses that “Authorial identity
remains a central concern for marginal subjects—that is, those who do not occupy upper-
middle-class, white, male, straight, able-bodied, cisgendered, Western positions.” This is an
incredibly important and theoretically productive issue, but one that is worked out in fan-
doms primarily in relation to contemporary, living authors situated—in general—in the same
ideological and cultural debates as the reader. See: Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction:
Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2017), 19, 26.
128 J. H. POPE
(even as far back as Dryden’s interventions into his versions of Shakespeare’s

plays). Fix-it fics have persisted from Fletcher, through Tate, and down to
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
This final play in particular speaks to the fannish desire to see both more
of and more from the fan object, with a narrative focused on fulfilling a
young academic’s vision of Desdemona and Juliet as feministic, sexually
progressive in spite of the benevolent and dismissive misogyny of her older
male colleague. Additionally, a distinct sense of fannish play—of reverent
irreverence and intertextual hide-and-go-seek—permeates texts such as
Ryan North’s choosable-path adventures, To Be or Not to Be (2013/2016)
and Romeo and/or Juliet (2016). The difference between commercial
Shakespeare fan fiction and online or noncommercial Shakespeare fan fic-
tion lies not in genre but in the parameters of form, the apparatuses of
production, and the conception of audience, metatextual concerns that
nevertheless shape the text and determine its cultural position and the
ways in which it can be consumed. Even though online fan fiction is acces-
sible to all and appears in massive digital databases, an individual fic might
be written as a gift for a single individual and read by a select few people
with parallel interests. By contrast, commercial texts—whether performed
or published in the traditional sense—are written with a larger, paying
audience in mind, with production costs footed by publishers, movie stu-
dios, and so forth, and with an awareness of the dictates and demands that
accompany such apparatuses. Extreme brevity or length—outside of a
niche or avant-garde market—are not commercially viable, so the four-
word “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare” is as unlikely as
the 4.1-million-word—and counting—“The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds
Conquest” to share shelf space with the above-mentioned texts.62
However, the different ways in which we access or consume commercial
and online fan fiction, and their often differing relation to editorial p
ractice
or materiality, should not be the basis for separating adaptive texts that are
fundamentally—ideologically and generically—similar.
62
AuraChannelerChris, “The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest,” FanFiction, Published
March 5, 2008, accessed July 24, 2019, https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4112682/1/The-
Subspace-Emissary-s-Worlds-Conquest. Although it does not appear on AO3 and is not
Shakespeare fanfic, this work stands as the longest available fic, approximately five times as
long as Shakespeare’s complete body of work.
Bibliography
1f_this_be_madness. “Hamlet and the Pirates.” Archive of Our Own. Published
October 2, 2015. Accessed July 15, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/
works/4914781?view_full_work=true.
720418mb. “Standing Ovation.” Archive of Our Own. Published February 7,
2017. Accessed July 30, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619868/
chapters/21733892.
a_t_rain. “The Great Danish Crocodile Cook-Off.” Archive of Our Own. Published
May 18, 2019. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
18875281.
Ambrose. “Food and Cheer.” Archive of Our Own. Published October 17, 2015.
Accessed July 17, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/5016358.
AuraChannelerChris. “The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest.” FanFiction.
Published March 5, 2008. Accessed July 24, 2019. https://www.fanfiction.
net/s/4112682/1/The-Subspace-Emissary-s-Worlds-Conquest.
beacandy. “Exit, Katherine.” Archive of Our Own. Published September 19, 2015.
Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827524.
benvoliio. “Patience Perforce.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 6, 2018.
Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225991/
chapters/32798499.
cheshireArcher. “The Perfect Nurse.” Archive of Our Own. Published September
4, 2017. Accessed July 16, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
11994462.
Busse, 41–59. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006.
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
London, 1719.
ElwritesFanworks. “No Forgiveness Under Heaven.” Archive of Our Own.
Published May 29, 2017. Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.
org/works/11030331.
Fazel, Valerie and Louise Geddes. “‘Give Me Your Hands If We Be Friends’:
Collaborative Authority in Shakespeare Fan Fiction.” Shakespeare 12, no. 3
(2016): 274–86.
130 J. H. POPE
fiftysevenacademics. “Antonio Evens the Score.” Archive of Our Own. Published:

April 23, 2015. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
3808588.
Flaherty, Jennifer. “‘How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?’” In Shakespeare
and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 101–14. Cambridge:
Gardenostalgic. “To Mar the Foolish Fates.” Archive of Our Own. Published
April 6, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
6475003.
hamlets_scribe. “Hamlette.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 21, 2014.
Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668677.
Hartley, Andrew. “Introduction: ‘Reason Not the Need!’” In Shakespeare and
Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 1–12. Cambridge:
Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Fan Fiction as Literature.” In The Fan
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” In Fan
Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen
Hills, Matt. “Media Academics as Media Audiences: Aesthetic Judgments in Media
and Cultural Studies.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated
World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington,
33–47. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007.
Howell, Katherine Anderson. “Invitation: Remix Pedagogy in the Fandom
Classroom.” In Fandom as Classroom Practice: A Teaching Guide, edited by
Katherine Anderson Howell, 1–15. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.
ilikeituptheass. “The Kingdom of Denmark Is Run by a Gay Stoner’s Father but It
Sounds Like the Author Is on Crack by Fall Out Boy.” Archive of Our Own.
Published June 19, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://archiveofourown.
org/works/14975120.
Pop, 2013.

New York and London: New York University Press, 2006.
jlaw13. “The Heart Wants What It Wants.” Archive of Our Own. Published March
18104915/chapters/42799271.
Kaplan, Deborah. “Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative.” In
Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen
Killtheselights. “Conceal Me What I Am.” Archive of Our Own. Published April
14242881/chapters/32843100.
Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, edited by Robert
Shaughnessy, 93–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Lanier, Douglas M. “The Hogarth Shakespeare Series: Redeeming Shakespeare’s
Literariness.” In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James
MacBeth. “Beshrew My Heart.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 28, 2014.
Accessed August 3, 2018. https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/2033745.
marruman. “Geraldus Spring, The Shakespearian Talk Show.” Archive of Our
Own. Published August 2, 2015. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofou-
rown.org/works/4482794.
mcrshank. “Auric Idolatry.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 30, 2018.
Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14141649/
chapters/32591031.
megvad. “Romance and Justice.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 7, 2017.
chapters/24086955.
MissTantabis. “Ganymede and Jupiter.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 6,
2018. Accessed June 12, 2018. https://www.archiveofourown.org/works/
14863355.
NathanieloftheSky. “To Where the Wind Blows.” Archive of Our Own. Published
June 24, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/
works/15028202/chapters/34838825.
Nayoky. “The Twelfth Trap.” Archive of Our Own. Published July 28, 2015.
chapters/10093139.
planet_plantagenet. “Tempest/Star Trek Crossover.” Archive of Our Own.
Published July 6, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2019. https://archiveofourown.
org/works/7401964.
132 J. H. POPE
planet_plantagenet. “Wild and Whirling Words: Hamlet in Texts.” Archive of Our

Own. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://archiveofou-
rown.org/works/11149473/chapters/24876822.
princehamlet. “Suddenly, Pirates!” Archive of Our Own. Published May 17, 2018.
chapters/33939147.
Raggdoll_101. “Shakespeare Crack-eth.” Archive of Our Own. Published February
13713543.
republic. “John Cage collaborates with William Shakespeare.” Archive of Our
Own. Published September 20, 2016. Accessed July 18, 2019. https://
archiveofourown.org/works/8092441.
Rollins, H. E., ed. The Letters of John Keats. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge
Sandvoss, Cornel. “The Death of the Reader?: Literary Theory and the Study of
Texts in Popular Culture.” In The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 61–74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
SanSese. “The Game of Seats.” Archive of Our Own. Published May 16, 2016.
Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice.
London, 1600.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. London, 1597.
TheHazardsofLove13. “Toys of Desperation.” Archive of Our Own. Published
June 10, 2018. Accessed July 19, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
14893634.
tinypurplefishes. “The Shrew of Padua.” Archive of Our Own. Published September
4827707.
tvecking. “Just this once.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 6, 2018.
Accessed August 7, 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/13890330.
Whyman, Erica. “Queering the Pitch.” Romeo and Juliet Program. Stratford-
upon-Avon: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2018.
CHAPTER 5
“There is no slander in an allowed fool”:

Shakespeare, RPF, and Parody
Although Shakespeare has a sizable fandom on archiveofourown.org

(AO3), he and his works are not always of primary significance in fan fic-
tion. As noted in Chap. 4, fics that reference Shakespeare outnumber
those tagged as belonging to the Shakespeare fandom approximately 3:1.
In these cases, Shakespeare serves a secondary, allusive function as a gen-
eral cultural signifier of taste and sophistication, the embodiment of a
‘classic’ author or hegemonic canonicity, a high-culture writing style that
is inspiring or boringly obtuse, and a whole range of other meanings that
are employed in the service of fics written primarily for other fandoms. This
conforms generally to one of the two types of ‘Shakespeare users’ identi-
fied by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes. While some users are “delib-
erate seekers of Shakespeare,” others are “incidental tourists, visitors
whose interest in something other than Shakespeare—an actor, a new film
adaptation, an adjacent discipline, or a culturally eclectic website—drives
them circuitously to the corpus. Their use may be occasional, spontane-
ous, offhand, drawn to the text for the length of time it will take to satisfy
[a] related interest.”1 In this chapter, I examine a range of texts that treat
Shakespeare as secondary, partly through a continued discussion of cross-
over fics but primarily through a discussion of Real Person Fic (RPF)
1
Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” in The
M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 8.

134 J. H. POPE
focused first on Shakespeare himself and then on celebrity actors who have
played prominent roles in Shakespeare productions and films as well as in
the objects of other popular fandoms. Tom Hiddleston, for example, has
appeared in a number of Shakespeare projects in addition to portraying
Loki in the immensely popular Marvel superhero films, and he has been a
popular focus of RPF that frequently comments on his affinity for
Shakespeare. In many of these fics, Shakespeare is incorporated as a signifi-
cant feature of the actor’s identity, but one that is dealt with according to
varying degrees of familiarity and interest by the fics’ authors. I move from
there into a discussion of the incorporation of Shakespeare into other fan-
doms and fan texts, both noncommercial and commercial, particularly the
growing body of Shakespearean ‘parodies’ of popular films that reimaging
them as plays written by the Bard. In the process, I return to some of the
issues raised in Chap. 3 regarding the ownership of Shakespeare, as ‘par-
ody’ is a term that carries both generic and legal significance. Both con-
notations of parody are of paramount importance when discussing texts
such as Ian Doescher’s series of Shakespearean Star Wars plays. Taken
together, these texts illuminate how fans frequently operate as participants
in multiple fandoms, as well as how fannish forms of engagement serve to
negotiate Shakespeare’s status in contemporary popular culture by chal-
lenging or resisting that status.
The appearance of fan-centric actors in Shakespeare films is relevant to
Jeffrey Bussolini’s notion of “intertextuality of casting” and Alyson
Buckman’s related notion of “hyperdiegetic casting.”2 Although both of
these critics are discussing Joss Whedon’s work in particular and the way
in which his use of an ensemble of actors to offer a special pleasure and “a
collective, specialized fund of knowledge available specifically to those
who have watched (and rewatched) his fictions,”3 the idea works in terms
of how casting, say, Daisy Ridley in Ophelia or casting Doctor Who or
Avengers actors in Shakespearean film and stage productions is received by
the audience, as fans bring that other fandom with them to these Bard
projects. This can be intentional, as in, putting Daisy Ridley in Ophelia
serves a metatextual function as the strength and independence of her
2
Bussolini quoted in: K. Brenna Wardell, “Actors Assemble!: The Intertextual Pleasures of
the Joss Whedon Ensemble,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer
2016): para. 11–13; Buckman quoted in: J. Douglas Rabb and J. Michael Richardson, Joss
Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist: Narrative Ethics of the Bard and the Buffyverse (Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 15.
3
Buckman, quoted in: Rabb and Richardson, Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist, 15.
5 “THERE IS NO SLANDER IN AN ALLOWED FOOL”: SHAKESPEARE, RPF… 135
character Rey from Star Wars impinges upon Ridley as Ophelia, and the
audience—rightly or not—expects a kind of Rey-ness from the character,
with some audiences seeing Rey playing Ophelia more so than Ridley play-
ing Ophelia. For example, in Peter Rabbit (2018), Ridley lends her voice
to Cotton-Tail, whose intensity and physicality undoubtedly read as Rey-
esque to viewers who are aware that Ridley is the voice behind the rabbit.
Intertextual casting connections can be unintentional and anachronistic,
which is relevant because, as we saw in the previous chapter, fandoms can
be cheerfully anachronistic and counterfactual. During a recent screening
of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010), one of my students exclaimed “Jyn
Erso!” when Felicity Jones first appeared on screen as Miranda, a reference
to Jones’ character in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). In the discus-
sion that followed Taymor’s film, this student expressed disappointment
that Jones’ wispy fragility in The Tempest stood in stark contrast to Jyn
Erso’s strength, assertiveness, and capability in Rogue One. Although
Taymor’s film predates Rogue One by approximately six years, some fans
will see the character wherever the actor’s body appears and see all perfor-
mances as in dialogue with the fan text. However, these fans are not naïve
in assuming that there is some essential connection between Miranda and
Jyn Erso or that the six-year deficit does not matter. Rather, it is the plea-
sure evoked by the fan object—in this case, Star Wars—that encourages
the juxtaposition of the two roles. This functions a little differently in
Whedon’s work because he is largely responsible for the casting of his films
and television shows, so having Nathan Fillion play both Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing and Captain Mal in Firefly is not a coincidence.
As K. Brenna Wardell notes, Whedon’s use of an ensemble encourages in-
the-know audiences to see the roles as in dialogue with one another: “A
Whedon newcomer may find individual Fillion roles rewarding in their
own right, but for frequent Whedon viewers there are distinct pleasures in
recognizing Fillion, connecting each role to previous roles and texts, see-
ing him work with Whedon plays from non-Fillion texts, and reveling in
the radically varied ways in which Whedon showcases him.”4 So while the
4
Wardell, “Actors Assemble!,” para. 11. A number of Whedon critics have argued that
Whedon’s use of ensembles links him to Shakespearean theatrical practice in the playwright’s
use of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men (Wardell, “Actors Assemble!,” para.
3–4; Rabb and Richardson, Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist, 11–12). While this com-
parison has merit, the use of ensembles has been and is such a common practice in theater
that there is nothing specifically Shakespearean about it, even though Shakespeare’s acting
companies are famous examples of it. And as Wardell notes, directors such as Martin Scorsese,
136 J. H. POPE
intertextuality of casting might be more explicitly intentional in diverse

projects overseen by the same creative team than it is in different projects
overseen by different people, fans often establish that intertextuality on
their own. And we would be naïve to ignore the fact that studios undoubt-
edly count on this draw to attract existing fans to something else by virtue
of such casting. Likewise, it is a point often made by film and television
critics in their reviews and commentary. In his piece on Ophelia for CNN,
Brian Lowry spends as much time discussing Star Wars as he does Ridley’s
new film “which trades in the lightsaber for Shakespeare,” noting the
“balancing act for those featured in blockbuster franchises—choosing
roles that allow them to stretch as actors, and getting people to see them
separately from the iconic characters they play.”5 Audiences, and fans in
particular, engage in intertextual viewing.
Such intertextual viewing is undoubtedly connected to aspects of celeb-
rity culture and fandom, but it is often less about following a specific actor
from project to project (such as watching the newest Jennifer Aniston or
Brad Pitt vehicle) than it is about seeing the ghost of a particular character
across different projects. This can be manifested in fan fiction in both
crossover fic or RPF, or in a combination of the two. In crossover fic,
characters from two or more fandoms interact with one another (e.g.,
Doctor Who meets Luke Skywalker), or characters from one fandom
either find themselves in the imaginative worlds of other fandoms (Iron
Man finds himself aboard the Death Star) or the specifics of that world
intrude on their own (Iron Man discovers he can use the Force in an oth-
erwise normal Marvel version of New York City). Crossovers can be novel
in that they strive for a sense of both playfulness and disorientation, pursu-
ing the pleasure of unexpected combinations and also serving as a demon-
stration of the author’s ability to find points of contact across disparate
imaginative worlds and sets of characters. Crossovers also reflect the mul-
tidirectional nature of fandom in general in that fans are rarely fans of a
single television series or movie but are rather fans of numerous things—
John Ford, and Judd Apatow have also used the same actors across numerous films (Wardell,
“Actors Assemble!,” para. 12). Additionally, some movie and television studios have long-
standing relationships with specific actors, whether through MGM’s long-term contacts for
actors in the 1930s and 1940s or more recently in Pixar’s repeated hiring of John Ratzenberger
as a voice actor.
5
Brian Lowry, “Daisey Ridley trades ‘Star Wars’ for Shakespeare in ‘Ophelia,’” CNN,
Published July 2, 2019, accessed July 30, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/
entertainment/daisy-ridley-ophelia-column/index.html.
to varying degrees—at once. Although the imaginative worlds of each of

these objects might be hermetically sealed off from one another within the
worlds themselves and as separate intellectual properties, fans—and audi-
ences more generally—are transtextual. While crossover fic commonly
brings some of the dominant fandoms into contact with one another, it is
also often reflective of the specific transfandom of a particular author, thus
offering a unique constellation of intersections. As discussed in Chap. 4,
fan fiction’s pleasure lies in recognition, that readers and writers can read
recognizable characters circulating in recognizable worlds and behaving in
recognizable ways. Crossover fic requires, at minimum, a double recogni-
tion. If Harry Potter and Star Trek are crossed over but the reader is unfa-
miliar with one of those two worlds, the fic loses its coherence and impact
as a crossover. You can still read it, but as Anne Jamison reminds us, that’s
not the point.6 As crossovers multiply or become more esoteric, the size of
the ‘in-the-know’ readership diminishes and coalesces around the authors
themselves who are hailing a potentially small group of similarly disposed
transfans. HouseGameOfPotter’s lengthy “The Room” crosses over Harry
Potter and Game of Thrones in detail, merging two of the largest contem-
porary media fandoms.7 By contrast, in “The Quidditch Match,”
TheGryffindorBookworm crosses over Harry Potter with the MASH tele-
vision series, a less obvious pairing, while other crossovers are substantially
more wide-ranging.8 Arken_Stone1’s “The Librarian, the Doctor and the
Tardis” crosses over Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, Sherlock,
Star Trek, Lucifer, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit.9 Still others
cross Harry Potter over with a wide range of films, television series, novels,
anime, videogames, and so forth all in a single fic, limited only by an
author’s reading and viewing practices. In Shakespeare fanfic, characters
are crossed over between the plays and outside Shakespeare’s body of
work. In “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel,” fresne crosses over A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado
6
Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 14.
7
HouseGameOfPotter, “The Room,” Archive of Our Own, Published November 13,
2017, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/12710496/chapters/
28986447.
8
TheGryffindorBookworm, “The Quidditch Match,” Archive of Our Own, Published
August 15, 2018, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688266.
9
Arken_Stone1, “The Librarian, the Doctor and the Tardis,” Archive of Our Own,
Published November 28, 2017, accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12851208/chapters/29347227.
138 J. H. POPE
About Nothing, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Othello,
imagining Titania and Oberon as the architects of fate for the various plays
and altering their details, often to slash and genderfluid purposes.10 In
“Pathstone,” WhimsicallyWiddershins crosses over Othello and Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight in which Iago and Gawain find themselves exchang-
ing stories in an inn over drinks, whereas “Rendezvous” by Elsinore_and_
Inverness crosses over Doctor Who and Richard II.11 All such
crossovers—Shakespearean or otherwise—require audiences who are
comfortable reading in all of the grafted fandoms.
Intertextual viewing also takes on a complex dimension when we con-
sider the case of Shakespeare. Indeed, the very nature of Shakespeare—
and theater more generally—introduces some ideas that fan studies have
not sufficiently dealt with, particularly as it pertains to casting and perfor-
mance. As Sheenagh Pugh notes, “Characters, except in purely book-
based fandoms, necessarily go about behind the faces of real people,
actors.”12 As such, media fans typically imagine and discuss characters as
they appear on screen: Luke Skywalker looks and behaves like actor Mark
Hamill and is imagined as such in Star Wars fanfic or fan works. Despite
originating in book fandoms, fan works dealing with Harry Potter or Lord
of the Rings tend to draw on the characterizations offered by Daniel
Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Ian McKellen, and Elijah Wood, or else they are
specifically and explicitly grounded in details from the novels.13 In some
cases, characters are embodied by multiple actors, such as Star Trek’s
James Kirk as played by both William Shatner and Chris Pine. With the
exception of characters like James Bond, Batman, or The Doctor, charac-
ters are rarely embodied by more than one or two different actors. The
options open up a bit more when discussing works that have been
10
fresne, “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel,” Archive of Our Own, Published December
11
WhimsicallyWiddershins, “Pathstone,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 9, 2018,
accessed July 26, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/14595411; Elsinore_and_
Inverness, “Rendezvous,” Archive of Our Own, Published September 24, 2017, accessed
12
Seren, 2005), 158.
13
In many cases, fandoms related to an object that has both book and film iterations, for
example, will make it clear which version they are dealing with. Harry Potter and Lord of the
Rings fanfic, for example, will frequently delineate whether an individual fic belongs to the
book or the film fandom.
f requently adapted, especially ones that are out of copyright, from Hercules
to Elizabeth Bennet to Sherlock Holmes. By contrast, Shakespeare’s char-
acter appears in no fixed form, and with very few physical descriptions
given in the plays: the Duke of Gloucester has a hunchback; Rosalind is
relatively tall; Katherine Minola might have a limp. Shakespeare fans might
be purely ‘book’ fans in that they prefer the texts of the plays, or they
might be fans of particular performances, the diversity of which means a
wide range of potential foundational imaginings. For some fans, Hamlet
will be imagined as Laurence Olivier, David Tennant, Mel Gibson, Ethan
Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, or any one of the thousands of actors who have
played the role. Some fans of Romeo and Juliet might be inspired by Baz
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) but be entirely unaware of the exis-
tence of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film. Some fans will be inspired by the
gender- and race-blind casting of London stage performances while others
will never experience Shakespeare outside of a classroom or film produc-
tion. In short, while the media fans that come to mind when we think of
‘fans’ are typically working from a limited number of sources and embodi-
ments, Shakespeare fans are choosing from near infinite possibilities. Say
‘Hermione Granger’ and a set menu of imaginative choices appears before
the Harry Potter fan. Say ‘Juliet’ and the Shakespeare fan stands before an
unlimited international buffet of options.
Real Person Fic shares some ground with crossover and other styles of
fanfic, but it also breaks with many of fanfic’s conventions as a whole. RPF
takes as its focus the actors, musicians, authors, athletes, and so forth who
are the objects of fandom, a kind of celebrity fan. While RPF often dove-
tails with fanfic of all types, it is distinct in that it explicitly acknowledges
performance and fictionality rather than fleshing out an established fic-
tional world. Whereas, for example, film-based Harry Potter fanfic typi-
cally maintains the reality of the Wizarding World and its characters,
Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson RPF acknowledge that Harry Potter
and Hermione Granger are roles played by these actors. In other words,
whereas fanfic generally prioritizes character and world, RPF often makes
clear the distinction between the fictional and the real. Although, as Pugh
notes, a lot of RPF can also blur the distinction between actors and the
characters they play,14 related to what Murray Pomerance characterizes as
a strong “actor-character bond,” “the tenuousness between actors and the

14
140 J. H. POPE
characters they play.”15 Of course, celebrity fandom and media fandom are
by no means wholly separate, and one might emerge from the other: one
could become a fan of Daniel Radcliffe because of his portrayal of Harry
Potter. Following Pugh, in RPF, it is not uncommon to see actors repre-
sented as strikingly similar to the characters they portray (emphasizing
that they are perfect for the role) or, sometimes, strikingly dissimilar to
those same characters (emphasizing the strength of their acting ability).
RPF frequently involves speculating about what the ‘real’ actor is like, or
what the authors might wish them to be like, detailing a fictional private
life beyond both the performance of a character and the public perfor-
mance of their own celebrity persona.16 Although frequently connected to
contemporary celebrity culture, it is important to note that RPF is by no
means a new genre linked solely to fan fiction, just as fanfic is not a wholly
new phenomenon. Indeed, Shakespeare himself arguably wrote some,
most obviously in the Plantagenet and Tudor RPF of his history plays, but
likewise in some of the tragedies, namely King Lear and Macbeth, which
serve simultaneously as RPF and Holinshed fix-it fic. We might also look
to Christopher Marlowe’s RPF slash, Edward II, but we need not limit
ourselves to Elizabethan and Jacobean examples, as RPF theater alone
stretches back at least to Aristophanes’ The Frogs (405BC), an originary
example of Euripides-Aeschylus RPF. In short, online RPF is tied to the
long history of historical and biographical fiction.
RPF is stylistically notable within fan fiction on a number of fronts,
many of which are related. First, whereas fanfic in general is sometimes
sexual and sometimes not, RPF tends toward romantic, erotic, or sexually
explicit encounters. Pugh contends that RPF evolved specifically from
slash, which could help explain the preponderance of erotic narratives,17
but we should also consider the influence of celebrity culture more
15
Murray Pomerance, “Doing Dumbledore: Actor-Character Bonding and Accretionary
Performance,” in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and
Television, eds. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2016), 166.
16
Here, I am slightly modifying Busse’s discussion of real person slash (RPS). She argues
that “RPS deals with at least three different versions of the celebrity: the real star whom we
can never know, the public performance of the star, and the extrapolated star where the
writer fictionalizes a supposed private life.” See Kristina Busse, Framing Fan Fiction:
Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2017), 172.
17
enerally and the long history of related fan practices such as writing let-
g
ters—confessional, desirous, or otherwise—and sending gifts, pictures,
and other tokens to celebrities.18 Second, fanfic in general often avoids
original characters (OCs) inserted by the author, preferring instead to
develop, expand upon, and play with established fictional characters. By
contrast, RPF frequently employs OCs who interact with the celebrities in
the fics. When established characters do appear, they tend to be other
celebrities rather than fictional characters, such as in the large body of
work tagged as ‘British Actor RPF’ on AO3. Third, RPF is more likely
than other forms of fanfic to be written from a second-person perspective.
This is perhaps not surprising. A genre that is frequently grounded in
desire will logically include stand-ins for the author as part of the fantasy
fulfillment, either by writing that stand-in in as a named third-person OC,
by encouraging readers to insert themselves through the use of second-
person narration, or through the use of y/n inclusions (‘y/n’ is a fanfic
prompt for the reader to insert ‘your name’ wherever ‘y/n’ appears, so
‘He smiled at y/n’ is meant to be read as ‘He smiled at John,’ or whatever
your name might be). Fourth, the standard notion of canon does not
always operate in RPF in the same way as it does in other genres of fanfic
because, rather than the officially sanctioned continuity and consistency of
a fictional world, “the observable moments of RPF are a random jumble
of marketing ploys and happenstance, crafted constructs and slips of actual
personality, about which fandom at large comes to a consensus,” repudiat-
ing the singular narrative of fictional characters.19 Thus, canon in RPF is
more difficult to access because no fan has total access to the complete and
authentic narrative of a celebrity’s life, which can only be glimpsed in frag-
ments—if at all—and coalesces around specific moments or apparent char-
acter traits: an actor working on a specific film on location at a specific
time; pictures of vacations captured by the paparazzi or posted by the
actor to Instagram; tabloid stories about relationship or financial troubles;
the hints of an actor’s real sense of humor or personal politics conveyed
during an interview. All of these are the disparate points that can be
stitched together to form the foundation of canon on which RPF
authors build.
18
Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5–8.
19
V. Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, ed.
Anne Jamison (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2013), 328.
142 J. H. POPE
Although RPF is a well-established genre within fanfic, it has not

attracted a great deal of published scholarship. Pugh, for example, writes
broadly about RPF in The Democratic Genre, noting that she avoids quot-
ing from RPF “for obvious legal reasons,” namely a fear of ending up “on
the wrong end of a libel suit.”20 Nevertheless, some critics have published
work on some subgenres of RPF, such as Coppa’s and Busse’s work on
popslash (i.e., RPF focused on boybands, typically the Backstreet Boys or
∗NSYNC and originating in the early 2000s). Busse, for example, argues
that popslash fics “foreground the way subject positions are not only cho-
sen but also consciously created and shaped by the audience even as they
address a desire for an imaginary core identity,” and therefore share a
thematic focus on the performance of postmodern selfhood.21 Additionally,
Coppa suggests that popslash helped break the taboo within fandom more
generally which held that “writing fanfiction, particularly romantic or
sexual fiction, about ‘real people’ (actors, musicians, celebrities) was dis-
respectful or in bad taste.”22 Likewise, V. Arrow notes that, in spite of
popslash, RPF is still “a world in some ways completely apart from the rest
of fanfiction subculture,” derided within the fanfic community as
‘creepy.’23 Arrow also argues that most RPF consists of slash pairings of
musicians in the popslash tradition but that, in contrast to the assump-
tions made by critics of RPF, much of it aims to be respectful of its subject
by probing for the truth of that individual, even if that truth often comes
across during scenes of intimacy.24 As we will see, however, Shakespeare—
or Shakespearean actor—RPF departs form some of these assumptions.
Busse discusses identification and desire as it is articulated in RPF by
distinguishing between “insertion and observer fantasy as recurring modes
of fannish narratives. In the former, writers may directly insert themselves
into the narrative or mold one of the characters to become their represen-
tative, while in the latter they voyeuristically fantasize a reality in which the
stars remain undisturbed by outside observers.”25 Both insertion and
observer fantasy are prevalent in Shakespeare RPF. Additionally, it is note-
worthy that RPF occupies a paradoxical space within fan culture more

20
Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 42–43.

21
22
University of Michigan Press, 2017), 101.
23
Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” 323.
24
Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” 331.
25
Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 44.
broadly, especially when it is focused on celebrity actors and musicians.

While it might be marginalized within the broader fanfic community, RPF
is also connected to the most mainstream, socially acceptable forms of
fandom, as celebrity and music fandoms have numerous commercial ven-
ues that legitimize their fans. Indeed, Coppa goes so far as to suggest that
these fandoms are perhaps “too close to mainstream culture,” with the
end result that they “never had much of an organized subcultural
presence.”26 But while buying magazines featuring photo spreads and
interviews with a favorite actor, reading and watching tabloid stories about
their spending habits and personal lives, or seeking them out for auto-
graphs are activities that are legitimized and encouraged in popular cul-
ture, RPF is seen as crossing the very hazy line of appropriateness, even
within the fanfic community.
RPF relevant to Shakespeare comes in two forms: fics featuring
Shakespeare himself, and ones focused on actors who have played
Shakespearean roles on stage or screen. Fics focused on Shakespeare him-
self serve to complicate some of the predominant assumptions about
RPF. For example, is it accurate to consider the playwright a celebrity or
star in the same sense as we would an actor or even a famous contempo-
rary author? If, as Busse suggests, RPF is grounded in the fan’s knowing
recognition of the celebrity’s multivalent performance of self, then we are
missing comparable performances from Shakespeare himself such talk
show appearances, magazine profiles and interviews, tabloid stories about
off-camera antics, Twitter and Instagram posts, and so forth. Nevertheless,
Shakespeare is still anachronistically wrested into our own understanding
of celebrity, which is clearly evident in Shakespeare in Love, a film that maps
a turn-of-the-millennium sense of showbiz and fame onto Shakespeare’s
world of Elizabethan theater in order to encourage the audience to iden-
tify with him by refashioning him according to our own sense of celebrity.
This version of Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is driven by passion and
sexual desire that is grounded in identification: Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow)
loves him as a nobody playwright and identifies with his artistic sensibili-
ties when everyone else is blind to his talents and more smitten with
Christopher Marlowe. Such pre-fame recognition of talent and the mutual
affection that arises prior to wealth and celebrity is an extremely common
26
Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan
Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson
and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2006), 56.
144 J. H. POPE
trope in RPF focused on today’s celebrities. Michelle K. Yost notes that

“Shakespeare’s celebrity and iconography are the fuel of fannish imagina-
tion, remaking him into their own folk hero. His life is an incomplete
story that some authors yearn to fill because missing puzzle pieces are a
source of irritation. Others want to see the object of their admiration
reflect (and embody) their own desires for success, love, and acceptance.”27
In this sense, the details of Shakespeare’s biography are as tantalizingly
ellipsistic as any media text, and from the ghost of Shakespeare that appears
in Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida to Kenneth Branagh’s speculations about
a post-London Shakespeare in the film All Is True (2018), authors have
used Shakespeare to reflect their own desires or to playfully fill in the
‘missing scenes’ of his life.
In some cases, Shakespeare RPF is blended with crossover and other
fanfic genres. In a tantalizing summary for “Bed Time Story About Master
Luke,” a fic that still remains unwritten, JadeEyedMonster explains their
ambitious plan for a crossover between The Last Jedi and Shakespeare:
[The] basic concept is that there are two time-travelers who travel from dif-
ferent timelines into 16th century Europe and fall in love. One of them is
Rey, who is devastated from the death of Master Luke [at the end of The
Last Jedi] so tries to use the Force astral projection to contact him but
instead ends up in the body of Mary Arden who is just taking care of little
baby William and starts telling him a bed time story about Luke. The other
one is the Anne Hathaway who from childhood since she can remember did
switch between her 16th century body and her 21st century body and is just
trying to control it and live this confusing life. So the way they meet is prob-
ably going to be really cute but at the end of the day Will is going to have
his kids with Anne and leave to London. So Mary and Anne are going to
raise all of these new kids in their family home in Stratford and have adven-
tures on the farm and its [sic] all going to be cute and dreamy.28
Fics such as these merge the loose biographical details of Shakespeare with
the playful irreverence that characterizes much of crossover fic in general.
While narratives such as Shakespeare in Love and All Is True strive, if
27
28
JadeEyedMonster, “Bed Time Story About Master Luke,” Archive of Our Own,
Published January 17, 2018, accessed July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/
works/13401843.
s omewhat tongue-in-cheek or anachronistically, toward an overall sense of

historical plausibility, fics like “Bed Time Story About Master Luke” treat
Shakespeare as no different than any other media text or pop culture char-
acter. In this vein, there are numerous examples of Shakespeare/Marlowe
slash fic on AO3, some deriving from Shakespeare in Love, Will, or other
recent filmic depictions of the two playwrights, and some tagged more
generally as ‘Historical RPF’ or ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre &
Literature RPF.’ Many of these fics play on Shakespeare’s admiration for
the more established and admired Marlowe as well as the homoerotic pos-
sibilities and queer readings of both writers’ works. Shakespeare frequently
plays the role of the fan and Marlowe of the celebrity in which Shakespeare’s
veneration of Marlowe becomes the foundation for a sexual encounter. In
Ashmole’s “A Man in Hue,” a fresh-faced Shakespeare is awestruck when
Marlowe, “This man known already by reputation, … The writer of
Tamburlaine” joins him for a drink.29 Shakespeare’s sexual and authorial
inexperience is matched by the more seasoned and knowing—in both
regards—Marlowe. The blending of professional and sexual apprentice-
ship is also evident in “The Chimes at Midnight” by nitpickyabouttrains in
which Shakespeare is desperate to have Marlowe read Two Gentlemen of
Verona, detailing an encounter between the two that results in both sex
and their decision to collaborate with each other in the future.30
Not all RPF featuring Shakespeare is overtly erotic. In “Lent,” a_t_rain
focuses on Shakespeare’s relationship with his daughters, Susanna and
Judith, during a visit back to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1599. Will talks to
them about his work, with Judith in particular lamenting the paucity of
compelling female characters in history and in history plays. This fic
focuses almost entirely on the family’s reading habits and the playwright’s
ruminations about a new tragedy he might write—what would become
Hamlet—as he reads Nicholas Breton’s The Miseries of Mavillia to his
daughters over the course of his holiday visit. Ultimately, the author flips
the prevalent autobiographical reading of the genesis of Hamlet by sug-
gesting that the play was inspired not by Shakespeare’s son but by his
daughters. “I wanted to explore the possibility that Hamlet may have
started off as a girl, even if theatrical practicalities ensured that he didn’t
29
Ashmole, “A Man in Hue,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 30, 2016, accessed
30
nitpickyabouttrains, “The Chimes At Midnight,” Archive of Our Own, Published July
146 J. H. POPE
end up that way,” writes a_t_rain in the fic’s Notes.31 In “Words Words
Words,” one of the most intriguing Shakespeare RPFs, author La Reine
Noire writes in response to the news in 2016 that Oxford University Press
would be claiming that the Henry VI plays were collaborations between
Shakespeare and Marlowe in their most recent edition.32 Drawing inspira-
tion from the tavern scenes in Shakespeare in Love, La Reine Noire specu-
lates about how that collaboration might have played out by contemplating
the concept of collaboration through the lens of fan fiction. In the Notes,
the author explains:
If you’ve been following the early modern news circuit (and if you’re read-
ing this fic, odds are you do), you might have heard about the newly fash-
ionable theory that the three parts of Henry VI were the collaborative effort
of Shakespeare and Marlowe. My main issue with this theory hinges on the
definition of the word ‘collaboration,’ which we as fan authors know can
mean so many different things.
This fic operates on the assumption that the Marlowe-Shakespeare collabo-

ration on the three parts of Henry VI worked more or less like a collabora-
tion between fan authors, where Marlowe was the beta-reader33 on Parts 2
and 3 and a co-author on the prequel, Part 1, where his primary contribu-
tion was the Joan of Arc storyline. Shakespeare then wrote Richard III on
his own shortly after Marlowe’s murder. That assumption is mine and is not
based on extant scholarship.34
This fic encapsulates the often blurry distinction between scholarship and
fan criticism, offering a productive, creative analysis of a contentious
31
a_t_rain, “Lent,” Archive of Our Own, Published February 18, 2015, accessed July 31,
2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/3387269.
32
The author does not identify which specific news story inspired the fic, but a number
of stories appeared in the news media in the months immediately prior to the publication
of the fic. See Dalya Alberge, “Christopher Marlowe Credited as One of Shakespeare’s
Co-writers,” The Guardian, Published October 23, 2016, accessed July 31, 2019, https://
www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christopher-marlowe-credited-as-one-of-
shakespeares-co-writers.
33
‘Beta reading’ is the fanfic equivalent of peer review where an early version of a fic is read
and commented on by, usually, other fanfic authors. Beta reading differs from peer review,
however, in that authors are not compelled to act upon the feedback and suggested revisions
in order to achieve publication.
34
La Reine Noire, “Words Words Words,” Archive of Our Own, Published December 18,
authorship controversy. When Shakespeare appears as a character in RPF,

he is frequently of primary importance to fic authors who are Fazel and
Geddes’ “intentional and deliberate seekers of Shakespeare.”35
Shakespeare, however, also appears in RPF dedicated to other fandoms
and other celebrities, and in these fics, the playwright becomes associated
with a loose array of shifting significations, serving a more allusive func-
tion. In SHADOWSQUILL’s “Is This a dagger?,” for example, the author
crosses over Doctor Who with the actor who played the Ninth Doctor in
2005, Christopher Eccleston, and who also played Macbeth in the Royal
Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth in 2018. In this fic, the
Doctor is the real person—or real extraterrestrial being—who is trying to
convince his companion, Rose, that he is a competent actor, but she laughs
at his seriousness as he delivers his lines. To convince her and satisfy his
bruised ego, the Doctor takes Rose ahead in time: “He ran to the console
room and entered the coordinates for Stratford-upon-Avon on Earth.
Year 2018. Period, anytime from March to June as long as there was a
performance where he was on stage.” The Doctor stays aboard the
TARDIS while Rose attends a ‘Christopher Eccleston’ performance, and
when she returns to the TARDIS following the play, her attitude has
changed completely. “You’ll be a breath-taking Macbeth,” she tells the
Doctor, and she asks him to recite some more lines—this time, she does
not laugh.36 This fic implicitly addresses the draw, for some, of the RSC
casting Eccleston in the play, giving Doctor Who fans an opportunity to see
a former Time Lord in the flesh. In this intertextual viewing, the fan sees
the Doctor first and Eccleston second, offering up the playful fantasy that
anyone who attended one of these performances in 2018 was unknow-
ingly in the presence of one of the most powerful entities in the universe.
Additionally, Rose’s reactions serve to validate both Eccleston and Doctor
Who (or, perhaps more broadly, genre roles): that she initially finds the
thought that the Doctor can really act humorous because she can only see
him as a particular, quirky type of character is reflective of audiences’
inability to see past an iconic character and view the actor separate from
that role, the point that Lowry makes about Star Wars actors in his CNN
article. That Rose is sufficiently cowed and brought to awe of the Doctor’s
performance of Eccleston performing Macbeth serves as proof that it is
35
Fazel and Geddes, “Introduction: The Shakespeare User,” 8.
36
SHADOWSQUILL, “Is This a Dagger?,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 8, 2018,
148 J. H. POPE
the audience’s perspective that is limited rather than the Doctor-Eccleston’s

range. Paradoxically, however, even as the author encourages us to see that
Eccleston is more than just a single role, by reimagining the actor as the
Doctor’s performance, we see that the role still dominates the actor’s
identity by virtue of its primacy in the narrative. This testifies to the fan-
nish imperative to see such actors’ work as always in dialogue with the
object of their fandom, the strong actor-character bond discussed by
Pomerance.37
In some RPF that intersects with Shakespeare, the playwright is clearly
of secondary importance. In “Is This a Dagger?,” the author devotes more
attention to the inner workings of the TARDIS than to an engagement
with Macbeth beyond a few references to some of the play’s most well-
known lines, invoking the conventional status of Shakespearean tragedy as
the stuff of real acting. In SailorLestrade’s “Shakespeare in Love,” an RPF
focused on Tom Hiddleston, Shakespeare serves as a plot device more
than anything else. In this second-person narrative, you are a young
woman attending school at the same time as a not-yet-famous Hiddleston,
and you are tasked with reading an unnamed Shakespeare play for class, a
frustrating task because you do not understand the play. While in the
library working to understand the play, you see Hiddleston embodying
the stereotypical nerd, wearing “[t]hick framed glasses and a Doctor Who
shirt” and who is in the library to do some reading in advance of a new—
again, unnamed—Shakespeare film adaptation.38 Significantly, it is not a
film that Hiddleston is in himself, but as a Shakespeare fan, he is presum-
ably excited to refamiliarize himself with the playtext before viewing the
film. Following this chance encounter, he becomes your Shakespeare
tutor, and “[h]e gave you tips and movie suggestions that helped you
understand it better.”39 Over the course of the remaining brief paragraphs,
you and Hiddleston date, engage in a successful long-distance relation-
ship, get married, and get pregnant, and the narrative concludes with
37
Having attended one of Eccleston’s performances in May 2018, I unsurprisingly over-
heard a lot of discussion of Doctor Who among the audience, as is presumably the case for any
performance in which an actor from another fan object appears. To wit, when I attended a
2016 performance of Doctor Faustus starring Kit Harrington at the Duke of York in London,
the audience was filled with Game of Thrones fans, some of whom were wearing homemade
‘I love you Jon Snow’ shirts.
38
SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love,” Archive of Our Own, Published May 14, 2015,
39
SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love.”
Hiddleston eagerly picking out Shakespeare-inspired baby names.

Shakespeare fandom is clearly central to the story, but it is Hiddleston’s
fandom, not the author’s or central character’s, playing on the actor’s
well-established affinity for Shakespeare both in the press and through his
involvement with a number of Shakespeare projects. In this fic, no men-
tion is made of Hiddleston’s involvement with, say, The Avengers or his
other film roles, nor do we observe him reading Thor comics: his t-shirt
and general appearance mark him as nerdy and fannish in general, and his
words mark him as a Shakespeare fan in particular, and he is desperate to
share that fandom with anyone. Indeed, the fact that the only thing he
talks to you about is Shakespeare implies that it is the reader’s willingness
to be receptive to his fandom that is the foundation of their relationship,
a gesture that aligns him with a Mandella-like fan quality from 10 Things I
Hate About You.
In much of Hiddleston RPF, the actor’s well-documented relationship
with Shakespeare is key to the fic. He has appeared as Prince Hal in The
Hollow Crown (2012) and as Coriolanus in a 2013 Donmar Warehouse
production, and he was cast by another noted Shakespearean, Kenneth
Branagh, for the role of Loki in Thor (2011), with Branagh again directing
him in a limited stage run of Hamlet in 2017. Hiddleston has also fre-
quently discussed his love of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean aspects of
Loki in media interviews.40 While it is certainly not uncommon for actors
to have extensive stage experience with Shakespeare, this aspect of
Hiddleston’s history and personality has become one of those ‘observable
moments’ identified by Arrow that fans accept and rewrite as core to the
actor’s canonical persona from which they can extrapolate while remaining
true to the ‘real’ Hiddleston. Significantly, the actor’s love of Shakespeare
is often depicted as predating his celebrity, validating its connection to the
‘real’ Tom Hiddleston. As many of these fics also focus OCs who knew
him pre-fame, the truthfulness of this authenticity is verified and does not
lie in the actor simply claiming ‘I’ve always been a fan of Shakespeare’
because it makes him sound sophisticated. His love is real, observed, and
substantiated by these women firsthand. As noted earlier in the chapter,
Busse characterizes these types of fics as insertion fantasies in which “the
40
See, for example, Jenelle Riley, “Stagecraft Special Edition: Tom Hiddleston Talks
Shakespeare, ‘Avengers,’” Variety, Published April 25, 2018, accessed August 12, 2019,
https://variety.com/2018/film/features/tom-hiddleston-avengers-infinity-war-loki-
hamlet-1202783878/.
150 J. H. POPE
text envisions the author entering the story, usually to meet the stars and
often to become romantically involved with them.”41 In contrast to
SailorLestrade’s fic in which Shakespeare fandom is key but the
Shakespearean text is largely irrelevant, cloj’s “Talk Shakespeare to Me”
(another second-person narrative) blends together Shakespearean dia-
logue and the events of the text. You, a woman named Mia, are a recent
graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts participating in a festival
of productions feature old and new grads. Tasked with playing Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing, you unexpectedly find yourself acting opposite
Hiddleston’s Benedick. Although Hiddleston begins admiring your legs
before rehearsals begin, running lines together brings the two of you
closer and closer together. In addition to including the text of the relevant
lines of the play they rehearse, cloj demonstrates a comfort and familiarity
with the text as Hiddleston proposes that they rehearse Act 5, scene 4:
“You gulped. It’s where your characters declare their love, then kiss. Then
kiss!”42 This is a marked contrast to SailorLestrade’s vague reference to “a
Shakespeare play.”43 As cloj’s fic progresses and Mia’s encounter with
Hiddleston grows more sexually explicit, the actor transitions from gentle-
manly politeness to speaking in affected Shakespearean language, such as
when he sees you naked and you move to cover yourself: “Prithee doth
not encave from me lovely. Thou hast nothing to be asham’d of and thy
corse is nothing but beautiful to mine eyes,” he says.44 Similarly, in hold-
ingtorches’ “Petrified Heart,” you are a woman who unexpectedly finds
herself rekindling a relationship with Hiddleston during a snowstorm, a
relationship that had begun before he was famous, thus emphasizing the
authenticity of the relationship. The narrator finds herself taking a bath at
the actor’s cottage and coming face to face with a Shakespeare rubber
duckie, proof that “Tom’s sense of humour and love for all things
Shakespeare had remained unchanged through the years.”45 During the
bath, the duckie becomes your object of contemplation about how to
handle the present circumstances, with the scroll it holds reading “To be
or not to be” evoking the narrator’s own introspection that plays on
41
Busse, Framing Fan Fiction, 45.
42
cloj, “Talk Shakespeare to Me,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 20, 2015, accessed
43
SailorLestrade, “Shakespeare in Love.”
44
cloj, “Talk Shakespeare to Me.”
45
holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Archive of Our Own, Published June 3, 2018,
Hamlet’s own soul searching. In addition to this explicit reference, the fic
is suffused with other Shakespearean allusions. Addressing the duckie, the
narrator laments, “I don’t even know why he’s being so kind to me even
though I’m being so cruel,” playing on Hamlet’s comment that “I must
be cruel only to be kind.”46 When Hiddleston declares his affection for the
narrator, he says, “the moment I met you, I knew I was born to beg for
you,” a probable allusion to Richard II’s comment that “We were not
born to sue but to command.”47 In Marylebone221’s “Oscar Speech,”
another second-person narrator, you (his wife) beam with pride as
Hiddleston delivers a speech after winning an Oscar, using the speech as a
platform to praise women and address #MeToo and to chastise inaction in
Hollywood via Shakespeare. The actor concludes his speech with
“Hashtags and Clothes are statements nothing more. Only paving the way
is pretending you stand for this but do not want to change a thing. Shame
on them who only pretend. I’ll end this with Shakespeare’s word: Men at
some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our
stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”48 In VenlaMatleena’s “It
All Began from Shakespeare” (one of the longest Hiddleston RPFs at
thirty-one chapters and nearly 62,000 words), you are a University College
London student taking a special course on Shakespeare that happens to be
taught by Hiddleston, your favorite actor. The course begins as “Tom
spoke about his love for Shakespeare,” and soon, he asks to sit with you at
lunch: “You were sitting alone again but this time one certain Shakespeare–
fan insisted on sitting with you.”49 Eventually, you and Tom rehearse
Romeo and Juliet’s first kiss in front of the class, and your relationship
develops from there, moving beyond the Shakespearean starting point
into more typical RPF territory.
In addition to het RPF, the Hiddleston-Shakespeare connection appears
in plenty of slash RPF. In “That Most Ingrateful Boy,” missdibley puts a
teenaged Hiddleston—“an English exchange student” in New York—in a
production of Twelfth Night playing Antonio while the central female
46
holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Hamlet, 3.4.179.
47
holdingtorches, “Petrified Heart,” Hamlet, 1.1.196.
48
Marylebone221, “Oscar Speech,” Archive of Our Own, Published March 5, 2018,
49
VenlaMatleena, “It all began from Shakespeare,” Archive of Our Own, Published May
23, 2016, accessed, July 29, 2019, https://archiveofourown.org/works/6943414/
chapters/15834985.
152 J. H. POPE
character, Teddy Gonzalez, plays Sebastian.50 The fic draws on readings of

the play that posit homoerotic longing between Antonio and Sebastian, a
sexual tension that spills over from the play into the Tom-Teddy sexual
encounter. As in cloj’s “Shakespeare in Love,” missdibley uses the text,
rehearsal, and performance of the Shakespeare play as a form of foreplay
that invigorates Hiddleston and becomes the venue through which sexual
tension becomes sexual encounter. In MiloBettany’s “Shakespeare in
Love,” Tom Hiddleston and William Shakespeare magically share the
same dream across centuries, which finds the actor gushing “You are my
biggest inspiration, master Shakespeare” and feeling his first rush of
“homoerotic tendencies” as the two nearly share a kiss before both men
wake up in their own times.51 When Shakespeare wakes up, he weeps,
brokenhearted that he has lost the man in his dreams, and with tears in his
eyes pens Sonnet 15, playfully implying that Hiddleston is the anonymous
Fair Youth of the sonnets. In this fic, fandom is explicitly emphasized as
the actor is meeting his fans following a performance of Coriolanus before
he himself becomes the fan when encountering Shakespeare in the dream/
vision. Regardless of whether the RPF is het or slash, Hiddleston- or
Shakespeare-focused, power and authority or an imbalanced power rela-
tionship are recurring themes across numerous authors, and these power
relationships are frequently articulated in institutional or educational
terms as teacher-student or master-apprentice in which the novice is initi-
ated into the realm of expertise. In this sense, RPF reiterates and engages
in some of the core debates surrounding fanfic and the dialectical relation-
ship between cultural producers and cultural consumers, as master-
apprentice themes acknowledge the debt of the fan to the fan object while
also seeking to overcome that debt through the process of initiation that
often blends sexual and creative energies.
In recent years, a range of commercially available texts have been pub-
lished that are rooted in fan culture and the genres of fan fiction—notably
crossover fic—that incorporate Shakespeare into other popular fandoms,
often by mashing up a Shakespearean style of writing and formality of dic-
tion with recognizable media properties. As we saw in the previous chapter,
adopting a Shakespearean ‘voice’ is a recurring feature of numerous fics,
50
missdibley, “That Most Ingrateful Boy,” Archive of Our Own, Published April 24, 2016,
51
MiloBettany, “Shakespeare in Love,” Archive of Our Own, Published January 17, 2015,
the antithesis of an approach to Shakespeare that strives to ‘translate’ him

into a more contemporary—and thus accessible—voice, an approach that
has persisted from at least Dryden, through the eighteenth century, and
down to the present in the form of alternative universe (AU) films, fics,
and other adaptations. Rather than seeking to modernize Shakespeare,
these texts seek to Shakespeare-ize the modern. This approach is undoubt-
edly connected to the spirit of irreverent play that characterizes fan culture
and fan fiction, the “juxtaposition of dissimilar texts,” of “the stuffy and
the contemporary.”52 Relevant here is also Christy Desmet’s discussion of
YouTube Shakespeare mash-ups that serve to critique “Shakespeare’s place
on the border between high art and popular culture.”53 Douglas Lanier
rightly discourages us from dismissing such pop culture mash-ups as pass-
ing fads or purely as objects of postmodern irony, arguing that “Pop par-
ody of Shakespeare often coexists with the conviction that Shakespeare is
a valuable aesthetic touchstone or ethical resource—the object of parody
is typically not Shakespeare at all but the stultifying decorum that sur-
rounds him,” and these works free Shakespeare from the institutional,
academic, and cultural traditions that have since stifled him.54 It is also
important for us to recognize, as Lanier does, that Shakespeare scholars or
fans are not necessarily the primary intended audiences for these texts,
which is partly why fanfic crossover serves as a productive venue through
which to interpret texts in which Shakespeare is of secondary importance.
While the history of Shakespeare allusions and adaptations is long
indeed, the current spate of fan-centric crossovers can be traced back to
The Klingon Hamlet (1996), prepared by the Klingon Language
Institute (with a similar translation of Much Ado About Nothing follow-
ing in 2001). The text is the embodiment of a fannish engagement with
popular culture and the epitome of a fanfic intervention into and
52
Jennifer Holl, “Shakespeare Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play,” in The
M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 124; Douglas Lanier, “Will of the
People: Recent Shakespeare Film Parody and the Politics of Popularization,” in A Concise
Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana E. Henderson (Malden, Oxford and Carlton:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 177.
53
Christy Desmet, “YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention,” in
OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, ed. Daniel Fischlin
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 64.
54
Press, 2002), 17–18.
154 J. H. POPE
extrapolation on a popular media text that mobilizes a fan’s in-depth

knowledge of that text to exceptional ends. In Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country (1991), Chancellor Gorkon comments that “You
have not experienced Shakespeare, until you have read him in the origi-
nal Klingon.” This is, no doubt, a joke made in the context of a fran-
chise that has frequently cited Shakespeare throughout its—to that
point—twenty-five-year history, up to and including the Hamlet quota-
tion that forms the title of the film.55 The translators playfully take
Gorkon’s utterance as a statement of canonical fact regarding Klingon
literary culture, that Shakespeare was, in fact, a Klingon playwright,
maintaining and expanding upon the coherence of that fictional world.
In their discussion of Shakespearean authenticity that touches briefly on
The Klingon Hamlet, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson empha-
size that the text is one that—knowingly—“clearly exceeds current lim-
its of acceptability … precisely because the existing archive and the
various investments that we have made in that archive over the last four
centuries, preclude there ever being a Shakespeare who was a Klingon.
Hence, the Klingon Hamlet is, and currently remains, inauthentic.”56
While this may be true in the context of Shakespeare, it is not so in the
context of Star Trek wherein the translation heightens the authenticity
of that fictional world by expanding the Klingon canon in both cultural
and linguistic terms. The official language that exists in the franchise
consists—not surprisingly—of words related primarily to space travel
and conflict, so extrapolating on the available vocabulary to incorporate
the verbose musings on mortality and family in Hamlet is no small task.
The resulting text is as much a crossover as it is a missing scene fic that
develops the fictional Klingon language for a complete translation of
55
There is, undoubtedly, much to be said about how the notion of an ‘original Klingon
Shakespeare’ intersects with some of the key concepts discussed in Shakespeare’s Fans regard-
ing the authority of an original text, whether it is the original or an originary experience.
Despite the fact that Shakespeare has obviously been translated into Klingon, the Klingon
prioritization of their Shakespeare over an English Shakespeare speaks to the ownership para-
dox discussed in Chap. 3. Belonging to everyone and no one at the same time, Shakespeare
can be appropriated or poached by Klingon culture without the need to acknowledge debt,
to the point that that debt has effectively been erased from the culture that now claims com-
plete ownership of the playwright.
56
Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, “Shakespeare’s Multiple Metamorphoses:
Authenticity Agonistes,” College Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 14.
Hamlet, accompanied by a fictitious scholarly and editorial introduction.57

As in many of the notes that accompany AO3 fics, Lawrence M. Schoen’s
preface to The Klingon Hamlet explains the logic and intent of the text,
emphasizing that, since its founding, “the Klingon Language Institute has
grappled with the warrior’s tongue, embracing the willful suspension of
disbelief necessary to study an artificial language originally created as little
more than a prop. The volume you hold should be ample evidence of
Klingon’s evolution, from the sound stage to popular culture, from a back
lot at Paramount Pictures to Klingon and Star Trek fans throughout the
world.” Schoen concludes by imploring the reader to “join us in our sus-
pended disbelief; accept for a moment that this is the original version of
the play. Don’t concern yourself with temporal anomalies of how you can
be reading this play from the future.”58 Two points are clear from this
preface: first, that this is a text by and for fans of Star Trek, particularly the
small subset of fans who can read or speak a fictional language; second,
Shakespeare is simply the venue through which this fandom is expressed,
a test case to demonstrate the translators’ skills working in a language with
a very limited official vocabulary while simultaneously intersecting with
the canonical Star Trek narrative. In terms of the first point, the translation
epitomizes the ‘by fans, for fans’ nature of fanfic that can be gleefully
unconcerned with reaching a wider audience beyond the fandom itself.
Like many Shakespeare scholars with an interest in popular culture, I own
a copy of The Klingon Hamlet that I trot out as an example of Shakespeare’s
cultural prevalence, but I cannot read or pronounce a single word of the
Klingon language, rendering it as a prop or kitsch object used primarily for
pedagogical purposes or as a conversation piece. Akira Okrent estimates
that there are probably only twenty or thirty people in the world capable
of carrying on a conversation in Klingon.59 Consequently, the potential
readership of the text is incredibly small, even though the editors provide
a facing-page translation—Shakespeare’s play—and a brief English-
language introduction. Without these apparatuses, it is unlikely that the
57
For a compelling discussion of the postmodern politics of language and translation
apparent in the text, see: Karolina Kazimierczak, “Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and
Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation,” Studies in
Popular Culture 32, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 35–55.
58
Klingon Language Institute, The Klingon Hamlet, trans. Nick Nicholas and Andrew
Strader (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), ix.
59
Akira Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity,
Madness, and Genius (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 273.
156 J. H. POPE
text would be commercially viable or available. To the second point,

Shakespeare is simply a—difficult—mountain to be climbed in this fan
text. As Sarah Ekstrom notes in her foreword, since the initial publication
of Hamlet, the play “has earned the distinction of being one of the most
often quoted works in the English language, second only to the Bible, and
has been translated into spoken and written languages worldwide.”60
Having already translated books of the Bible, Shakespeare’s play thus rep-
resents the next logical challenge. As Lanier notes, the introduction to The
Klingon Hamlet parodies or “gently sends up” typical scholarly editorial
practice, emphasizing the merits of the present edition and the deficiencies
of previous ones.61 The editors even engage in their own version of the
authorship controversy, claiming that Federation propaganda during their
prior war with the Klingon Empire meant that “certain individuals resorted
to crude forgeries of Shex’pir, claiming him as a conveniently remote
mediaeval Terran, a certain Willem Shekispeore, and hoping by this falsifi-
cation of history to discredit the achievements of Klingon culture.”62 By
providing the facing-page translation, the reader is invited to compare the
turgid and clunky verse of this human pretender with the vibrant lyricism
of the Klingon Bard. Ultimately, The Klingon Hamlet epitomizes the
incorporation of Shakespeare into other fandoms through crossover.
A similar fannish engagement with Shakespeare as secondary is appar-
ent in the numerous Shakespearean versions of popular films that have
appeared in recent years that rewrite the films as Shakespearean plays.
Unlike The Klingon Hamlet which is presented as part of the Star Trek
canon, the majority of these texts are non-canonical crossovers that do not
aim to be consistent with established narratives (at least, not in the terms
that these narratives are developed in the original films), although they do
frequently strive to maintain consistency of characterization, albeit filtered
through Shakespearean language and style. Adam Bertocci offers up a
Shakespearean retelling of Joel and Ethan Cohen’s film The Big Lebowski
(1998) in The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two
Gentlemen of Lebowski (2010), and Jordan Monsell takes a similar approach
to Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984) in Ministers of Grace: The
Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of Ghostbusters (2016). The most
60
The Klingon Hamlet, xi.
61
Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 13. The Klingon Hamlet is even
accompanied by nearly twenty pages of endnotes and appendices.
62
The Klingon Hamlet, xiii.
rolific such author, however, is Ian Doescher. Beginning with William

p
Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope (2013) and continuing to the
present, Doescher has written Shakespearean versions of all of the core
Star Wars films including the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and
sequel trilogy. In a similar spirit, he has also written William Shakespeare’s
Get Thee … Back to the Future! (2019) and William Shakespeare’s Much
Ado About Mean Girls (2019), versions of Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the
Future (1985) and Mark Waters’ Mean Girls (2004), respectively. Doescher
also wrote an issue of Deadpool for Marvel Comics entitled Much Ado
About Deadpool (2016), which transports Marvel’s meta antihero back to
Shakespeare’s England where Deadpool interacts with both the playwright
and his characters.63 Beyond Shakespeare, Doescher also contributes a
short story to Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View (2017), a collec-
tion of forty brief missing scene stories commissioned by Disney to cele-
brate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars (1977), with proceeds of sales
going to charity.
Like The Klingon Hamlet, many of these texts mimic the style of mod-
ern critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays commonly encountered in the
classroom. In some cases, this mimicry is extremely precise. The Two
Gentlemen of Lebowski is formally identical to the Folger editions of the
individual plays, with the main text of the play on one page and relevant
glosses and images appearing in a box on the facing page. Even the page
layouts and headers are identical, with page number appearing at the top
left, play title in the top center, and Act/scene number at the top right of
each page. Bertocci’s glosses are impressively thorough and work to give
texture to the fiction that what we are reading is a real Shakespeare play:
the meaning and etymology of obscure words are explained, pertinent
Elizabethan (and earlier) cultural and political history is offered as con-
text, classical allusions are illuminated, and there are numerous references
to both scholarly works and points of contact between this and other
Shakespeare plays so the reader can better understand where the present
work fits in with the oeuvre as a whole. The tone of the glosses ranges
from serious to mock-serious to playful (“lance: euphemism for penis; see
also most nouns in Shakespeare”).64 Monsell pursues a generally similar
63
Doescher’s Deadpool (issue #21) is included in the Deadpool Does Shakespeare collection
released in 2017.
64
Adam Bertocci, The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two Gentlemen of
Lebowski (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 116.
158 J. H. POPE
aesthetic in Ministers of Grace, with a variety of public domain images

interspersed throughout the text (along with some drawn by the author),
but no glosses or editorial interventions are included. Unlike The Klingon
Hamlet and The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, this crossover between
Shakespeare and Ghostbusters is not presented as a ‘scholarly edition.’
Doescher’s works are unique in this group as they include original faux-
woodcut images depicting key scenes from the Star Wars films that mostly
maintain the scifi aesthetic of the films, although some of the images blend
scifi and vaguely Elizabethan aesthetics: while the duel between Darth
Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi aboard the Death Star is illustrated to include
lightsabers and electric lighting, Admiral Ackbar is depicted aboard a sail-
ing vessel complete with a spoked wooden wheel.65 Doescher’s texts con-
tain no glosses and are instead presented as ‘old’ volumes: beneath the
dustjackets, the hardcover editions are printed to look like worn, leather-
bound books from an earlier time that could share shelf space with those
dusty tomes undetected, a paratextual passing that reflects the intent of
the texts as a whole.
As with other fan fiction that crosses over Shakespearean language
and style with contemporary fan objects, the results are mixed and
depend heavily on the author’s level of comfort with such a writing style.
Both Bertocci and Doescher strive, as much as possible, to emulate the
blank verse of Shakespeare’s plays which contributes to the pleasures of
the texts, especially for the transfan familiar with both Shakespeare and
the adapted film. Doescher makes use of asides to humorous effect, such
as having the droid R2-D2—who communicates in beeps and boops in
the film—speak directly to the audience like a cross-dressing Viola or
Rosalind: “Yet not in language shall my pranks be done:/ Around both
humans and the droids I must/ Be seen to make such errant beeps and
squeaks,/ That they shall think me simple.”66 These asides are also
employed to anachronistically rewrite the films from the perspective of a
fan who has seen all of the films. In both Star Wars and The Empire
Strikes Back (1980), Darth Vader is a largely irredeemable villain whose
origins and motivations are unknown to the audience. During the open-
65
Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope (Philadelphia: Quirk
Books, 2013), 131; Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return (Philadelphia:
Quirk Books, 2014), 121. Similarly, characters are sometimes—but not always—depicted
wearing pseudo-Shakespearean clothing. Both Get Thee … Back to the Future! And Much Ado
About Mean Girls contain significantly fewer images, but in much the same spirit.
66
Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 15.
ing pages of Verily, A New Hope, however, Vader appears as a morose and
contemplative character. After crushing Rebel Leader 1’s throat during
an interrogation, Vader—echoing Macbeth—addresses his hand: “O that
the fingers of this wretched hand/ Had not the pain of suff ’ring ever
known./ But now my path is join’d unto the dark,/ And wicked men—
whose hands and fingers move/ To crush their foes—are now my
company.”67 Such comments allude to the characterization of Vader in
Return of the Jedi (1983), retroactively applied here to the earlier film.
Additionally, the use of a formal Shakespearean style and diction serves
to humorously emphasize and parody the melodrama of the Star Wars
films, and to juxtapose the canonical author with the canonical fan fran-
chise. Doescher undoubtedly plays on the fact that many readers will be
more familiar with the films than with Shakespeare’s plays, with the fan’s
pleasure of recognition arising from how the Star Wars we know and
love remain recognizable as archaic stage plays.68 Although Shakespeare
fans are of secondary importance in the texts, the author offers them
numerous allusive Easter eggs, such as when Luke Skywalker resumes his
attack on the Death Star by proclaiming “Once more unto the trench,
dear friends, once more!”69 Numerous similar examples of tweaked
Shakespearean quotations appear throughout the series to very clever
effect—Doescher clearly knows his Shakespeare. However, that knowl-
edge is deployed in the service of Star Wars fandom rather than the other
way around in his tragicomic crossovers. Bertocci similarly includes a
number of allusions to Shakespeare’s work, such as when The Knave
(i.e., The Dude from The Big Lebowski) echoes Jaques’ seven ages of man
soliloquy from As You Like It: “I am one man, of several persons./ For
each man in his time plays many parts,/ His acts being two voices.”70
Bertocci’s incorporation of Shakespeare, however, is less thorough than
Doescher’s, and the author frequently abandons blank verse to write in
prose. By contrast, Monsell only occasionally flirts with iambic pentam-
eter, preferring archaic diction and syntax to signal ‘Shakespearean,’
along with a few allusions to the plays. When Ray takes out a loan to
fund their ghost-busting business, Egon invokes The Merchant of Venice
67
Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 12–14.
68
Doescher overcomes the limitations of the stage in adapting a scifi epic through the
generous use of a Chorus that narrates action such as space battles not easily translated to the
stage.
69
Doescher, Verily, A New Hope, 160.
70
Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 81; As You Like It, 2.7.139–66.
160 J. H. POPE
by proclaiming “an interest/ Of seventy thousand ducats wilt thou

owe./ Surely a pound of flesh ’twould be a fate less cruel.”71 This is not
an indictment of Bertocci and Monsell or an aesthetic judgment of their
work as compared to Doescher’s. Rather, these varying levels of engage-
ment with Shakespeare indicate his fluctuating significance in the service
of other fandoms, of which all three authors demonstrate their in-depth
knowledge.
All of these authors also employ a chorus or choral characters. In the
case of Doescher, the Chorus primarily serves the aforementioned prag-
matic function of making sense of the chaos of space warfare and the
transitions between the films’ disparate terrestrial and stellar settings.
More importantly, choral characters are employed as embodiments of the
playful spirit of fan fiction and in the process find common ground with
Shakespeare’s transgressive and irreverent fools. At the conclusion of The
Jedi Doth Return, the other characters freeze as R2-D2 addresses
the audience:
Even thus, or tale is finish’d.

Pardon if your hope’s diminish’d—
If you did not find the sequel
Satisfying. If unequal
Our keen play is unto others,
Do not part in anger, brothers.
Ears, attend: I know surprises,
Visions of all shapes and sizes.72
Both Ministers of Grace and Two Gentlemen of Lebowski conclude with

epilogues that cite and refashion Puck’s metatheatrical address to the audi-
ence at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
If we shadows of offended,

Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And all wrapp’d up be this idle theme,
A noble and a pretty story-dream
71
Jordan Monsell, Ministers of Grace: The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of
Ghostbusters (Los Angeles: Shadowcut Press, 2016), 30.
72
Doescher, The Jedi Doth Return, 159.
Made me laugh to overtake the band,

Parts, in sooth; and others less so scann’d.
… If we be friends, I’ll catch thee down the trail
And we shall share sarsaparilla ale.73
If we spirits have offended

Think on this and all is mended
That you have but slumbered here
Whilst these visions did appear
So dream on custard, and do not frown
For how could you not love this towne?
And clap thy hands if we be friends
For Winston shall restore amends.74
As the transgressive trickster who crosses the boundary between divinity

and humanity to play a game with mortals by magically refashioning their
narratives, Puck is embraced as the spiritual predecessor to these fan cross-
overs. All three authors address their potential to offend or disappoint, to
fail to live up to the audience’s expectations of the mash-up of Shakespeare
and popular culture, but in doing so, they advocate the playful fantasy of
fan fiction that encourages readers to pursue texts that fulfill their desires
and avoid those that do not.
All of these crossovers engage with the dual significance of ‘parody’
that reflects back on the contentious issue of ownership and intellectual
property discussed in Chap. 3. From a generic or stylistic perspective, ‘par-
ody’ describes a work that imitates the distinctive style of another work or
author to comic effect. In this sense, the parodic work of these texts oper-
ates in both directions, as the high-culture formality of Shakespeare is
employed to parody pop culture texts, while those same pop culture texts
parody Shakespeare by removing him from his elevated status to incorpo-
rate him into contemporary popular culture. Writing specifically about
film, Lanier draws on Don Harries’ work to argue that Shakespeare paro-
dies “have been most concerned with incongruities of stylistic register,” a
blending of high and low culture that oscillates between similarity and
difference.75 Such oscillation is clearly evident in the texts discussed above.
Similarly, Bitely rightly argues that parody works to make Shakespeare less
73
Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 193.
74
Monsell, Ministers of Grace, 133.
75
Douglas Lanier, “Will of the People,” 178.
162 J. H. POPE
alien and intimidating: “parody familiarizes Shakespeare by removing an

uncomfortable distance between the author, the text, and the reader.”76 In
crossover fics—especially in those that are commercially available—parody
also serves an equally important legal function. Generally speaking, parody
falls under the category of ‘fair use’ in copyright law wherein copyrighted
intellectual properties can be imitated for the purposes of humor or ridi-
cule without obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
While this matters little in relation to Shakespeare because his works fall
outside the temporal limits of copyright, it is of utmost importance in rela-
tion to the films he is crossed over with. Monsell explicitly flags this dis-
tinction in his title: Ministers of Grace is The Unauthorized Shakespearean
Parody of Ghostbusters, and it is not legally authorized by the filmmakers or
studio. The same goes for Bertocci’s Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. Bertocci
sees himself as working in the tradition of Shakespeare: “The vast majority
of Shakespeare’s plays … can be linked to prior sources: history, classic
stories, even the original work of other writers …. In Shakespeare’s sim-
pler, happier, plague-ridden times, plots and ideas were freely shared and
adapted and reworked. Shakespeare thrived in a entertainment industry
obsessed with remakes, adaptations, and mashups—just like Hollywood
today.”77 While this may be so, it is the text’s legal status as a parody that
protects Bertocci from charges of copyright infringement and allows him
to profit from the work. By contrast, Doescher’s Star Wars plays were writ-
ten with the permission of Lucasfilm and Disney, meaning that the plays
fall under the authority of the copyright holders (the same goes for Get
Thee … Back to the Future! And Much Ado About Mean Girls, where the
copyright is held by Universal and Paramount, respectively). All of these
texts can live in the world of commercial fiction, which is not the case for
the vast majority of unpaid fanfic. This underscores Pugh’s definition of
fan fiction as “writing, whether official or unofficial, paid or unpaid, which
makes use of an accepted canon of characters, settings and plots generated
76
Amelia R. Bitely, “‘An Improbable Fiction’: How Fans Rewrite Shakespeare,” in Selected
Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, vol. 1 (2007), 63. Likewise, as noted at the
outset of this chapter, Lanier argues that “Pop parody of Shakespeare often coexists with the
conviction that Shakespeare is a valuable aesthetic touchstone or ethical resource—the object
of parody is typically not Shakespeare at all but the stultifying decorum that surrounds him,”
and these works ‘free’ Shakespeare from the traditions that have since stifled him. See Lanier,
Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, 17–18, 106–09.
77
Bertocci, Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 199.
by another writer or writers.”78 Doescher’s texts are not fundamentally

different than Bertocci’s or Monsell’s texts, but the work of all three
authors is fundamentally similar to the body of work available on AO3.
Working under the umbrella of copyright undoubtedly impacts what
Doescher can and cannot do with the characters of Star Wars. The droids
C-3PO and R2-D2 are lightly slashed, for example, alluding to popular,
tongue-in-cheek fan readings of their odd couple relationship as queer. In
their fluctuating relationship with fan fiction, Lucasfilm has remained con-
sistent in protecting the PG-nature of its relationships, taking exception to
erotically charged depictions of its characters, queer or otherwise.79 This is
not to say that Doescher wanted to explicitly slash the droids, just that
such a choice would not likely be approved for inclusion. Regardless, I do
not believe that the presence of a legal relationship between author and
studio denies the status of the texts as fan fiction even if it influences the
final product. Of greater interest in the present work is what happens to
Shakespeare in this transaction between author and studio by appropriat-
ing him into a copyright relationship that would not otherwise apply. In
the Frequently Asked Questions section on his website, Doescher answers
the inevitable question: how can I get permission to stage one of these
plays? He answers:
Several theater companies and schools have expressed interest in perfor-

mance rights, but those rights are owned by the respective movie studios
[who are] … allowing only a few scenes to be read/performed at book
events where I appear. When I say “a few scenes,” I don’t mean specific
scenes—I just mean that at my book events I read a few speeches and often
will have audience members join me in reading some scenes. These movie
studios have been clear and consistent that public performances or readings
of any kind—whether for money, for free, or as part of a fundraiser—are not
allowed. You may have heard of theaters or other groups doing readings or
performances of my licensed books; up to this point, none of those have
been authorized by anyone. While I appreciate the enthusiasm of people
who write me and say, “I know your website says performances aren’t
allowed, but…” my answer is the same: the copyright for these books are in
the movie studios’ names, so performance permission is not mine to give.80
78
79
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2006), 150.
80
Ian Doescher, “Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed August 15, 2019, https://ian-
doescher.com/frequently-asked-questions/.
164 J. H. POPE
Ironically, Shakespeare’s lack of copyright protection has led to a different

outcome of the all/none ownership paradox discussed in Chap. 3: because
his works belong to no one, they can be claimed by Lucasfilm, completely
exiled from the stage in the process. More than serving a fan’s secondary
crossover purpose, the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars transforms the
playwright into property wherein “Once more unto the trench, dear
friends” is not just a playful allusion to Henry V but a restricted-access
extension of a media franchise that has inspired fandom for over
four decades.
From RPF to parody, Shakespeare has been crossed over into other
fandoms with varying degrees of importance, but often in ways that fore-
ground issues of authority. This might be articulated through a slashed
depiction of Shakespeare as a playwright-in-training, in awe of and inspired
by the superior Marlowe in which Shakespeare himself becomes the smit-
ten fan. Whether in RPF or crossover fics that emphasize Shakespeare’s
own adaptation of prior sources and narratives in order to validate their
own approach to Shakespeare—in adapting him, I am only doing what
Shakespeare himself did to other writers—these authors participate in the
paradoxical interpretation of Shakespeare that asserts that he is simultane-
ously exemplary and no different from us, both imitative and worthy of
imitation. In his discussion of Shakespeare fanfic, Lanier suggests that “In
a way, these works return Shakespeare’s plays—which themselves adapt
earlier materials—to their place in a long tradition of imitation and adapta-
tion from which their status as literary monuments has tended to isolate
them.”81 In the process, these adaptations—parodic or otherwise—often
preserve and rely on a status or even mythos of Shakespeare as “author-
god” even if they seek to challenge it.82 Sometimes an indicator of taste
and sophistication, sometimes a boring relic, sometimes the test of theatri-
cal skill, sometimes a vague signifier of authenticity, and sometimes simply
a stylistic and formal challenge, Shakespeare means many different things
to many different fans who work to incorporate him into everything from
celebrity culture to a galaxy far, far away. But exactly what he means
depends on the individual transfan who alludes, either incidentally or
extensively, to Shakespeare in the service of other fandoms.

81
Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall, “Exit, pursued by a fan: Shakespeare, Fandom,
82
and the Lure of the Alternate Universe,” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (2016): 32.
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Doescher, Ian. Get Thee … Back to the Future! Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2019a.
Doescher, Ian. Much Ado About Mean Girls. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2019b.
Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope. Philadelphia:
Quirk Books, 2013.
Doescher, Ian. William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return. Philadelphia: Quirk
Books, 2014.
166 J. H. POPE
Elsinore_and_Inverness. “Rendezvous.” Archive of Our Own. Published September

12180159/chapters/27649740.
Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes. “Introduction: The Shakespeare User.” In
Macmillan, 2017.
Fedderson, Kim and J. Michael Richardson. “Shakespeare’s Multiple
Metamorphoses: Authenticity Agonistes.” College Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter
2009): 1–18.
(2016): 27–38.
fresne. “Seasons Turn, Fae Turn the Wheel.” Archive of Our Own. Published
December 24, 2014. Accessed July 26, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/
works/2841458.
holdingtorches. “Petrified Heart.” Archive of Our Own. Published June 3, 2018.
Holl, Jennifer. “Shakespeare Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play.” In
Macmillan, 2017.
HouseGameOfPotter. “The Room.” Archive of Our Own. Published November
12710496/chapters/28986447.
JadeEyedMonster. “Bed Time Story About Master Luke.” Archive of Our Own.
Published January 17, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofou-
Pop, 2013.
Kazimierczak, Karolina. “Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for
Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation.” Studies in
Popular Culture 32, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 35–55.
Klingon Language Institute. The Klingon Hamlet. Translated by Nick Nicholas
and Andrew Strader. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.
La Reine Noire. “Words Words Words.” Archive of Our Own. Published December
8888116.

Lanier, Douglas. “Will of the People: Recent Shakespeare Film Parody and the
Politics of Popularization.” In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen,
edited by Diana E. Henderson, 176–96. Malden, Oxford and Carlton:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Lowry, Brian. “Daisey Ridley Trades ‘Star Wars’ for Shakespeare in ‘Ophelia.’”
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com/2019/07/02/entertainment/daisy-ridley-ophelia-column/index.html.
Marylebone221. “Oscar Speech.” Archive of Our Own. Published March 5, 2018.
MiloBettany. “Shakespeare in Love.” Archive of Our Own. Published January 17,
2015. Accessed July 29, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188078.
missdibley. “That Most Ingrateful Boy.” Archive of Our Own. Published April 24,
Monsell, Jordan. Ministers of Grace: The Unauthorized Shakespearean Parody of
Ghostbusters. Los Angeles: Shadowcut Press, 2016.
nitpickyabouttrains. “The Chimes at Midnight.” Archive of Our Own. Published
July 31, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2019. https://archiveofourown.org/works/
11665209.
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Creativity, Madness, and Genius. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010.
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Palmer, 166–83. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
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Moralist: Narrative Ethics of the Bard and the Buffyverse. Jefferson: McFarland
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168 J. H. POPE
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14595411.
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
Shakespeare is an essential part of the history of fandom. Assessing his

cultural, literary, and adaptive legacy from the perspective of fan studies
not only expands our understanding of that history but also complicates
many of the longstanding assumptions of the field, especially those regard-
ing the amateur status of fan creators, the understanding of fan work as a
form of unpaid labor of love, and the relationship between fans and cul-
tural producers. Shakespeare’s copyright status alone has enabled audi-
ences and readers to reimagine his plays and characters in ways that are
seen today as fannish forms of revision and expansion, long before the
appearance of Star Trek fanzines. This consideration of Shakespeare dem-
onstrates the limitations of viewing fan works primarily through the lens of
copyright and the relationships between producers and consumers that
result from legal definitions of intellectual property and fair use. Shakespeare
fan fiction, for example, proliferates not just in free digital archives but on
the stage, in cinemas, and in bookstores. Shakespeare’s Fans demonstrates
the importance of Matt Hills’ call for “proper distance” between fan schol-
ars and fandom, the need to overcome the selection bias that leads scholars
to prioritize their own preferred fan objects or forms of engagement at the
expense of the true range, diversity, and history of fandom.1
1
Matt Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms: Between
Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?,” in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, eds. Katherine
Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 20–21.

170 J. H. POPE
Shakespeare is not unique as a fan object, although he plays an impor-

tant role in the history of fandom, especially in the context of eighteenth-
century debates about his cultural status and the legal and moral right that
other authors had—and have—in adapting and reworking his narratives
and characters. From the early 1700s onward, we can observe an ongoing
debate about what constitutes an appropriate form of engagement with
the playwright. In the absence of actionable copyright, moral and inter-
pretive authority has most often been appropriated by the purveyors of
official Shakespearean culture who have asserted their informal and yet
tangible ownership over him. These debates anticipate and mirror many of
the ongoing debates between fans and cultural producers regarding just
what they are allowed to do with their fan objects that have shaped fan-
dom as it has moved into the mainstream of popular culture in recent
decades. While the copyright debates that shape fan studies are largely
irrelevant to Shakespeare, his works still circulate in the context of owner-
ship and authority paradigms that parallel intellectual property concerns.
Paradoxically, Ian Doescher’s Star Wars texts demonstrate that Shakespeare
does not remain permanently immune to the reach of copyright. Just as
the cultural and education institutions of official Shakespeare can claim an
informal moral ownership over him, Lucasfilm and Disney can claim legal
ownership over aspects of his work through the publication of fan fiction
that brings the playwright into the orbit of contemporary intellectual
properties. Lawrence Lessig argues that our copyright laws are designed so
that “no one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to
the Brothers Grimm.”2 Doescher’s work and legal restriction of access to
it indicate the extent to which copyright can still matter in relation to
Shakespeare fan texts.
But again, Shakespeare is not unique in this regard, and I expect that
scholars in a diverse range of fields can see points of contact between the
history of fandom via Shakespeare and a plethora of other authors and
texts. Shakespeare is simply a very visible feature of the history of fandom,
in no small part due to the cultural, educational, and institutional preva-
lence of his work. From the perspective of fan studies, it is essential that we
work to delve more deeply into the history of fandom, especially in rela-
tion to authors and texts that predate contemporary notions of copyright
and intellectual property. Exciting work has already been done on Jane
2
Quoted in: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York; London: New York University Press, 2006), 137–38.
6 CONCLUSION 171
Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle and some of the fandom-specific engage-
ments with those authors that have emerged. In the case of Austen, one
online fan group—the Republic of Pemberley—offered rigid guidelines
for tone, style, and content, insisting that writers adhere to canon and
avoid explicit content in their contributions to the Bits of Ivory archive.3
Sherlock Holmes fandom is home to one of the first fan societies, the
Baker Street Irregulars established in 1934, and Sherlock fanfic authors
often participate in the so-called Great Game in which they pretend that
the Sherlock stories are factual and written by John Watson, Holmes’
biographers, wherein “the fans play exaggerated versions of themselves,
taking their obsession seriously and ironically at the same time.”4 Regardless
of what we can say about fandom in general, individual fandoms or niches
within those fandoms continually emerge to express their fandom in ways
that can be idiomatic of the group, so it is important that we do not let
one fandom speak for them all. What is unique about the case of
Shakespeare, however, is that he provides a venue through which to incor-
porate into fan studies theatrical performance and the proliferation of dra-
matic adaptations of existing plays.
Throughout the evolution of Shakespeare’s Fans, I have often been
asked, “why would you want to write about something like fan fiction?”
The easy answer is, “because it’s there.” Shakespeare scholars follow him
wherever he goes and wherever he is taken as a traveling companion, so I
am simply doing my due diligence by following him into digital fanfic
archives. Drawing on Derridean notions of the archive, Abigail Derecho
convincingly argues in favor of accepting fan fiction as “archontic litera-
ture” wherein there are no borders to violate: instead, these texts only add
to the original text’s archive, “becoming a part of the archive and expand-
ing it. An archontic text allows, or even invites, writers to enter it, select
specific items they find useful, make new artifacts using those found
objects, and deposit the newly made work back into the source text’s
3
Seren, 2005), 37. The Republic of Pemberley transitioned to a more dispersed Facebook
presence in 2017. The Bits of Ivory archive is still accessible but static at Pemberley.com.
4
Roberta Pearson, “It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace,” in The Fan Fiction
Press, 2014), 49; Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart
Pop, 2013), 8.
172 J. H. POPE
archive.”5 The real reason, though, is that understanding fandom gives

scholars a window onto contemporary reading and viewing practices that
foreground identity politics and empower readers to refashion culture to
make it speak to them in whatever way they see fit. While often dismissed
as overly affective, fandom offers a critical space for audiences to both
adore what they love and to demand more from it, to make it do things
that its creators may never have intended or even approve of. The results
can be playful and effervescent or critically engaged—or both simultane-
ously. In some cases, fan works repudiate the subtle winking of academic
criticism and theory by liberating interpretation from the text and from
history through its embracement of anachronism and counterfactualism.
Whereas the critic teases out and contextualizes the hints of homoeroti-
cism in Twelfth Night’s Antonio, fans explicitly slash him. Fan culture
approaches Shakespeare as no different than any contemporary media
text, celebrity author, or film director. Additionally, Shakespearean fan
works are part of the long history of Shakespeare adaptation and criticism,
a continuation of rather than a split from. As much as we might like to
claim fan fiction, for example, as a radically new approach or as the antith-
esis of traditional academic or pedagogical interpretations, any such claim
is ignorant of the diversity of those interpretations which, like fan works,
have continually refashioned Shakespeare according to the desires of a
particular readership. And just as scholarship and pedagogy can range
from politically and ideologically conservative to radical, so to have fan
works tread similarly diverse grounds, endlessly constituting and exploring
interpretive questions in response to alternately unsatisfying or inspiring
interpretations. Kylie Mirmohamadi argues that fan fiction helps create a
“sense of reading in the present tense,” transforming reading from passive
spectatorship into active participation.6 Such active participation is becom-
ing increasingly common as fans have come to expect to be able to talk
back to the objects of their fandom and to those who have created those
objects. A testament to this is the fact that in August 2019, archiveofou-
5
Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of
Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, Inc.,
2006), 65.
6
Kylie Mirmohamadi, The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 39.
6 CONCLUSION 173
rown.org received the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, a category that
has historically been dominated by published science fiction and fantasy
criticism.
For the Shakespeare scholar, engaging with fandom and fan works
forces us to confront and reconsider our own assumptions about our rela-
tionship to the playwright and the extent to which we view ourselves as
part of the Shakespeare fandom or apart from it. To what extent do we
really embrace the notion that Shakespeare belongs to all? Can we—or
should we—make more pedagogical room for affective responses that
sometimes ignore accepted ideals of academic rigor and close reading?
Fandom is most radical in that it validates individualized readings of
Shakespeare, allowing you to consume the corpus as you like it, and to
make of it what you will. This poses some obvious existential threats to
many academic approaches to Shakespeare by taking postmodern relativ-
ism and hypersubjectivity to the extreme. By what criteria do we assess
such works? Scholars are in the process of grappling with these issues. As I
write, Douglas Lanier is organizing a panel for the 2020 meeting of the
Shakespeare Association of America focused on the “largely neglected the
question of principles by which we assign value to Shakespeare
adaptations.”7 Such work promises to offer productive models for our
engagement with fan works.
There is still considerable work to be done to more fully explore the
range and history of Shakespeare fandom. The case of published versus
online fan fiction has obvious parallels to traditional Shakespeare film
adaptations and the Bard on YouTube.8 Likewise, collecting various
objects of Shakespearean material culture from rare books to mulberry
relics to film posters to action figures should be brought into dialogue
with fan collecting. One of the most fruitful avenues for future research
lies in our engagement with anti-fandom. In these cases, Shakespeare is
the focus, but not in a reverent—or irreverent—celebratory way, and he
and his works (and those who enjoy them) are, implicitly or explicitly,
mocked and ridiculed. These texts mobilize a fan’s in-depth knowledge of
7
“2020 Seminars and Workshops,” The Shakespeare Association of America, accessed
August 21, 2019, http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminars-
and-workshops-2/.
8
See: Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube (London and New York: Bloomsbury,
2014).
174 J. H. POPE
and familiarity with a text in order to mock or deride the playwright and
antagonize his fans. Such anti-fandom offers a productive critical lens
through which to interpret films such as Tromeo and Juliet (1996) and
Anonymous (2011). Rather than the irreverence that characterizes a sig-
nificant number of fan works, films such as these are gleefully sacrilegious,
aimed particularly at provoking a response from custodians of official
Shakespeares.9 Anti-fandom can help us understand the authorship con-
troversy and approach anti-Stratfordians from a new perspective.
Ultimately, the better we understand fan culture and the myriad forms of
fan engagement, the better we will understand what Shakespeare means to
cultural consumers today.
Bibliography
“2020 Seminars and Workshops.” The Shakespeare Association of America.
Accessed August 21, 2019. http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-
meetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/.
Alters, Diane F. “The Other Side of Fandom: Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and the Hurts
of History.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World,
edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 344–56.
New York: New York University Press, 2007.
9
See: Derek Johnson, “Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies
of Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan
Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press,
2007), 285–300; Diane F. Alters, “The Other Side of Fandom: Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and
the Hurts of History,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds.
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University
Press, 2007), 344–56; Lesley Goodman, “Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory,
and the Death of the Author,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 4 (2015): 662–76.
While these scholars deal primarily with spoiler culture and anti-fandom in relation to televi-
sion fandom, their work is clearly relevant to adaptations and engagements that mock or
attack Shakespeare.
6 CONCLUSION 175
Hills, Matt. “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms:

Between Academics’ and Fans’ Moral Economies?” In Fan Culture: Theory/
Practice, edited by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, 14–37. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Pop, 2013.
Johnson, Derek. “Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive
Hegemonies of Fandom.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a
Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee
Harrington, 285–300. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Mirmohamadi, Kylie. The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
O’Neill, Stephen. Shakespeare and YouTube. London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Pearson, Roberta. “It’s Always 1895: Sherlock Holmes in Cyberspace.” In The
Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse,
44–60. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS Amateur, 7, 8, 11, 16, 27, 46, 46n17,

10 Things I Hate About You, 26, 52, 54, 60, 69, 72, 72n14, 74,
33–63, 68, 108, 149 82–84, 87–89, 169
Anachronism, 26, 34, 122–124, 172
Anonymity, 120
A Anonymous, 71, 72, 91, 174
Actor, 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 26, 28, 34, 46, Anti-fandom, 74, 173, 174, 174n9
48, 54, 58, 62, 79, 83, 104, 121, Anti-Midas, 55n57
124, 133–136, 136n4, 138–143, Appropriation, 33, 40n8, 67–69,
147–152, 148n37 81n47, 85
Adaptation, 9–11, 13–17, 19, Arcadia, 76
33, 36, 61, 67, 68, 77–79, Archive, 3, 24, 25, 71, 87, 100, 101,
80n45, 88–90, 94, 100, 103, 105, 108, 112, 114, 115, 119,
104, 107, 108, 110, 124, 127, 154, 169, 171, 171n3, 172
133, 148, 153, 162, 164, Archive of Our Own (AO3), 100,
171–173, 174n9 101, 110, 112, 113, 115,
Affect, 26, 33–63, 85, 118 117n42, 119, 120, 128n62, 133,
The Alchemist, 8 141, 145, 155, 163
All is True, 144 Aristophanes, 140
Allusion, 47, 61, 80, 107, Arthurian literature, 19
113, 116, 151, 153, 157, As You Like It, 79, 138, 159
159, 164 Atwood, Margaret, 17, 18
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33726-1
178 INDEX
Austen, Jane, 23, 75, 115, 170–171 The Cobler of Preston (Charles
Authenticity, 41, 54, 81, 106, 149, Johnson), 78
150, 154, 164 The Cobler of Preston (Christopher
Authority, 16, 21, 27, 38, 39, 41–44, Bullock), 78
67, 70, 73, 74, 91, 92, 94, 95, Cohen, Ethan, 156
120, 152, 154n55, 162, 164, 170 Cohen, Joel, 156
The Avengers, 20, 21, 134, 149 Collectors/collecting, 2, 7, 21, 173
Colman, George, 52, 62n84
Comic books, 10
B Commemoration, 17, 55, 58, 62, 69,
Back to the Future, 157, 158n65, 162 70
Bardolatry, 2, 26, 34, 46, 80 Commodity/consumer culture, 69,
Batman, 138 82, 86, 87
BDSM, 111 Communal property, 71
Beaumont, Francis, 46n17 Congreve, William, 50
Bertocci, Adam, 156–160, 162, 163 Copyright, 11, 14, 15, 23, 27, 74, 77,
The Big Bang Theory, 9 82–84, 88, 91, 139, 162–164,
The Big Lebowski, 156, 159 169, 170
Bikini Kill, 42 Coriolanus, 149, 152
Black and Deep: William Shakespeare Cosplay, 6, 25, 57
Vampire Hunter, 17, 68 Counterfactualism, 93, 95, 123, 124,
Branagh, Kenneth, 139, 144, 149 172
Breton, Nicholas, 145 Crosby, Sidney, 7
Brony, 8 Cushman, Charlotte, 104
Bullock, Christopher, 78, 79, 81, 82
D
C Defoe, Daniel, 48–50
Cage, John, 116–118, 128 Devotion, 7, 8, 41, 54, 56, 63
Canon, 38, 61, 62, 76, 106, 124, 141, Disney, 23, 91, 157, 162, 170
154, 156, 162, 171 Diversity, 6, 12, 25, 38, 39, 87, 139,
Celebrity culture, 2, 10, 136, 140, 169, 172
164 Doctor Who, 15, 109, 113, 134, 137,
Censorship, 77 138, 147, 148n37
Changing Places, 1 Dodd, James, 51
Character-based criticism, 122 Doescher, Ian, 28, 134, 157–160,
Cheap Trick, 44, 44n13 158n65, 159n68, 162, 163, 170
Chorus, 159n68, 160 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 10, 75, 115,
The Chronicles of Narnia, 117, 137 171
Clarke, Mary Cowden, 127 Drury Lane, 54, 57, 59, 62, 63, 78, 79
The Clash, 42 Dryden, John, 79–82, 80n45, 81n47,
Clopton, Hugh, 47, 54 124, 128, 144, 153
INDEX 179
E crossover, 15, 28, 29, 108, 109,

Eccleston, Christopher, 147, 148, 124–126, 133, 136, 137, 144,
148n37 152, 162, 164
Edward II, 140 databases, 15, 27, 84, 100, 101,
Elizabeth Bennet, 139 116, 128
Emmerich, Roland, 71 definition of, 14, 18, 75,
76, 162
explicit sex in, 113
F fluff, 15, 102, 112
Fair use, 11, 162, 169 genderswap, 15, 15n46, 103, 104,
Fan 114, 124
aca-fans/ scholar-fans, 3, 4, genres, 15, 15n46, 28, 42, 56,
11, 24 62n84, 75, 76, 101–104, 110,
community, 6, 7, 10, 24, 63, 86, 112, 114, 117, 124, 128,
88, 93, 105 140–142, 144, 147, 152
culture, 2, 4, 11, 26, 29, 56, 73, 74, giftfic, 15, 15n46
76, 119, 142, 152, 153, 172, het, 15, 15n46, 103
174 history of, 6, 12, 14, 15, 18, 85,
definition of, 4, 14, 18, 22, 74, 76, 127
83, 146, 162 kudos, 101
economic status, 27 legal status of, 74, 162
enthusiasm, 4, 8, 56, 94 length of texts, 100, 102
folk culture, 85 metadata, 101
gender, 90, 139 original characters, 107, 141
immaturity, 8, 37 plagiarism and, 13
religious obsession, 7, 9 popslash, 142
reverence, 17, 63, 125 PWP, 15, 102
sacrilege, 47, 63, 126 RPF, 28, 136, 139, 140,
self-identification, 119 142, 143
sexual obsession, 8, 37 slash, 15, 16, 22, 24, 103, 104
stereotypes, 8, 21, 26, 33 tropes, 15, 28, 102, 103, 108
transfandom, 137 Yuletide, 15, 15n46, 105
Fan art, 11, 24, 25 Fantasy, 2, 5, 8, 26, 37, 63, 72, 73,
Fan fiction 111, 115, 141, 142, 147, 149,
5+1 things, 15, 15n46 161, 173
alternative universe (AU), 108, 112, Feminism, 13, 34, 38, 40, 40n8,
153 42–45, 91
anonymity, 120 Fillion, Nathan, 23, 135
body swap, 15 Fletcher, John, 75, 128
canon, 76, 106, 124, Folger Shakespeare Library, 25,
162 69, 70
crack, 124 The Frogs, 140
180 INDEX
G Harry Potter, 2, 4, 7, 10, 24, 76, 88,

Game of Thrones, 15, 25, 76, 83, 109, 90, 94, 100, 104, 106, 109, 116,
137, 148n37 119, 125, 137–140, 138n13
Garrick, David, 26, 27, 33–63, 76, 82, Hello Kitty, 7
125 Henry IV, 112
The Jubilee, 49, 61, 62 Henry V, 164
King Lear, 82 Henry VI, 146
ode, 53, 55, 55n54, 55n57, Hercules, 139
58–61 Hiddleston, Tom, 28, 134, 148–152
Romeo and Juliet, 82 The History of King Lear, 76
Shakespeare Jubilee, 26, 34, 46 Holinshed, Raphael, 46n17, 76, 140
Shakespeare Temple, 54 The Hollow Crown, 149
Garrick’s Vagary, 55
Gastrell, Francis, 47
Gatekeeping, 73, 74, 119 I
Geeks/Nerds, 9, 73, 148 Identity/representation, 3–5, 7, 9, 33,
Gender, 15n46, 18, 33, 34, 34n2, 39, 36, 38, 40, 61, 62n84, 72n14,
41, 43, 45n13, 88, 103, 104, 87, 88, 90, 93, 104, 106, 126,
111, 118 127n61, 134, 142, 148, 172
General Hospital, 6 Idolatry, 50, 55, 56
Gentleman, Francis, 52 Iliad, 12, 13
Get Thee . . . Back to the Future!, 157, Imagined subjectivity, 3
158n65, 162 Intellectual property, 23, 24, 27, 34,
Ghostbusters, 156, 158 67, 74, 76, 77, 81, 84, 91, 94,
Gibson, Mel, 139 137, 161, 162, 169, 170
Gift economy, 11, 67–95
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,
127 J
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning James Bond, 138
Juliet), 128 Jay, Stacey, 117
Gower, Lord Ronald, 71 Jett, Joan, 44, 44n13
Grateful Dead, 4 Johnson, Charles, 78, 79
Green Bay Packers, 4 Johnson, Samuel, 50–53, 50n35, 59, 60
Gregg, Clark, 20 Jones, Felicity, 135
Jonson, Ben, 8, 69, 74
Juliet Immortal, 117
H Junger, Gil, 26
Hag-Seed, 17
Hamill, Mark, 138
Hamlet, 1, 19, 99, 107, 112, 114– K
116, 121, 122, 125, 145, 149, Keats, John, 123
154–156 King, Stephen, 18
INDEX 181
Kiss Me Kate, 36 Marvel Comics, 20, 76, 157

The Klingon Hamlet, 153–158, MASH, 137
156n61 McCarthy, Claire, 19, 127
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, McKellen, Ian, 138
46n17 Mean Girls, 157
Kurosawa, Akira, 19 Measure for Measure, 114
Media fandom, 2, 26, 28, 45, 75, 85,
103, 117, 119, 137, 140
L The Merchant of Venice, 114, 159
Labor/work, 1–4, 3n2, 5n9, 9–15, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 47
17, 18, 20–23, 25–29, 33, 35, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 46, 79,
42, 45n13, 46n17, 49, 50, 92, 104, 137, 160
50n35, 59, 60, 67, 68, 70–73, Minimal departure, 121, 124
72n14, 76–88, 85n56, 90, 91, Ministers of Grace, 156, 158,
94, 99–101, 105–107, 105n12, 160, 162
110, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122, The Miseries of Mavillia, 145
125–127, 128n62, 133–135, Misogyny, 18, 126, 128
137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 148, Monsell, Jordan, 156, 157, 159, 160,
153, 156–164, 162n76, 169– 162, 163
174, 174n9 Montagu, Elizabeth, 60
Letters to Cleo, 41–44 Montreal Canadiens, 6
Licensing of the Press Act (1662), 77 Much Ado About Deadpool, 157
Licensing Order (1643), 77 Much Ado About Mean Girls, 157,
The Lion King, 107 158n65, 162
Livejournal.com, 100 Much Ado About Nothing, 135,
Lodge, David, 1 137–138, 150, 153
Love in a Forest, 79 Much Ado About Nothing (2013 film),
Love’s Labor’s Lost, 46 20
Lucasfilm, 23, 91, 162–164, 170 Mulberry tree, 47–49, 51, 53, 54
Luhrmann, Baz, 139 My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, 8
M N
Macbeth, 19, 36, 37, 61, 79, 123, 140, Negative capability, 123
147, 148, 159 New Place, 47–49, 54
MacDonald, Ann-Marie, 128 North, Ryan, 19, 23, 24, 128
Man and Wife, 52, 53, 53n49, 61,
62n84
Marlowe, Christopher, 113, 140, 143, O
145, 146, 164 Odyssey, 12
Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Olivier, Laurence, 139
20, 28, 109 Open access, 11, 72
182 INDEX
Ophelia, 19, 121, 124, 125, 127, R

134–136 Race, 57, 73, 88
Othello, 114, 138 Radcliffe, Daniel, 138–140
Ovid, 46n17 The Raincoats, 42
Recognition, 19, 36, 57, 58, 61, 63,
107, 109, 137, 143, 159
P Reitman, Ivan, 156
Parody, 16, 23, 28, 133–164 Religion, 56, 88
Participatory culture, 3, 5, 51, Republic of Pemberley, 171, 171n3
58, 93 Rhys, Jean, 14
Peter Rabbit, 135 Richard III, 54, 114, 146
Pez dispensers, 7 Richardson, Samuel, 48–50, 77
Pickford, Mary, 111 Ridley, Daisy, 134–136
Pirates, 115 Riot Grrrl, 40, 40n8, 42, 44, 45
Plagiarism, 13, 80n45 Robinson Crusoe, 115
Plautus, 46n17 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 135
Play, 1, 6, 8–11, 15, 19–22, Romeo + Juliet, 1, 2, 139
27, 28, 35, 37–39, 41–47, Romeo and Juliet, 15, 19, 82, 82n50,
46n17, 51–57, 53n49, 104, 108, 110n25, 112, 116,
59–62, 62n84, 68, 75, 117, 122–124, 138, 139, 151
78–84, 87–94, 99, 102, 104, Romeo and Juliet (1968 film), 139
108, 109, 110n25, 111, 112, Romeo and/or Juliet, 19, 23, 128
114, 116, 117, 120–128, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
134–141, 145–148, 150, 152, Dead, 14, 19, 127
153, 155–159, 161–164, Rowe, Nicholas, 47–49
169–171 Rowling, J. K., 94
Postmodernism, 16, 75, 118, 123, Royal Shakespeare Company, 70, 147
126, 127, 127n61, 142, 153,
155n57, 173
The Prince of Denmark, S
17, 68 San Diego Comic-Con, 3
Professional, 8, 9, 11, 17, 24, 27, 52, Scalzi, John, 73, 74
54, 68–70, 72n14, 82–84, 88, Science fiction, 2, 4, 10, 73, 75, 106,
89, 91, 95, 145 173
Proper distance, 3, 4n6, 11, 169 Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee, 51
Pseudonyms, 118, 120 Sequels, 14, 78, 157, 160
The Public Ledger, 55, 60 The Sex Pistols, 42
PWP, 15n46, 102 Shakespeare, Judith, 145
Shakespeare, Susanna, 145
Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 8–10,
Q 33–63, 67–95, 99–128, 133–164,
Quidditch, 7, 94 169–174
INDEX 183
as character, 19, 22, 27, 48, 57, 61, Star Wars: A New Hope, 14
68, 75, 76, 89, 91, 93, 109, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,
111, 122, 124–126, 137, 139, 158
147, 169 Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 14
copyright status, 15, 27, 83, 88, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, 144
164, 169 Statue of Anne (1710), 77
cultural status, 170 Stoppard, Tom, 14, 15, 19, 127
education/pedagogy, 22, 92, 170, The Stratford Jubilee, 52
172 Stratford-upon-Avon, 25, 27, 34, 35,
material culture, 126, 173 46–51, 57, 58, 61, 71, 123, 145,
official culture, 27, 71 147
ownership of, 27, 69, 72, 72n14, Supernatural, 9, 29
74, 80, 134, 164, 170
as secondary, 28, 133, 148, 153,
156, 159 T
theft from, 68, 82 The Taming of the Shrew, 33, 36, 38,
writing style, 133, 158 68, 75, 78, 99, 110, 111
Shakespeare Association of America Tate, Nahum, 76, 128
(SAA), 1, 2, 25, 70, 173 The Tempest, 19, 99, 135, 138
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 70, 71 The Tempest (2010 film), 135
Shakespeare in Love, 143–146 Tennant, David, 139
Shakespeare’s Globe, 25 Tetracentenary, 17, 69, 123
Shakespeare studies, 11, 33, 35, 46, Theater, 8–10, 23–25, 34, 46, 46n17,
67, 89 47, 51, 54, 58n64, 78, 90, 108,
Shakesploitation, 34, 68 124, 135n4, 138, 140, 143, 163
Shakespop, 16, 68, 69, 71 Theft, 67, 80, 81, 109
Shatner, William, 10, 138 Thor, 149
Sherlock Holmes, 10, 56, 103, 115, The Three Conjurors, 79
139, 171 Throne of Blood, 19
She’s the Man, 16, 19, 108 To Be or Not to Be, 128
The Shining, 18 Tourism, 9, 25, 47, 49, 52, 54, 70,
Sidney, Sir Philip, 76 133
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 138 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great
Squee, 1–29 Britain, 48
Star Trek, 4, 7, 10, 12n38, 13, 25, 58, Translation, 153–156, 155n57
75, 88, 90, 93, 103, 109, 137, Troilus and Cressida, 79, 81, 82
138, 154–156, 155n57, 169 Troilus and Cressida (Dryden play),
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered 144
Country, 154 Tromeo and Juliet, 174
Star Wars, 2, 6, 10, 15, 22–24, 28, 76, Trpcic, Shawna, 23
91, 92, 108, 116, 134–136, 138, Twelfth Night, 8, 19, 93, 99, 109,
147, 157–159, 162, 163, 170 116, 137, 151, 172
184 INDEX
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 157, 158, Whedon, Joss, 4, 20–24, 54, 134,
160, 162 135, 135n4
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 145 Whyman, Erica, 104
Wide Sargasso Sea, 14
Wilkes, John, 79
V William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, 157,
Valli, Frankie, 41 164
Vandalism, 72 The Winter’s Tale, 137
Victor, Benjamin, 47 The Woman’s Prize, 75
Voltaire, 60 Wood, Elijah, 138
W Y
Warner Brothers (WB), 94 YouTube, 23–25, 84, 89, 153, 173
Waters, Mark, 157
Watson, Emma, 138, 139
Wattpad.com, 100 Z
Web 2.0, 2 Zeffirelli, Franco, 139
Wendig, Chuck, 91 Zemeckis, Robert, 157

Shakespeare's Fans: Adapting The Bard in The Age of Media Fandom

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover Image: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

student who got trapped in a conversation with me about Shakespeare fan

1 Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee? 1

2 “My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the

3 “my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the

4 “the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction 99

5 “There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare,

Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee?

At a recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), I

© The Author(s) 2020 1

popular perception of fans as socially inept, sexually immature, and obses-

which replays scholar-fans’ pre-theoretical investments in specific fan cul-

Textual Poachers: fan is a necessarily active identity, and oftentimes a com-

behaviors as a manifestation of their lack of control. At the same time, fan

pursue the object of their devotion without entertaining possible alterna-

Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10.

“Brony,” Urban Dictionary, accessed August 5, 2019, https://www.urbandictionary.

of popular culture to fringes that many of us cannot begin to imagine. Up

absence of ‘new’ or official material in the originating medium.”29 Thus,

fans? As Hills argues in his discussion of ‘proper distance,’ I believe it is

fan fiction? Additionally, if we accept Hutcheon’s assertion that fan fiction

Whereas fan fiction is an uncritical emulative novelty, creative criticism is

The Avengers. As Coulson operates from a position of authority to help

the Bard.62 David Lavery likewise characterizes Whedon’s Much Ado as “a

playwright seriously or to justify their interests as a valid field of academic

alongside the author’s other publications. Whedon’s film and North’s

Hills, “‘Proper Distance’ in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms,” 19–20.

Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 263.

infatuation with Shakespeare that was inappropriately idolatrous or accused

Wilcox, Rhonda V. “Joss Whedon’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About

“My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect

One of the barriers to effectively integrating fan studies into Shakespeare

© The Author(s) 2020 33

Mandella’s character comes more clearly into focus over halfway

Mandella’s feminine and irrational fandom is contrasted by Michael’s

In response to the information about her musical tastes, Patrick offers

is unspoken, it is clear that she thinks he is at Club Skunk in order to ask

10 Things’ engagement with and treatment of fandom contributes to

­ ilgrimage, “the inaugural moment in the history of Shakespearian tour-

him renown’d to the End of Time.”27 In the elevation of Shakespeare

“context prior to text,” Shakespeare before ‘Shakespeare.’33 Certainly, the

playwright but is rather positioning himself as a more discerning and

Jubilee in October 176945—a visitor to Stratford is simply sick of hearing

the general questioning of Garrick’s motives in organizing the Jubilee in

expression”—‘the God of our idolatry’—might be “pardonable from the

be performed. Such an absence has been described at worst as evidence of

The fan’s pleasure of recognition is key to the reception of the ode,

birthplace.84 While it may not have happened in Stratford, revisionist nar-

Stott, What Blest Genius?, 176.

Holland, Peter. “David Garrick: Saints, Temples and Jubilees.” In Celebrating

“my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare,

© The Author(s) 2020 67

adorn the present text), “a matter of a weaker party wresting something of

already there, and builds connections between the traditional conventions

seventeenth century to the present, the timelessness of Shakespeare means

more recent years—and following on the ‘Shakespop’ phenomenon that

­ utlining in detail the evidence in support of Shakespeare’s authorship.14

authors, and one of its most marketable products …. A sense of academic

1 Introduction: To Squee or not to Squee? 1

2 “My love admits no qualifying dross”: Affect and the

3 “my worthless gifts”?: Shakespeare, Legitimacy, and the

4 “the rest is …”: Shakespeare and Online Fan Fiction 99

5 “There is no slander in an allowed fool”: Shakespeare,

ilgrimage, “the inaugural moment in the history of Shakespearian tour-

utlining in detail the evidence in support of Shakespeare’s authorship.14

innocuous,” arguing that it seeks to “imitate, emulate, and extend

character dies, and sometimes by which method), ‘Genderswap,’ or

s omewhat tongue-in-cheek or anachronistically, toward an overall sense of

rolific such author, however, is Ian Doescher. Beginning with William