Our notions of Shakespeare have been shaped partly by his diffuse presence in films, comics, television, popular novels, kitsch, and advertising. Through a series of case studies, Douglas Lanier examines how modern popular culture has appropriated and refashioned Shakespeare as a cultural icon.

This book traces Shakespeare's contributions to America's cultural history from the colonial era to the present, with substantial attention to theatre history, publishing history, and criticism.
It identifies four broad themes that distinguish Shakespeare in the United States from the dramatist's reception in other countries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans in search of self-improvement took a utilitarian approach to the plays, mining them for moral insights and everyday wisdom; beginning in the nineteenth century, American entrepreneurs collected, edited, and...

This new study of Shakespeare's English history plays looks at the plays through the lens of early modern staging, focusing on the recurrence of particular stage pictures and 'units of action', and seeking to show how these units function in particular and characteristic ways within the history plays. Through close analysis of stage practice and stage picture, the book builds a profile of the kinds of writing and staging that characterise a Shakespearean history play and that differentiate one history play from another.
The first part of the book concentrates primarily on the stage,...

Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me ', but how did people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now? Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory underwent rapid...