Whats the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare [Hardcover]

What's the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare? The answer is simple: don't read him. To that end, Richard Burt and Julian Yates embark on a project of un/reading the Bard, turning the conventional challenges into a roadmap for textual analysis and a thorough reconsideration of the plays in light of their absorption into global culture.1. What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? 2. 'Oh, horrible, most horrible!' - Hamlet's Telephone 3. Romeo and Juliet is for Zombies 4. Drown Before Reading: Prospero's Missing Book&s 5. Anonymous / Anony /mess

What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? is written in a refreshing quick-fire style, at times informal and irreverent, but nevertheless engaging, entertaining, and scholarly. Detailed endnotes, including full references of all works cited, a cumulative index of references, and over a dozen well-chosen black-and-white illustrations (mostly screen captures from various media cited in the book) are included. - Parergon

In What's the Worse Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?, seasoned icono-clashers Richard Burt and Julian Yates scan the Shakespearean mediascape for its intensities, lags, evasions, and misfires. In wryly techno-savvy readings that cross-cut between the First Folio, conceived as a canny media launch, and contemporary video and film refractions, Burt and Yates renew the enterprise of close reading without either fetishizing the Shakespearean original or exchanging the vertiginous risks of unreadability for quick laughs and easy access. - Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English, The University of California, Irvine, USA and author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

A spectacular traversal and updating of Shakespeare's legacy as media event and up-to-the-minute report on traumatic narratives, blatant or concealed, that continue to hound us. I have the chapter on Hamlet's telephone on speed dial. A genuine achievementlÓ3