Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value Douglas Lanier These days there is a growing sense among Shakespeareans that our field has arrived at a

crossroads. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the dominant preoccupation of academic

Shakespeareans was to establish and preserve an "authentic" Shakespeare text. The reigning

assumption has been that the source of Shakespeare's greatness is to be identified with the verbal

particularities of his scripts which we as scholars are obliged to cherish, explicate and place in

historical context. The appeal to Shakespeare's original language, an appeal conducted from a

variety of perspectives, has provided Shakespearean scholarship of the last century its distinctive

cultural authority. It is no accident that professional Shakespearean scholarship–a peculiarly

twentieth-century invention, we should acknowledge–can be traced to the professionalization of

Shakespearean editing in the late nineteenth century and the concomitant demotion of

biographical criticism's prestige.1 The critical descent of the Shakespeare the man enabled the

ascent of Shakespeare the text. This focus on the Shakespearean text ever-more-closely read, a

professional investment in the specificity of Shakespeare's language, has cut across a wide range

of otherwise divergent critical schools, even putatively iconoclastic ones, so much so that it has

taken on the status of common sense among scholars. What else would you study when you

study Shakespeare? And this textual paradigm carried with it an ethical imperative of fidelity,

the duty to remain rigorously true to the Shakespearean text(s), even though what it means to be

"true" to Shakespeare has been variously construed.2 Recent textual criticism has, of course,

posed a formidable challenge to this long-held view. Many have argued that a single definitive

Shakespearean text is largely a critical will o' the wisp because the documents we have received

from the past suggest the fluid, ever-unfinished state of many plays.3 Even so, as editors

"unedit" scripts and reevaluate marginal features like mismatched speech prefixes, it remains an

open question whether postmodern textual criticism has really challenged the underlying

investment of Shakespeare scholarship in Shakespeare as text or simply redoubles that

investment by fetishizing variant historical exemplars rather than some single ideal script.

Arguably, the ethical imperative of rigorous fidelity to the text has not so much been overthrown

as extended to a new set of documents.

Palpable too is a certain restlessness with the reign of New Historicism over

Shakespearean studies, though there are signs that its dominance has begun to wane. One source

of that restlessness springs from how historical reading has become routinized; another from the

sense that approaching an historical archive with a literary critic's eye is no longer novel or quite

so compelling, perhaps because after New Historicism it has become more difficult to appeal to

the firm facticity of history to ground a literary reading. But that restlessness also comes from

New Historicism's own preferred modes of engagement with the present, conducted either

through shadow-boxing (using a reading of the past to engage the present) or through

acknowledging the historian's situatedness in the present in what is too often little more than a

pre-emptive defense against the charge of insufficient historical self-consciousness. By contrast,

cultural materialist readings have always been explicit about their political aims, their interest in

laying claim to the authority of the past in order to change the present. Yet by exposing the

ideological investedness and discursivity of accounts of the past, they have run into difficulty

with grounding the authority of any appeal to history. The newfound interest in adaptations of

Shakespeare is in some ways, then, a response to restlessness with historicisms new and old.

The rise in study of Shakespearean adaptations too has multiple origins. Like the new

textual criticism, it takes sustenance from postmodern reconception of the relationship between

originals and (re)productions. Indeed, the founding gesture of many an article on adaptation is

that we are now in an age of post-fidelity (though the very need for such an opening gambit

testifies to the residual power of fidelity as a discourse). Moreover, for the past decade

adaptation studies have been catalyzed by an accelerated transcoding of Shakespeare in the 90s

and after from theater and book to mass media, pop-cultural and digital forms. The global scope

of Shakespeare's transcoding has become especially apparent during the last twenty-five years, a

fact exemplified by the Globe-to-Globe Festival which brought foreign language productions of

Shakespeare to the reconstructed Globe theater in London as part of the British 2012 Olympic

celebrations, a gesture which sought to acknowledge globalized Shakespeare and at the same

time to re-appropriate it to bolster British cultural prestige. Shakespeare's imbrication with

cultural processes of adaptation is, in other words, visible to us and modern audiences as never

before. And, we should not fail to notice, the interest in Shakespearean adaptations is in no small

part yet another response to the ever-present institutional pressure to find new texts with which

Shakespearean professionals might ply their trade. One of the difficulties of reconceptualizing

the discipline of Shakespearean criticism at this moment is how to rethink the object of its

practice and the grounds for its claims to cultural authority, which despite enormous changes in

critical practice still remain tied to some form of appeal to the Shakespearean text(s).

Foregrounding the trope of adaptation, I argue, offers a useful way forward, a means for

reconceptualizing Shakespeare as a disciplinary field, but only if we place the Shakespearean

text and the authority it seems to provide firmly within the orbit of adaptation.

Despite an avalanche of recent work on Shakespearean adaptation, we have been slow to

absorb its consequences for the field of Shakespeare studies as a whole.4 Too much of this work

still begins with the proposition that adaptations should be read against the "original," that they

are supplemental to or dependent upon "real" Shakespeare, and that the point of criticism is to

place such works in relationship to their originary source which stands outside them. An

important, underappreciated reason for this, I believe, is the powerful undertow of classroom

practice, a site from which a great deal of the interest in Shakespearean adaptation has emerged.

Despite bold statements from those who problematize the authority of the Shakespearean text in

relation to its latter-day (re)productions, most Shakespeareans still teach adaptations in the

context of courses on Shakespeare, where we tend to treat them as vehicles for generating

interest in the Shakespearean text, the course's central touchstone. No doubt there is value in that

approach. But far too often the work of comparing Shakespearean scripts to adaptations fosters

the illusion that (re)producers of Shakespeare engage directly and primarily with originary

Shakespearean texts rather than with a much more inchoate and complex web of intervening

adaptations or, just as important, with the protocols formal and ideological of genres and media

that have little to do with the Shakespearean text. What is more, the forms of comparison we use

in classes tend to obscure the extent to which the seemingly stable textual objects we treat as

"proper" Shakespeare are themselves fluid and adaptational by their nature: Shakespeare's

scripts themselves adapt prior narratives, typically from one medium and/or genre to another;

those scripts are inevitably changed in ways large and small, witting and unwitting, in the

process of being realized in performance; the publication process–the movement from

manuscript to print to latter-day editorial (re)construction to digital formatting–is itself a mode of

adaptation. That is, even as adaptations have become pedagogical objects in the classroom, the

curricular imperatives within which we typically conduct their study tends to reinstate the regime

of the "authentic" Shakespearean text, try as we might to be explicit about critiquing concepts of

fidelity and authenticity. To put the matter succinctly, pedagogical practice situates the closely-

read Shakespearean text as the origin and ultimate point of return of the adaptational process and

thereby reinforces the secondarity of adaptation.

What is more, the still dominant theoretical models for Shakespearean adaptation find it

difficult to resist the considerable residual power of the textual fidelity paradigm. The paradigm

of "appropriation," with its roots in cultural materialist and ultimately Marxist analysis, exerts

enormous force over the field, having become its preferred term of art,5 appearing in the title of a

major journal devoted to Shakespearean adaptation (Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of

Shakespeare and Appropriation) and the title or subtitle for a score of recent books. Unlike

adaptation, appropriation operates not merely on the Shakespearean text but also on the cultural

authority attached to that text, its accumulated cultural capital which serves as a legitimating

token in cultural struggles between subgroups. By tracing how and in what contexts

Shakespearean cultural authority is invoked, cultural materialist analysis champions counter-

hegemonic appropriations of Shakespeare and exposes (ab)uses of Shakespeare in the service of

dominant power. However, one problem of the appropriative model is that it tends to reify the

very cultural authority it purports to contest.6 In practice, accounts of Shakespearean

appropriation too often imagine a process in which Shakespeare's legitimating power remains

remarkably stable as it is snatched back and forth between cultural groups in a zero-sum political

game of "Bard, Bard, who's got the Bard?" By focusing on (re)distributions of a Shakespearean

cultural power we treat as stable, we can too easily fail to consider the extent to which acts of

adaptation actively create, transform, and recast the very Shakespeare they claim merely to

appropriate, and we neglect Shakespeare's engagement with other, equally if not more powerful

axes of cultural authorization, such as that of contemporary popular culture.7

Noteworthy too is how the Shakespearean text is often deployed in analyses of

appropriation. In his three volumes of essays on Shakespearean appropriation, for example, the

muich-missed Terence Hawkes takes the provocative position that, to quote his second book,

"Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare,"8 that is, Shakespearean meaning is

available in the present only through processes of appropriation which actively create, rather than

passively decode, the readings and values we attribute to the Shakespearean text. (What the

word "Shakespeare" refers to in Hawkes's famous formulation rewards close attention.) This

proposition he demonstrates by unearthing with dazzling acuity the ideological investments of

prior appropriators. One of the theoretical challenges of this position is adjudicating between

these actively-created meanings and values attached to Shakespeare's name. If we do the

meaning when we mean by Shakespeare, how are we to judge between those self-created

interpretations? In his analyses Hawkes often deploys counter-readings of Shakespeare's text–

often allied with carnivality, aurality and anarchic pleasure–to refute or dismantle the arguments

of his interlocutors. That is, no small part of the rhetorical force of Hawkes's essays depends

upon an implicit appeal to the authority of the "original" Shakespeare text situated in an

historically "authentic" context. Though we all may mean by Shakespeare, the appeal to the text

allows some to mean more authentically and authoritatively than others. My point here is not to

denigrate Hawkes's line of analysis–it is work exciting in its implications. Rather, it is to

observe that the appropriative model often depends upon positing, reifying and at times even

amplifying Shakespeare's cultural authority in order to observe it being exchanged, and it is also

to observe that final authority often remains vested in the Shakespearean text which, it turns out,

once "properly" contextualized does indeed mean, and with a vengeance.

There have been several attempts to craft alternative post-modern, post-fidelity theories

of Shakespearean adaptation. Gary Taylor's incisive chronicle of Shakespearean reinvention has

the considerable virtue of mapping in all its messy complexity a tissue of interwoven cultural

energies often far afield from the text itself, at least up until the twentieth century where he

locates the epicenter of Shakespearean reinvention in Anglophone academia.9 Equally

promising is Diana Henderson's emphasis on "collaboration," that is, on a non-agonistic

conception of interactions between Shakespeare and latter-day adaptors,10 though

conceptualizing how Shakespeare is a fully mutual participant in the interaction remains a

formidable theoretical challenge. Bryan Reynolds and his many co-writers have used the

Deleuzian notion of "transversalism" to suggest how the Shakespearean text, particularly when

re-produced in performance, creates an intersubjective space which "invites people to deviate

from the hierarchializing assemblages–whether vertical or horizontal–of any organizational

social structure"; Shakespeare models and produces a "metamorphosis of becoming-other-

social-identities" that "confounds such concepts as the essential, the normal, the unified, and the

universal" as well as the binary constructs that underwrite them.11 If so, it is not clear whether

the quality of transversality results from certain processes of performance or re-production or is

somehow located in the Shakespearean text itself. Too often alternate models for Shakespearean

adaptation continue to think in terms of some direct encounter between an "original"

Shakespeare text and the adaptor or seek to (re)invest the Shakespearean text with special power,

albeit one which is counter-hegemonic or progressive. The impulse to find a way to circle back

and read the "original" Shakespearean text in relation to adaptations or to preserve that text's

authority, albeit in some transmuted form, speaks to our field's collective investment in

continuing to claim authority from that text, even as we have problematized that authority.

Performance critics have offered the most thoroughgoing discussions of this theoretical impasse.

William Worthen's powerful meditations on the relationship between the Shakespearean text and

Shakespearean performance have repeatedly made the case that the Shakespearean text does not

and should not regulate theatrical production. Margaret Jane Kidnie arrives at much the same

conclusion in her examination of the problem. Her notion of "pragmatic adaptation" appeals not

to Shakespeare's text but to an ever-changing "community of users" (31) to define the fluid but

discernible range of genuine, faithful or authentic interpretations of Shakespeare's works at any

given historical moment.

This challenge here is also one of ethics and value. Despite the critique of the notion of

an "original" Shakespearean text in the last critical generation, retaining some notion of fidelity

to "the text" has remained a foundational orientation for literary scholars as professionals, the

legitimizing ethical duty that divides us from amateurs and "creatives." Textual fidelity has also

provided a powerful means for ranking rival adaptations, though in light of poststructuralist

critiques of value we have learned to couch our judgment calls in seemingly neutral language

("it's not very interesting"). We can see "residual fidelity" at work, for example, in the principles

which have governed the establishment of an informal canon of Shakespeare films in recent

years, for with few exceptions fidelity to Shakespeare's language has been the single most salient

standard for determining membership. What the fidelity model has offered is a fairly clear and

professionally efficacious standard for assigning value, even though our shared understandings

of what constitutes fidelity to Shakespeare's text have largely been informal, subjective and

under-examined. In our putatively post-fidelity moment, the dominant alternative to the fidelity

model has become valuing adaptations according to the political work they do. This alternative

has been recently championed by Denise Albanese, who seeks to reclaim Shakespeare as a

shared public resource, "a repository for social dreaming, the dispensation toward revolutionary

transformation associated with the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch" (121). This instrumentalist

approach to value is certainly consistent with the cultural materialist model of appropriation, but

it risks erecting political litmus tests and overvaluing empty gestures of resistance, and it's not

clear that Shakespeare very effectively enables the political work he's expected to support.

How then to reconceptualize Shakespearean adaptation post-fidelity? One way would be

to rethink the defining object of our field, to shift it from Shakespeare the text to "Shakespeare"

the adaptation, that is, to the aggregated web of cultural forces and productions which in some

fashion lay claim to the label "Shakespearean" but which has long exceeded the canon of plays

and poems we have come to attribute to the pen of William Shakespeare.12 Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari's13 concept of the "rhizome" can provide a model for conceptualizing this

adaptational field. At the heart of DG's philosophy is an emphasis upon differential "becoming"

rather than Platonic "being." In effect DG radically postmodernize Aristotelian metaphysics.

Like Aristotle they stress the fundamentally dynamic nature of existence, distinguishing

potentiality from actuality, dynamis from entelecheia. But unlike Aristotle the dynamic process

of"becoming" is for DG not governed by any teleology, end-point or final form; we do not

become our way into a pre-ordained state of being or maturity. Rather, the radical nature of

ever-differing-from-oneself, a process of endless "becoming" which for DG governs every aspect

of existence, obliterates all conventional notions of "being." To posit a still point of structure,

form, value or meaning, to assert identity, is perceptually to arrest the flux of becoming-different,

to misperceive stability within what is in fact the fluidity of ceaseless change, or to attempt to

impose structure (typically a binary one) upon non-unitary multiplicity. Indeed, DG pointedly

reevaluate Aristotle's distinction between potentiality and actuality. They stress that potentiality

and virtuality, what a thing might become through the inexorability of difference and desire, is in

fact its reality, rather than the identity that thing might momentarily seem to take at a moment in

time.

DG's concept of the rhizome partakes of this emphasis upon becoming and difference.

The "rhizome" designates both a mode of relation and a form of conceptual structure.

Rhizomatic relations involve "the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing

to do with each other" (qtd in DG, 10). The elements in relation remain distinct–DG reject the

notion of a synthesis or symbiosis–yet through their relationship they move independently in the

direction of each other. This movement involves a double process of deterritorialization (a de-

structuring of each original) and reterritorialization (the drive to create a new stability or order).

DG use the example of the wasp and orchid to explain this rhizomatic relation:

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp

reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a

piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by

transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogenous elements, form a rhizome.

(DG 10)

While remaining distinct creatures from different orders of nature (plant, animal), orchid and

wasp bend their modes of becoming in the direction of each other, forming "a becoming-wasp of

the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp" (DG 10). The relation leads to a mutuality of

change between otherwise unconnected elements–"the two becomings interlink and form relays

in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further" (DG 10). Such

"aparallel evolution," argues DG, is central to the processes which shape the becomings of

beings and ideas, particularly the creation of new ones.

As one moves beyond consideration of a single rhizomatic relation (between wasp and

orchid) to the complex (and changing) set of multiple relations that shape any entity, it becomes

necessary to reconceptualize notions of genealogical structure. In the introductory chapter to A

Thousand Plateaus, DG contrast "arboreal" and "rhizomatic" conceptualizations of the book.14

An arboreal structure–or, as DG would have it, "the root-book"–traces its ideas and forms back

to a single source–a master author, a classic text, a foundational idea, an historical reality. Its

various transformations, what DG call "arborescent thoughts," are organized into homogenous,

vertically hierarchical schema and historical genealogies. In an arboreal structure, meaning is

conceived in terms of a single root and myriad branches, its growth governed by an entelechy

determined by that root. To extend this metaphor to Shakespeare, an arboreal conception of

adaptation encourages one to trace back Shakespeare's cultural authority ultimately to the

originary Shakespearean text. A rhizomatic structure, by contrast, has no single or central root

and no vertical structure. Instead, like the underground root system of rhizomatic plants, it is a

horizontal, decentered multiplicity of subterranean roots which cross each other, bifurcating and

recombining, breaking off and restarting. In some places rhizomatic roots collect into temporary

tangles of connection or nodes that then themselves break apart and reassemble into other nodes,

some playing out in dead ends, others taking what DG call "lines of flight," that is, altogether

new directions of thought, all without compromising the ever-expanding, ever-changing

aggregate. What is more, a rhizome has no central organizing intelligence or point of origin; it

may be entered at any point, and there is no a priori path through its web of connections. The

decentered structure of the internet provides an apt example of rhizomatic structure (a metaphor

unavailable to DG in 1987). DG describe the rhizome thusly:

In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of

communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical,

nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central

automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. (DG 1987, 21)

A rhizome consists of what Deleuze calls "plateaus," a plateau being "a continuous, self-

vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination or

external end" (DG 1987, 22). By its nature a plateau is provisional, permeable and in a state of

becoming, a space where particular meanings or energies temporarily intensify and

"territorialize"–one thinks of nineteenth-century operatic Shakespeare or late twentieth-century

teen Shakespeare cinema. But a plateau is itself subject to the principle of difference as it

encounters other elements in and outside the rhizome and becomes other-than-itself, as it

fractures according to its own internal contradictions or outside contingencies, or as it engenders

new lines of flight.

If we conceive of our shared object of study not as Shakespeare the text but as the vast

web of adaptations, allusions and (re)productions that comprises the ever-changing cultural

phenomenon we call "Shakespeare,"15 the rhizome can offer a compelling theoretical model. A

rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare situates "his" cultural authority not in the Shakespearean

text at all but in the accrued power of Shakespearean adaptation, the multiple, changing lines of

force we and previous cultures have labeled as "Shakespeare," lines of force that have been

created by and which respond to historical contingencies. Within the Shakespearean rhizome,

the Shakespearean text is an important element but not a determining one; it becomes less a root

than a node which might be situated in relation to other adaptational rhizomes. To think

rhizomatically about the Shakespearean text is to foreground its fundamentally adaptational

nature–as a version of prior narratives, as a script necessarily imbricated in performance

processes, as a text ever in transit between manuscript, theatrical and print cultures, a work

dependent upon its latter-day producers for its continued life. That is, Shakespearean

rhizomatics includes Shakespeare the text but is in no way reducible to it; it also necessarily

includes faithful and unfaithful adaptations, and adaptations of them, and adaptations of them.

And by its nature the Shakespearean rhizome is never a stable object but an aggregated field in a

perpetual state of becoming, ever being reconfigured as new adaptations intersect with and grow

from it. Articulating the Shakespearean rhizome's changing lines of energy and difference, the

myriad interactions, affiliations, contestations, collusions, ruptures, and, yes, appropriations

among adaptations without privileging Shakespeare's "original" text as a determining or final

adjudicatory force, serves as the raison d'être for Shakespearean rhizomatics as a field.16

It is important to be clear. This is not a matter of scholars abandoning closely reading

historical evidence before us, including the Shakespearean text(s), but rather a matter of what

principles close reading might serve. Historically, close reading has operated on what it

postulates as a stable, indeed monumental text, the particularities of which anchor and

underwrite interpretation and serve as standards against which rival readings may be judged.

Close reading has thus tended to reify the textual object on which its authority depends. But

there is no necessity why this should be so. Certainly close reading can be one method (but not

the only one) to recognize the processual, ever-provisional–DG might say "immanent"–qualities

of the Shakespearean "originals" before us, particularly when those texts are read closely against

other texts with which they are in rhizomatic relation. What a rhizomatic mode of close reading

would require is scrupulous attention to texts within larger processes of adaptation, to their status

as creative acts; what one leaves behind is the ability to regulate Shakespearean adaptations–to

designate what is and is not properly Shakespearean–according to fidelity to the Shakespearean

text(s). In a stimulating article which argues for homologies between biological and cultural

processes of adaptation, Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon begin with the proposition that

"biologists do not evaluate the merit of organisms relative to their ancestors; all have equal

biological merit. So too...do cultural adaptations have equal cultural validity."17 Indeed, by

attending to difference without using it as a mode of evaluation close reading can recover

processes of adaptation.

At first glance Shakespearean rhizomatics may look suspiciously like the old myth

criticism, a study of enduring themes or master narratives and their variations, except that in this

case we are making no claim for the archetypal nature of those themes and narratives. In reality,

Shakespearean rhizomatics presses in precisely the opposite direction. Myth criticism aimed to

construct the archetypal Ur-narratives that animated the many variants it considered, and it did so

by privileging what remained the same across variations. Its primary interest was in how a given

myth is preserved over time and across cultures, despite that myth's many particular

manifestations. By contrast a rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare stresses the power of those

ever-differentiating particulars–specific adaptations, allusions, performances–to transform and

restructure the aggregated Shakespearean field into something ever new. By emphasizing

difference as essential to the cultural afterlife of "Shakespeare" and by refusing to treat the

Shakespearean text as a regulative standard or mystified icon of value, a rhizomatic approach

seeks to demonstrate how "Shakespeare" becomes ever-other-than-itself precisely through the

varied particularities of its manifestations which proliferate according to no pre-ordained

teleology. In this way, then, Shakespearean rhizomatics wholeheartedly embraces the

materialism of cultural materialist criticism, but in a way that radicalizes its implications.

What would rhizomatic Shakespearean criticism look like? One way to offer an answer

is to reimagine how we position adaptations vis-a-vis the Shakespearean text(s) in the classroom.

Instead of beginning with the Shakespearean text and moving to adaptations, a procedure which

only reinforces the primacy of that text to those adaptations, one might begin with an adaptation

and move back toward and through the Shakespearean script to other adaptations, situating that

script as one element–albeit a historically important element–in an adaptational chain. (This

approach has the added advantage of mirroring how nearly all audiences actually encounter

Shakespearean text[s].) The aim would not be to produce a grand genealogical narrative that

unites the texts under consideration, for such a narrative would suggest an element of historical

necessity to their relation and obscure the extent to which they partake of relations with non-

Shakespearean material. Rather, the aim is to stress the crossing lines of association and

difference that give creative energy to each adaptation, to recover something of the qualities of

contingency and choice that these adaptations might exhibit, and to suggest how those lines of

energy might illuminate the nature of "Shakespeare," both historically and in the present.

Crucial to this enterprise is to treat Shakespeare script(s) as themselves adaptations (and in many

respects), rather than as monumental objects isolated from processes of change and relationality.

For example, one might begin a discussion of Hamlet with the relatively unknown 1945

film Strange Illusion, an intriguing film noir by Poverty Row director Edgar Ulmer.18 In the film

Paul Cartwright, college-age son of a prominent California politician, returns home after his

father's death to discover that his mother Virginia has taken up with Brett Curtis, a charismatic

but mysterious suitor. At the same time Paul is haunted by inchoate, foreboding dreams about a

threatening stranger who poses as his father, dreams linked to his father's death. As this

summary suggests, Strange Illusion is rife with resonances of Hamlet, yet it never cites

Shakespeare's text directly. To see Strange Illusion first, then read a script of Hamlet (with close

attention to the editorial problems posed by any particular Hamlet script), then to read

Belleforest, Saxo Grammaticus and Seneca is to be reminded that an "essential" Hamlet may be

difficult to locate in any simple way in Shakespeare's language. The tale is in fact many tales in

relation with one another, a aggregate ever in flux. And such an approach demonstrates how

these tales transform each other proleptically and retrospectively, drawing the eye to how each

version creates new potentialities (and seeks to redirect or close off others) in its predecessors

and in the group. What is more, by pointedly beginning in the middle of the Shakespearean

rhizome this approach reminds students that a work like Strange Illusion does not begin with the

Shakespearean script and adapt it to popular form but rather puts into relationship an already

culturally-transformed Hamlet and other elements which themselves resonate within (or are

thereby drawn into) the larger Shakespearean rhizome. Strange Illusion connects with

Shakespeare through an Oedipalized Hamlet that can be traced through biographical readings of

Shakespearean character in the nineteenth century, Freud and Ernst Jones, Barrymore's

performances of Hamlet in the early 20s, and Olivier's film Hamlet which followed Strange

Illusion three years later. At the same time, Strange Illusion's film noir mode might be allied

with transformed lines of energy which run through Senecan drama, early modern revenge

tragedy and the Gothic–a pervasive fatalism, identity structured around a traumatic loss, a slow,

suspenseful revelation of a hidden narrative, eruptions of dreams, madness and "meta-states" into

reality, an obsession with the half-seen, shadowed or superimposed image. But Strange Illusion

also connects with films of the mid 20th century that have a markedly ambivalent relationship

with mainstream psychoanalysis–Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit

(1948) and Charles Frend's The Magnet (1950) are examples. Considered in these contexts, the

particularity of Strange Illusion comes into focus, for it stages a crossing of energies between an

Oedipalized Hamlet narrative (which dominates the film's first half) and the debunking of

European psychiatry and its displacement by American ego psychology (which dominates the

second half), all of which filtered through motifs from "boy's own adventure" films and stories.

In this case Shakespeare's Hamlet serves as a medium for a post-war dialogue about the nature of

the psychic economy after trauma. And the film also resonates with its future, for in general

affect, narrative, and subgenre Strange Illusion points toward Michael Almereyda's independent,

youth-market film of Hamlet from 2000, itself a transformation of teen Shakespeare cinema of

the late 90s. In Almereyda's far more pessimistic treatment the protagonist confronts not only a

slick seducer of his mother but also a vast corporate-media apparatus which takes up the position

of his dead father, at once his antagonist and ally in taking revenge upon Claudius. Again, the

point is not to construct some linear genealogy for Strange Illusion, but to use the film to model

several analytic strategies in order to think rhizomatically about "Shakespeare."

My choice of Strange Illusion, certainly an "unfaithful" adaptation and admittedly an

obscure (and for some viewers a crudely made) film, also raises the problem of ethics and

evaluation of Shakespearean adaptation. How to conceptualize the responsibilities of

Shakespearean criticism within a new paradigm that does not privilege fidelity to some

Shakespearean text? Is this not a license for irresponsibility, a free-for-all in which any critical

judgment is simply to be suspended? Though DG reject conventional ethical formulations, they

do offer some help in framing the issue. First, if we conceive of "Shakespeare" rhizomatically,

our chief responsibility is to the Shakespearean rhizome itself. At its heart that responsibility is

to acknowledge, map and preserve (in the sense of not disciplining) "Shakespeare's" creative

potentialities, not to stand as guardians of authenticity. For Deleuze ethical responsibility–with

emphasis on "response"–is first and foremost to the process of immanent difference itself, which

he sees as a principle of liberation. This is emphatically not to claim that all Shakespearean

adaptations are politically liberatory–adaptational processes can seek to close off as well as open

up new ways of thinking (and it can do both–and often does–in different ways in the same work).

The point is that we cannot take full analytic account of a work or its politics without being

attentive to the particular historical "Shakespeare" with which it is engaged, both in terms of

specific historical texts and practices that bear the label "Shakespearean" at a given moment and

the more general state of the cultural formation "Shakespeare" of the time. As critics we remain

responsible to that principle of difference by asking different analytic questions than we have

been used to: not, how does this work match up with or deviate from the language of the

Shakespearean text(s), but rather, with which particular elements in the Shakespearean rhizome

is this work in relation, and in what relation? Not, is this or is this not "really" Hamlet, but

rather, how does this adaptation reshape or extend a collective conception of what constitutes the

"essential" Hamlet? Not, should we this count as Shakespearean, but rather, in what ways does

attributing the label "Shakespearean" to this work change the cultural formation that goes by the

name "Shakespeare"?

It is true that this approach requires Shakespearean scholars to give up much of our

regulatory authority over the Shakespearean text(s). But, historically, infidelity to Shakespeare's

text(s) has been just as important to Shakespeare's extraordinary vitality in world culture as have

been principles of textual fiddlity. Indeed, we should acknowledge, principles of textual

infidelity and fidelity are themselves historically in flux (they did not mean the same thing in the

eighteenth century than they do for us), and processes of adaptation contribute to their change.

By thinking of critical ethics in terms of responsibility to "Shakespeare" the cultural

phenomenon and not exclusively or primarily to texts, we can more honestly acknowledge the

historicity of our own critical practices and our claims to authority, and we are in a better place

to understand why "Shakespeare" merits such sustained critical attention.

A equally vexing issue is the assignment of value to Shakespearean adaptations.

Traditionally one crucial role of the Shakespearean critic has been to divide the authentically

Shakespearean from what we once called "Shakespeareana." But if the object of Shakespearean

criticism becomes a heterogenous field of adaptations–performances, novelizations, films, all of

varying aesthetic quality and ideological content, but also kitsch, propaganda, anti-

Stratfordianism, and the vulgarly commercial or pornographic–how can criticism rank the

relative value of various adaptations? Should we judge, and how? It is not a challenge we

should dodge, for the very act of choosing a Shakespearean adaptation to teach or write about

has a canonizing effect. What is more, the very act of designating a work "Shakespearean" is

potentially a creative act, a way of placing it into relation with other works which bear the label

"Shakespearean" and reshaping in some small or large way what can be designated

"Shakespeare." But such assignments of the label "Shakespearean" can also become a means by

which hierarchical value is constructed and meanings subjected to discipline, even (or perhaps

especially) when those valuations are casual or implicit.

Two observations might be made here. First, one way to engage this question is by

thinking in terms of strategic value rather than absolute value.19 My singling out of Strange

Illusion is not meant to suggest the film's privileged status as a Shakespearean adaptation, and in

the classroom I make that intention clear. I chose it precisely because I suspect my student

audience might find its production values annoyingly unpolished, its politics old-fashioned, its

status as a "proper" version of Hamlet questionable, that is, because the film pushes against

many of their received notions of proper Shakespearean value. The usefulness of Strange

Illusion rests in what it can by its relation to other adaptations illuminate about intensities and

complex relations in the larger Shakespearean rhizome, including what happens to the meaning

of "Shakespeare" and "Hamlet" when one designates an ambiguous adaptation like Strange

Illusion Shakespearean. Strange Illusion immediately puts up for discussion issues that remain

largely off the table in many Shakespeare classes–do we mean by "Shakespeare"? What are the

limits of the term "Shakespearean"? How to articulate and interrogate the standards we use for

judging "good" or "bad" adaptations of Shakespeare? To what extent is the Shakespearean text

imbricated with larger processes of cultural adaptation? The point of using Strange Illusion is to

put the issue of adaptation front and center, rather than treating adaptation as a supplemental

matter in the study of Shakespeare. At the same time, because Strange Illusion is "unfaithful"

and decidedly un-hip, for some even "bad" Shakespeare, it tends to resist the tendency for

students to enshrine it easily as part of the Hamlet adaptational canon. Its rather stubborn

difference from received canons of "proper" Shakespeare is potentially productive in

deterritorializing received notions of Shakespeare students have inherited. The "potentially" of

my argument is cautionary, for it is always possible that today's provisional strategy of relation

might harden into tomorrow's canonical truism.

Secondly, rhizomatic analysis seeks out which relations, of the multiplicity of relations a

work partakes, are particularly creative. Of special value are those relations which effect a

conceptual transformation in the larger aggregate and initiate what DG call a "line of flight," that

is, a novel mode of becoming or way of thinking created by a new form of connection,

heretofore only immanent or virtual, between two entities. In the case of Shakespeare,

connections between "Shakespeare" and realms of culture hitherto distinct from it (Shakespeare

in other languages, Shakespeare in comic books, film noir Shakespeare) release a semiotic and

affective power in the original aggregate, by forcing us to reconceive what "Shakespeare" might

mean and demonstrating its virtual multiplicity. For DG such "lines of flight" are to be valued,

and the power of rhizomatic analysis is that it draws our attention to "lines of flight" in

seemingly unpromising material (such as Strange Illusion). DG offer this analytic advice:

Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight;

make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous lines....Conjugate

deterritorialized flows... (DG 11)

By thinking of any one Shakespearean adaptation not in single, privileged relation to a

Shakespearean text but rather in a multiplicity of relations to an ever-changing aggregate of

adaptations, we are in a better position to understand how and to what extent that adaptation by

way of rupture deterritorializes the whole, in short, more judiciously to value its potential for

conceptual difference.

For a rhizomatic understanding of "Shakespeare," it is an article of faith that adaptation is

the only cultural life Shakespeare has and the only life his work has ever had. This is as true of

the scripts that bear Shakespeare's name as it is for modern Shakespearean performances or

films, for not only do those scripts adapt Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, medieval theater, folk

practice, early modern discourses of all sorts, and myriad other materials, but the very scripts

themselves, even before an editor gets her hands on them, are adaptations for the printed page of

manuscripts intended for performance on an early modern stage, performances of stories based

on prior stories which were created from handwritten rolls individually distributed to actors.

Adaptation is, Linda Hutcheon reminds us, both a process and a product, an action one does and

a work that results from that action.20 The rhizome, a destratified, proliferating network of

disjunctive yet productive relations, is a means to reimagine the products that form

"Shakespeare" as an open-ended, non-teleological process of adaptation and remediation, as a

form of "nomadic thought," in DG's terms. This is not simply to ignore the power dynamics at

work in accounts of Shakespearean "appropriation." Rather, it is to complicate accounts of them

by emphasizing the multidimensionality of any act of adaptation, its engagement not merely (or

primarily or even at all) with the language of the Shakespearean text(s) but with the proliferating

network of relations that constitute "Shakespeare" at a given historical moment. Those relations

are certainly fraught with forms of cultural power, but the very semiotic instability of

"Shakespeare," its capacity for deterritorialization and reterritorialization within time,

complicates the notion of cultural dominants and subordinates and thus problematizes the model

of Shakespearean appropriation. As an interpretive strategy Shakespearean rhizomatics seeks to

turn our attention to "Shakespeare"-as-process and to place the Shakespearean text(s) within that

process. But it is also a strategy which actively participates in that process by fostering patterns

of thought that value rather than regulate Shakespearean difference. Rhizomatics does so by

being responsible finally not to text(s) but to a principle of "Shakespeare's" ongoing becoming,

or, to give it its proper name, radical creativity. And it is there that the cultural power of

Shakespeare has long resided.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. (2005) Shakespeare: The Biography. Nan A. Talese.

Albanese, Denise. (2010) Extramural Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bate, Jonathan. (1998) The Genius of Shakespeare. Oxford UP.

------. (2008) Soul of the Age. Penguin.

Bevington, David. (2002) Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience. Wiley-

Blackwell.

------. (2009) This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now.

U Chicago P.

Bornstein, George, and Ralph Williams (eds.) (1993) Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the

Humanities. U Michigan P.

Bortolotti, Gary, and Linda Hutcheon. (2007) "On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking

Fidelity Discourse and 'Success'–Biologically." New Literary History 38.3: 443-458.

Buhler, Stephen. (2011) "The Psychology of Teen Hamlets: Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion."

Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28: 353-61.

Bulman, James C. (ed.) (1995) Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Routledge.

Bryson, Bill. (2007) Shakespeare: The World as Stage. HarperCollins.

Calbi, Maurizio. (2013) Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First

Century. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cartelli, Thomas. (1999) Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial

Appropriations. Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

24 Schizophrenia. U Minnesota P. New ed. (2004) Continuum.

Desmet, Christy, and Robert O. Sawyer (eds.) (1999) Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Routledge.

Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield (eds.) (1994) Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural

Materialism. Manchester UP and Cornell UP.

Drakakis, John (ed.) (1985) Alternative Shakespeares. Methuen.

Duncan-Jones, Katharine. (2010) Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. Bloomsbury-Arden.

Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells (eds.) (2013). Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence,

Argument, Controversy. Cambridge UP.

Fortier, Mark. (1996) "Shakespeare as 'Minor Theater': Deleuze and Guattari and the Aims of

Adaptation," Mosaic 29.1: 1-18.

------. (2007). "Wild Adaptation." Borrowers and Lenders 3.

Friedman, Michael D. (2002) "In Defense of Authenticity." Studies in Philology 99.1: 33-56.

Garber, Marjorie. (2009) Shakespeare and Modern Culture. Harvard UP.

Greenblatt, Stephen. (2004) Will in the World. Norton.

Hawkes, Terence. (1986) That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. Routledge.

------. (1992) Meaning By Shakespeare. Routledge.

------. (2002) Shakespeare in the Present. Routledge.

Henderson, Diana. (2006) Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time

and Media. Cornell UP.

Hodgdon, Barbara. (1998) The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. U

Pennsylvania P.

Holderness, Graham. (ed.) (1988) The Shakespeare Myth. Routledge.

25 ------. (2011) Nine Lives of William Shakespeare. Bloomsbury Academic.

Honan, Park. (1999) Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford UP.

Hutcheon, Linda. (2006) A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge.

Johnson, Lemuel. (1998) Shakespeare in Africa & Other Venues: Import & the Appropriation

of Culture. Africa World Press.

Kidnie, Margaret Jane. (2009) Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Routledge.

Lynch, Jack. (2007) Becoming Shakespeare. Walker & Co.

Maguire, Laurie E. (2000) "Composition/Decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death

of the Author." In The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality. Ed. Andrew

Murphy. Manchester UP. 135-53.

Marcus, Leah S. (1996) Unediting the Renaissance. Routledge.

------. (2007) "Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age." In A Concise Companion to

Shakespeare and the Text. Ed. Andrew R. Murphy. Blackwell. 128-44.

Marsden, Jean I. (ed.) (1992) The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance

Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. Palgrave.

Massai, Sonia (ed.) (2005) World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and

Performance. Routledge.

McGann, Jerome. (1983). A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. U Chicago P.

McLeod, Randall (ed.) (1988) Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance. AMS Press.

Nichol, Charles. (2007) The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. Allen Lane.

Orgel, Stephen. (2002). "The Authentic Shakespeare." In The Authentic Shakespeare and other

Problems of the Early Modern Stage. Routledge. 231-56.

Potter, Lois. (2012) The Life of William Shakespeare. Wiley-Blackwell.

26 Reynolds, Bryan. (2003) Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical

Future. Palgrave.

Reynolds, Bryan, and Don Hedrick (eds.) (2000) Shakespeare Without Class:

Misappropriations of Cultural Capital. Palgrave.

Sanders, Julie. (2002) Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-Century Women Novelists and

Appropriation. Manchester UP.

------. (2006) Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge.

Sawyer, Robert O. (2003) Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C.

Swinburne, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. Fairleigh Dickinson UP.

Shapiro, James (2005) 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins.

------. (2010) Contested Will. Simon and Shuster.

Sinfield, Alan. (2006) Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural

Materialism. Routledge.

Symington, Rodney. (2006) The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the

Third Reich. Edwin Mellen.

Taylor, Gary. (1989) Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the

Present. Grove Press.

Wells, Stanley. (2002) Shakespeare: For All Time. Oxford UP.

Wilson, Richard. (2004) Secret Shakespeare. Manchester UP.

Wood, Michael. (2003) In Search of Shakespeare. Basic Books.

Worthen, William. (1997) Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge UP.

------. (2003) Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge UP.

------. (2014) Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge UP.

27

28 Notes

1. The place of biographical criticism in twentieth-century criticism, of course, is far more complex than this broad-brush formulation allows. Until relatively recently much of the energy of connecting life to work had shifted to non-academic scholarship, particularly anti-Stratfordianism. Even so, biographical criticism remains a powerful though largely unacknowledged residual element in professional scholarship. Recently Shakespeare biographicalism has undergone something of a renaissance among academic critics: see, for example, Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life, David Bevington's Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, Richard Wilson's Secret Shakespeare, James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age, Lois Potter's The Life of William Shakespeare, Katharine Duncan-Jones's Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, and Graham Holderness's Nine Lives of William Shakespeare. (To this list might be added works by popular historians–for example, Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare, companion volume to his TV series of the same name, Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography, and Charles Nichol's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street–as well as Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage.) Many of the works in this list–Wilson's and Holderness's are exceptions–target a cross-over readership, itself an indication of the residual power of biographicalism for non-academic audiences. Also noteworthy in this connection is the reignition of the debate about Shakespeare's authorship, fueled by James Shapiro's Contested Will, the film Anonymous (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2011), and Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells's collection Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, along with an ever-active raft of anti-Stratfordian screeds. Notable too is the power of films like Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) and Miguel y William (dir. Inés Paris, 2007), which by playfully engaging and romanticizing Shakespeare's life reignited popular interest in the topic and suggested both the market potential of Shakespeare biographies and the need for scholars to reclaim their authority over the issue. 2. The impulse to problematize fidelity (most recently the keyword has been "authenticity") and the concomitant struggle to conceptualize critical practice in its absence has been an enduring theoretical impasse in Shakespeare performance studies. Note James C. Bulman's discussion of the question in his introduction to Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-12, as well as William Worthen's extended engagement with the problem in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) and Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). However, not all would agree that fidelity has become an untenable or undesirable ideal; see, for example, Michael D. Friedman, "In Defense of Authenticity," Studies in Philology 99.1 (2002): 33-56. Friedman's opening footnote provides a judicious sampling of scholarship on the issue. 3. See, for example, Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (NY: Routledge, 1998 and "Editing Shakespeare in the Postmodern Age," in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 128-44; Stephen Orgel, "The Authentic Shakespeare," in The Authentic Shakespeare and other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (NY: Routledge, 2002), 231-256; and William Worthen, "Authority and Performance," in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (NY: Routledge, 1997), 1-44. Useful discussions of the postmodern turn in editing can be found in

29 Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983); Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (NY: AMS Press, 1988); and Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, eds. George Bornstein and Ralph Williams (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1993). 4. For an attempt to rethink the concept of disciplinary field within the context of Shakespearean adaptation, see Sonia Massai, "Defining Local Shakespeares," in World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3-11. 5. Its ultimate origins in the field can be traced to three early collections on Shakespearean adaptation with a cultural materialist bent, The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988); Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989); The Appropriation of Shakespeare, ed. Jean I. Marsden (Prentice-Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Sinfield's introduction to the second half of Political Shakespeare, "Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions," provides a succinct statement of principles for cultural materialist criticism, and his Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (Routledge, 2006) forcefully restates the cultural materialist case. 6. See Denise Albanese, Extramural Shakespeare (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20-1. 7. Richard Burt's Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares, Revised Edition: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) is a notable exception. 8. Meaning by Shakespeare (NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. 9. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present (NY: Grove P, 1989). 10. Collaborations With the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time And Media (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006). 11. Bryan Reynolds and Don Hedrick, "Shakespeare and Transversal Power," in Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, eds. Bryan Reynolds and Don Hedrick, eds. (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 19. Reynolds develops this argument further in Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (NY: Palgrave, 2003). 12. There are signs that this kind of reconceptualization is emerging. The cultural afterlife of Shakespeare has been the topic of a number of recent studies: in addition to pioneering works like Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford UP, 1998), see Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: For All Time (Oxford UP, 2002); Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare (Walker & Co., 2007); David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (U Chicago P, 2009); and Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009). In different ways, each of these works reveals the tensions in Shakespearean studies between fidelity to the Shakespearean text and engagement with "Shakespeare" as a network of adaptations. 13. Deleuze and Guattari pointedly co-authored A Thousand Plateaus as a way of confounding the normativity of single authorship and illustrating their concept of the assemblage, a social entity composed of heterogenous components which remain non-totalized and complexly related. Accordingly, I will refer to the author of A Thousand Plateaus throughout as DG.

30 14. "Introduction: Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987), pp. 3-25. In the course of the discussion DG introduce a third model for the book, the "radicle-system" or "fascicular root book," a work which seems to consist of a decentered system of heterogenous components (a quality of the rhizome) but which in fact imposes some external principle of unity on those components (a quality of aborescence). DG cite William Burroughs' and James Joyce's novels as examples, where, they argue, "unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object [the world the novel represents, the language it uses], while a new kind of unity triumphs in the subject [the modernist author]" (6). The fascicular root book is, in effect, a pseudo-rhizome. 15. Another model for the Shakespearean aggregate I am attempting is the machine, which DG contrast to what they designate the mechanism. A mechanism is a well-bounded entity with a specific function; a machine, by contrast, is a collection of connections, not made by any one creator, not bound to one purpose or end, and without a closed identity. Mechanisms seek to accomplish their assigned purposes but do not transform themselves by doing so; machines, by contrast, seek to make connections outside themselves in order to extend and transform themselves, but without some overarching guiding intelligence or aim. As a cultural phenomenon "Shakespeare" functions much as a machine, an open set of connections that fastens upon opportunities to extend its reach into new semiotic (and non-semiotic) realms, but which does not do so according to an a priori entelechy or the dictates of a single or collective author/producer. The very open-endedness of "Shakespeare" is crucial to its cultural vitality. 16. For a congruent argument with roots in Deleuze and Guattari's theories, see Mark Fortier, "Wild Adaptation," Borrowers and Lenders 3 (Fall-Winter 2007). See also Fortier, "Shakespeare as 'Minor Theater': Deleuze and Guattari and the Aims of Adaptation," Mosaic 29.1 (March 1996): 1-18. 17. "On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and 'Success'–Biologically," New Literary History 28 (2007), p. 446. 18. Stephen Buhler offers a fine discussion of the film in his "The Psychology of Teen Hamlets: Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28 (2011): 353-61. 19. In different ways, this is the position of Kidnie with her notion of "pragmatic adaptation" and Albanese with her notion of "social dreaming." 20. A Theory of Adaptation (NY: Routledge, 2006), p. 7 and after. In her discussion of adaptation in "What is Adaptation?" in Adaptation and Appropriation (NY: Routledge, 2005), pp. 17-25, Julie Sanders helpfully stresses adaptation as a process rather than product.