Paying attention in Shakespeare parody: from Tom Stoppard to YouTube

Summary

Within Anglo-American criticism, the phenomenon of Shakespearian appropriation has been framed largely as an encounter between ‘mighty opposites’. Harold Bloom’s competitive model from The Anxiety of Influence (1973) offers the best-known version of this critical narrative. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism is sometimes offered as an alternative to the dominance/submission dynamic of Bloom; in this model, Bard and appropriator engage in a serious, dignified conversation between equals. Either construction entails critical costs. Bloom’s model is exclusionary; you cannot have true anxiety of influence unless you are Shakespeare or Milton and have already gained admittance to the canon. The Bakhtinian model, which can elide the distance between ‘dialogism’ and ‘dialogue’, assumes a similarity of voice, as well as an (often unexamined) equality between two writers who may have vastly different backgrounds and goals.

APPROPRIATION AS THRIFT AND THEFT

My own approach to appropriation posits a more equitable (although not necessarily equal) exchange between texts and writers by considering appropriation as a form of imaginative ‘donation’ as well as a potential theft of intellectual property or cultural capital. Graham Holderness reminds us that my translation of the term works better in American than in British English. But even more broadly, from a rhetorical perspective some of the persistent theoretical barriers to imagining appropriation as a two-way exchange, or a process of give-and-take, are inherent to the theoretical frameworks that inform appropriation studies: first, the economic metaphors that govern Foucault’s concept of authorship; and second, an insistently textual bias in post-Derridean notions of performativity. Both have tended to equate Shakespearian appropriation with the norms of print culture.