What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?

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.

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What's the Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare? The title reads like that of a reality show or game show (The ShaX-Factor) in which one might expect the direst forms of bardoclasm to run amok as contestants are dared to discover the latest degradations. Deploying this shock value in order to reclaim misreadings, missed readings, botched readings, and non-readings of Shakespeare's plays, our book seeks to examine the frequently mooted 'unreadability' of Shakespeare's texts as a peculiar symptom of their absorption into global culture as they are variously remediated. Combining close textual analysis, history of the book, media studies, with a willingness to see possibilities for enabling / enlivening responsiveness in rubbished cultural forms and a shameless sense of the fun to be had in reading, we offer our book as a guide to the way un-readability as it is keyed to questions of media specificity haunts Shakespeare Studies as a whole. Allied to this re-description of the field, we provide four chapter-length readings which rethink the nature of Shakespeare's plays as they are altered by adaptations, spin offs, and translations whose way of joining Shakespeare's text is not reducible to reading"--