This work offers an assessment of appropriations of Shakespeare that respond to the enduring impositions of colonialism. Through a range of readings, Thomas Cartelli illuminates texts and events that position themselves in relation or response to Shakespeare, such as: polemical essays by Walt Whitman; the 19th-century play, "Jack Cade", commissioned and staged by the first major American Shakespeare actor; an essay on labour-management reform by social activist Jane Addams; novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone; the 1849 Astor Place Riot; and a 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary celebration performance at the City College Campus of New York. Divided into three sections, Part One examines US contentions with Shakespeare and argues that they witness a failure to develop models of subjectivity that break from the heroic, and paternalist bias of Shakespearean drama. Part Two focuses on the role of "The Tempest" in postcolonial formulations of power and identity, and the efforts to write postcolonial subjectivities that extend beyond its orbit. Part Three treats the colonial afterlife and postcolonial career of the so-called "O

Repositioning Shakespeare offers an original assessment of a broad range of texts and cultural events that appropriate Shakespeare. Examining these materials within the context of 'the nation' in a postcolonial era, Thomas Cartelli considers:
* essays by Walt Whitman
* the nineteenth-century play, 'Jack Cade'
* novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone
* the 1849 Astor Place Riot
Cartelli places particular emphasis on redefining the 'postcolonial' in order to find a place for America. In doing so, Repositioning Shakespeare makes a considerable contribution to the continuing debate about the uses we make of Shakespeare.

In the Shakespeare aftermath-where all things Shakespearean are available for reassembly and reenactment-experimental transactions with Shakespeare become consequential events in their own right, informed by technologies of performance and display that defy conventional staging and filmic practices. Reenactment signifies here both an undoing and a redoing, above all a doing differently of what otherwise continues to be enacted as the same. Rooted in the modernist avant-garde, this revisionary approach to models of the past is advanced by theater artists and filmmakers whose number includes Romeo Castellucci, Annie Dorsen, Peter Greenaway, Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, and New York's Wooster Group, among others. Although the intermedial turn taken by such artists heralds a virtual future, this book demonstrates that embodiment-in more diverse forms than ever before-continues to exert expressive force in Shakespearean reproduction's turning world.

This study explores the structure of psychological, social and political exchanges that were negotiated between audiences and plays in Elizabethan public theatres in a period ostensibly dominated by Shakespeare, but strongly rooted in Marlowe.