Shakespeare in pop culture: pop culture is what we refer to as the cultural activities or commercial products reflecting, suited to, or aimed at the tastes of the general masses of people. pop culture can be films, television, music, artwork, video games, etc. Shakespeare frequently appears in pop culture. your task is to find a minimum of [3] pop culture references to Shakespeare to discuss in class. use this sheet to record your findings, and please feel free to think outside the box (the discussion will be much more interesting if we come in with different examples).

Festivity, the carnivalesque, and reinvention and appropriation of Shakespeare by popular culture in certain cultural contexts to assert international and national values.

Explanation:

The festive background of Elizabethan England obviously had a great impact on its dramatic productions. Very much aware of the popular demands and eager to cater for them, companies and their playwrights were keen to draw their productions and inspiration from legends, traditions, and myths linked to celebrations from the calendar festivals. Drama, was primarily the most popular medium of entertainment, in comparison to poetry and prose, and the location and design (next to wh*rehouses and bear and bull-baiting arenas, or other animal fighting pits, which could take place even inside the theatres) of the playhouses tell us much about the kind of relationship they bore with popular crowds. “It is also clear that the theatre was not necessarily first and foremost a temple of high culture, but might be primarily a place for having fun, rather than an instrument of privileged communication” (Laroque 180).

In 2012, thirty-seven companies from thirty-seven different countries intend to perform their own Shakespeare versions at the Globe. The tone is of celebration, as the direction states on the first page of the festival program: “The Globe to Globe festival is a carnival of stories” (2012:1). The related themes of festivity and the carnivalesque, so essential in Shakespeare’s time and extensively discussed by François Laroque, are rescued and privileged side by side with the issue of translation. Translation has gained such importance and value that the program opens with an article entitled “Flexible Shakespeare - Dennis Kennedy considers the gains to be made in performing the Bard without his language.” We must also remember that the program is not aimed at scholars, but at ordinary spectators, either with little or with considerable academic knowledge of Shakespeare, which shows how translation and cultural diversity have now become part of everybody’s life.

Because of Shakespeare’s flexible status, of the fluidity of shifting categories, and of the possibilities of reinvention, appropriation, and adaptation, my position towards the concepts of culture, the popular, and their connection with Shakespeare is one that does not regard these relationships on the basis of levels, superiority, evaluation, and categorization of cultural expressions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. These are instances of language, of social constructions, in constant exchange, shift, and negotiation.

High or erudite culture will be used corresponding to a sum of discourses based on academic criteria, literacy, formal higher education, privileged financial means, and therefore as belonging to a minority, generally holder of economic, social, and political power. Popular culture will refer to other than formal sources of knowledge, including traditional practices, folklore, customs, and oral transmission of memory, to communal values and essentially shared practices, as well as to a site of identification and vindication of identities.

Resource I Used:

Back to the roots: Shakespeare and Popular Culture in the 20th and 21st centuries

Website: Open Edition Journals

I hope this helps you in any shape or form.

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