Shakespeare, Transmediation and International Identity

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University of Bergen. The interweaving of Shakespeare’s plays into the cultural vocabularies and identities of nearly every nation has much to reveal about the interaction between texts and cultures, at the same time offering a model of cultural transmediation that is applicable to many other transnational exchanges. Just as, in their earliest forms, the plays absorb, transform and redefine elements of international Renaissance culture, so they have themselves become absorbed and redefined as components of a great range of global cultural forms. The essence of this study is to explore both processes, but particularly the latter, and to reveal within it elements of the processes by which nations take possession of dominant cultural forms from other sources, making them part of their own identities as mature, independent nations. In this way the study contributes to the reconfiguration of literary and cultural movements within a global frame, many of which are still explored within the category of ‘postcolonial’, despite the contested and outmoded nature of the term. The project thus combines historical analysis with theoretical exploration, to offer a genuinely new approach to the transfer of forms between cultures.