At a recent meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), I participated in a conversation with some fellow panelists about why we all chose to study Shakespeare in the first place. Some spoke about the intellectual rewards offered by texts, while others told more personal stories about reading the plays as a child with their parents. While some of us did not contribute to the conversation, others held back until someone postulated that in trying to answer the question, many of us were probably looking for the ârightâ answer, one that was suitably scholarly or poignant enough that it would not compromise our standing with our peers in the room, a room which was filledâas SAA sessions often areâwith junior scholars through to the titans of our field. This person joked that none of us wanted to say, âI got interested in Shakespeare because I had a crush on Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet .â We laughed, and the conversation soon moved in a different direction. The whole discussion reminded me of the game of Humiliation played by a group of professors in David Lodgeâs Changing Places (1975) in which the participants admit which famous work of literature they have never read. The âwinnerâ of the game is an English professor who admits to having never read Hamlet , a revelation so ghastly that he loses his job because of it. Saying that you came to Shakespeare because of Leo seemed to be the equivalent of being ignorant of Hamlet : there are just some things you do not say, no matter how true they are. In the case of Romeo + Juliet (1996), the fear being danced around was of being seen by your peers as immature and overly affective rather than appropriately serious and academic. In fan cultures, âsqueeingâ describes excessive âemotional exuberanceâ when discussing a favorite film or meeting the actors from a favorite television series.1 It is also a term that is almost always used in a pejorative sense, the suggestion of shamelessly overdoing it by gushing, by getting too excited. Many of us are at the SAA because we love Shakespeare or because we love talking about his works with other people who love talking about the same thing. But we are scholars and critics. We do not confuse infatuation with critical inquiry. We do not squee, not when we are talking about Shakespeare, and not when we are meeting our academic idols at the conference.
When we think of fans, Shakespeare does not come immediately to mind. Rather, we tend to think of media fandom, particularly fans of science fiction and fantasy, that image of the fan that has come to dominate popular culture depictions of the fan, whether they be Trekkies or fans of Star Wars or Harry Potter. Images of enthusiastic individuals dressed up as a favorite character while waiting in line to buy a movie ticket or the newest book in a series might spring to mind. We might also think of sports fans devoted to a favorite team, decked out officially licensed gear, and proclaiming that âthis is the year!â Or we might think of fans of a particular band who are continually saving for plane tickets and concert tickets. Maybe we think of collectors of sports or film memorabilia, passionate proponents of a particular videogame console or cellphone manufacturer, or adherents of celebrity culture. Shakespeare, however, tends to remain on the margins of our conception of fandom in spite ofâor, perhaps, partly because ofâhis cultural and educational pride of place as the canonical author. This also in spite of the fact that, as I argue throughout this book, Shakespeareâs fans have been around for centuries, even if they have not often been written about or conceptualized as fans. Rather, we have a different name for Shakespeare fandom: bardolatry.
For Shakespeare scholars unfamiliar with it, fan studies has grown substantially as a field of study over the past three decades, especially since the publication of Henry Jenkinsâ Textual Poachers (1992), exploding further with the advent of Web 2.0 in the late 1990s when fan practices became both more visible and more accessible. Jenkins wrote in response to the popular perception of fans as socially inept, sexually immature, and obsessive consumers of popular culture who were mindlessly uncritical of the media they consumed. Writing as both a fan and a scholar, Jenkinsâ âethnographic accountâ of fandom theorized it not as a form of passive, brainless media spectatorship, but rather as a âparticipatory cultureâ that was engaged and critical, receptive but responsive, and frequently constructing new meaning from a text rather than operating solely as an ideological mirror to it.2 And, equally important, Textual Poachers is a self-reflective work that contemplates Jenkinsâ role as a participant-observer, what has become known in the field as an âaca-fan,â the combined identities of an academic and a fan.3 Jenkinsâ work has evolved considerably since 1992 in tandem with changes in the way media is consumed and the fluctuating relationship between cultural producers and the fans they court, as well as the changes in the ways fans communicate with and disseminate their work to each other.4 Fandomâand the mainstream acceptability of itâhas come a long way from the homemade fanzines and small conventions of the late 1960s to the massive digital archives of fan fiction and the newsworthy, cultural pervasiveness of the annual San Diego Comic-Con today. Following Jenkins, Matt Hills has done considerable work on how we reconcile and theorize those dual identities of fan and scholar, as well as the tensions and contradictions within and between them that emerge from differing âimagined subjectivityâ that establishes criteria for âgoodâ and âbadâ fans/academics.5 And while Hills has often written about the similarities between academia and fandom, he has also cautioned against overly celebratory models of analysis. He argues instead in favor of, first, studying fandom as it is and not just according to the media tastes of like-minded scholars and, second, of maintaining a necessary âproper distanceâ from the object of study. Ideally, âproper distanceâ is achieved when the scholar is neither âtoo closeâ to nor âtoo distantâ from the object of study. Being too close âcan problematically give rise to academic work which replays scholar-fansâ pre-theoretical investments in specific fan cultural practices, and non-investments in other fan practices,â whereas being too distant can result in âa symbolic annihilation or exnomination of fan practices beyond the scope of the scholarâs pre-theoretical affective relationships.â6 As will become evident, Hillsâ arguments about the fan objects we choose to write about are of paramount importance to the present work.
Oftentimes, trying to define fan feels like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net. It is an identity or label that many of us feel that we understand as it applies to ourselves or to others and our general likes and dislikes. We use phrases such as âIâm a fan ofâ or âIâm not a fan ofâ as our daily vernacular in reference to almost anything, to the point that the term loses appreciable stability and meaning. âIâm a big fan of summer,â I might say, or âIâm not a fan of mushrooms.â Colloquially, we invoke our fan status to denote everything from mild indifference or inclination to passionate enthusiasm or support. When applied to specific cultural texts or objects, the term tends to coalesce into something slightly more precise, although still elusive. We are or know fans of Star Trek, the Grateful Dead, Harry Potter, the Green Bay Packers, and Joss Whedon, and in these examples, we apply labels to those fans (Trekkies, Deadheads, Potterheads, Cheeseheads, and Whedonites, respectively). We know of fans of specific actors, tech companies, clothing brands, and so forth. Seemingly, anyone or anything is capable of spawning its own fandom.
In her overview of fan culture (particularly as it relates to science fiction), Karen Hellekson offers useful general definitions of two key terms: âFans are people who actively engage with something ⊠and fandom is the community that fans self-constitute around that text or object.â7 In this, Hellekson addresses two of the dominant elements of the fan identity that have emerged in the critical literature, particularly since Jenkinsâ Textual Poachers: fan is a necessarily active identity, and oftentimes a communal one as well. For Jenkins, characterizing fan activity as âparticipatory cultureâ served as a w...