In the first episode of Westworld , the administration of an amusement park peopled with robots faces technical problems with one of the androids, who threatens the technicians with lines like “By most mechanical and dirty hand / I shall have such revenges on you both / The things that I will do / What they are yet I know not, but they will be / The terrors of the earth” (1.1.61). While the team is unsettled by these off-script menaces, wondering “What the hell was that?” and emphasising “We didn’t program any of those behaviors” (1.1.62), Dr Robert Ford, the creator of the park, attributes them to “Shakespeare” (1.1.60). He explains to his bewildered colleagues that in a previous role in one of the park’s pre-programmed scenarios, the android played a professor of English literature who had such quotations at his command. The memories that the team thought had been deleted have somehow found their way back into the android’s program. According to Ford, there is “no cause for alarm […]. Simply our old work coming back to haunt us” (1.1.63).
Such unexpected Shakespearean returns are the focus of this study. Through selected case studies, I am exploring how the “old work” of Shakespeare’s topics, plots, dramaturgical devices, characters, and poetry surfaces in current complex TV series. The following chapters will ask how such unforeseen Shakespearean returns impact the TV series. Do they affect the “core code” of the new narratives (1.1.64), as the technical team in Westworld suspects? Are these returns intentional or surprising afterlives of a past considered forgotten? How can we account for this haunting quality of the Shakespearean legacy? Do the Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series? And what new insights may the twenty-first-century remediations grant us into Shakespeare’s texts? Pursuing these questions, the book offers four case studies that read Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the science fiction-Western Westworld , King Lear with the satirical dynastic drama of Succession , Hamlet with the international legal thriller Black Earth Rising, and Coriolanus with the political thriller Homeland . The final chapter will bring the insights together, aiming to distil important characteristics of the emerging adaptational aggregate of ‘serial Shakespeare’.
The four series discussed in my study were selected because their engagement with Shakespeare covers a broad spectrum of adaptational strategies that allows for mutually illuminating readings as well as for theoretical insights. Westworld , with which I begin, features direct quotations from several Shakespeare plays including The Tempest . Succession explicitly refers to a number of Shakespeare plays in its diegesis, but does not directly mention King Lear . However, the Lear legacy has been highlighted in the marketing and journalistic reception of the series. Black Earth Rising contains only one direct reference to Shakespeare in a Hamlet allusion at the very end of the series and has never been marketed or received as Shakespearean, while Homeland does not refer to Shakespeare at all and has not been publicised as related to Shakespeare. In the course of examining the case studies that this study offers, the relation between Shakespeare and the respective series hence becomes increasingly subtle and debatable, which raises pertinent questions that are currently discussed in adaptation studies regarding what is ‘Shakespeare’ and what is ‘not Shakespeare’.1 In each of the series, I will argue, a particular form of a return is taken over as a topic from Shakespeare, and at the same time, this serialised form of return speaks to the series’ adaptational stance: returns of the dead in Westworld , returns of the predecessor in Succession , returns to the roots in Black Earth Rising, and returns to the home in Homeland . The four series were also chosen because they negotiate urgent political and social concerns, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, postgenocidal and postcolonial justice, and terrorism. They all premiered after 2010, and three of them are ongoing as I complete this manuscript, with Homeland’s eighth and final season and Westworld’s third season being broadcast in 2020 and Succession’s third season announced for 2020 or 2021. There are (as yet) no plans for a continuation of the miniseries Black Earth Rising, the most recent of the series discussed in this study, which was first aired in 2018.
My study traces the Shakespearean legacy in an aesthetic phenomenon that has recently gained as much popular as scholarly attention: in TV series that are characterised by long narrative arcs; large budgets; high production standards; a cinematographic look; elaborate scripts written by teams of prestigious authors, many of whom are known for their previous film work; casts that include well-known actors; and, above all, narrative complexity and self-reflexivity. The series are typically developed with multiple seasons in mind, but decisions on their continuation are usually made during or even after the broadcast of each season, so that season finales have to be conclusive enough to be the end of the entire series but open enough to allow for new seasons. As the series can develop their characters over many episodes, they can offer psychological complexity and depth. The scripts are responsive, since the authors, directors, producers, and actors can take into account audience reactions and journalistic criticism in the writing and filming of later episodes and seasons. Scholars have offered competing labels to categorise this new kind of TV series, including ‘quality TV’ (Thompson 1996), ‘prestige TV’ (Bignell 2013), ‘transgressive television’ (Däwes et al. 2015), and, most influential, ‘complex TV’ (Mittell 2015), Jason Mittell’s term that I will be adopting, too.
Historicising the development, Mittell has shown how the new form of TV storytelling has spread since the late 1990s, deliberately offering an alternative to conventional episodic series that require some plot closure at the end of each episode (2015, 17). Instead, complex TV unfolds cumulative narratives with long story arcs. It experimentally merges established genres to create new forms; Black Earth Rising’s combination of a legal thriller with a coming-of-age drama or Westworld’s blending of science fiction and the Western are typical examples. Mittell notes that serials are a minority phenomenon, with most television shows still working with more conventional narrative patterns, but it is one that has gained considerable public attention and cultural capital in recent decades (cf. 31). Such narrative experiments in the commercial medium of TV became possible because the number of channels and networks rose and audiences for each show shrunk. Therefore, shows which attract a small but dedicated audience have become commercially viable. What is more, the cultural prestige of particular series has helped to make a channel’s brand seem more sophisticated (cf. 34). Thus, a commercial for HBO, the channel that has produced a number of award-winning shows including Succession and Westworld , claimed “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”. Like Shakespeare’s plays, ‘complex’ or ‘quality’ TV is hence situated ambiguously between highbrow and popular culture. References to Shakespeare frequently function as markers of high cultural learning while at the same time self-reflexively raising the question of where the TV show itself belongs in this stratified notion of culture. In this respect, the series participate in a common postmodern trend of Shakespearean appropriations, which self-reflexively negotiate their own status (cf. Lanier 2002). It might be part of this participation in Shakespearean ‘high culture’ that the prestige series predominantly use Shakespeare’s tragedies as references, traditionally the more esteemed form of dramatic art.
The new trend of serial Shakespeare was prepared by TV and film versions of Shakespeare that contributed to the fact that many people today predominantly encounter Shakespeare’s oeuvre through filmic adaptations, which frame the experience of reading the plays or seeing them on stage (cf. Ryle 2014, 9). Current TV series keep drawing inspiration from and in turn influence filmic, literary, and theatrical Shakespeare versions in what can be considered a transmedial transformation of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. As Douglas Lanier noted ten years ago, “[i]nstead of being particular texts, ‘Shakespeare’ […] becomes a collection of narratives highly mobile from context to context, verbal style to style, genre to genre, media platform to platform” (2010, 107). According to Lanier, after the peak of Anglophone mass-market Shakespeare films in the 1990s and early 2000s, “the adaptational energy once associated with Shakespeare on film has migrated elsewhere” (105). This study argues that the adaptational energy has partly travelled to complex TV, which offer...