The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations

In 1623 Ben Jonson touted Shakespeare as the soul of his age; three centuries later, a newspaper advertisement used Shakespeare's reputation to market Budweiser, "The King of All Bottled Beers." Spanning the past hundred years, The Shakespeare Trade looks at how present-day representations of Shakespeare borrow from and negotiate with his cultural authority to shore up particular obsessions, preoccupations, and myths while making and remaking Anglo-American images of gender and subjectivity...