Buildings frequently change over their lifespans as they are adapted to new needs and affected by damage and decay, yet our approaches to architectural history often fail to account for the material and cultural effects of interventions on existing structures or to pursue the critical questions they raise about temporality and urban environments. The book’s Introduction orients readers to diachronic approaches to architectural history, that is, beyond the moment of initial construction, oriented to the perspective of historical actors. In recognizing moments of architectural revision and rebuilding as inflection points, it stresses the importance of accounting for architectural fabrics composed of variously dated elements and of examining the ways that architectural change shapes audience perception of the site’s history and their own era’s relationship to it. Close examination of two exceptionally long-lasting structures, the Pantheon in Rome and the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofia in Constantinople/Istanbul present a compelling contrast to most modern forms of architectural restoration and illustrate central themes of the book. The chapter situates study of historical architecture within current approaches to cultural time and to material culture and places architectural change in dialogue with text-based approaches to Roman temporality.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of American culture and anti-Indianism. It begins with a discussion of Thanksgiving, Americans’ favorite holiday, from the perspective of Wamsutta Frank James, an American Indian, activist, and leader of the Wampanoag Tribe. For Wamsutta Frank James, Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration but a day of mourning. The use of celebrations such as Thanksgiving to promote myths about US history shows the importance of American culture for Whiteness. The chapter reviews some characteristics and popular myths about American Indians and Alaska Natives, the challenges of defining culture, and culture as a system of people, places, practices, power, and purpose. It examines incorporation, appropriation, assimilation, and segregation as strategies to enforce White cultural hegemony. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on “cancel culture” and the freedom of speech defense. It ends with a discussion of Wamsutta Frank James and reimagining US culture.

Suspecting it was more widely known for its sporting prowess than its culture, Australia decided to stage four arts festivals prior to hosting the 2000 Olympics. The first, held in 1997, celebrated the indigenous cultures of the world, with prominence given to Aboriginal Australia. Conceived as the “Festival of the Dreaming,” it featured, in addition to dance, storytelling, and art, performances of Waiting for Godot in Bundjalung. It was hoped parallels between the play’s universal themes and historical Aboriginal experience – a politics of waiting and existential despair – would reveal indigenous culture. In the event, this was not realized. This chapter explores some of the reasons why. Audiences heard Bundjalung spoken but it proved so mellifluous that the expected interplay of antagonism and resignation voiced in English did not take place. Audiences could follow the English text cued as sur-titles but given ignorance of Bundjalung they could not appreciate they were hearing a transliteration. Audiences could see the cast interacting, but they were not aware that the protocols of Aboriginal conversation had been set aside. While the Bundjalung Waiting for Godot was years ahead of its time, it continues to raise issues for the notion of global Irish studies.

The chapter argues that Robert Lowell erred morally, and thereby aesthetically – since art must be held to account – in his literary experiment of appropriating the epistolary voice of Elizabeth Hardwick, the esteemed literary critic, novelist, and co-founder of and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, into The Dolphin (1973). Hardwick was Lowell’s second wife, then ex-wife at the time Lowell composed his sequence. Saltmarsh argues for a need to see her as a subject, and not an objectified "Lizzie" character. In quoting from many of Hardwick’s essays, letters, and writings, she hopes to restory what we think we know about the literary history of Lowell and Hardwick. Broadly, this chapter offers a reappraisal of both Lowell and Hardwick, and sheds light on the limits of confessional poetry, particularly when a writer is purporting to speak as an intimate other.

This chapter examines a range of 1916 Shakespearean appropriations from the German sphere of influence (the German Reich and Austria-Hungary). Many of them argued that Germany had thoroughly ‘naturalised’ Shakespeare and thus had as much, or more, right to ‘own’ him as Britain. They also used Shakespeare to criticise Britain's alleged iniquities. However, German responses to the Shakespeare Tercentenary did not present an entirely unified, patriotic front. Some of them, like the April 1916 issue of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, exposed significant blind spots in the propagandistic uses of Shakespeare. Chief among them was the uncomfortable contradiction inherent in the claim that Shakespeare was universal and above the hostilities of the war while, at the same time, constituting a uniquely German property. Moreover, it proved possible to use Shakespeare in radical ways which contradicted the official patriotic line, as evidenced in Karl Kraus’s subversive articles published in his magazine Die Fackel.

This section situates the study within the current debates surrounding the issues of commemoration, cultural memory, and identity. It applies the insights offered by memory studies to investigate the political implications of Shakespearean appropriation and legacy. It introduces the key focus of the book: the ways in which memorialising Shakespeare was used to formulate and contest imperial, national, and social identities during the global crisis of the First World War. As diverse groups evoked him to underpin their collective past and common values, Shakespeare provided a starting point for dialogue and a shared ‘language’ in which it could be conducted. This dialogue was not always friendly, as people used Shakespeare not only to highlight their commonalities, but also to insist on their differences. Although imperialist and nationalist agendas often dominated, Shakespeare also provided an outlet for other, usually silenced and forgotten voices, as marginalised racial, ethnic, and social groups adopted him to respond to the prevalent totalising narratives. Examining these exchanges within the framework of memory studies offers a unique view of the intertwining of culture and politics at the time that saw the emergence of the world order which is still with us over a hundred years later.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

This chapter analyses Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2009) and David Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet (2005) as screen works that appropriate Shakespeare not through the play-text of Romeo and Juliet but instead through its screen history of networked hypertexts. I argue that both films decentre Shakespeare as a source by appropriating Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), rather than the play-text, as a key hypotext. Both Levine and Lachapelle’s works can be discussed from various perspectives of adaptation studies. They are, for example, good examples of genre films – Lachapelle’s Romeo & Juliet, a six-minute film advertising H&M denim jeans, is a commercial advertisement in the form of a music video, whilst Warm Bodies is a romzomcom.

I will explore how web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet challenge and revise the famous (and infamous) narrative of the star-crossed lovers. Participating in a new model for Shakespeare on screen, these series change the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expanding the number and variety of the female characters, adapting Shakespeare to address issues of gender, sexuality and love in the digital age. The young women who create web-series such as Any Other Rosie, Any Other Vlog, Jules and Monty and Rome and Juliet shift the viewer’s focus away from Juliet and her complicated legacy.

Created by Chicanx and Indigenous artists living and working in the US–Mexico Borderlands, Borderlands Shakespeare appropriations situate Shakespeare within the unique context of la frontera, engaging with its hybrid cultures, genres, and languages. These appropriations draw from Anglo, Spanish, and Indigenous traditions, and they confront Shakespeare’s colonial legacies, interrogating the complex layers of colonialism shaping the region and Shakespeare’s reception in it. To explore the decolonial vision of Borderlands Shakespeare, this essay focuses on Edit Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers (1991), an appropriation of Romeo and Juliet set in Los Angeles during Día de los Muertos, and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry (2014), an appropriation of Henry IV, Part I set in post-apocalyptic San Diego. These plays engage with Shakespeare to critique imperialist policies that have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, the criminalization of migration, and high levels of labor and environmental exploitation. In their use of multilingual Indigenous and Chicanx frameworks to imagine more just futures, Borderlands Shakespeare plays such as The Language of Flowers and El Henry offer valuable methodologies for decolonizing English literary studies and for approaching canonical Western texts in culturally sustaining ways.

The Introduction establishes the distinctive focus and range of contributions within Shakespeare at War. This transhistorical material history prioritizes how Shakespeare is used at times of war from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and shows how this focus sheds light on some of the core political issues dominating a conflict, the wartime role played by the arts, and the shifting cultural capital of Shakespeare for different communities. The Introduction argues for the importance of a ‘material’ emphasis: all contributions use a significant archival object as their starting point in order to establish how these items can help us recover different wartime stories, voices, and perspectives. In place of a single, linear history, our aim – through the structure, content, and material focus of the collection – is to embrace a plurality of histories. The Introduction also contextualizes the diversity of its twenty-six contributions: nineteen are essays by Shakespeare scholars, war historians, or public figures who have served in the British Army, while the remaining seven are by theatre directors who have directed Shakespeare while the UK was at war or have set their productions at times of war to encourage audiences to think critically about the complexities of major conflicts.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.