Abstract
The language of the meme—whether understood through Richard Dawkins’s early theories of cultural memetics or through the more recent phenomenon of Internet memes—can enable a discussion of how texts by Shakespeare circulate in culture. Through a process of uptake and reworking, these Shakespearean memes can appear in unlikely places. Here, I consider what I call the ghost meme from Hamlet, studying the appearance of a father-haunting-son story arc in several contemporary television series: Lost, Six Feet Under, Sons of Anarchy, Gossip Girl, and Arrested Development. Through a process of unacknowledged doubling, repetition, and revision, these series give new forms to Shakespeare’s texts, thereby extending the life span of the meme and ensuring its cultural “stickiness.”
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Denslow, K.N. (2017). Guest Starring Hamlet: The Proliferation of the Shakespeare Meme on American Television. In: Desmet, C., Loper, N., Casey, J. (eds) Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63300-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63300-8_6
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