Afterword

Abstract

In the Introduction to Repositioning Shakespeare (1999), I offer a brief survey of different modes of appropriation, models of which I describe and explore in the body of the book itself. These modes range from the possessively predatory or confrontational to the repossessively proprietary, with a few privileged spaces left in between for other appropriative modes like the dialogic, which is signaled when “each partner to the [appropriative] transaction may be said to enter into each other’s frame of reference.”¹ These are the spaces most likely to overlap with what the editors, and many contributors to this volume, would identify as the space of the ethical, which, more often than not, is identifiable with the volume’s prevailing concern with inter-subjectivity. I would like briefly to revisit these distinctions—my own and theirs—with respect to the often competing, often collateral, imperatives of the political while indicating how the ethical and the political may overlap— fill the same space—in the practice of Shakespeare appropriation. I would also like to question whether an appropriation can truly be considered ethical if it fails to leave an obvious or urgent political imperative unsatisfied. I take my cue here from a predecessor Afterword author, Theodore Leinwand, who, in the final pages of Marshall Grossman’s estimable essay collection, Reading Renaissance Ethics (2007), privileges as ethics only “an ethics that begins when action begins, an ethics of action and motion,” using as his base model the way Hamlet “methodically works his way toward an ethics of action in the graveyard.”²