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Ethics and the Undead: Reading Shakespearean (Mis)appropriation in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula

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Abstract

In a characteristically witty and suggestive essay, Terence Hawkes has argued that Shakespeare’s global hegemony within late Western modernity may have potentially sinister overtones.1 Not content to merely rise above politics, “this Shakespeare,” writes Hawkes,

now speaks with transfixing power, to any and all ways of life. Not dead, so much as—well—Undead, he effortlessly blurs and transgresses all boundaries. Shape-shifting at will, his “love for everything” signals a voracious and insatiable appetite: he sucks the life-blood from any and all cultures, Russian, African, Indian, for these transfusions guarantee his “truly global reach.”2

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Notes

  1. Terence Hawkes, “Band of Brothers,” in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 21.

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  2. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 141.

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  3. Denise Albanese, “The Shakespeare Film and the Americanization of Culture,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 208.

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  4. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 92.

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  5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1983), 60.

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  6. For a good recent reading of Shakespeare and the global, see Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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  7. All references are to Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997), 169.

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  8. A similar point is made by Rebecca A. Pope, “Writing and Biting in Dracula,” in New Casebooks: Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1999), 68–92.

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  9. All references are to William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997).

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  10. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 140.

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  11. See Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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  12. Martin Bailey, Dürer (London: Phaidon, 1999), 22–24.

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  13. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 126.

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  14. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A and B Texts (1624, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). For more on Faustus and early modern Christology, see chapter 6 of my book, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 140–61.

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  15. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 292.

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  16. See Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 316–18.

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© 2014 Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin

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Streete, A. (2014). Ethics and the Undead: Reading Shakespearean (Mis)appropriation in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula . In: Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_4

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