Textual appropriation: totalitarian violence in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Textual appropriation: totalitarian violence in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and

Abstract

Adaptations and vernacular appropriations on page and stage offer alternative readings of Shakespeare’s plays, mediated by heterogeneous forces of race, language and culture Appropriation can take multiple forms, as each generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare in contemporary terms in an ongoing process of mutation (Marsden 9). In an essay entitled “The Postcolonial/Postmodern Shakespeare”, Jyotsna Singh states that the postmodernist tendency to pluralize and decenter all totalizing assumptions of the centre has altered traditional values: “the Shakespearean text is no longer sacrosanct: instead it is invaded by heteroglossia, or multiplicity of styles and forms in the Bakhtinian sense, that disrupt the cultural authority of the official English Shakespeare” (Kerr et alii 39). Adaptations and vernacular appropriations on page and stage offer alternative readings of Shakespeare’s plays, mediated by heterogeneous forces of race, language and culture Appropriation can take multiple forms, as each generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare in contemporary terms in an ongoing process of mutation (Marsden 9). In an essay entitled “The Postcolonial/Postmodern Shakespeare”, Jyotsna Singh states that the postmodernist tendency to pluralize and decenter all totalizing assumptions of the centre has altered traditional values: “the Shakespearean text is no longer sacrosanct: instead it is invaded by heteroglossia, or multiplicity of styles and forms in the Bakhtinian sense, that disrupt the cultural authority of the official English Shakespeare” (Kerr et alii 39).