De-Colonising Shakespeare?: Agency and (Masculine) Authority in Gregory Rogers’s The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2009vol19no1art1158Keywords:
Edward Said, William Shakespeare, discourse, Gregory Rogers, The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard, colonisation, decolonisationAbstract
Although Said is writing about literal geographies here as well as cultural mappings of them, I open with his claims in order to initiate my consideration of the ways in which 'Shakespeare' as a discourse (Freedman 1989, p.245) and Shakespeare's historical and geographical contexts have been made over into culturally-contested terrain within contemporary children's literature for the purposes of constructing and controlling social space and subjectivities. Historically, both the discourse of 'Shakespeare' and the depiction of William Shakespeare as a character have been deployed as structuring logics for narratives about the inherent value of Shakespeare, and in turn, for discussions of not just the legitimacy but the necessity of young people's subordination of self to Shakespeare. Gregory Rogers's 'The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard' (2004) not only participates in that tradition of children's literature which deploys Shakespeare as a colonising discourse but also disrupts the norms of the tradition in two important ways.
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References
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