Mask and Persona: Creating the Bard for Bardcom

Peter Holland

doi:10.21153/psj2019vol5no2art912

Authors

Peter Holland University of Notre Dame, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no2art912

Keywords:

Shakespeare, mask, celebrity, comedy, sitcom, afterlife

Abstract

This article explores a number of perspectives on the creation of very different Shakespeares as personas by first examining the celebration of the 400th anniversary of his death in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 2016 and Shake, Mr Shakespeare, a remarkable Roy Mack 1936 Warner Brothers short. From there it moves on to consider the brief appearance of Shakespeare in the time-travel comedy Blackadder: Back and Forth, in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ episode of Doctor Who and in the off-Broadway musical Something Rotten!, before examining the work of Ben Elton in his screenplay for All Is True and in the seemingly unlikely success of Upstart Crow, the BBC sitcom with Shakespeare as the lead character, which has so far completed three six-episode series and three Christmas specials. The article is concerned with the multiple masks of the sequence of personas that create these Shakespeares, from Shakespeare as perhaps the epitome of the celebrity author to Shakespeare as a sitcom Dad.

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Author Biography

Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA

Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He moved there in 2002 from the position of Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. He was Editor of Shakespeare Survey for 19 years and is co-General Editor for Oxford Shakespeare Topics, Great Shakespeareans, Arden Shakespeare in the Theatre and the Arden Shakespeare 4^th Series. He has edited many Shakespeare plays including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford) and Coriolanus (Arden 3^rd series). He is the author of over 150 articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Garrick, pantomime and other topics, as well as a number of monographs. He is Chair of the International Shakespeare Association, the world’s only global organisation for Shakespeare scholars. Current projects include a monograph on Shakespeare and Forgetting and editing King Lear for Arden 4.

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