Book Description

"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Modeling his new approach to the critical category of fidelity, Newlin closely examines four twentieth-century films and tv series next to their Shakespearean counterparts within the contexts of their casting, genre, and reception. When a director of an unconventional version of The Tempest, for example, chooses to cast a white man as either Caliban or Miranda, they seemingly depart from Shakespeare's original text. Yet with these casting decisions, Newlin argues that The Master (2012) and Brigsby Bear (2017) eerily recall the realities of the early modern theater. The Master unexpectedly depicts something like the mythic "wild man" figure that informed The Tempest's early-colonial context, while Brigsby Bear invokes the exploitative, abusive treatment of boy-actors cast in female roles on the renaissance stage. Similarly, by not explicitly identifying as an adaptation of Othello, the cult comedy series Vice Principals (2016-17) frees itself to more faithfully capture the play's early modern comic context - while also illuminating the parallels between racist discourse in Shakespeare's age and our own. By reading these works as uncannily faithful adaptations, Newlin articulates something like the original response of Shakespeare's audience. Finally, Newlin demonstrates how a filmed adaptation might itself intervene in Shakespeare's critical reception. As a version of The Winter's Tale that ends tragically, the celebrated film Manchester By The Sea (2016) effectively rebuts Stanley Cavell's celebrated reading of Shakespeare's romance. Recognizing the parallels between Manchester By The Sea and The Winter's Tale, Newlin argues that Shakespeare views grief and guilt as forms of certainty - in contradistinction to Cavell's reading of the play as a portrait of skepticism. The first extended treatment of adaptation as a form of uncanny return, Uncanny Fidelity offers students and scholars of Shakespeare in film, adaptation studies, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory a critical framework to further engage the matter of personal response with deeper theoretical rigor. In redefining what constitutes adaptation, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare's afterlife can radically challenge our own conception of what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean"--