Sammendrag
In this paper, I explore the presence of Shakespeare and his characters in two graphic novel series: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989-1996) and Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare (2010-2014). Gaiman’s much-lauded series follows Morpheus, the god-like personification of dreams who empowers Shakespeare with his creative force, and then facilitates a disruption between the real and the ideal that allows Shakespeare and his characters to coexist. Their coexistence then complicates our collective idealization of Shakespeare’s characters and plays by imagining an alternate reasoning for Shakespeare’s creative impetus, and thereby establishing a sharp contrast between an unknown playwright eager for the god-like powers Morpheus offers and his monstrous “creations.” Alternatively, McCreery and Del Col’s series imagines a world where Shakespeare is a god, but one who regrets his creative powers and shuns his creations. Worshipped and relentlessly sought, this Shakespeare remains the mythic engine of a series that follows characters from across his plays who speak in a pastiche of fragmented Shakespearean lines, and who we must follow through alternate story lines that problematize our relationship with Shakespeare’s plays. Though Shakespeare himself struggles with his ambiguous divinity in both series, his characters statically linger as monstrous shadows of their original forms. Illustrating the limitations and possibilities of divinity and monstrosity thus allows Shakespeare and his characters to shift from idealism to realism in both series through the multimodality of graphic novels, combined with the pitting of gods against monsters common to fantasy and science fiction. Both series thereby critically interrogate the shifting power and frailty, and ultimately, the consequences, of our historical Bardolatry.
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