Extramural Shakespeare

Extramural Shakespeare makes a bold contribution to the recent debates about Shakespeare's place in American culture in the new millennium. Informed by cultural studies discussions about elite and mass culture and drawing upon the unique, transdisciplinary methods associated with that field, this study argues that Shakespeare should be considered instead as public culture. Denise Albanese argues that due to the emergence of mass education in the twentieth century, Shakespeare has become public property, even though official discourse and film treat his texts as if they belong to elites.  Extramural Shakespeare demonstrates that reading Shakespeare dialectically attends to the hopes for a better world his texts might still represent.