This book examines how Shakespeare's plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring togetherThe Tempestand the science fiction-WesternWestworld, King Learand the satirical dynastic drama ofSuccession, Hamletand the legal thrillerBlack Earth Rising, as well as Coriolanusand the political thrillerHomeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare's texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.

Christina Wald is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She is the author ofThe Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction (2014) andHysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007). She has editedMedieval Shakespeare (2012) and co-editedThe Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern (2011).