Chasing Shakespeare: The Impurity of the “Not Quite” in Norry Niven’s From Above and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Romeo

Abstract

The essay situates the “not Shakespeare” of this volume within the theoretical problematics of the “post-textual.” It re-elaborates the “post-textual” as the uncanny re-appearance of Shakespeare in the form of heterogeneous fragments that are made to cohabit with various textual and media environments. These media products include a “Shakespeare” that is not quite Shakespeare, an “entity” that  becomes the site of unceasing transactions (for instance, between an “outside” and an “inside,” between visibility and invisibility, between the “original” and its iteration) and multiple contaminations (through media, characters, and plays).