Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture

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Summary: This book puts the Bard on the front burner of pop culture.
Review: "Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares" is a savvy look at the wide range of adaptations, spin-offs, and citations of Shakespeare's plays in 1990s popular culture. The Bard has permeated contemporary film, television, video, and electronic media such as Internet Websites and CD-ROMs in direct translation, interpretation, and as a cultural icon. While we may be familiar with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh's film adaptations of the plays, what does it say about our culture when Shakespearean references turn up in television episodes of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island, films like "In and Out" and "My Own Private Idaho," and hardcore porn adaptations of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet? Instead of lamenting this unusual dissemination of Shakespeare from a position of literary authority, Burt reads the reception of these often quite bad replays in relation to the contemporary youth culture and the "queering" of Shakespeare. Documenting a fascinating array of Shakespearean citations that are so far from their originals that they no longer count as interpretation of the plays, Burt considers what Shakespeare enables American popular culture to do that it couldn't otherwise do without him and scrutinizes academic fantasies about fandom and stardom.

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Summary: should not be missed...
Review: A brilliant and insightful foray into the world of "Shakespeare" in 1990's popular culture. An important event in Shakespeare studies.

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Summary: A savvy, highly informative, yet entertaining work.
Review: A groundbreaking new work by an erudite theorist who has the exceedingly good taste to recognize students of unusual merit. The entire book is a worthwhile read, but be sure to read the acknowledgements for a very exciting mention of the talented,yet pulchritudinous beauty -- Elizabeth MacDuffie

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Summary: Oh, please.
Review: Burt is the worst kind of self-promoting academic sharlatan. I love Shakespeare; porn is fine at times. But devoting serious consideration to the congruence of the two? He should be ashamed of himself, but obviously has no shame.

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Summary: Burt's book comes on like dynamite
Review: Burt's book comes on like dynamite, exploding established divisions between academic and popular culture. An inveterate explorer in the jungle of the quotidien-inane, Burt immerses himself in the culture of stupidity without drowning in it. The Shakespeare that emerges here is a hipper, more knowing bard for our times.

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Summary: BARDCORE CRITICISM AT ITS BEST!
Review: Burt's brilliant book is provocatively devoted to, among other adaptations and citations of Shakespeare in mass media, "bardcore" pornorgraphic adaptations such as A Midsummer Night's Cream, the Playboy Twelfth Night (a softcore rock musical) Romeo and Julian, and Hamlet: For the Love of Ophelia. All of these and more are listed on his excellent personal naughtyprofessor website. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in Shakespeare and popular culture, and I am looking forward to Burt's edited book Shakespeare After Mass Media.

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Summary: Shakespeare and Pornography have finally found each other!
Review: Burt's commentary on the infiltration of Shakespeare into popular culture is fantastic. Not only has he managed to connect high culture with low culture by showing how Shakepseare is everywhere, even in pornography, he has done it in an intriguing and extremely accessible way. I urge everyone to read this book: students, academics and anyone else who is interested in increasing their knowledge of Shakespeare.

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Summary: Burt's book's a stunner
Review: Combining glittery high theory with `low' culture materials, Richard Burt has written an absolutely brilliant, path-breaking study of Shakespeare in contemporary mass media, focusing mostly on film, but discussing t.v. sit-coms, comic books, and novels as well. Most of these films and other texts have never before been archived or examined by any other Shakespeare critic. What is particularly original about Burt's book is the way he views what he concedes are often trashy films, including some hardcore pornographic adaptations, from the vantage point of the critic as loser. Instead of trying to redeem mass culture `trash' as politically dissident, transgressive, or subversive material, as most critics doing cultural studies now do, Burt questions whether the trashy material he examines can be recycled, and opens up as a profound, troubling question whether criticism (avowedly political or not, high-minded or low-minded) can ever fully transcend questions concerning its own potential triviality and stupidity. This is a very sophisticated and challenging book, but is very accessible and very entertaining. Burt will soon emerge as the Stephan Greenblatt of post-millenial Shakespeare criticism. His book is a truly remarkable read!

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Summary: A Timely, Transformative Text
Review: Hot! Hot! Hot! This brilliant book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the current(Spring-Summer 99) spate of both teen Shakespeare movies and the "tourist class" response to them in art house theaters. Presenting a comprehensive but open-ended scholarship of the popular, Burt canvasses a range of films and television shows that allude to Shakespeare from mid-century forward, concentrating on the 70s through the late 90s. He also displays a sure hand as a reader of the plays he discusses and recent cultural criticism about Shakespeare. The book accounts for a recent phenomenon: the way in which the plays' processing by mass media totally empties them of whatever cultural values or political effectiveness current criticism of the right and left have claimed for them. Marking a major paradigm shift in masscult studies from the critic as "fan" to the critic as "loser," Burt challenges the distinction between progressive and reactionary takes on both Shakespeare and the culture industry. As losers, Shakespeare critics are closer to what's happening than they realize--and than they really want to be, despite their medium cool academic fantasies. Along the way, Burt provides strong interpretations of Dead Poet's Society, sound in porn movies, Polanski's Macbeth, Quiz Show, key TV adaptations, and much much more. Maddening, persuasive and a blast to read, this book will tax whatever preconceptions you have about Shakespeare, the mainstream and pornographic film industries, and popular media in general.

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Summary: A wonderful find!
Review: I happened to be doing research for my thesis on Shakespeare in the university library and, while looking for other books, I was intrigued by the three XXXs in the title of Burt's book on the shelf, so I pulled it off and looked through it. What a daring work of cultural criticism! When I saw the chapters on Shakespeare porn, I marvelled both at the courage of the man to write such a book and how at the publisher who took it on. Of course, I check it out and read it. I especially was drawn to the chapter on action films and Burt's point that while the films cannibalize others, no one in the films ever eats; the characters are anorexic. The book is full of similarly wonderful insights. I am a cinephile, and very much appreciated Burt's quite hip approach to ShaXXXspeare. Now, it's back to those other, rather staid books of Shakespeare criticism, I was orginally looking for.