"Bringing together two growing bodies of work - early modern race scholarship and adaptation theory - this volume articulates the centrality of race and its intersections with other identity categories in the contemporary adapted Shakespearean history play. By considering questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and class, it investigates the English histories' ongoing and shifting contributions to ideas about nationhood in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where Shakespeare's persistent cultural capital plays an increasingly ambivalent role. The book begins by examining two 21st-century adaptations of the Henriad that intentionally engage contemporary identity politics through cross-racial casting - the BBC miniseries, The Hollow Crown (2012, 2016) and Lennix, Quinn, and Thompson's all-Black Henry IV conflation, the film H4 (2012). In these works, adaptation itself becomes a means of interrogating Shakespeare's relationship to race as well as to other axes of power and difference. From these, the author turns to reassess the past and present cultural implications of history adaptations from the Shakespearean box office boom of the 1990s, when casting actors of colour in cinematic Shakespeare first became a conscious concern alongside more overt engagements with class, queer sexuality and disability. The conclusion explores how digital culture's responses to non-traditional Shakespearean casting practices are shaping constructions of race and its intersections on both sides of the Atlantic"--

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction - From Rodney King to Netflix's The King: Adaptation and/as Intersectionality in Shakespeare's Histories, 1991-2019
Chapter One - Through a Glass Darkly: Race, Gender, Disability and Sophie Okonedo's Margaret of Anjou in The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses
Chapter Two -Two Yorks, the Boy and the King of Pop: Colour-Conscious Casting and Queer Seriality in The Hollow Crown, Season One
Chapter Three - The Fat Knight in Black and White: Race, Disability, Gender, Nation, Falstaff
Chapter Four - Straight Outta Shakespeare: H4, My Own Private Idaho and the Universality Conundrum
Chapter Five - Film Noir, White Heat, 'Top of the World': Loncraine's Richard III in Nazi-Face
Conclusion - Swinging the Lens: Bridgerton as Shakespearean History in Digital Cultures
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Jennie M. Votava is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College, USA. She received her AB in English and MD from Harvard University in 1997 and 2001, and her PhD from New York University in 2012. She has published essays in Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin (forthcoming), and Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, eds. Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson.