Open AccessDe-Colonising Shakespeare?: Agency and (Masculine) Authority in Gregory Rogers’s The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard
Author(s) -
Erica Hateley
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
papers (victoria park)/papers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1837-4530
pISSN - 1034-9243
DOI - 10.21153/pecl2009vol19no1art1158
Subject(s) - narrative , depiction , agency (philosophy) , literature , tempest , value (mathematics) , character (mathematics) , appropriation , freedman , sociology , aesthetics , history , art , philosophy , epistemology , social science , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , machine learning , computer science
Although Said is writing about literal geographies here as well as cultural mappings of them, I open with his claims in order to initiate my consideration of the ways in which 'Shakespeare' as a discourse (Freedman 1989, p.245) and Shakespeare's historical and geographical contexts have been made over into culturally-contested terrain within contemporary children's literature for the purposes of constructing and controlling social space and subjectivities. Historically, both the discourse of 'Shakespeare' and the depiction of William Shakespeare as a character have been deployed as structuring logics for narratives about the inherent value of Shakespeare, and in turn, for discussions of not just the legitimacy but the necessity of young people's subordination of self to Shakespeare. Gregory Rogers's 'The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard' (2004) not only participates in that tradition of children's literature which deploys Shakespeare as a colonising discourse but also disrupts the norms of the tradition in two important ways.