Visualizing the Bard: Shakespeare, Comics, and the Politics of Authorship

In his recent book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro begins by pointing out that this subject has been both “walled off from serious study by Shakespearean scholars” and, yet, remains immensely popular amongst general readers from school children to Supreme Court justices. The result of this contradiction, according to Shapiro, is that the bulk of information for interested general readers comes from those who don’t believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. While that is true regarding explicit engagements with authorship, this paper will argue that, in their attempts to make Shakespeare and his works accessible to modern (and, perhaps, reluctant) readers, graphic narratives also participate in, and in some cases attempt to “answer,” the authorship question. However, they don’t necessarily do so from the anti-Shakespeare side of the argument.

Specifically, this paper will interrogate the ways in which graphic narratives of Shakespeare’s plays (like the Classics Illustrated, Manga, and No Fear Shakespeare series as well as Marcia Williams’ Tales from Shakespeare) and those which focus on Shakespeare’s biography or feature Shakespeare as a character (like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Marvel: 1602 series and IDW’s nascent series, Kill Shakespeare) engage in the authorship controversy both visually and textually through their constructions of Shakespeare as a person, as an author, and as an authority.