“A Fair House built on another man’s ground”: Public Shakespeare at Seneca Village

Abstract

Though scholars have sought to highlight how artists employ Shakespeare as an instrument of radical resistance, this essay reconsiders the relationship between Shakespeare and artistic subversion. We use Anna Watkins Fisher’s concept of parasitic resistance to frame our analysis of the Public Theater’s 2021 adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Rather than advocate for Shakespeare as either complicit or resistant to the corporatization of public theater, we suggest a spectrum of possibilities within this binary, possibilities which operationalize tactics that strategically place complicity and resistance in relation to one another. Merry Wives thus illuminates how performance can subtly subvert the intertwined pressures of capitalism and white patriarchy by appropriating and wielding the tools of performance itself, the specific cultural authority of the Shakespeare system, and the linguistic and artistic cultural capital imagined as inherent to that system, in order to lay bare some of the palimpsest historicities of settler colonialism.