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The Shakespearean actor is a readily recognisable figure within the transatlantic cultural landscape. They may move regularly between the theatrical environs, which garnered them the appellation and more mainstream fare in television or film, but they are always, somehow, Shakespearean. However, if easily identified, the Shakespearean actor is harder to define. For example, the multi-volume Great Shakespeareans shortlists individuals who, in editors Peter Holland’s and Adrian Poole’s words, have had ‘the greatest influence on both the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally’). But such scholarly endeavours consistently stop short of describing any social or cultural function which the Shakespearean may fill or any implicit ideological work at hand in the naming of actors as Shakespeareans. These omissions are all the more curious because, while its attribution is inherently positive in the examples above, popular culture also abounds with rather less illustrious Shakespeareans. Consider, for instance, how Niles and Frasier Crane watched, appalled, while their childhood icon, Jackson Hedley (Derek Jacobi), gurned and groaned on stage. Playing a caricature of himself in Extras, meanwhile, Ian McKellen confides that he knew what to say in The Lord of the Rings because ‘the words were written down for me’. Welcome to bad Shakespeare: a trope that has existed for as long as there has been the potential for ‘good’ Shakespeareanism. For evidence, one needs only consider Hamlet’s stubborn insistence that actors deliver their lines ‘trippingly on the tongue’. Bad Shakespeare has no such luck, however. From Mr Wopsle in Great Expectations to Alan Rickman’s frustrated thespian-turned-science-fiction-star in Galaxy Quest (‘How did I come to this? I played Richard III. There were five curtain calls’), these Shakespeareans are hammy, self-congratulating and embarrassing; they exhibit what David McGowan calls ‘visible acting’. Reversing a more typical focus on prestige and skill, this article will reflect on what it says about our relationship to Shakespeare that we take such evident and knowing pleasure in watching highly respected performers apparently fail at their jobs. Building on film studies and scholarship on badfilms, I will consider whether these fictional performances of failure only reify existing norms of ‘good’ performance or if they offer more subversive possibilities. Full article

From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity’s destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In “Epidemiology,” from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie’s affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the “Golden Age of Television,” what media scholars also call, “Peak” or “Prestige TV.” In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional. Full article

The classic problematic of divine absence and presence is a familiar theological trope (deus absconditus). It achieves new life, however, in the work of contemporary Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (b. 1970), who explores the theme in his recent television miniseries The Young Pope (2016). I “read” Sorrentino as part of a trajectory in contemporary Italian theory (Vattimo, Agamben, etc.) that deconstructs-as-a-way-of-receiving certain traditional (especially Catholic) problematics. However, Sorrentino is to be distinguished from these others by what we might call a postmodern sincerity, whereby he manages to twist without breaking an orthodox understanding of divine invisibility. Importantly, Sorrentino emphasizes the interpersonal and ongoing nature of revelation, and thus situates the absconditus problem in a broader account of dialogical divine love. “Reading” Sorrentino in this way suggests that deus absconditus and deus revelatus are not concepts in tension but rather dynamic parts of an integral, integrating dialectic. It also suggests that visual storytelling remains a powerful medium for raising and indeed enacting fundamental theological questions to do with belief and unbelief. Full article