This book examines British playwrights' responses to the work of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries since 1945 from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Sarah
Kane's Blasted and Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. Using the work of Julie Sanders and others
working in the fields of Adaptation Studies and intertextual criticism it argues that this
relatively neglected area of drama widely considered to be adaptation should instead be
considered as appropriation - as work that often mounts challenges to the ideologies and
orthodoxies within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and questions the legitimacy and cultural
authority of Shakespeare's legacy. The book discusses the work of Howard Barker Peter Barnes
Edward Bond Howard Brenton David Edgar Elaine Feinstein and the Women's Theatre Group David
Greig Sarah Kane Dennis Kelly Bernard Kopps Charles Marowitz Julia Pascal and Arnold
Wesker.
