About the Author:
Robert Sawyer is an Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare and the Victorians. He is co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare.

Although many would contend that Shakespeare is generally employed as a conservative symbol, this book suggests instead that Shakespeare can be appropriated by both dominant and marginal groups. Sawyer provocatively argues that a single cultural context may produce diametrically opposed readings of the playwright, so at the same time that Shakespeare's cultural status may be used to subvert traditional ideas of politics and letters in George Eliot and A. C. Swinburne, it may also be used to promote more conservative policies and literary interpretations in other writers such as Robert Browning and Charles Dickens.