Hacking Adaptation: Updating, Porting, and Forking the Shakespearean Source Code

This essay proposes that computer hacking can provide us with an appropriate framework through which to rethink the basic workings of adaptation in general and Shakespeare adaptation in particular in the twenty-first century. Building on the work of Thomas Leitch and Sarah Cardwell in adaptation studies and Christopher Kelty in the anthropology of the hacker movement, the essay positions itself as an alternative to Douglas Lanier’s model of the Shakespeare rhizome. The central argument is that understanding Shakespeare’s works as source code, and adaptations of them as hacks of that source code, as well as sources of future hacks, makes it possible to account for and work with the difficult but crucial notions of the source and of fidelity, while resolving many of the theoretical, practical, and political problems which motivated scholars to avoid or try to overcome those notions in the past.