Yassified Shakespeare

This exhilarating tour of meme, yass, RuPaul and drag embraces Shakespearean postmodernity in all its inauthentic authenticity. - Emma Smith, University of Oxford, UK.

To ‘yassify’: to ‘glamify’ – often using digital filters – making it Queerer in the process

Yassification: to make something ‘larger than life’

Yassification distorts reality and its satire lies in its self-referential nature: there needs to be an original object for comparison to the yassified version. Enter: William Shakespeare.

From Harold Perrineau’s turn as Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet to the ‘ShakesQueer’ episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Shakespeare’s cultural capital is often served hand-in-hand with drag aesthetics to today’s audiences. Exploring the intersection between Shakespeare and drag in contemporary American culture, termed here as ‘ShaxDrag’, the book interrogates the specific role Shakespeare plays in American popular culture.

Whether it be Queer-coded iterations of Shakespeare’s persona by performers on Broadway or at a Renaissance Faire, or performances of Shakespearean content by Drag Queens, the authors contend that ShaxDrag is used to subvert white, Eurocentric ideas about high culture, education, language and taste. Through ShaxDrag marginalized voices can liberate Shakespeare’s cultural capital from its colonialist agenda, re-read it via various contemporary filters and use it to advocate for their own inclusion in greater canons. Yassified Shakespeare mines Shakespearean remixes as a site of Queer theory, revealing how Shakespeare can be a critical site of Queer world-making.