This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21^st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. While The Shakespeare User contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical works on digital and Internet Shakespeares, this volume looks beyond the study of Shakespeare artifacts to the system of use and users that constitute the Shakespeare network. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction. 

Valerie M. Fazel teaches at Arizona State University. Her work on Shakespeare and digital media has been published in Borrowers and Lenders and Shakespeare (with Louise Geddes). 

Louise Geddes is Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe (2017). Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, MaRDiE, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Shakespeare Survey.