Yassified Shakespeare by Trevor Boffone

Yassified Shakespeare by Trevor Boffone

‘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.

Trevor Boffone is Lecturer in the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston, USA. His work using TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood. He is the author of TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (2024), Social Media in Musical Theatre (Methuen Drama, 2023), Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok (2021), andeditor of TikTok Cultures in the United States (2022).

Danielle Rosvally is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University at Buffalo, USA. She is the author of Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in New York's Nineteenth Century (2024). She is the co-editor of Early Modern Liveness: Mediating Presence in Text, Stage, and Screen (Arden Shakespeare, 2023), and Revenge is Mad Hard: Fat Ham and the Question of Cultural Reclamation (Forthcoming).