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LIKE economic capital in the age of globalization, Shakespearean cultural capital in the age of mass media is restless. Pierre Bourdieu's original conception of cultural capital tended to stress its relative stability. That is, for Bourdieu the cultural capital manifested in, say, the ability to recognize Shakespearean citations or appreciate a performance of Macbeth, remained a relatively fixed marker of cultural difference. Cultural capital preserves a system of social stratification based on cultural distinctions, without that system relying primarily on economic status or traditional ideas of "class." However, in a postmodern age, when supposedly distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and popular culture have collapsed, the cultural prestige attached to Shakespeare, residual now though it may be, has undergone a recuperative transformation. Shakespearean cultural capital now moves freely from investment to investment, from one cultural arena or medium to another, in a search for renewed value. That value accrues from a process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby Shakespeare's association with a mass-cultural product, medium, or genre lends that item a moiety of highbrow depth, "universality," authority, continuity with established tradition, or seriousness of purpose, while at the same time the association with mass culture lends Shakespeare street credibility, broad intelligibility, and celebrity.
Three qualities characterize this reciprocal relationship between Shakespeare and mass culture. First, it is rhizomatic. Deleuze's classic example of a rhizomatic relationship is of the wasp and the orchid. Both beings maintain their relative autonomy, but both evolve in the direction of the other so that the wasp can be said to be "becoming-orchid," and the orchid "becoming-wasp." The relationship is not symbiotic - one does not depend on the other - so much as mutually catalytic of dramatically new directions in development, what Deleuze calls "lines of flight." The recent relationship between Shakespeare and mass culture has had this rhizomatic quality, particularly so in the case of Shakespeare on film. Second, Shakespeare's relationship with specific media or arenas of culture tends to be invested with energy at certain moments and social contexts, and that energy shifts from medium to medium, context to context, over time. Shakespeare's relationship with advertising was highly charged in the Anglo-American sphere in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, only to wane quickly in the new century; in the United...