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THE “CLASSICAL” IN MODERN POPULAR CULTURE: CITATION, IMITATION AND ASSIMILATION OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S LEGACY IN THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 73-89

The legacy of William Shakespeare occupies a unique place in modern Western society. Shakespeare’s texts, on the one hand, belong to the classical discourse of high culture. On the other hand, the modern popular culture of the consumer society was able to integrate separate Shakespearean images in particular and rethought the legacy of the English poet and playwright in general, integrating it into its own cultural canons. The range of perceptions of Shakespeare in Star Trek is quite wide, ranging from cultural and visual quotations to attempts to deconstruct the classical Shakespearean legacy, which turns into a simulacrum combining classical and popular cultural features, mixing Earth and extraterrestrial social perceptions of the poet’s heritage. Popular culture assimilated Shakespeare’s texts, turning them into simulacra and constructs. These metamorphoses became possible as a result of the deconstruction of high culture. In this article, using the principles of the interdisciplinarity of intellectual and cultural histories, the author analyzes the tactics and strategies of a cultural and intellectual assimilation of classical Shakespearean legacy through the prism of the Star Trek series, defined as one of the most consistent attempts to visualize the Shakespearean impact in the popular culture and modern society of consumption. Therefore, the aim of this article is to analyze the main strategies for visualizing the classical cultural canon, represented in Shakespearean legacy in modern American popular culture. Visual sources capturing the main directions and trends of rethinking the Shakespearean legacy in the discourse of popular culture are represented by the television series and films of the Star Trek franchise. Studying the assimilation of Shakespeare’s metatext, the author believes that Star Trek transplants the realities and images of high culture Shakespeare’s texts belong to into speculative and fantastic contexts of imagined and imagining alien societies. Since the narration of the English poet and playwright becomes a cultural code for reading and understanding the social and political realities of the Star Trek universe, their further integration and assimilation became inevitable. Analyzing the main directions and features of the assimilation of the classical Shakespearean narrative in the visual environments and spaces of modern popular culture, the author shows that the transplantation of classical plots into the contexts of American television fiction has allowed several generations of directors and screenwriters to use the images of Shakespearean drama for the construction and deconstruction of the “political” in society. The author believes that such strategies of cultural construction and deconstruction actualized the continuity between classical high culture and its modern mass forms that prevail in the consumer society. Therefore, the author analyzes the features of the integration of Shakespeare’s legacy into the canon of popular culture through such a prism of its assimilation as Americanization. The Americanization of Shakespeare’s legacy led to a revision of the classical perception of the image of the poet, which turned Star Trek into a cultural space for rethinking William Shakespeare through the prism of his vision by alien eyes. Therefore, the Klingon Shakespeare project actually emerged as an attempt to promote an alternative cultural memory based on the perception of the classical legacy as a construct existing in the state of constant deconstruction and revision.

Keywords: popular culture, high culture, William Shakespeare, “Shakespearean” in Western culture, series, Star Trek, continuity, assimilation, integration