Anti-Shakespeare shrews: Women, sexism, and talking back to the Bard in Upstart Crow and All Is True

Abstract

Ben Elton's Upstart Crow (2016–18) is a popular BBC sitcom about Shakespeare's early years as a writer, while Elton's All Is True (2018) is a somber biopic about Shakespeare's retirement to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Elton's biofictions place a fictionalized historic Shakespeare in direct contact with female antifans—his wife, daughters, and female friends—to broach the contemporary concern of gender equality. In each of Elton's texts, antifans expose Shakespeare's sexism and investment in the patriarchal status quo. However, despite the depth of the antifans' antipathy, Shakespeare antifandom sometimes emerges as ambivalent. A third text, teen comedy St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), centers its plot on Shakespeare and his antifans but offers a different spin on both.