Citational Shakespearean performances as racialized antifandom in Netflix's The Crown

Abstract

Fandom is often theorized as a vital praxis that expands agency across the permeable borderland between creatives and consumers, making consumers into creatives and critics who transform and complicate notions of an authoritative textual source such as Shakespeare's canon. Such potential for leveled authority—in which the Shakespearean text, its performance history, editorial interventions, adaptations, and appropriations sit side-by-side with user reimaginations—opens vistas of opportunity to puncture the enduring status of Shakespeare's canon as exclusively white. However, the radical potential of fandom's extreme accessibility can spark an antifandom that polices, among other factors, the whiteness of Shakespeare and Shakespearean fan communities. Three episodes of the Netflix heritage drama The Crown (2016–2023) typify the antifandom that sutures Shakespearean authority to the British monarchy by means of citational performance, reenactments of scenes from Shakespeare that in each case appear at moments of crisis regarding the ruler and the nation.