This book is a scholarly examination of the way that fiction produced since the year 2000 incorporates the work and legacy of Shakespeare. Some of these novels and short stories revisit the plots of Shakespeare's plays, retelling their stories or otherwise adapting the material to explore contemporary concerns and issues.

How do writers of contemporary fiction incorporate Shakespeare - the man, his work and his cultural legacy? This collection brings together some of the leading voices in the scholarship of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation to examine the ways in which writers have used literary culture's most prominent historical figure to their own ends since the year 2000. The essays consider the representation of the man himself, the rethinking of his stories - often in pointed defiance of the original - and explorations of the plays radically repositioned in time and space. In the process the collection reveals which versions of Shakespeare are most current in contemporary culture and education, even as they remake them in the terms of the present, often exploiting the new notions of genre, of publishing technologies, and of political identity which have evolved so drastically since the turn of the last century.