‘Re-vision’ – ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ – has been the name of the game in literary and cultural criticism for the last three decades. Meanwhile ‘revision’, in the sense of borrowing from an original to further one's own artistic purposes, has been pursued even more vigorously within the novel, the theatre and film. Inevitably, perhaps, it has been Shakespeare who has served as the cultural hero against whom most artists have wanted to measure themselves, playfully or angrily rewriting the plays from radical, postcolonial, feminist, lesbian or gay points of view, or borrowing from his plots to give added resonance to their own enterprises. There is an immense range and variety of such ‘appropriations’. From the disconcerting eruption into Gus Van Sant's tale of Seattle rentboys, My Own Private Idaho (1991) of lines and even whole scenes of Henry IV, to the incestuous Lear of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) Shakespeare has been ‘plundered’ to serve purposes as diverse as diligent modernisation and outright burlesque.