Royal Bodies in Shakespearean Adaptations on Screen

The introduction to this special issue details each of the articles and situates the themes covered not only in relation to existing scholarship on the royal body, but to examples of the depiction of current British royalty in the media. We reflect, for instance, on the complex ideological constructions at work in the British press's depiction of Catherine [Middleton], Duchess of Cambridge in comparison to Meghan [Markle], Duchess of Sussex, and contrast the two royal women in order to highlight the distinctly racialized and gendered ways in which royal bodies are seen to occupy public space. In introducing the interdisciplinary approaches taken across the special issue and the depth and variety of discussion, we set out the importance of attending to the performativity of power and its multiply mediated and multiply constituted sites.