entities stand as crystallizations of a distinctly Aegean manner of animalian compositeness that is highly intuitive in its integration. These entities – the boar’s tusk helmet, ox-hide shield and ikrion (ship cabin) – embody this dynamic in an arrant fashion, since, while each is prominently animalian and bodily, they do not themselves take the shapes of animal physiques. Instead, they brought novel, conventional object-forms to animalian presences in the Aegean. By not standing as animals themselves, they starkly draw out the potent relational dynamics that could be realized between creatures, and between creatures and things. Discussion ultimately concerns the added complexity introduced to the statuses of these entities when rendered in movable representational media like glyptic and painted ceramics; particular attention comes to their frequent rendering in series. While seriation is often read as simplifying something’s status to the merely ornamental, I argue, instead, that articulation of shields, helmets and ikria in series imbued them with a peculiar, complex dynamism.

I look at Wittgenstein’s statement, in his letter to Russell, of the “main contention” of his book. I consider also the relation between his main contention and what he describes in the book as his fundamental idea. I discuss also what he means when he says that what he calls his main contention, and his main point is the cardinal problem of philosophy.

This chapter studies two contrasting models for predictive thinking and representation in Thomas Hardy. In The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s depiction of repetitive phenomena evokes one renovated account of logico-mathematical probability, John Venn’s empirical theory about how we judge from series of instances. In the novel’s palpably antiquated rural setting – where characters intuit more than they see, gamble by the light of glowworms, and infer human plots from long-run traces in the material world – the abstractions of Victorian logic acquire concrete form. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), by contrast, serial iterations are compressed into images. Hardy designs literary equivalents of Francis Galton’s “composite photographs,” used to model statistical data and mental processes. Characters think in overlays, detecting a parent’s face playing over that of a child, designing a future self by laying transparencies over the present, and imagining human plots as grids from overhead. Serial and composite thinking extend to Hardy’s “approximative” theory of fiction. He uses these tropes as an implicit riposte to critics and advocates for a novelistic realism tolerant of repetition, coincidence, and improbability.

The structure of Shakespearean drama does not fit easily into the novel-like episodic sequence of the television series. It is therefore no wonder that none of the serialized adaptations of Romeo and Juliet seem to have survived the first season of their broadcast. Nonetheless, the two series examined here, Star-Crossed (created by Meredith Averill for CW, 2014) and Still Star-Crossed (created by Heather Mitchell for ABC, 2017) are worthy of critical attention for a number of reasons. They appear to take radically different paths in appropriating the famously ill-fated romance to contemporary television screens, both in terms of genre and setting, language and style, and also in the way they intend to open up the play’s dramatic structure into a potentially endless sequence of episodes.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

I will explore how web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet challenge and revise the famous (and infamous) narrative of the star-crossed lovers. Participating in a new model for Shakespeare on screen, these series change the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expanding the number and variety of the female characters, adapting Shakespeare to address issues of gender, sexuality and love in the digital age. The young women who create web-series such as Any Other Rosie, Any Other Vlog, Jules and Monty and Rome and Juliet shift the viewer’s focus away from Juliet and her complicated legacy.

Thomas Hoccleve has long been identified both as an autobiographical poet and as a poet who hoped that his writings would speak on his behalf to prospective readers and patrons. This chapter builds upon these insights by suggesting that Hoccleve felt certain literary materials could exercise a quasi-religious or even quasi-legal force, or “vertu,” in the social world. I argue that Hoccleve’s faith in this idea was motivated by his familiarity with two other late-medieval discourses in which certain words were believed to possess a direct and unmediated kind of power: the language of Lancastrian bureaucracy, which Hoccleve knew firsthand from his work at the Privy Seal, and the language of the church, and in particular sacramental language. I suggest that, in the Series, Hoccleve attempts to write a kind of poetry that will exercise an analogous kind of “vertu” upon his audience. By composing a book that will speak directly to the “prees” on his behalf, he hopes to circumvent the skepticism with which his own words have been received by his readers and patrons in the wake of his “wilde infirmitee”—even if he doubts that, in the end, the Series will do exactly what he wishes.

Chapter 7 explores recent splinters or CFs in the making. It investigates the profitability of five initial and eight final splinters, originally viewed as blend parts and later developed as frequent spliters used in series, to form new words by analogy.