When Shakespeare is taken up by (or for) Australians, there is an ongoing (post)colonial anxiety as well as the more broadly familiar high/pop culture tensions which have been the object of much scholarship and comment in recent decades. 3 See Mark MacLeod, “Adapting and Parodying Shakespeare for Young Adults: John Marsden’s Hamlet and A (.)ġ In Australian culture, as elsewhere, ‘Shakespeare’ is a discursive formation attracting veneration (of the ‘greatest writer in the English language’, or ‘universal insights into humanity’ type), aspiration (of the assertive ‘Australians can do Shakespeare as well as anyone’, or the more self-abnegating ‘will the Imperial Mother be proud if we do Shakespeare well’ variety), and far more rarely, of resistance (‘we don’t need Shakespeare’).Such novels thus address “the two key themes of girl studies the (in)significance of girl culture and the problem of girls’ agency”, 2 and do so in a context of ongoing (post)colonial and patriarchal anxiety. However, even as Shakespearean cultural agency is made the purview of girlhood, gender norms continue to exert enormous pressure on what the most desirable subjectivity might be. In these novels, female protagonists make sense of themselves by making sense of Shakespeare, and in so doing claim subjectivity for themselves. Such ambivalence informs recent Australian young adult (YA) appropriations of Shakespeare for and about young women. This anecdote reveals the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in Australian culture, where his works are not only an artefact of British Imperialism and a marker of cultivated taste, but also marked by oppositional possibilities-of potential resistance to hierarchies of nation or culture, but less so of gender. So remembers Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946) of her girlhood acquisition and subsequent peer-induced suppression of Shakespeare. 2 Catherine Driscoll, “Girls Today: Girls, Girl Culture and Girl Studies”, Girlhood Studies vol.
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