Joe Orton and Shakespeare: collage, class and queerness

This essay considers Joe Orton's relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwell's neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeare's themes and contest critical authority. By focusing specifically on Arden editions, Orton and Halliwell resist the gentrification of Shakespeare engendered by elitist academic discourse and bourgeois spaces such as the public library and the theatre. The same irreverent attitude to Shakespeare is evident in Orton's plays. Although he admired, identified with and drew inspiration from his predecessor, Orton recycles Shakespeare's plots, lines and motifs to transform their class politics and to amplify their sexual dissidence. Overall, this essay contends that by reshaping Shakespeare from a working class, queer perspective Orton resists the Bard's growing function as an emblem of social distinction in mid-century Britain.