Shakespearean Sitcom: Upstart Crow, Shakespeare’s Plays and the Problem of Literature on Television

In Upstart Crow (BBC Two, 2016–20), writer Ben Elton makes William Shakespeare into the protagonist of a television sitcom in the British working class tradition. In this chapter, Reto Winckler argues that Upstart Crow thereby seeks to transform Literature with a capital L (that is, literature as an institution, associated with cultural prestige) into television, in a bid to reclaim Shakespeare for popular culture. With the subsequent printing and publication of the Upstart Crow scripts, however, sitcom and television also became literature. The chapter shows how, as an example of both televisual literature and literary television, Upstart Crow embodies the complex artistic and political relationships that exist between the two art forms and media. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021.