“What’s in a Name?” Authorship as (Micro)Genre in the Paratext of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

The novels commissioned and published as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project involve a series of recontextualisations of Shakespeare’s work, not only from the genre of drama to that of prose or a range of established subgenres, but the choice of author to adapt it may also serve to locate the adaptation in a very specific microgenre defined by the connotations engendered by the modern author’s oeuvre – and frame its reception accordingly. The article discusses how this process finds expression in the Hogarth Shakespeare project paratexts, which are seen as ways of making creative use of the popular conceptions of the modern authors evoked by their very names to reframe, revise and re-energise Shakespeare’s work for new audiences, in part through the specific form of (micro)generic recontextualisation that they bring about.