Narco-Capitalist Macbeths in TV Series: Shakespeare’s Archive in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013)

Abstract

I will tackle serial appropriations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in The Wire (David Simon, 2002–2008) and Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan, 2008–2013). Both complex TV series recast Macbeth in the context of narcocapitalism. Rather than constituting an alternative to mainstream capitalism, narco-capitalism maintains the American and global socioeconomic orders as depicted in both series. Paying attention to what will be defined as Shakespeare’s archive, it will be shown that traces from Macbeth are reactivated in The Wire and Breaking Bad. Shakespeare’s archive is formed by traces of Shakespeare’s dramatic and narrative sources, quartos, folios, later editions and adaptations. This corpus displays verbal and non-verbal features of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Taken together, traces and reenactments of Shakespeare highlight the multifarious and competing ways in which Shakespearean appropriations sail through the depth and length of complex TV. To illustrate this, I will use archive theory, transmedia theory and narcocapitalism as lenses of analysis. This framework helps explain archival strategies employed for Shakespearean appropriation within the social context of both series. The results reveal that Shakespeare’s archive in both works leads to an ambivalent ethical assessment of the potentialities of narco-capitalism.