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Drawing on the distinction between a ‘text’ and a ‘work’ as defined by Joseph Grigely and revised by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, this article argues that R.E.M.’s 1994 album, Monster appropriates some of the themes, situations and character-functions of the work Othello in order to illuminate and demystify the ways in which the mass media and mainstream rock and roll culture, in Iago-like fashion, attempt to seize and rewrite the identities of youths and inspire in them Othello-like effects of possessiveness and jealousy that can lead to male-on-female violence. Crucially, however, the album does not dramatize black male-on-white female violence; rather, it de-races the kind of possessiveness, jealousy and gendered violence that we find in Shakespeare’s play, usefully reminding us that such violence has no necessary connection to race.

Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, follows the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe of actors and musicians who perform concerts and stage Shakespeare’s plays in the scattered communities of survivors of an influenza pandemic. Tattooed on the arm of Kirsten Raymonde, an actress in the troupe, are the words ‘Because survival is insufficient’, a phrase borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager, indicating that the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven can enrich the lives of the survivors of the pandemic. But even if survival in this post-apocalyptic landscape is considered insufficient, it cannot be taken for granted. In a world without electricity and modern technology, encounters with strangers on the road occasionally turn confrontational, even deadly. The novel thus dramatises a constant struggle that complicates the idea that survival is insufficient, and ceaselessly probes the notion that Beethoven and Shakespeare can enrich our lives in post-apocalyptic times.