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Music by the London Symphony Orchestra, directly by Valery Gergiev. Composed by Sergei Prokofiev. With "artistic collaboration" from Oliver Simola; scenography and lights by François-Pierre Couture; costumes by Camille Assaf. Recorded by Sébastien Marcovici.

With Doug Baum, Marissa Brown, Lorrin Brubaker, Jeremy Coachman, Courtney Conovan, Daphne Fernberger, David Adrian Freeland Jr., Mario Gonzalez, Oliver Greene-Cramer, Sierra Herrera, Leo Hishikawa, Payton Johnson, Shu Kinouchi, Peter Mazurowski, Vinicius Silva, Nayomi Van Brunt. Note that different dancers played Romeo and Juliet at different performances, including same-gender pairs.

Describes three kinds of serial performance of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleoptra: "sequelization, when the two plays are presented independently during the same theatre season or are released as film adaptations one after the other; serialization, when the two plays are performed together as parts of one long, continuous show; conflation, when the stories are merged into a single fiction containing additional plot points such as Cleopatra’s early affair with Caesar." Offers Trevor Nunn's 1972 Roman cycle, Stuart Burge's 1970 Julius Caesar and Charlton Heston's 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, and David Muse's 2008 Julius Caesar and Michael Kahn's 2008 Antony and Cleopatra (q.v. all) as examples. Expanded from Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake (q.v.).

Traces changing depictions of Sir John Oldcastle/Falstaff in different contexts: as leader of an uprising; in Reformation religious texts; as "fun-loving mischievous fat knight" in Shakespeare's plays. Suggests that Oldcastle/Falstaff serves as example of "conspicuous forgetting" and "serial memory."

Argues that "the dialogue with Shakespeare is central to Joyce’s, Beckett’s and many of their contemporaries’ explorations of creative processes, which rely on seriality as a gradually evolving characteristic of fiction as work in progress." Considers Shakespearean allusions in Joyce's Ulysses and Beckett's Murphy and Dream of Fair to Middling Women. 

Describes "the Desdemona effect": "she forgets everything around her, yearns only for [Othello's] stories and begs for their serial repetition." Suggests that stories re-told have amplified emotional impact.

Points to uncertain ending of 2 Henry VI and repetition between 2 and 3 Henry VI as evidence of "dominant seriality" in Shakespeare's English history plays. Reads 2 Henry IV's repetitions from 1 Henry IV as "recessive seriality."

Suggests that Cymbeline rewrites theme of "cryptomania"—"a euphoric obsession with keeping something hidden"—from Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet.

Includes ten essays on Shakespeare.

Suggests that Shakespeare contrasts brief, often comic scenes about lower-class characters with his main plot. Points to Shakespeare's influence on modernist writers. English summary, 177.

Suggests that the conflicts and emotions in Othello are existential in nature. English summary, 235.