Pascale Aebischer was among the first scholars to address Mike Figgis's adaptation, in the film Hotel, of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi. Aebischer proposed an understanding of the “presposterous” contemporary Jacobean film or play text, a “countercinematic” Warburgian Nachleben (afterlife) or adaptation as “cultural cannibalism”: anachronistic, narratologically disjointed, and irreverent.
The early moderns’ anxiety over textual legacy and influence, the monuments and architecture of history, was refracted by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century directors into Aebischer's “preposterous contemporary Jacobean,” a series of works like Hotel, Edward II, The Revengers Tragedy, and Coriolanus, that challenge and complicate the reception of Shakespearean or Websterian work. This category of the preposterous stands in contrast to works such as Shakespeare in Love or Anonymous (2011), a Da Vinci Code-style flowering of sentimentalism, conservatism, conspiracy theories, and contempt for scholarly accuracy.
But there are other categories...
