A Linfield Professor Is Now in Possession of Steve Bannon's Hip-Hop Adaptation of a Shakespeare Play

It's pretty much as weird as you'd expect.

By Shannon Gormley

As several news organizations have pointed out, Trump's appointed chief strategist, Steve Bannon, once co-wrote a hip-hop adaptation of Coriolanus. Linfield professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has now obtained a copy of the revised Shakespearean play, and it's basically as weird as you'd imagine.

Shakespeare's original script profiles a hawkish Roman general who is at odds with Rome's population for stuff like claiming the poor deserve to suffer the famine the city is experiencing. But instead of a Roman famine, Bannon's Coriolanus is set in 1992 LA. In the article he wrote for the New York Times, Pollack-Pelzner describes the script:

The samples of the script that Pollack-Pelzner shares in the article are entertainingly absurd, but as Pollack Pelzner point out, they're also kind of terrifying. He suggests that the script can provide clues to what Trump's administration will look. "At a moment when the question 'What does Bannon want?' has taken on a new urgency, his adaptation of Shakespeare offers an unexpected clue," writes Pollack-Pelzner. Some of those clues are forboding:

Read Pollack Pelzner's full article, complete with excerpts from the script, here.

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