What follows is an annotated bibliography like that students are asked to produce for the AnnBib assignment in my section of ENGL & THRE 3333: Shakespeare: Comedies & Sonnets during the Fall 2016 instructional term at Schreiner University. As with the sample proposal and sample exploratory essay from which it arises (and which it echoes), its topic is slightly aside from that allowed to the students; rather than treating a single work, it treats a more general Shakespearean reconstruction, looking for what prompts continuance of the Bard in popular culture. It does, however, adhere to the length requirements expressed to students; they are asked for two paragraphs and eight three-part annotations (MLA-style Works Cited citation, source summary, and assessment of utility to the ongoing project), exclusive of heading, title,  and page numbers; the bibliography below conforms to those standards. Its formatting will necessarily differ from student submissions due to the differing medium. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

My own involvement with Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) dates back to the beginning of my undergraduate studies; a friend made early in my abortive tenure as a music major introduced me to the game, and I played steadily until moving to New York City in 2009. During that time, I participated in the in-person and online communities associated with the game, helping to steer small parts of its story through that participation and deriving no small pleasure therefrom (in addition to spending no small amount of money on doing so). Because L5R has been part of my life for as many years as it has, I have ample reason to look through its materials from time to time; it was during such a review that I ran again across the character of Shosuro Furuyari, described by various bits of the game’s narratives as the foremost playwright in the fictional milieu. From there, it was a small step to look at how the writer recapitulates beliefs about the Swan of Avon for a late twentieth and early twenty-first century gaming audience.

In pulling up critical materials on the game and its characters, I looked first through such databases as Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, and Project Muse for articles that answered to the search term “Legend of the Five Rings.” Given the niche market for L5R and the relatively limited scholarly treatment of role-playing games, generally, I did not expect to find much–and the expectation was met, revealing only a non-scholarly New York Times piece treating the game. I then expanded my search to “tabletop role-playing games,” opening my research to treatments of the genre as a whole; the search revealed more sources, although not all were useful due to being too early in publication, and others enjoyed privilege of access that prevented immediate review. Many of the latter–those showing up as most relevant by keyword search–were requested through interlibrary loan services and read, largely in the order received. Additionally, following the news that Marlowe has been credited as co-author with Shakespeare of the Henry VI plays, a search of Logan Library holdings for pieces treating the intersection of Marlowe and Shakespeare yielded one source readily available–the Murphy attested below–and another requested through interlibrary loan.

Burda, Paul. “Roll a D20 and the Author Dies.” From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom, edited by Paul Budra and Clint Burnham, Indiana UP, 2012, pp. 1-14.

After a brief vignette detailing involvement with a role-playing group, the chapter offers a brief history of the tabletop role-playing game and a definition of the genre taken from Daniel Mackay. Prior scholarship on role-playing games is rehearsed before Mackay’s definition is shaded against other scholarly treatments of performance and orality. The chapter then moves to posit how much of the role-playing game can be treated as literary, comparing rulebooks to theoretical tracts and instantiations of games to literary texts themselves. It also asserts that role-playing games prefigure digital media in terms of enacting deconstructionist ideas—and that they are, in fact, superior objects for the study of such theoretical approaches than the new media commonly supposed to be eminent in enacting them. Why they are is explained in some detail, and implications for teaching are noted before the chapter returns to its opening vignette to conclude.

As a serious scholarly treatment of role-playing games as objects of study, Burda’s chapter legitimates the genre. Further, although the piece focuses most on Dungeons & Dragons, it also explicitly makes mention of less-known gaming properties, which makes its arguments more readily applicable to L5R than might otherwise be the case. At root, Burda argues that role-playing games are art, and one of the things that art does is encapsulate and rework those tropes existent when it is developed. That L5R can be read as reinterpreting Shakespeare, then, becomes eminently sensible.

Copeland, Teresa, et al. “Three Different Paths for Tabletop Gaming in School Libraries.” Library Trends, vol. 61, no. 4, 2013, pp. 825-35. Project Muse, doi.org/10.1353/lib.2013.0018. Accessed 19 October 2016.

Working from the position that tabletop games are a useful educational resource and therefore to be promoted as library holdings, the article explicates how three school library staffers in the United States and United Kingdom integrate tabletop gaming into their institutions’ offerings. Copeland articulates how the pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade school for which she works incorporates games into the whole curriculum, focusing on role-playing Homeric epic and related activities. Co-author Brenda Henderson reports on the more time-limited—but necessarily more focused—gaming activities at her school, their social ramifications, and their bridge into community involvement. Co-author Brian Mayer discusses how his institution partners with nearly two dozen school districts to facilitate integrating games into curricular and extracurricular offerings.

The article openly asserts the validity of gaming—including role-playing—as a teaching and learning tool. As such, it helps position games as exerting substantial influence on their players, particularly the younger players who encounter formalized gaming at a time in their lives when they are particularly prone to taking up ideas explicitly and implicitly indicated. The content of games is therefore singularly important—and even if L5R is not directed towards a young player-base, it is likely to be played by younger players. What it says, then, matters—even or especially if the information is inaccurate.

Danforth, Liz. “Gender and Games.” Library Journal, vol. 136, no. 13, 2011, p. 53. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=64501689&scope=site. Accessed 17 October 2016.

The article argues that libraries should encourage gaming among their patrons, whatever their gender, and notes both difficulties in and possibilities for expanding gaming among feminine library patrons. After a brief introduction, the piece moves through a discussion of the context of gaming and the complexity of the gaming environment before articulating what libraries offer to gaming communities. Notable is the article’s emphasis on the inclusive nature of the library as an institution.

Because the article makes much of the inclusive nature of libraries and positions games of various sorts—including tabletop role-playing games—as activities eminently suited to libraries, it tacitly asserts that gaming is an activity available to be enjoyed by all. As such, its messages are similarly to be made available to all; it follows that those messages, being in a position to reach many, can—and perhaps ought to—exert substantial influence on the beliefs and attitudes of a large section of the populace. Accordingly, those messages become more than merely facets of what is “just a game,” and the view of Shakespeare advanced in L5R becomes one that can potentially mislead myriad current gamers—and gamers yet to come.

Daniau, Stéphanie. “The Transformative Potential of Role-Playing Games–: From Play Skills to Human Skills.” Simulation & Gaming, vol. 47, no. 4, 2016, pp. 423-44, doi.org/10.1177/1046878116650765. Accessed 31 October 2016.

Working in part from a doctoral dissertation, the article argues that tabletop role-playing games have substantial potential benefits to groups and individuals in that they offer practice in being more fully human. After laying out the scarce but burgeoning critical context of role-playing game study, the article situates its topic in context, presents a set of typical gaming structures, describes the game’s evolution, links game theory and play skills, and explores the transformative potential of the game, citing it as a means to help people construct themselves as more self-actualized and thus better able to face the world.

Daniau offers a perspective of role-playing games as not only therapeutic objects but as formative objects for social growth and change. Such a position privileges the content of the games themselves; if they are to be among the materials used to construct the constituent parts of society, they need to be based in the best available knowledge. If they are not, then, errors are embedded in the most elemental parts of the social fabric; the tapestry cannot help but be marred thereby.

Fine, Gary Alan. Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture, Russell Sage Foundation, 2012.

The author argues that the small groups in which people find themselves are the primary components of the larger cultural groups typically studied, that they are, in fact, people’s principal organizational affiliations. At root, larger societies reenact the dynamics of their smaller components; the study of those smaller components, then, offers transcendent representative generalizability of ideas. In supporting the idea, Fine draws upon several previous studies he had previously conducted, with topics ranging from Little League teams to tabletop role-playing groups to the National Weather Service, laying out the argument in an introduction and nine chapters what the eponymous tiny publics are, how they form, how they function internally, how they interact, and how they extend into larger groups.

Fine is the author of one of the seminal academic studies on tabletop role-playing games, Shared Fantasy, so his comments about such games are of some importance. Additionally, by arguing that small-scale social groups, explicitly including gaming communities, constitute larger groups and that the dynamics at work in the smaller directly and substantially influence the larger, he makes it possible to argue that what happens in gaming groups has larger ramifications for society at large. What they do well works to broader benefit; what they do poorly works to broader detriment.

Murphy, Donna N. The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Murphy argues that the playwright and otherwise talented Christopher Marlowe is the “actual” primary author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Following a foreword written by Cynthia Morgan, Murphy lays out in twelve chapters and two appendices her support for the idea that Marlowe faked his own death and continued writing under the pseudonym “William Shakespeare” to escape execution. Linguistic data taken from works by Marlowe and Shakespeare highlight commonalities of usage Murphy asserts are too close to be coincidence—particularly given the lack of attestation by newsmonger Thomas Nashe of the person of Shakespeare.

While Murphy does acknowledge that assigning authorship to early modern works definitively is problematic in part because of authorial practices of the time and the limits of documentation, she does present an extensive, peer-reviewed case against the traditional view of the Bard as sole or even primary author—or an actual person at all. While it might stretch credulity to think that a person who would expect execution by English authorities would remain in the area of London—and, indeed, in positions therein that would attract the notice of those very authorities—the book does serve as a useful counterargument to the idea that the Shakespeare presented in L5R is inaccurate. The work, and others like it, lend some validity to the view; if a dedicated scholar holds the view, one who would work with its object at some remove can surely be forgiven for doing the same.

Silcox, Mark. “On the Value of Make-Believe.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 46, no. 4, 2012, pp. 20-31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.46.4.0020. Accessed 19 October 2016.

Contextualizing its discussion in a history of play since the middle of the 20th century, the article explores ideas of the innate value of pretend play—in itself, rather than as a means to another end—through filtering the ideas of Kendall Walton, Ron Edwards, and Bernard Suits. The article summarizes the ideas in order, emphasizing Walton, but it shies away from making any kind of unifying claim. In effect, the article makes the case that consideration of whether pretend play—explicitly including role-playing games—has value needs to be conducted, likely in places strange to academia.

Along with several other articles, Silcox’s piece serves to situate role-playing games as objects worth scholarly study. Such a claim should not continue to be necessary, as the strong cultural studies motion among humanistic study ought to call for all such cultural products to be taken up as valid objects of consideration. Conservatism within academe, however, still vitiates against treating many less cachet-bearing objects, and broader misconceptions about humanistic study suggest that much of what it treats is folly. Having an argument against such views suggests itself as useful in making a claim about such objects as L5R.

Werner, Kat. “Bringing Them In: Developing a Gaming Program for the Library.” Library Trends, vol. 61, no. 4, 2013, pp. 790-801. Project Muse, doi.org/10.1353/lib.2013.0015. Accessed 19 October 2016.

After a brief introduction and background for the author’s involvement in developing library gaming programs the article lays out means for setting up such programs—including those for tabletop role-playing games—and tournaments. It then addresses local impacts, means for assessing effects of such programs, challenges such programs face, and additional resources. In concluding, the article looks forward and suggests that gaming programs can be a valuable source of ongoing community outreach.

Another library-based treatment of role-playing games, Werner’s piece functions much as those of Copeland et al. and Danforth. It marks the role-playing game as a useful educational artifact, which makes the contents of each game—including L5R—vitally important.

What follows is an exploratory essay like that students are asked to produce for the Expl assignment in my section of ENGL & THRE 3333: Shakespeare: Comedies & Sonnets during the Fall 2016 instructional term at Schreiner University. As with the sample proposal from which it arises (and which it echoes), its topic is slightly aside from that allowed to the students; rather than treating a single work, it treats a more general Shakespearean reconstruction, looking for what prompts continuance of the Bard in popular culture. It does, however, adhere to the length requirements expressed to students; they are asked for 1,300 to 1,625 words, exclusive of heading, title,  page numbers, and any necessary Works Cited entries, and the essay below is 1,527 words long, assessed by those standards. Its formatting will necessarily differ from student submissions due to the differing medium. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

Set in a fantastical analogue of feudal Japan and China, the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is a tabletop gaming property that, across the first two decades of its existence, encompassed a collectible card game, a role-playing game, miniatures wargaming, and more “traditional” table games. (As of this writing, the property is undergoing a transition associated with new ownership. A card game is promised, and a role-playing game is suggested, as being forthcoming, but what connections to earlier incarnations of the property will be in place are unclear.) Each partook of an ongoing, player-driven storyline; that is, while there was an over-arching plotline for the whole gaming property, many of the points of that plot were determined by players, whether explicitly by fiat or through results achieved by victories at major gaming events. The direct and identifiable impact on storyline by players accounted for much of the game’s popularity and the loyalty of its player base. It also commanded a rich and detailed back history for the player-current narratives to emerge from, and that, in turn, included consideration of faux-historical cultural figures. One of them, Shosuro Furuyari, is a clear send-up of a particular view on William Shakespeare–one that is, unfortunately, not the most accurate view of the Bard to be found.

The focus of L5R is on the noble classes of the land of the Empire of Rokugan, the aforementioned analogue of feudal Japan and China. As noted in the core rulebook of the L5R role-playing game’s fourth edition (Carman et al., 13-71), the members of those noble classes are divided, for the most part, into various Clans and Families. The mightiest of the Clans, the Great Clans, originally descended from the divine children of the Sun and Moon, and their social roles and overall philosophies derive in large part from their founders. Each of the Clans adopts an animal totem to serve as its dominant heraldic emblem and as an overarching metaphor for the Clan as a whole. One such is the Scorpion Clan, descended from the underhanded Bayushi; its members are the spies and assassins of the Empire, those willing to take most any means to get done whatever jobs need to get done, regardless of the stains on their personal honor. They find secrets and keep them, doing much to disguise such truths as may not be palatable or helpful–and as part of their disguising, they maintain extensive groups of actors and workers associated with acting. This includes no few playwrights, among whom is the figure of Shosuro Furuyari, acknowledged as the greatest dramatist in the milieu–and a clear incarnation of Shakespeare.

To be fair, the nature of the tabletop role-playing game, even one with as involved a backstory as L5R, precludes full historical development. As it is, the in-game history of Rokugan is only cursorily sketched, more than a dozen centuries of material compressed into forms easily accessed by casual players (who still often find themselves daunted by the scope and extent of the material). That history occupies scores of pages across nearly two dozen books in the fourth edition of the role-playing game–as well as hundreds of other pages in the previous three editions of the game. Although the game texts are supplemented by no few works of fiction, written by the game’s writers and reflecting “official” developments of the storyline, there is still a paucity of evidence upon which to base any assertions about in-game historical figures.

Such evidence as exists, however, serves to associate Furuyari with Shakespeare. For one, the very name of the character connects the Scorpion dramatist to the Bard. The character’s personal name, Furuyari, can be read as furu + yari–and in a language deliberately patterned after (sometimes poorly translated) Japanese. At least one meaning of furu, depending on the transliteration, is “shake,” and at least one meaning of yari is “spear.” The name therefore reads as “shake spear,” a slightly punning reference to the name of the Swan of Avon of which the man himself was evidently aware, given his work in securing his family’s coat of arms (Wolfe). It is a fitting name for a premiere dramatist in another milieu, and its deployment makes clear that the game’s writers are using the figure as a representative of the most famous of all playwrights.

Other evidence functions similarly. For example, one of Furuyari’s best known plays is One Winter’s Snowfall (Wulf et al., 32), the title of which evokes Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Another of his major works, Death of the First Hantei, presents a scene in which many people lie to their lord to ease his mind–but one refuses to do so (Soesbee 28); the scene evokes Cordelia’s refusal to tell sweet untruths to her father in King Lear. Yet another of his plays is described as “a three-part epic” (“Honest”), calling to mind the Bard’s three plays about Henry VI. Admittedly, no more than snippets of the texts of the plays are available–although role-playing games are themselves necessarily associated with theater through their performative nature, it is not often that full scripts are presented within them. But even that can be read as evocative of Shakespeare, given such theorized lost plays as Love’s Labour’s Won. There are connections, therefore, to be made between the role-playing game’s character and the Swan of Avon.

Unfortunately, the Shakespeare stand-in in L5R is a fraud, a non-existent person used as a cover for others. In its origins, the façade serves to cover over dramatists uncertain of the reception of their plays and as a convenient vehicle for the Scorpion to maneuver into positions from which to gather intelligence (Wick 36). Agrarian feudal societies do not necessarily offer much in the way of entertainment, so traveling groups of performers were likely to be welcomed warmly–and in the hours after the plays and after-parties ended, as the grateful hosts slept, the actors could creep about and find out more than had already been revealed by careful observation and drink-loosened tongues. Later, the returned spirit of a villainous figure–again, L5R is a fantasy game–assumes the identity of Furuyari, using the reverence in which the setting holds the (imagined) writer to maneuver into positions of power and influence and thence to attempt a coup against the current rightful rulers; for a time, he stands among the closest advisers of the lord of the Scorpion Clan, only to be exposed–and to confess himself as–a traitor to that lord and to the Empire as a whole (Wulf, “Master”). Subsequently, he actively works to undermine the legitimate authorities of the Empire (Wulf, “Unfinished”). That is, by posing as the playwright, the pernicious antagonist accrues influence that is then put to vile–and objectively evil, in the context of the game–ends. Neither view of the Shakespeare-analogue–and therefore of the Bard, by proxy–is favorable.

It might be argued, and with some justice, that L5R is simply a game and that the assertions made in it are not to be taken as representative or directive–and the implications of it are far less so. L5R is a series of games, and there is a disjunction between the world of the game and the world that enfolds the game. Too, the contextual materials the game offers are scanty, as any simulation’s must be. But L5R is also a sprawling narrative, one that has pulled in thousands of audience members across decades, and it is no secret that the kinds of fans associated with tabletop gaming are often intense in their devotion to the objects of their fandom. As Flegel and Roth, Roth and Flegel, and Stein and Busse assert, fandoms take into themselves no small part of those properties of which they are fans, integrating with them in familial, communal ways; what the properties do exerts influence on who its fans are. For L5R to put forth a view of Shakespeare that holds him a fiction–and one easily exploited for nefarious purposes–is dangerous, even if the view is occluded and partial. That a thing works subtly and through suggestion does not mean it does not work, after all, as the victims of any number of half-heard rumors can attest.

Even with such problems, though, the fact that L5R does engage with Shakespeare–and not only in Furuyari; for example, the plot of a foregrounded scene from a work of prominent in-world fiction closely mimics the final scene of Taming of the Shrew, highlighting a wager of obedience (Wick 15-17)–is itself an important thing. Among others, it reaffirms the central place of the Bard to the narrative communities that have succeeded him. It shows that the Swan of Avon still swims through the currents of popular consciousness in the English-speaking world, even in those eddies which may be thought to be far removed from the main stream, and it offers promise that the utility of Shakespeare and studies thereof are far from exhausted. More is being done, so more is yet to do, and that offers no small hope for those who will continue to undertake academic study of the humanities.

Works Cited

• Carman, Shawn, et al. Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, 4th ed., Alderac Entertainment Group, 2010.
• Flegel, Monica, and Jenny Roth. “Legitimacy, Validity, and Wriitng for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Labor.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1092-1108.
• “An Honest Ant.” Kaze no Shiro, www.kazenoshiro.com/kazenoshiro/1/hhorant.php. Accessed 5 October 2016.
• Roth, Jenny, and Monica Flegel. “It’s Like Rape: Metaphorical Family Transgressions, Copyright Ownership, and Fandom.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 6, 2014, pp. 901-13, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.964175. Accessed 29 September 2016.
• Shakespeare. The Taming of the Shrew. The Necessary Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, 4th ed., Pearson, 2014. pp. 2-41.
• Soesbee, Ree. Winter Court: Kyuden Seppun, Five Rings Publishing Group, 1999.
• Stein, Louisa, and Kristina Busse. “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context.” Popular Communication, vol. 7, 2009, pp. 192-207, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405700903177545. Accessed 29 September 2016.
• Wick, John. Way of the Scorpion, Five Rings Publishing Group, 1998.
• Wolfe, Heather. “Shakespeare Coat of Arms Discovery.” Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folger.edu/shakespeare-coat-of-arms-discovery. Accessed 3 October 2016.
• Wulf, Rich. “Unfinished Business, Part II.” Kaze no Shiro, 2016, www.kazenoshiro.com/2008/10/06/unfinished-business-part-ii/. Accessed 4 October 2016.
• —. “Master of Secrets.” Kaze no Shiro, 2016, www.kazenoshiro.com/2008/08/15/master-of-secrets/. Accessed 4 October 2016.
• Wulf, Rich, et al. Secrets of the Scorpion, Alderac Entertainment Group, 2003.

What follows is a paper proposal like that students are asked to produce for the PProp assignment in my section of ENGL & THRE 3333: Shakespeare: Comedies & Sonnets during the Fall 2016 instructional term at Schreiner University. Its topic is slightly aside from that allowed to the students; rather than treating a single work, it treats a more general Shakespearean reconstruction, looking for what prompts continuance of the Bard in popular culture. It does, however, adhere to the length requirements expressed to students; they are asked for 300 to 500 words, exclusive of heading, title,  page numbers, and any necessary Works Cited entries, and the proposal below is 342 words long, assessed by those standards. Its formatting will necessarily differ from student submissions due to the differing medium. How the medium influences reading is something well worth considering as a classroom discussion, particularly for those students who are going into particularly writing- or design-intensive fields.

Set in a fantastical analogue of feudal Japan and China, the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is a tabletop gaming property that, across the first two decades of its existence, encompassed a collectible card game, a role-playing game, miniatures wargaming, and more “traditional” table games. Each partook of an ongoing, player-driven storyline; that is, while there was an over-arching plotline for the whole gaming property, many of the points of that plot were determined by players, whether explicitly by fiat or through results achieved by victories at major gaming events. The direct and identifiable impact on storyline by players accounted for much of the game’s popularity and the loyalty of its player base. It also commanded a rich and detailed back history for the player-current narratives to emerge from, and that, in turn, included consideration of faux-historical cultural figures. One of them, Shosuro Furuyari, is a clear send-up of a particular view on William Shakespeare–one that is, unfortunately, not the most accurate view of the Bard to be found.

The view of Shakespeare is conveyed by L5R’s presentation of its foremost dramatic mind merits explication; the figure is repeatedly referenced and, though convolutions of plot only possible in a fantastic setting, appears–or seems to do so–so it is clearly one of importance to the overarching storyline. Consideration of what influences lead to the specific iteration of the Bard–major cultural threads near the time of the property’s beginning and at significant points in the overall narrative–also suggests itself as worth offering, and the influences likely to result from consumption of the idea of Shakespeare conveyed by L5R–that is, what are players whose views on the world are necessarily influenced by the works in which they partake–are also likely to need investigation. What implications such media influence has appear to be usefully interrogated, as well. In effect, looking at Shosuro Furuyari allows for examination of the continued utility of even bad views of the Swan of Avon, arguing in favor of continued study of already-well-studied works.