Professor Writes about High-Noon Showdowns and Shakespeare’s Histories

I sat down with Dr. Susan Cosby-Ronnenberg to talk about her book, Deadwood and Shakespeare: The Henriad in the Old West, which compares four of the bard’s historical plays to the critically acclaimed Western television series.

The book started out as a passion project for the professor, who describes herself as an avid TV watcher.

She explains that while on sabbatical she did have two ‘serious’ projects planned, but she wanted to “dip my toes into the water of pop culture studies.”

In 2010, she presented the paper at the National Pop Culture Studies Conference. “I had the twice the amount of material that I needed for the first draft,” she recalled, “which should have been a clue.”

After receiving a lot of positive feedback, Ronnenberg continued the project over the next several summers. “As I kept revising it, it kept growing. When I hit 83 pages, I decided that it was a book proposal, not a paper or two papers or three papers.”

She conducted her research by comparing analysis from Shakespeare’s historical plays to critical works examining the television show.

Ronnenberg is not the first person to do a critical study of the Deadwood series, with content also taken from blog posts and even the DVD box set commentary coming into her book.

The professor was surprised to find that she was the first one to specifically compare it to works of Shakespeare in terms of characters, plot, and presentation of the story.

“They’re both really male dominated performance pieces,” the professor said as she explained some of the parallels she found between an American Western and an English history play.

“Because most of the history plays are about political maneuvering or war, and so they feature large casts of male characters with marginalized female roles and that’s the same thing that the Western does most of the time.”

As Ronnenberg had never published a literary analysis book before, she was a little daunted on where to start. A friend and colleague of hers recommended McFarland, a publisher with a number of pop culture and lit analysis series.

The company website contained the information on what exactly she needed to send in for her proposal. “I looked at the conventions and what was required, and I already had most of that put together because I’d written so much,” she explained. “They wanted a chapter, I could easily pick one chapter out of all of that, but they also wanted a structure for the overall project.” Questions such as the exact amount and content of chapters, as well as a final word count were trickier for Ronnenberg to answer. After consulting with those she knew who had already published books, she provided the publisher with a sample chapter, as well as a proposed outline of the project. McFarland reviewed the proposal for three months before the professor received a response.

Ronnenberg was surprised and flattered by the response people have had to her book. “It’s been nice to have people be excited about it. There are people who know me who are excited for me, but what’s been really fun is people that I don’t know who are excited that there’s a book on this.”

The professor mentioned that people she knew from previous jobs, graduate school, undergraduate school, and even high school have posted pictures of themselves with her book on social media. “That has been really exciting to see.”

The main thing that the professor wants people to take away from reading her book is:

“For people who love Shakespeare, expand their viewing/reading/listening to watch Deadwood and give it a chance. And vice versa for people of love Deadwood to take another look at Shakespeare’s history plays. Because people who enjoy one might get surprising amount of enjoyment out of the other.”

Deadwood and Shakespeare: The Henriad in the Old West by Susan Cosby-Ronnenberg is available at most major book retailers, as well as on Amazon.