Like apparitions of Shakespeare’s ghost, stories in which Shakespeare is either brought to the present or visited in his own era by means of a time machine turn on direct contact between Shakespeare and the modern world. Time-travel narratives, as a subgenre of science fiction, usually partake in popular culture’s ambiguous relationship with Shakespeare, as both an icon of cultural value and as a figure to be debunked. Accordingly, they often represent Shakespeare as grotesque in his body and bodily functions. Besides, many suggest that he is a sort of hack writer, and mock the way his works are received by a bardolatrous establishment. The pretensions of the humanities, too, are ridiculed and contrasted with the genuine achievements of the hard sciences. Thus, such stories support a middle-brow discourse on high culture. Some time-travel stories, however, such as those by Anthony Burgess and Hugh Kingsmill, are in fact far from low-brow. Whereas Burgess’s “The Muse” sends up modern literary theory in a time-travel parody, Kingsmill uses the form to deconstruct contemporary ideas about Shakespeare as self-projections and catering to the masses. Stories involving magical means of time travel, too, usually eschew the technocratic discourse of the time-travel narrative.