There appears to be an affinity between Shakespeare and postapocalyptic fiction. His works are invoked in a number of such novels, including Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Cronin’s novel is mainly set ninety-two years after a failed military experiment that has turned a large part of the American population into vampires, where what is left of humanity is living under a constant threat of violent extinction. Here Shakespeare is only present in a number of epigraphs, what Gerard Genette has referred to as ‘mute gesture[s]’ (156). In Mandel’s novel, set mainly in an America slowly recovering twenty years after a devastating influenza epidemic that killed millions of people, Shakespeare has a greater presence, both through the framing story of a production of King Lear, and through a travelling acting company, which almost exclusively performs Shakespeare’s plays. In this article I investigate the various ways in which Shakespeare is referenced and utilised, as well as which of his texts the authors have chosen to include, discussing what work the Shakespearean references perform and how they relate to questions of cultural memory. I argue that the epigraphs in The Passage, although relying on the reader’s participation in application and interpretation in order not to be a ‘mute gesture’, could be said to be of greater relevance to the reception and understanding of the novel, than Station Eleven’s often casual references to Shakespeare’s ‘greatest hits’.