Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media 9781474295116, 9781474295147, 9781474295123

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Broadcast Your Shakespeare

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Broadcast Your Shakespeare Continuity and Change Across Media Edited by Stephen O’Neill

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Stephen O’Neill and contributors, 2018 Stephen O’Neill has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Joss Barrat All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-474-29511-6 PB: 978-1-3501-1882-9 ePDF: 978-1-474-29512-3 eBook: 978-1-474-29513-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations viii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiv Note on Procedures and Abbreviations xvi

Introduction: ‘Sowed and Scattered’: Shakespeare’s Media Ecologies 1 Stephen O’Neill

PART ONE The Politics of Broadcast(ing) Shakespeare 1 Broadcasting Censorship: Hollywood’s Production Code and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 27 Darlena Ciraulo

2 Broadcasting the Bard: Orson Welles, Shakespeare and War 47 Robert Sawyer

3 This Distracted Globe, This Brave New World: Learning from the MIT Global Shakespeares’ Twenty-First Century 67 Diana E. Henderson

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CONTENTS

4 ‘Once more to the breach!’: Shakespeare, Wikipedia’s Gender Gap and the Online, Digital Elite 87 David C. Moberly

PART TWO Genre and Audience 5 Emo Hamlet: Locating Shakespearean Affect in Social Media 107 Christy Desmet

6 ‘It Is Worth the Listening To’: The Phonograph and the Teaching of Shakespeare in EarlyTwentieth-Century America 123 Joseph Haughey

7 Juliet, Tumbld: Fan Renovations of Shakespeare’s Juliet on Tumblr 141 Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer

8 ‘Certain o’er incertainty’: Troilus and Cressida, Ambiguity and the Lewis Episode ‘Generation of Vipers’ 161 Sarah Olive

PART THREE Broadcast the Self: Celebrity and Identity 9 Vlogging the Bard: Serialization, Social Media, Shakespeare 185 Douglas M. Lanier

CONTENTS

10 Tweeting Television/Broadcasting the Bard: @HollowCrownFans and Digital Shakespeares 207 Romano Mullin

11 ‘Somewhere in the world … Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it’: Tom Hiddleston Performing the Shakespearean Online 227 Anna Blackwell

Afterword: Special Affects: Performing Resistance Through Narrowcasting 247 Courtney Lehmann Notes 256 Index 307

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 ‘Oberon, King of the Fairies, rules the Fairy Kingdom’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (Warner Brothers). Reprinted with permission of ‘The Cleveland Press Shakespeare Photographs: 1870–1982 Collection’, Special Collections, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University 29 1.2 ‘As the two couples continue their quarrelling, Oberon causes night to fall in the forest’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (Warner Brothers). Reprinted with permission of ‘The Cleveland Press Shakespeare Photographs: 1870–1982 Collection’, Special Collections, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University 43 6.1 ‘Mark Antony’s Curse’ recording, 1895. Photo courtesy Michael W. Sherman, Monarch Record Enterprises 124 6.2 The Victor Record Company advertisement in the English Journal, February 1923. Copyright 1923 and 1941 by the National Council of Teachers of English; reprinted with permission 130

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Anna Blackwell is an Early Career Academic Fellow working in the Centre for Adaptations, De Montfort University. She has published on the topic of the contemporary Shakespearean actor in Critical Survey and Adaptation, and her continuing research on the intersections between Shakespeare and popular digital culture can be seen in edited collections including, Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital: His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Adaptation. She is currently writing a monograph for inclusion in the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series. Darlena Ciraulo is Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri, where she specializes in Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare. Her work on Shakespeare and appropriation has appeared in Philological Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and Philosophy and Literature. Her passion for visual culture has led to research on Shakespeare, art and film; she has in this area written an article on botanical illustration in Romeo and Juliet (2015) and on Shakespeare in Western films (Multicultural Shakespeare, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book-length project that explores Shakespeare in the mythic American West. Christy Desmet was Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer), Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (with Robert

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Sawyer), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams) and a volume on Helen Faucit, the nineteenth-century Shakespearean actress and critic. With Sujata Iyengar, she co-founded and was co-general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Her work focused on Shakespearean appropriation and on Shakespeare in new media and digital contexts. Joseph Haughey is Assistant Professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, where he teaches courses in literature and pedagogy. His current research projects trace Shakespeare’s ever-evolving role in American secondary curricula, from the early nineteenth century – when excerpts from his plays appeared in readers not as literature but as exemplars for teaching public speaking – to the present, focusing particularly on its historical intersections with educational technological advancement and progressive teaching methods (e.g. web- and performance-based approaches), as well as the influence of wider theoretical and critical underpinnings in the teaching of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry over time. Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Global Citizen Honors Program at Olivet College, where he teaches Shakespeare, film, creative writing, composition and rhetoric and literature. His long-standing research interest is performances of Shakespearean texts in film and television, with more recent forays into the construction of knowledge and identity and into representations of Shakespeare in social media. His work has appeared in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and The Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference. Diana E. Henderson is Professor of Literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, co-editor of Shakespeare Studies and a former president of the Shakespeare Association of

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America. Her publications include Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance; Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media; A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen; and Alternative Shakespeares 3, as well as over forty Shakespearerelated articles. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Actors’ Shakespeare Company, the Potomac Theater Company, the New York Theater Workshop, the Huntington Theater Company and the Central Square Theater as consultant, featured speaker or dramaturg. Douglas Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire; for 2016–17, he served as Fulbright Global Shakespeare Center Distinguished Professor at Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick. His book Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture appeared in 2002. He has published widely on Shakespeare in mass media, as well as on Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, the Jacobean masque and literature pedagogy. He is currently working on two book projects, a study of Othello on screen and a book on The Merchant of Venice for the Arden Language & Writing series. Courtney Lehmann is the Tully Knoles Professor of the Humanities at the University of the Pacific. She is the author of Shakespeare Remains (2002) and Screen Adaptations: Romeo and Juliet (Methuen Series in Drama, 2010), as well as coauthor of Great Shakespeareans, Volume XVII (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013) and co-editor of Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (FDU Press, 2002) and The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory (FDU Press, 2002). In 2016, she was the recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award, the highest honour a faculty member can achieve at the University of the Pacific. She has published more than thirty-five articles and essays on Shakespeare and cinema and is currently completing a book on women directors of Shakespeare films.

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David C. Moberly is completing a dissertation at the University of Minnesota entitled Taming of the Tigress: Gender, Shakespeare, and the Arab World. His publications include an article in Critical Survey on the first Arabic Taming of the Shrew and a chapter on the Irene myth in Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe (2017). Global Shakespeares, Shakespeare translation, adaptation, and the digital humanities make up his core research interests. He is also a co-author with Margaret Litvin of the Shakespeare in the Arab World blog. He has presented his work at the World Shakespeare Congress and the Shakespeare Association of America. Romano Mullin teaches English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, where he recently completed his PhD on the cultural afterlives of the Renaissance in the twenty-first century. His research interests include Shakespeare in film and digital cultures. Sarah Olive is Senior Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her monograph Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy, 1989–2009 was published by Intellect in 2015. She is also the Chair of the British Shakespeare Association’s Education Committee, the founding editor of Teaching Shakespeare and the founder of the Education Network blog. Her research interests are in Shakespeare in popular culture and education, primarily in the UK and East Asia. Stephen O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Maynooth University-National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is the author of two books, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (Arden Shakespeare, 2014) and Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007), and co-editor with Janet Clare of Shakespeare and the Irish Writer (2010). His articles and book chapters include work on Shakespeare and Ireland, Hip-Hop

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Shakespeare, social media Shakespeares and Shakespeare and quotation. With Maurizio Calbi, he co-edited the special issue of Borrowers and Lenders on ‘Shakespeare and Social Media’ (2016). Robert Sawyer is Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches Shakespeare, Victorian Literature and Literary Criticism. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (FDU Press, 2003), he is also co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Routledge, 1999) and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2001). His most recent publication is a book chapter entitled ‘“A Whirl of Aesthetic Terminology”: Swinburne, Shakespeare, and Ethical Criticism’ in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Palgrave, 2014). His book entitled Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry was published by Palgrave in 2017, and his next book project, Shakespeare Between the World Wars, will be published in 2018. He is currently co-editing a special issue of Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance entitled ‘Shakespeare in Cross-Cultural Spaces’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would sincerely like to thank all of the contributors for their hard work and patience, as they responded to suggestions and to what was hopefully not an overly demanding editorial process. Multiples of emails and track changes later, they can now see how their chapters combine to broadcast Shakespeare. The idea for this collection first emerged from a seminar I convened convened at the 43rd meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, held in Vancouver, 2015. Thanks are due to the original set of participants, some of whom are among the contributors here, as well as to Mark Thornton Burnett for suggesting the idea of such a seminar and to Katherine Rowe and the SAA board for supporting it. Indeed, the SAA’s continuing support and development of research on adaptations and media approaches to Shakespeare is both encouraging and valuable. Other individuals need to be mentioned here because they variously enabled, assisted and helped frame the shape of the volume: Pascale Aebischer and Peter Kirwan each gave terrific feedback and encouragement on the original proposal; Robert Sawyer, in addition to supplying a chapter, offered sage advice and suggestions; Courtney Lehmann generously agreed to give of her time to write the Afterword; and Maurizio Calbi kindly offered comments on the Introduction. Thanks are also due to colleagues closer to home; to the supportive research culture at Maynooth University, where humanities research and scholarship continues to be valued in and of itself; and to my colleagues in the Department of English. Thanks to my partner Andy Whelan for listening to me talk about this book for more time than he would have cared for, and for helping with the index. I would also like to thank Margaret Bartley at Bloomsbury for her support of the volume throughout; to

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Susan Furber for her careful management of the project into completion; to the peer reviewer for insightful, productive and detailed feedback; and to those individuals who worked on the cover art and the book’s production, especially Manikandan Kuppan at Integra. It is a privilege to be published by the Arden Shakespeare and to contribute a media focus to its rich history of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. It is with sadness that, since the publication of the hardback edition and this paperback, one of the contributors Professor Christy Desmet passed away. Her essay in this volume is one among her host of publications that made such a formative contribution to Shakespeare studies. The editor and publisher extend their sympathies to Christy’s partner, David, her colleagues Sujata Iyengar, Robert Sawyer and Darlena Ciraulo, and the network of Shakespeareans that will continue to use and appreciate her work. Stephen O’Neill, December 2018, Dublin.

NOTE ON PROCEDURES AND ABBREVIATIONS All Shakespeare quotations are from the Arden Shakespeare Third Series and, where not yet available, from the Second Series. OED

Oxford English Dictionary

SQ

Shakespeare Quarterly

SS

Shakespeare Survey

SSt

Shakespeare Studies

Introduction: ‘Sowed and Scattered’ Shakespeare’s Media Ecologies Stephen O’Neill

Shakespeare studies is experiencing a media turn. This is evident in the way that scholars in the field are giving serious critical attention to the proliferation of vernacular produced Shakespeare materials online. It is evident in the increasing interest in Shakespeare’s media histories or, more precisely, in how Shakespeare – here understood as an assemblage of texts – finds iteration through specific, yet interconnected, media technologies such as radio, TV, film and digital platforms. It is evident too in the recognition of how Shakespeare has so often been mobilized to legitimate a new technology or serve as its launch content.1 To such well-known examples as Alexander Graham Bell quoting ‘To be or not to be’ in the earliest demonstrations of the telephone might be added

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the uncanny reappearances of Shakespeares in vlogs, tweets, memes, computer games and other stand-out media genres of the early twenty-first century.2 The present volume builds on work in the field around the related areas of adaptation and appropriation across literary, popular cultures and digital cultures, as well as Shakespeare’s media histories.3 A media-consciousness has asserted itself in international Shakespeare studies, although more recent work owes much to scholarship on Shakespeare in performance, as well as to Shakespeare and film. The nature of this volume’s contribution to the field and to what is an ever-evolving understanding of what Shakespeare constitutes is captured in its title: Broadcast Your Shakespeare aims to examine and critically reflect on the intersection of each of its terms. The particular word combination recalls Cole Porter’s ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, from the musical Kiss Me Kate (dir. George Sidney, 1953). This citation provides a figure for media iterations of Shakespeare more generally, where what is discovered is a repetition of Shakespeare the cultural icon as a seemingly stable property (as in the case of Porter’s lyrics, where Shakespeare is the epitome of high culture and, more problematically, traditional masculinity, making women ‘kow-tow’), but also repetition with a difference, as the texts return in potentially new guises. As Kiss Me Kate, a seemingly post-‘proper’ Shakespeare text, becomes entangled with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, which is already bound up with Shakespeare’s cultural capital, it becomes difficult to draw clear lines of demarcation between Shakespeare/‘Shakespeare(s)’. Such media crossovers powerfully suggest that mediatized survival has long been an intrinsic part of the ‘living-dead’ Bard, rather than some ex-post-facto addition.4 This dimension alone makes the turn to media within Shakespeare studies engaging and signals new ways of thinking about Shakespeare’s (re)appearance in writing and cultural productions.

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Sowings: ‘Broadcast’ and other terms ‘Broadcast’ is firstly understood to entail transmission on a large scale as with radio and TV, but also to denote forms of vernacular media production, as captured in YouTube’s original strapline ‘Broadcast Yourself’, with its connotation of empowered individual media users as the ‘broadcasters of tomorrow’.5 It is precisely in such connections between older and newer media that this volume is interested. The connections that emerge are neither casual nor incidental but instead reflect the condition of the contemporary mediascape as comprising a variety of coexisting media technologies and platforms that remediate aspects of each other and perform their social functions.6 Chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and move between traditional media and newer forms such as the database and social media networks, with no one medium prioritized. Foregrounding how Shakespeare is sowed and scattered, this arrangement should enable readers to attend to the continuities, sometimes surprising, between old and new media iterations of Shakespeare. As such, this volume unfolds a deep understanding of the history of Shakespeare in media, one that challenges that relation as linear or as progressing towards some end point of absolute sophistication. The volume takes its cue from recent media-oriented approaches to Shakespeare. It considers Shakespeare as situated in and informed by a complex media ecology, which Ingo Berensmeyer defines as ‘the networked, interlocking structure of different media and media configurations’.7 Proposing media ecology as a critical paradigm for interpreting the Shakespeare phenomenon, Berensmeyer argues that attention to media in Shakespeare’s own works and in the texts’ media afterlives allows for a dialectic rather than a binary of difference and continuity, bridging the gap between the apparent extremes of historicist and presentist interpretations of Shakespeare. This dialectical approach involves recognizing the newness

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or difference of the most recent media refashionings of Shakespeare and, at the same time, attending to these as accretions: ‘new media configurations’, Berensmeyer suggests, ‘add new layers of meaning to texts from the past by inserting them into new contexts’.8 They are, furthermore, performative accretions, in that they ‘do not imitate or replicate something given; they actively shape reality’, and do so in the context of other media.9 The emphasis on contextual relationality is a reminder not to overstate medium specificity, since the attributes, appearance and operations of one medium can only ever be understood in relation to other media. As Richard Burt and Julian Yates argue, media-specific experiences of Shakespeare are in fact ‘a series of variable frame effects predicated upon other media’.10 A pure, linear sense of Shakespeare’s progression through successive media (this might look something like from theatre-to-book-toradio-to-film-to-TV-to-social media) is a fallacy that belies the entanglements of media platforms within the media ecology.11 Moreover, interpreting Shakespeare’s media histories as a set of entanglements or interruptions need not be a deficit – as Alan Galey cautions, in desiring ‘purity in transmission we can overlook the pleasures of contamination’, limiting the potential of media to regenerate or renew Shakespeare for successive audiences.12 To think further about how Shakespeare becomes through media, one can look to a second understanding of ‘broadcast’, that is its use, dating from the late 1700s and early 1800s, in agriculture, as in to ‘sow by scattering’. Tracing the term, and its application to radio and TV, James Hamilton explains how the farmer progresses through a field, scooping a handful of seeds from a seed bag and casting them through the air in the hopes that they germinate and grow into crops to be later harvested.13 The practice establishes a key dynamic about the relation between the human user and media. Shakespeare himself draws on harvesting metaphors, most notably in Coriolanus, where Coriolanus figures the plebeians’ discontent as a function of patrician appeasement: the ‘very

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cockle of rebellion’, he claims, has been ‘ploughed for, sowed and scattered / By mingling them with us’.14 Without using the word, Coriolanus speaks of things being broadcast by individuals, by a collective, but also, he implies, by nature’s hidden operations, as the seeds of rebellion take root. It is this connection between human action and the workings of nature that renders broadcasting as agricultural practice especially significant as a metaphor for ‘media broadcasting’, a term whose ‘trajectory’, Hamilton argues, ‘can be understood as a complex historical process of mystification and naturalization – the transmogrification of a human muscle-powered activity into a non-human, invisible force of nature’.15 In this metaphor, media objects entail volitional human action but also processes that come to function semi-automatically, acquiring a technological or non-human agency, so that Shakespeare is the seed that is scattered not merely by human hands but by the very processes of media technologies themselves.16 This resonates with debates about the hidden algorithmic operations of new media platforms but, as the following chapters demonstrate, there is a longer history of medium agency in the constitution and experience of Shakespeare.17 The volume puts forth a sense of a Shakespeare as something that is sowed in the media ecology and scattered through it. This second understanding is conceptually useful for Shakespeare studies. It complicates universalizing claims about Shakespeare’s ‘presence throughout the world as the common currency of humanity’, recently made by Stephen Greenblatt, and instead interprets Shakespeare as something that is disseminated, dispersed or cast abroad through a complexity of networks in which, as humans, we are situated.18 ‘Broadcast Shakespeare’ as a concept – and critical paradigm – thus provokes several issues. It raises the question of a medium’s role in the production of Shakespeare as global. It further provokes concern about media iterations of Shakespeare as forms of dilution and loss, a leaving behind of the ‘thing itself’ in favour of a copy, derivation or perhaps a ‘mingling’ (to recall Coriolanus’ pejorative phrase) of Shakespeare with

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other media objects, although media adaptations may just as readily forge a sense of Shakespeare’s proximity to us as they do an impression of Shakespeare’s historical remoteness. A third and related sense comes into play, of broadcast as ‘volume’, or as the amplification of Shakespeare through and across media. This sense of a proliferation, or even a surfeit of Shakespearean content, bears comparison with the digital age of the twenty-first century as characterized by not so much information flow as ‘infoglut’.19 Yet older media such as radio and the phonograph, discussed in Robert Sawyer’s and Joseph Haughey’s chapters, respectively, in their own ways contributed to the spread of Shakespeare to audiences on a mass scale. The title’s possessive pronoun – ‘your Shakespeare’ – may seem to contradict this massification of Shakespeare to an amorphous collective audience, and to leave aside the individual respondent, producer or viewer. However, all of the chapters in various ways address the human agent involved in the production and consumption of Shakespeare within and through specific media. In fact, and to borrow from Burt and Yates’s interpretation of the First Folio’s appeal to the reader, ‘the phenomenon that was, is, and will be “Shakespeare”’ is a function of the dynamic between text, media and the reader, the latter being the necessary ‘biosemiotic motor that enables “Shakespeare” to go viral’.20 What further emerges is an understanding of Shakespeare as constituted by human actors as they variously use, respond to or repurpose media or find themselves habituated by a medium’s properties and its politics. This expands or reframes what is meant by authenticity vis-àvis Shakespeare since, as Romano Mullin notes in his chapter, each user’s recognition and deployment of Shakespeare comes to be considered authentic on its own terms. Moreover, the contributors to this volume can each be understood as producing their own Shakespeare in the process of critical analysis and in the context of the interpretive community that is Shakespeare studies, its critical paradigms and parameters. Writing and speaking across professional fields are themselves

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forms of broadcasting, as Diana Henderson notes in this volume, and the imagined ‘your’ of the volume title will no doubt resonate differently among participants in the field of international Shakespeare studies. How the personal enters into Shakespeare studies – or how personal Shakespeare becomes for us as critics and writers – is, as Arthur Little Jr argues, bound up with historically valorized claims for Shakespeare as unmarked white property.21 As critics, readers, theatregoers or viewers of media screens, ‘we’ (that collective postulated in scholarly writing) share and sustain Shakespeare again and again but also, and from varying degrees of access and privilege, broadcast our identities as these are informed by such categories as race, class, gender and sexuality. In a sense, then, the personal is always already part of the conversation about Shakespeare, about what we do in and through that signifier. So to ‘Shakespeare’, the final term in the title, which may appear to require the least elaboration, although one that still proves contentious, even within early-modern studies itself.22 Some glosses or explanations have already been suggested – Shakespeare as an assemblage; Shakespeare as a proliferation (signalled in the field through the increasingly normative use of the pluralized form); Shakespeare as historical process or phenomenon, as in something that has an origin or fixed point (‘sowed’) in, but is also recurrent through, history (‘scattered’). None of these operate in isolation. Nor is a Shakespeare play regarded in the following chapters as an entirely relativist formulation bereft of its own internal logic or agency. Shakespeare is sufficiently capacious to provide for a range of significations. To return to ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, in addition to interpreting Porter’s lyrics as an appropriation of Shakespearean value for Kiss Me Kate’s assertion of heterosexual masculine desire, they can be read as appropriations in another sense, that is as arrogating value on to the individual such that Shakespeare becomes an agential property, one available not just to the song’s protagonist, but to all.

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The politics of broadcast(ing) Shakespeare The example of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ alerts us to broader questions about what Shakespeare signifies, how Shakespeare’s cultural capital is deployed and the politics of popular culture and media adaptations of Shakespeare. Part One addresses these questions in its focus on the politics of broadcasting Shakespeare, although politics is a thread that runs through all of the contributions. It leads off with Darlena Ciraulo’s chapter, which plays with broadcast as a conceptual tool in order to interpret Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) in the context of Hollywood’s Production Code, a censorious set of guidelines that sought to spread moral values through the industry. Ciraulo uncovers competing understandings of the ideological affordances of Shakespeare as broadcast or remediated through the filmic medium. The studio, Warner Brothers, regarded Shakespeare as a high-art icon that could legitimate film and provide an appropriate morality but also as a repository of recreational material for movie houses in the Depression era. Warner Brothers even commissioned Shake, Mr Shakespeare (1934), a short film (available on YouTube) that served as a promotional for the representational capacities of the motionpicture industry. The film features a troupe of Shakespearean characters and iconic scenes that are interrupted by Shakespeare himself, who angrily asks, ‘Was it for this I spilled such magical ink?’, to which the reply is, ‘ah listen Bill, times have changed, this is different’.23 Here sounding a recognition of different media effects, the troupe then break into full song, urging Shakespeare to ‘shake’ along to the music and to go with the times. Media, Shake, Mr Shakespeare recognizes, bring their own affordances and assert the distinctiveness of their effects. In directing Dream, Reinhardt and Dieterle used the pastoral world of Shakespeare’s play, richly conveyed on the big screen, to subtly assert their artistic vision. As Ciraulo argues, film

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in this context was less about a politics of containment, in the sense of providing pleasing spectacles to mass audiences, than about an aesthetics and politics of provocation, as the directors used Shakespeare’s dream world to cast forth new possibilities. How Shakespeare, as a site of possibility, combines with the affordances of media to become an agential force is further explored in Robert Sawyer’s chapter, although here the focus is on the medium of radio. Examining Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of Julius Caesar, which Welles had directed for the Mercury Theatre the previous year, Sawyer details how Welles deployed and clearly understood radio’s broadcast affordances, not least its capacity to generate a theatre of the mind. Radio brings Shakespeare into the contemporary moment, as in Sawyer’s example of NBC’s promotion of its ‘Streamlined Shakespeare’ radio broadcasts as ‘the words of William Shakespeare’ spoken by ‘the voice of John Barrymore’, and does so politically, as Welles’s production overtly addressed the rise of fascism. Yet, even as it claims to ventriloquize Shakespeare’s words and make them audible through star voices like Barrymore’s, the medium also displaces Shakespeare as the radio networks and the medium itself become the story. The politics Sawyer identifies are, then, on a large scale as he demonstrates how Welles used radio not merely to broadcast his cherished Shakespeare but also as an artistic weapon by amplifying his own voice to articulate opposition to fascism and to tyranny of all kinds. Equally, however, Sawyer turns his reader’s attention to subtle shifts in cultural values and hierarchies occasioned by radio Shakespeare in the 1930s, as the medium fostered a convergence of Shakespeare with other markers of cultural distinction such as the celebrity of the radio presenter, or the corporate branding of broadcast networks like CBS or NBC. The chapter thus invites us to consider the deployment and circulation of Shakespeare’s cultural capital as a function of technological developments, the demands of the contemporary moment and, in the case of Welles, dynamic individual agency.

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This triad features in Diana Henderson’s chapter, which addresses the dispersal of Shakespeare’s cultural value on a global scale through the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive. The site has significantly contributed to a broadly cast Shakespeare, providing scholars and practitioners with access to an extraordinary range of Shakespeare theatre productions and films from around the world. Henderson addresses the politics at work when, as scholars and students, we access Shakespeare through online platforms. She applies a ‘SWOT’ analysis – borrowed from the business world – to assay the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the MIT-based archive. This allows for a reflective critical approach in which Henderson foregrounds the achievements of the archive, from its emergence out of scholarly collaboration to its logic of deprivileged inclusion and a decentring of the traditional Anglophone epicentres of the Shakespeare industry. She also notes the archive’s limitations in realizing a comprehensively global sample of Shakespeare performance. The latter is for reasons that are at once technological, practical and legal. The politics in question here are those of a medium, in the sense that archives entail back-end processes of selection as well as the front-end arrangements of material as viewed and accessed on the interface itself. This is one of the ways the archive produces Shakespeare, or comes to inform what Shakespeare is understood to encompass. However, the politics Henderson uncovers are also those of the academy, as it grapples with the desirability of Open Access and the limits of copyright, and of humanities scholarship too, as it strives to sustain an ethical commitment to facts and complexity of thought in the digital age. Henderson’s chapter invites the field to think critically – and hopefully – about how as teachers, researchers or practitioners, we use digital resources. The politics as well as ethics of media use are among the issues explored in David Moberly’s chapter on Shakespeare entries on Wikipedia. Urging Shakespeare studies to think critically about the online, hyperlinked encyclopaedia and the Shakespeares that are broadcast in this setting, Moberly

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finds that editors or Wikipedians regard themselves as policing the boundaries of Shakespeare. At work here is a form of agency indicative of digital participatory cultures in which, theoretically at least, all digital denizens can make their own interventions into the information flow or, in this instance, regard Shakespeare as their property. As a radically participatory website, Wikipedia enables a broad spectrum of people to see themselves as part of Shakespeare discourse in a way hitherto impossible. Yet Moberly complicates this scenario by foregrounding Wikipedia’s gender gap: more men than women participate as editors. Despite constant editing and revision, entries for Shakespeare continue to reflect a male-centric construction and, as Denis Austin Britton has highlighted elsewhere, a white bias too. Britton cites the example of the Wikipedia entry ‘Shakespearean scholar’ where, of the 164 scholars listed, ‘only three non-white scholars make the cut’, leading him to suggest that ‘not everyone who works on Shakespeare gets to be considered a Shakespearean’.24 The platform’s biases need, then, to be urgently contested and, while not minimizing the inequities within the field of Shakespeare studies itself, Moberly calls upon Shakespeare scholars to become Wikipedians in order that more accurate, balanced and diversified accounts of Shakespeare might take root online.

Genre and audience ‘A Shakespeare play is no cadaver, useful for an autopsy. It is a living, vibrant entity that has the power of grasping us by the hand.…’ This claim for Shakespeare’s vitality and immediacy, made by Orson Welles and Roger Hill in an article for the English Journal, invites us to think of Shakespeare as effortlessly bringing forth audiences and resonating with them. ‘His words’, Welles and Hill continue, ‘march like heartbeats’.25 As captivating as these sentiments are, they

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risk positing an ahistorical understanding of audience, the ‘us’ who receive and respond, as well as of Shakespeare’s affective resonance. Although as audiences across time ‘we’ share the commonality of being sentient humans, this does not guarantee a commonality or universality of feelings or emotions. The chapters in Part Two suggest different ways for interpreting and understanding Shakespearean affect. They do so through a consideration of audience and genre as a crucial dynamic, with the former being constituted by the latter and its set of culturally specific and historically situated conditions. Arranged so that we move between new and old media – YouTube, the phonograph, Tumblr and TV – the chapters suggest media-focused, contextually informed approaches to Shakespeare audiences. Such attention to the historicity of audiences resists what can be, in the twenty-first century, a dismissal of the nature and power of past audiences in favour of a privileging of today’s audiences as more thoroughly engaged.26 Yet, more recent technological innovations that turn audiences into participant producers can foster a greater awareness of the potential ‘modes of reception’ in older media that might otherwise be overlooked.27 Among the platforms that has generated new Shakespeareinspired genres and audiences is YouTube and, in her chapter, Christy Desmet extends existing work on YouTube Shakespeare to identify the genre ‘emo Hamlets’.28 Influenced especially by Ethan Hawke’s portrayal in Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), these vernacularly produced videos and media register a particularly postmodern and post-millennial alienation and disaffection. It is a sense of Hamlet that has a long history – is Hamlet not the original emo? – but one that, as it circulates and accumulates on social media platforms, also appears to spread like a contagion. Through the lens of affect theory, Desmet interprets these emo-styled Hamlets as a set of feelings that accumulate without fully manifesting, such is the disembodied, dematerialized nature of social media itself. It evidences ‘structure of feeling’, to borrow Raymond Williams’s linkage of the shaping power of literary genres and forms on

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emotions, in that the videos reveal a shared aesthetic or ‘look’ but also appear grouped and connected on the platform.29 Emo Hamlets suggest the appearance or promise of connection. With Alemeryeda’s film as an intertext, and with its interest in older or soon-to-be obsolescent technologies, and thus the perils of mediation, emo Hamlets locate in the Shakespearean text social media’s possibilities for connection, and its deferral or failure. Desmet’s chapter here demonstrates the value of a media studies approach to Shakespeare, inviting us to regard YouTube as the intermediary between Shakespeare and us that forges a relatedness and, at the same time, interrupts that relatedness by making us conscious precisely of its work as an intermediary. How technology functions as an intermediary in the Shakespeare classroom is the focus of Joseph Haughey’s chapter. He examines the technological classroom of earlyto mid-twentieth-century America, where the phonograph, a technology developed in the 1890s, afforded teachers the opportunity to bring professional actors’ voices into the learning environment, and to turn students into an audience of participants rather than passive readers. Delving into the media ecology of the period, Haughey uncovers the critical and pedagogical debates surrounding the phonograph. Among the voices to be heard, both on the phonograph recording itself and in appraisals of it, was that of Orson Welles. His claims about Shakespeare’s vitality have already been noted, but in the piece with Roger Hill for the English Journal, Welles advocates the use of the new technology as an effective means to engage students. For Welles and Hill, text-based learning was impeding students’ appreciation of Shakespeare: the phonograph brought performed Shakespeare, frequently accompanied by music, into the classroom. Haughey sifts through the English Journal, the central publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, to provide an historical examination of how teachers thought about and incorporated the phonograph in their Shakespeare instruction. Where some teachers embraced the new multimedia approach, others regarded it as a displacement

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of more traditional approaches grounded in close reading. The ghost in the machine, as Haughey’s analysis reveals, is Shakespeare as cultural icon: the concern is about precisely the kind of Shakespeare that is being broadcast, especially where it seems too accessible, too popular or unscholarly and insufficiently text-based. These debates resonate with those in the twenty-first-century Shakespeare classroom. Identifying such patterns and continuities, Haughey argues for a broader historical conceptualization of technology, one that can inform its present and future applications. While recognizing continuity between media, acknowledging specificity is equally important and revealing. Earlier media such as the phonograph had participatory elements: the students of the classrooms Haughey’s chapter addresses may have been less passive recipients of text than hitherto, but their experience of Shakespeare through technology remained bounded by the classroom setting. With more recent participatory media platforms such as YouTube, Pinterest and Tumblr, each characterized by low barriers to entry, the contemporary student of Shakespeare has a surfeit of opportunities, both as consumers – thus occupying a more traditional sense of audience – and also producers. It is this media ecology that Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer’s chapter explores, as he undertakes a thick description of iterations of Shakespeare’s Juliet on Tumblr. Although Shakespeare studies has turned its critical attention to social media as the site of feminist and queer adaptations of Shakespeare’s heroines, thus far this social media and microblogging platform has been overlooked, perhaps because it includes more risqué content than other sites.30 HendershottKraetzer’s chapter demonstrates that Tumblr warrants close attention from a Shakespeare studies perspective. This is a Shakespeare by and for ‘prosumers’ in that seemingly stable distinctions between content producer and audience become blurred. The Juliets constructed in this setting are the collective work of producers and consumers, with the latter playing their part through such participatory actions as reblogging or liking posts. Interest-driven, the texts are a form of narrowcasting

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with the aim being to connect with the fan community but, as digital objects on a self-described ‘global platform’, they carry within them the potential for broadcasting. Even though connection may be remote and dematerialized, as in Desmet’s chapter on emo Hamlets, each Tumblr user posts with the expectation of an audience – somewhere, out there. Furthermore, it is a Shakespeare driven by the convergence of fan cultural practices with the affordances of the Tumblr platform. Tumblr Juliets bear the hallmarks of traditional fan behaviour (such as borrowing from canonical texts, or those of mass culture; identifying with character; and actively producing new meaning through alternate narratives or plots), as well as those of the platform, in that they tend to be multimodal, combining word, image, sound and GIFs. As HendershottKraetzer argues, the agency associated with the fan here, as he or she intervenes, remedies or renovates an iconic character like Juliet, is performed within and through the affordances of the platform, such that the non-human technological entity can itself be understood as an agential actor in the network of Juliets. From this perspective, Tumblr and other social media Shakespeares can be interpreted not just as vernacular broadcastings that signal new forms of audiencehood but as spaces where users and technologies cohabit. Newer media like Tumblr do not replace older technologies; instead, these coexist within the contemporary mediascape. This volume conveys something of this convergence in its arrangement: so Hendershott-Kraetzer’s medium-specific analysis of Tumblr is followed by Sarah Olive’s chapter on the intersection of Shakespeare and TV, in this instance the detective show Lewis. As with the discussion of Tumblr, what emerges is a sense of medium pleasure, a realization about the technology itself as satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding. In her chapter, Olive addresses the pleasure that genre especially can instil and sustain in audiences. Lewis and its predecessor Morse are known for their literary allusiveness, which variously construct, engage and reward a knowing audience. Olive focuses on the use of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida in the episode ‘Generation

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of Vipers’ (the title is a quote from the play), and carefully maps the connections between the Golden Age detective genre, the play and its critical reception. Shakespeare’s play informs plot and characterization, while selective quotation is used in the episode to, for instance, articulate the perils of social media; here Shakespeare is implicitly figured as a residual medium, the repository of moral values. Olive’s approach provides for close attention to the politics of genre, and of appropriation too, with an unfolding understanding of the rhizomatic relation between the texts.31 However, if the effectiveness of popular culture appropriations and adaptations is judged on their capacity to enact a ‘conceptual transformation’ of the Shakespearean intertext, the Lewis episode constitutes something of a missed opportunity.32 As Olive argues, where popular culture appropriations broadcast Shakespeare in the sense of producing a more progressive, contemporary politics, ‘Generation of Vipers’ is ultimately retrogressive in its use of Troilus and Cressida to underpin and valorize the gender conservatism of the detective genre: the TV show lags behind critical reappraisals of the play. Olive’s analysis highlights the delimiting effects of generic conventions on the kinds of Shakespeare that are intelligible in such a mass medium like TV but also identifies deeper interconnections between the politics of genre and audience pleasure.

Broadcast the self: Celebrity and identity The chapters in Part Three continue the volume’s thematic interest in the interplay between old and new media, between medium specificity and continuity, but elaborate on the identities that are mediated in the process. Douglas Lanier examines the emerging genre of the Shakespeare web series as a new mode of Shakespeare-inspired, character-and-personality driven storytelling. His chapter includes an appendix listing over fifty

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such series, thus providing a useful resource for future research on this new genre of Shakespeare vernacular production. Combining the vlog with long-form serialization, and posted across a number of social media platforms, this genre reflects teen culture tastes and priorities as they are mediated through online vernacular or participatory media. It is to here, argues Lanier, that the discursive energies associated with the teen Shakespeare film, a turn-of-the-millennium phenomenon and global in scale, have migrated. Lanier attributes the appeal of the web series to its immersive quality and reality effect. For the young performers and their online followers, Shakespeare provides plenty of expansive narratives to be adapted, yet the impulse is towards accumulating characterological revelation rather than plot and narrative development. The effect is to centre events on characters and their interpersonal relations, with Shakespeare perhaps functioning as a (mere) conduit for broadcasting a self. As Lanier suggests, Shakespeare web series disclose the social dynamics of being online; in a sense, the vlogs are allegories about identity performance in this setting. Shakespeare may – and may not – acquire special status in this new adaptational mode. Yet the catalogue of Shakespeare-themed web series that Lanier analyses supports an argument for Shakespeare’s ongoing circulation and cultural value. While there is the possibility that Shakespeare functions in such a way as to generalize about teen or online identity categories, the interest across the genre in queering Shakespearean characters suggests the revisionary aesthetics and politics of fandom; Shakespeare, the web series imply, is worth repurposing, reimagining and re-energizing; and Shakespearean characters provide productive frames for playing with and understanding identities online. A similar sense of Shakespeare as a frame – or scaffold – for performing identity online emerges in Romano Mullin’s chapter on Twitter Shakespeare. Here, as in Lanier’s chapter, attention to the specifics of online cultures provides for a detailed consideration of how Shakespeare is mobilized in different digital settings. Examining Twitter as a key site of new digital Shakespeares, Mullin considers the fan-generated

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group @HollowCrownFans. Global in its following, the Twitter account and handle draws its impulse from the BBC’s adaptation of the Henriad, generating a diverse range of digital objects that simultaneously pay homage to the TV show and extend its reach. If, in Lanier’s chapter, it is primarily through new media like the web series that pop and/or teen culture releases its Shakespeare interests, Mullin suggests a model of media convergence, in which fan-generated paratexts circulate alongside other modes of Shakespeare adaptation as TV, theatre and film. These Twitter Shakespeare texts are, as Mullin emphasizes, authentic on their own terms. The examples he explores reveal the workings of fan culture as it intersects with the affordances of the Twitter platform, which coaxes users into modes of social performance. Hashtags such as #ShakespeareSunday suggest a call and response, enabling and encouraging digital denizens to directly engage with and even produce their own Shakespeare texts, in turn performing an online presence and identity through Twitter and Shakespeare. As Mullin highlights, #ShakespeareSunday produces different temporal frames, at once invoking a sense of history through The Hollow Crown but also, and more emphatically, addressing contemporary events, such as, at the time of writing, the UK’s national referendum on membership of the European Union. While there is a reliance on The Hollow Crown itself, and thus an implicit sense of it as an anchoring authority, @HollowCrownFans amounts to collective broadcasting or multicasting as users and participants not only establish new reception parameters for the TV show but create their own set of thematics, priorities and interests. As Mullin notes, these frequently cohere around the show’s performers, especially those with significant star power like Tom Hiddleston, whose image and body, in both Shakespearean and other roles, become the site of a desired identity. However, Mullin argues, despite the international appeal of an actor like Hiddleston,  and despite the fact that @HollowCrownFans itself has a global following, this particular Twitter Shakespeare frequently activates traditional Anglophone expressions of the Bard.

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That Hiddleston is the focus of Anna Blackwell’s chapter suggests the significance of stardom, celebrity and social media to understandings of how Shakespeare signifies in the twenty-first century. Blackwell closely attends to Hiddleston’s performer identity online and offline, examining how social media texts construct his status and reputation as quintessentially Shakespearean. Like Mullin, Blackwell unpacks the expressions of identity that occur as Shakespeare’s cultural value is transposed onto Hiddleston. Through the lens of star studies, and with close attention to reception contexts, Blackwell moves across a range of media texts, including Hiddleston’s role as Loki in the Marvel franchise Thor, and social media avatars and memes that pay fan homage to Hiddleston or his various character portrayals. She considers how these iterate and broadcast an implicit set of value judgements about his Shakespeareanism, into which are folded normative expressions around Englishness, masculinity, class and race. Hiddleston emerges in this analysis as a complex, mutable text, the locus of desires and competing values, at once the epitome of high culture as well as a pop and digital culture icon. As Blackwell argues, he exemplifies the enduring international appeal of male, Eton-educated British actors, as well as the centrality of the actor’s body, to Shakespeare’s continuing adaptive legacy within pop culture. This fetishizing of Hiddleston extends to Shakespeare scholarship too: Shakespeare Survey featured on its cover Spencer Murphy’s photo art of a bare-chested Hiddleston as Coriolanus for the Donmar Warehouse’s 2014 production.33 This volume itself avails of Hiddleston’s star power in its use of his image on the cover art: it makes him a Shakespearean. Here, and in the social media texts Blackwell explores, Hiddleston is a mediating text for Shakespeare. He popularizes Shakespeare via his celebrity. But, as Blackwell argues, Hiddleston also functions as symbolic gatekeeper, an imagined guardian of authenticity, as captured in her example of the macro with Hiddleston listening intently, the caption reading ‘Somewhere in the world … Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it’. For all their

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humour, underpinning such digital iterations of Hiddleston are unconscious assumptions about what Shakespeare and indeed Hiddleston constitute; both ‘texts’ are presented as categories of identity that are intelligible for being normative, even as their circulation on the internet suggests a potential array of contradictory significations.

Scatterings Hiddleston suggests himself as a figure for Broadcast Your Shakespeare, providing points of connection rather than a linear through-line between Shakespeare performance in theatre, film, digital broadcast (as in Donmar’s Coriolanus for NT Live) and digital cultures. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, Hiddleston offers a visualization of broadcast Shakespeare as something human actioned or sowed but also scattered through the media ecology. Recognizing how the actor, his body and his image are, as Blackwell’s chapter foregrounds, mediated and mediatized is not to negate Hiddleston’s personal and professional achievements but to address the contribution of interconnecting technological processes to the text that is Hiddleston and to move towards a less anthropocentric understanding of cultural production. Hiddleston thus functions as a synecdoche for ‘Shakespeares’ as the consequence of the dynamic interaction of multiple actor – the text, human user, media technologies – within shifting cultural contexts. The chapters in this volume each, in their own way, address this dynamic and combine to offer a new historicizing of Shakespeare through a media lens. That focus is, in part, attributable to ‘our present moment of media transition’, as the pervasiveness, impact and speed of online technologies foster an acute appreciation of media and mediatization.34 However, the chapters do not privilege the present as the site of interpretation but instead provide critical reflections on the

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newly new Shakespeare, as if recognizing that these too will become old or historical examples of Shakespeare’s mediatized survival, or will be remediated by future media. The book thus argues that current analyses of new media Shakespeare have much to learn from older or legacy media and that an awareness of both media specificity and continuity can enhance Shakespeare pedagogy and research. Contributors reveal the work of specific media in variously popularizing, democratizing or contemporizing Shakespeare but also push debate beyond these familiar parameters to offer discerning analyses of the politics of broadcasting Shakespeare (Ciraulo, Sawyer, Henderson, Moberly); the production of audience through media genres (Haughey, Desmet, HendershottKraetzer, Olive); and the different modes through which Shakespeare is constructed, or how Shakespeare, in tandem with celebrity, operates as a conduit for self-expression, both wittingly and unwittingly (Lanier, Mullin, Blackwell). The chapters further suggest the work of media in embedding Shakespeare into social life, and turn a critical eye to what might otherwise be too easily regarded as habitual, quotidian encounters with the putatively transcendent Bard. Broadcast Your Shakespeare does not seek to make media the story of the Shakespeare phenomenon, as if media provides access to some pre-mediatized, authentic Shakespeare, nor does it regard media as proffering an overarching theorization of ‘Shakespeares’. Rather, the volume argues for the value of integrating a media studies approach with that of Shakespeare studies. What emerges through this combined perspective is an understanding of Shakespeare as always already existing in and reappearing through media, as well as an acute recognition that a medium brings to Shakespeare its own frame effects. Media are further understood as generative, in that they suggest a new vocabulary for the text, or extend its possibilities, or realize new texts, such as the short film Shake, Mr Shakespeare featured in Ciraulo’s chapter, the Wiki sonnet featured in Moberly’s, the Lewis episode explored by Olive, the web series as discussed in Lanier’s chapter or the

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tweets and memes that Mullin and Blackwell analyse. Media bring their own affordances and instead of interpreting these as some vandalizing of Shakespeare, or invoking hierarchies that privilege one media over another, this volume values the distinctiveness of media effects. In other words, Tumblr Shakespeare is not better than Twitter Shakespeare any more than Shakespeare in performance affords a purer Shakespeare experience than Shakespeare on screen: these are, to echo Shake, Mr Shakespeare, just different. In its critical eye and generic diversity, Broadcast Your Shakespeare invites its readers to approach Shakespeare as a series of media stories at once old, new and ongoing. The volume advances a dialectical approach to Shakespeare in media, attending to change as well as to continuities. In this regard, it resists a teleological understanding of contemporary Shakespeares as progressing towards some absolute point of accomplishment. While it is possible to discern a series of developments from the Shakespeare of traditional broadcast media to the digital platforms of the twenty-first century, and to recognize how, in this trajectory, Shakespeare’s currency is validated and the field of international Shakespeare studies energized, equally it is evident that the surface newness of a new media platform may disguise residues of older media, or entail its own politics that prove far from progressive. This volume resists humanist claims around Shakespeare’s immanence, sovereignty and universalism, claims that continue to be articulated within the field, and instead interprets Shakespeare as contingent on historically situated media and media users. ‘Broadcast’ is presented as conceptual tool and critical paradigm that understands Shakespeare as a complex, multifaceted dynamic comprising texts, users and media. Or, to put this another way, Shakespeare is continually being sowed and scattered, planted and dispersed, and, as the following chapters suggest, it is not always possible or desirable to decipher the seed from the human and technological mechanisms that cast it so broadly. To allow for and critically notice the ‘mingling’, to echo Coriolanus, of Shakespeare and users within a diverse

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media ecology is, Broadcast Your Shakespeare argues, to arrive at a productive understanding of Shakespeare as a mutable process rather than something static. Shakespeare is unfinished cultural and ideological business, the capacious site not only for individual and collective expression but also for discerning continuities between and changes across media; for exploring how users and technologies are coeval; and for destabilizing such binaries as old and new, high and popular. It is this Shakespeare, predicated on principles of openness and difference, that this volume values and seeks to broadcast.

PART ONE

The Politics of Broadcast(ing) Shakespeare

1 Broadcasting Censorship Hollywood’s Production Code and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Darlena Ciraulo

In 1934, Warner Brothers Studio began production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an all-star cast of silver-screen luminaries: James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Dick Powell as Lysander, Olivia De Havilland as Hermia, Joe E. Brown as Flute and Victor Jory as Oberon. The making of the movie came under the surveillance of Will Hays, who in 1922 had become the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). One of the primary aims of the MPPDA was to shore up the ethical standards of Hollywood in the light of a series of highprofile and very public sex scandals involving popular glamour icons and idols.1 The appointment of Hays appropriately fit the pristine image that a recently scandalized Hollywood was

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urgently attempting to promote. As Gregory Black notes, Hays ‘symbolized the figurative Puritan in Babylon’.2 A conservative in politics and mainstream in religion, Hays conferred an air of old-school decency and hard-edged propriety.3 Under the leadership of Hays, the MPPDA adopted a set of guidelines to uphold the moral subject of films, known informally as the Production Code. The story of the production and release of Warner Brothers’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) – which fell under the censorship of the Production Code – provides a critical case study for examining how Hollywood censors, as well as the movie industry, viewed cinema as a vital broadcast medium for the conveyance of morality and entertainment. The term ‘broadcast’ is used in this chapter to signify three interrelated ideas. By first looking at the basic tenets of the Production Code, this chapter explores how Hollywood regulators understood film as a powerful medium for the dispersal or dissemination of ethics to a large audience. The word ‘disseminate’ derives from the Latin dissiminare, which literally denotes ‘to plant’ seeds. Correspondingly, one early meaning of ‘broadcast’ is, as already discussed in this volume’s Introduction, ‘to scatter (seeds, etc.) abroad with the hand’. As will be shown, the film industry under the jurisdiction of the Production Code aimed to lay the foundation, or plant ‘seeds’, necessary for the proper inculcation of moral values and ethical growth. Second, ‘broadcast’ in this chapter refers to the circulation of filmic material for popular enjoyment and edification. This signification reflects the more familiar meaning of ‘broadcast’: ‘to scatter or disseminate widely’ (OED).4 With the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Warner Brothers utilized the medium of film to popularize Shakespearean drama by bringing ‘high art’ to the general public. The studio bolstered its cultural (and economic) capital, while simultaneously bringing the éclat of Shakespeare to mainstream America. ‘Broadcast’ further suggests casting forth to sow new material from older content. The joint directors of the film, Max Reinhardt

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FIGURE 1.1 ‘Oberon, King of the Fairies, rules the Fairy Kingdom’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (Warner Brothers).

and William Dieterle, appropriated the fairy landscape of Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century A Midsummer Night’s Dream to communicate the political evils of fascist Germany in pre–Second World War Europe. Reinhardt believed that filmmaking possessed an unprecedented ability to broadcast

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artistic statements to a vast international audience, even though the Production Code attempted to restrict and thus control creative expressions.

Censoring Hollywood Censorship efforts aimed at curbing movie content were far from novel in the American Depression era. The origins of city- and state-sponsored filmic control had firm roots in turnof-the-century grassroots campaigns, which were instigated by the angst and probity of neighbourhood social reformers. According to one critic, these moralists worked ‘to cure the societal ills that came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the triple blow of overwhelming immigration, explosive urbanization, and unrestrained industrialization’.5 Local attempts to control cinematic material for the benefit of national security and community well-being encountered debilitating obstacles at the national level.6 Federally mandated censorship was not enacted into law, but Hays, as the new head of MPPDA, actively sought to appease the complaints and grievances of moral reformers, especially those who targeted Hollywood as the new-fangled capital of debauchery and corruption. Notwithstanding the pressure from moral advocates, Hays’s first role as censor involved convincing individual studios to self-regulate material in order to limit, or altogether avoid, losses incurred from a possible cut film. As Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons write, ‘The movie companies … could not afford scandal or the federal probes of Hollywood high finance that might follow. Neither could they afford clean movies. They could afford – and very much needed – an astute public relations campaign.’7 Although movie moguls feared the establishment of antitrust laws, opponents of the film industry hoped that, as one early-twentiethcentury commentator puts it, ‘pecuniary profit [would] no

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longer accrue from a picture on the strength of its appeal to salacious tastes’.8 The concept of self-regulatory censorship, one aimed at quelling the rising tide of criticism, was backed by an unlikely but vociferous group, the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae. This religious organization sought to restructure the movie industry by implementing scrupulous and conscientious change from the inside out without governmental interference.9 Less preoccupied by concerns of financial loss, Catholic reformers were wary of federal censoring because it would, in all probability, provide a mere bandage for an ever-growing wound.10 In 1927, the American picture industry had already published a rudimentary list of suggested ‘Dos and Don’ts’, but the use and efficacy of these suggested rules were, in actual fact, inconsequential. According to censor Martin Quigley, ‘its generalized and vague character encouraged them [the industry] either to circumvent its injunctions or to ignore them’.11 Catholic Reformers of cinema were looking to anchor the industry’s rectitude in an unassailable morally Christian doctrine. They hoped that the codification of prohibited subject matter would supply the groundwork for dismantling the evils of Hollywood. Protestants also objected to licentious material in film but, instead of demanding a radical creed of production in legal censorship, they looked for a workable reconciliation between artistic freedom and the common good.12 The philosophy that developed around altering the base fabric of Hollywood decorum adhered to a distinct set of standards, known as the Motion Picture Production Code (1930–68), governed by the Production Code Administration (PCA). The Production Code, actually titled ‘A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Picture’, was endorsed by Joseph Breen, chair of the Production Code Administration. Co-authored by the Catholic priest Daniel Lord and Martin Quigley, the PCA composed rulebook guidelines that upheld, as well as assumed, a universal belief system of correct human conduct.

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These dictates, which underscore a prescribed vision of ethics, were to be followed in every Hollywood movie, and the PCA issued a seal of approval for each acceptable film. The Production Code consisted of two parts: ‘General Principles’ and ‘Particular Applications’. The first section delineates three fundamental rules that presuppose an essentialist ideology of moral behaviour: 1 No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. 2 Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. 3 Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.13 Although the Production Code underwent various changes and revisions over the decades, the ‘General Principles’ in the version of 1930 takes for granted that moral classifications, such as ‘evil’ and ‘sin’, or for that matter, ‘Law, natural or human’, have a uniform meaning or application. Furthermore, while the second section, ‘Particular Applications,’ outlines specific forbiddances and identifies categories of transgression and depravity under twelve subheadings, it never fully defines why or how the abrogation of the prescriptions constitutes immorality. (This writer applauds, however, the humanitarian principles upheld in the Code, especially the regulation of child and animal cruelty, as well as the prohibition against exposing children’s sex organs.) According to the Production Code, the PCA acknowledges and supports the ‘high trust and confidence’ that people around the world have placed on them (133). Thus, the responsibility of supervising the ethical content of film was interpreted as a moral obligation. As one observer keenly notes, ‘If we go to the film for a moral exhortation then we usually end up with moralism.’14

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Moralism – here identified as the desire to instil examples of absolute right and wrong – leads inevitably to a staunchly narrow and bigoted view of movie production, or of any art form for that matter.

Censoring fairyland The release of Warner Brothers’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream occurred at the onset of the Production Code crisis that shook filmdom in the 1930s. The filming brought to the foreground the relationship between censorship in film media and moral content. Director Max Reinhardt, an Austrian-Hungarian Jew, fled to the United States in 1934 soon after the Nazi government forced the relinquishment of his Berlin theatres. His son, Gottfried Reinhardt, writes that ‘Forced to leave Germany, Max Reinhardt loses [sic] his operational base and most of his possessions.’15 In 1905, Reinhardt’s ‘operational base’ was associated with the legendary Deutsches Theatre. As head of this celebrated playhouse, Reinhardt’s Shakespearean productions ushered in an enormous wave of critical acclamation. Regarding his reputation, Oliver Saylor writes that Reinhardt’s contemporaries ‘had become accustomed to see in the productions of this theatre the most important expression of modern stage art’.16 Moving beyond traditional Victorian staging practices, Reinhardt especially embraced modern scenic techniques, and his brilliant skill at design and décor, along with implementing the use of innovative acting, met with widespread approval.17 Reinhardt’s 1905 enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Neues Theatre brought him an impressive amount of fame and recognition.18 After fleeing Nazi persecution, Reinhardt turned his creative impulses to an American stage production of his long-standing theatrical success, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he presented the classic piece in six US cities, including the district of Hollywood itself in 1934.

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A premier Shakespearean producer and director, Reinhardt shortly received a movie contract from Warner Brothers to put on celluloid his majestic treatment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His cinematic partner was German-born William Dieterle, a Jewish studio director at Warner, who, moving to Hollywood in 1930, had worked with Reinhardt fifteen years earlier in Berlin. The high-brow image of Shakespeare appealed to Warner Brothers as a way to bolster its filmic reputation or, as one critic states, ‘to produce a work of “high art” responding specifically to new kinds of Hollywood censorship’.19 Warner Brothers Studio even issued Shake, Mr. Shakespeare (1934), a Vitaphone twenty-minute short, that illustrated Shakespeare’s marketability. In Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, written by Cyprus Wood and directed by Roy Mack, an assistant production manager is instructed to read all of the Bard’s works in one night to search for saleable plots. A dream sequence follows in which notable characters from the plays burst out into song and dance, and the amusement suggests how Shakespeare can accommodate the needs of showbiz under surveillance. More than mere erudite material, Shakespeare provides movie houses with recreation and diversion for its Depression-era audience. (In one scene in Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, Hamlet bowls with the skull of Yorick, while Romeo and Juliet fight over studio contracts.) When the character ‘Mr. Shakespeare’ finally arrives on stage, Hamlet advises the playwright to get with the times: ‘Today the screenplay is the thing,’ and Falstaff jocundly chimes in with ‘You gotta shake, Mr. Shakespeare.’20 Although Hamlet’s line, ‘the screenplay is the thing’, adds to the wit of this publicity piece, it also underscores the invention and artistry of moving pictures. Such ideas are reflected in the Production Code. The PCA recognized movies as ‘entertainment and art’,21 and Hollywood censors were keenly aware of film’s powerful ability to shape viewpoints and mould thought and behaviour. Despite the humour of Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, the trailer for Warner Brothers’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream boasts of

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the movie’s artistry and ‘MAGNIFICENCE,’ proclaiming it is ‘The Most Spectacular Film Ever Produced’. With a ‘cast of a 1000’ and the ‘immortal melodies’ of Felix Mendelssohn for its score, the film promises to reach a new level of brilliance and ingenuity in cinematic art. Warner Brothers sought to combine an image of highbrow, artsy Shakespeare with popular entertainment and the high-jinx love plot of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream provided an ideal synthesis of culture and fun. The movie trailer celebrates the play’s ‘ROMANCE that has Inspired lovers for 300 years’. Over and beyond the appeal and charm of this romantic storyline, the picture, according to the trailer, ‘Hits a New High in Hilarity’, acted by fifteen famous stars. This filmic experience ‘Two Solid Hours of Sheer Delight’ is offered at affordable prices as well.22 In addition to elaborately choreographed dances, the mirth of the madly doting lovers in the Athenian forest contributes to the ‘Sheer Delight’ of the film, and as Robert F. Willson observes, ‘The Reinhardt-Dieterle Dream reveals some striking parallels to screwball comedy.’23 Hollywood’s interest in remaking an Elizabethan play into a glamorized, side-splitting and overtly romanticized production – one available to a mass audience – coincides with the ethics of the PCA. As Douglas Lanier writes, ‘In part a bid by Warner and MGM for artistic prestige and in part a response to early ’30s concerns about sex and violence, the major film productions of Shakespeare seemed to ignite the cultural fantasy of a (re)popularized Shakespeare.’24 This cultural fantasy even launched American radio broadcasts of Shakespeare in the mid-1930s: NBC’s ‘Streamlined Shakespeare’ and CBS’s ‘Columbia Shakespeare Cycle’, as Robert Sawyer discusses in this volume. Pierre Berthomieu further notes that the visual effects and star-studded cast of Warner Brothers’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘expressed the wish to go against the idea of Shakespeare elitism and to break down possible cultural frontiers’.25 Given this emphasis on the popularization of Shakespeare, Reinhardt-Dieterle’s opulent and glitzy production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream conferred an air

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of sophistication, while simultaneously pleasing viewers with amusing entertainment. Warner Brothers’s expenditure of $1.5 million on the film guaranteed an extravagant production, and the mainstream plot of the picture would be an unlikely subject for Will Hays’s censorship. Moreover, M.G.M’s Romeo and Juliet and Paul Czinner’s As You Like It were scheduled to open in theatres the same year, and these films plainly indicated the boxoffice viability of Shakespearean love stories. Yet ReinhardtDieterle’s artistically sumptuous stagecraft, drawing on the distinguished talents of art director Anton Grot, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and ballet choreographer Bronislava Njinska, quickly clashed with Hollywood’s watchdog Will Hays. The PCA had called for the removal of offensive material from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to safeguard moviegoers from illicit subject matter. As noted previously, the ‘General Principles’ of the Production Code provided the theoretical framework for ‘Particular Applications’. The applications demanded the expurgation of banned topics such as ‘methods of crime’, ‘the use of liquor’, ‘sex perversion’, ‘white slavery’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘scenes of actual childbirth’, ‘profanity’ and ‘indecent or undue exposure’.26 Like all other major movie companies, particularly after 1934, Warner Brothers would be subject to fine and penalty, including banishment from American theatres, unless the studio agreed to excise scenes that violated applications of the code. Although these regulations were not constitutionally binding, Hollywood generally acquiesced to preserve its commercial interests by privileging moviemaking profitability over artistic expression. As Jon Lewis writes, ‘Cooperation and collusion protect the studios against the vagaries of the marketplace, the American zeitgeist, and all those so-called independent producers and distributors.’27 In essence, the PCA and Hollywood engaged in a mutually serving enterprise in which money and morality seemed to work hand in hand. Despite the rigorous effort of Warner Brothers to produce a high-quality and ‘safe’ movie, the PCA voiced objections to

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the content of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their criticism centred largely on infractions against specific applications of sexual conduct delineated in the Production Code: these problematic scenes dealt with Titania’s passion for Bottom and the seduction of Titania’s attendant fairy. Emphasizing the absurdity of broadcasting censorship, Ken Ludwig’s farcical play Shakespeare in Hollywood (2004) turns Will Hays into a buffoon and the enforcement of the code into a farce. Although Ludwig dramatizes a fictional conflict between Hays and Reinhardt, he explains that ‘the objections that Hays raises in the play are the ones that the Hays Office actually raised at the time of filming’.28 In the comedy, the character Hays demands that Reinhardt alter or expunge episodes of alleged sex perversions. The righteously indignant Hays explains to a confused Reinhardt the rudiments of the Production Code. Thus, the first projected deletion concerns the illicit relationship between Titania and Bottom. Titania’s affection for a donkeyheaded man would most likely fall under ‘Sex perversion’ in ‘Sex’ under ‘Particular Applications’ of the code. Hays states, ‘I’d like to see cut from your script as soon as possible … where someone named Titania sleeps with a man who has been changed into a donkey’ (39). When Reinhardt questions the nature of this offense, Hays retorts that ‘It is disgusting! It smacks of bestiality’ (39). Not only does this dialogue point to Hays’s own incompetence as an administrator of film (he is not familiar with the basic plot of the play) but it also illustrates the ridiculousness of bowdlerizing a scene that is iconic for its comic treatment of romantic love. The PCA found its strongest objection to the film in Reinhardt-Dieterle’s creative vision of Shakespeare’s woodland fairies. In Ludwig’s play, an incensed Hays reads from the script: ‘page 108, it says “the black fairy overpowers the white fairy and carries her off.”’ Hays continues in disbelief: ‘A black man carries off a white woman, and you expect to have no problems?’ (39–40). It can be surmised that the carrying off of a white character by a black one, or the ravishment of a white fairy, violates the Production Code’s prohibition against

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‘Seduction or rape’ under ‘Sex’ in ‘General Applications’. Moreover, it goes against the injunction against presentations of ‘Miscegenation’, listed under ‘Sex’ in the ‘General Applications’ (134–45). Since Ludwig bases his high-jinx comedy on actual objections that the Hays Office put forward, it can be speculated that the PCA may have viewed the fairy as a symbol of black power in the context of racist America. Yet Reinhardt creates the black fairy to represent the ‘spirit of Evil’ in fascist Europe: ‘People being dragged screaming from their homes. Families separated. Children murdered’ (40). According to Ludwig, ‘Reinhardt said that he created the black fairy to represent the evils of Nazism’ (11). On the one hand, the Production Code stipulates that a movie should mirror and inculcate examples of proper, collective values; thus, the expunging and modifying of alleged immoral and/or transgressive content is of vital importance for censors. On the other hand, Reinhardt’s cinematic rendering of fairyland stems from a deeply personal desire to express in symbolic form the horrors of Nazism. According to Ludwig, Jack Warner feared that the PCA would also object to the homoerotic rapport between the characters Pyramus and Thisby (11). In the shooting script (screenplay by Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall), male actors were scripted to play both the male and female parts, as they also would have done in early modern playhouses. Although Hays does not evince a concern with the ‘Pyramus and Thisby’ storyline in Shakespeare in Hollywood, his ineptitude is amplified at the end of Ludwig’s comedy. Finding Oberon’s magical love juice, Hays haphazardly squirts some of the potion in his eye and then looks into a mirror. Naturally, Hays falls in love with his own image. This narcissism demonstrates Hays’s inability to see beyond his own conservative agenda. That Hays has been comporting himself as a narrow-minded ass is literally figured when his head is transformed into that of a donkey. Hays is blinded by his smug sense of moralism and by his inflexible support of the Production Code. As Ludwig points out, although the PCA tried to censor the film’s content

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during production, these objections were eventually lifted without explanation (11).29

Hollywood as green world Despite the PCA’s stranglehold on Hollywood, Reinhardt believed in the artistic and liberating potential of film media. In the same year that Warner Brothers released A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the New York publishing company Grosset & Dunlap issued a photoplay edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a foreword by Max Reinhardt. Interspersed within the text are nine photographic stills from the movie, and the book’s cover advertises that it is ‘illustrated with scenes from the spectacular Warner Bros. production’.30 The dust cover, designed by artist A. B. Philips, contains a fantastical drawn collage with characters from the film, and it highlights the marital union of Theseus and Hippolyta, who stand happily together in a fairy-filled wood. In the foreword to this publication, one geared towards a popular reading audience, Reinhardt declares cinema’s unique power to reach millions of viewers across the globe, and he assures the cinematic projection of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a worldwide audience. Reinhardt continues to assert that the movie A Midsummer Night’s Dream enhances the experience of Shakespeare through the ‘magic of the motion picture camera’, along with the ‘ingenuity of Warner Brothers Studio’ (v). Not only do the tools of filmmaking enrich the Bard, but the medium of film operates as a utopian space that both unifies people and offers individuals a private hideaway in fantasy: ‘Every one has a secret corner into which he can retire and find refuge in Fancy’ (v). The big screen brings together all facets of society – ‘the great and the lowly, the rich and the poor’ – and these diverse populations discover a safe harbour from daily strife in the escapism that movies offer, especially the picture A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vi). Reinhardt

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understood that filmmaking, by combining technology with art, possesses the ability to distribute a grand aesthetic picture to an international audience, enticing spectators into an imaginative land of ‘Fancy’. The Reinhardt-Dieterle production utilized the studio’s large pool of cinematic devices and team of artistic talent to disseminate ‘Shakespeare’s lovely fantasy’ to ‘unnumbered millions’ (v). As imagined by Reinhardt, Hollywood is not only a private refuge but a public stage for personal expression. As Willson states, ‘Having escaped from the oppression of Hitler’s Germany, both Dieterle and Reinhardt viewed Hollywood as a creative kingdom in which technology placed at their disposal the tools to realize their artistic dreams.’31 Hollywood corresponds to the Athenian forest, or enchanted green world, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the ‘green world’, a term coined by Northrop Frye, characters undergo a transfiguring experience by departing from a ‘normal world’ (a city or court) to arrive in a ‘green world’ (such as a wood or grove). This pastoral location acts as redemptive agent in comedy.32 Although the idealistic underpinning of Frye’s theory has been challenged by critics, the green world ‘dream’ of Reinhardt and Dieterle shows Hollywood as a locus amoenus for artistic interpretation. For Reinhardt, the green world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – represented by fairyland – opens the pathway to alternative visions (or dreams) that encourage and nurture art. As Reinhardt writes in the foreword to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘since Life itself is a dream, we can escape it through our dreams within the dream’ (v). Throughout his theatrical career, Reinhardt repeatedly turned to this ‘dream’ play, and he directed diverse productions of it for over thirty years. As J. L. Styan states, Reinhardt ‘displayed his A Midsummer Night’s Dream like a personal banner’.33 Indeed, Reinhardt in many stage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had constructed Shakespeare’s Athenian woods as an idyllic setting, stressing the captivating richness of fairyland. As Roger Manvell explains, Reinhardt ‘developed the fairy element in the play along romantic,

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magical lines until it dwarfed the rest with its lighting effects and choreography’.34 In order to accentuate the bewitchment of the play’s woodland intrigue, Reinhardt also constructed a three-dimensional revolving forest with real trees, enveloped by bushes, and a pond that sparkled in the shimmering moonlight.35 Moss-covered ‘nooks and hollows on the hillocky stage floor’ added to the fabulous illusion of the ‘Athens Woods as a self contained world’.36 The vibrant scenography invited the viewer to enter into fairyland as participant as well as an onlooker. Designed by Gustav Knina, Reinhardt’s 1905 legendary set gave full realization to ‘green world’ romanticism, using, as Dennis Kennedy describes it, ‘a forest of thick tree trunks, realistic branches, and a carpet of grassy moss’.37 The sensory and tangible enchantment of the set conferred an element of concreteness and solidity to the shadow world of nighttime and its attendant moonlit sprites. This element of romantic expressionism gave weight to the imaginative possibility of the fairy world. However, in an ironic turn, Reinhardt and Dieterle use the platform of Hollywood to broadcast the evils of subjugation, both artistic and political. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s fairyland in the Reinhardt-Dieterle film version glimmers with supernal beauty. On the other hand, the landscape is dominated by an inimical, tyrannical force. The green world in this Reinhardt-Dieterle production is complicated, if not conflicted. Oberon and his fairy gremlins emerge as sinister agents of coercion and terror. Reinhardt’s stage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had become increasingly nefarious, and the darker undercurrent of Reinhardt’s dramaturgy coincided with the escalation and stronghold of Nazism. Gary Jay Williams writes that ‘with the rise of Hitler, darker shadows fall across his last versions, including the film’.38 In a flamboyantly choreographed ballet dance, performed before the arrival of dawn in the movie, Oberon’s fairies drive offstage Titania and her entourage of ethereal sylphs, who appear to move in a hypnotic and deathlike state. Rounded up, they succumb to the overwhelming might of the fairy king’s

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squad of demonic goblins. This dance interlude symbolizes the elfin king’s ultimate authority and command. He has not only cruelly stolen Titania’s Indian boy, played by childhood actor Sheila Brown, but he has also caused Titania to fall in love with Bottom. In an earlier movie scene, the Indian child gambols about fairyland, riding through the starry night on a unicorn and intermingling with an orchestra of musicians comprised of gnomes. While frolicking with a band of pixie children, the child takes delight in the merriment and jollity of wonderland, and the camera eventually closes in on Titania (Anita Louise), who holds the child in a full embrace of consummate affection. Titania and her followers embody green world idealism, which is juxtaposed to Oberon’s repressive regime. Only when the prized Indian boy lies in Oberon’s possession does he release his royal wife from the humiliation of loving an ass. As Oberon states in the film and in Shakespeare’s play, ‘And now I have the boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.’39 Oberon’s exercise of power, unlimited and supreme, resembles despotism. To symbolize Oberon’s absolute rule, the fairy king’s costume, designed by Max Reé and Milo Anderson, mirrors his repressive command. Oberon dominates the screen towering over his terrain on a magnificent horse; he wears a black bejewelled costume replete with a branched crown and dark cape, ghastly in its length and engulfing everything in its wake. Oberon’s policing crew hover menacingly about him in dark bat-like outfits, indicating an unassailable unit of strength that can’t be easily infiltrated or destroyed. By contrast, Titania and her fairy band are dressed in delicate gauze, flowing dresses – all white – willowy figures that sparkle and twinkle across the set, mimicking the grace and refinement of swans. Oberon’s black fairies predictably overwhelm Titania’s fairies, and this struggle is portrayed in a culminating and breathtaking moment in the film’s ballet number. In a dramatic dance scene, Titania’s defiant fairy (performed by the Danish ballerina Nina Theilade) attempts to resist subjugation. One of Oberon’s patrolling fairies (uncredited), whose outfit reveals

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FIGURE 1.2 ‘As the two couples continue their quarrelling, Oberon causes night to fall in the forest’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (Warner Brothers).

his brawn and muscular strength, successfully vanquishes and immobilizes the resisting threat. Valiantly striving to repel domination, the white fairy slowly capitulates, with hands still

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courageously fluttering with life, while the camera fades to the ebony of the night-time sky. It is not without significance that Shakespeare’s Oberon and the actual Will Hays share similarities. Like Hays, Oberon demonstrates a superior ability to manipulate, stage-manage or simply censure action. The fairy king, as patriarchal ruler of the Athenian woods, has the capability to commandeer eyesight. Oberon can make Lysander’s ‘eyeballs roll with wonted sight’ (3.2.369) or ‘charm [Demetrius’s] eyes against [Helena] do appear’ (3.2.99). Similar to Oberon, Hays governs perception by enforcing the implementation of the so-called morally correct vision. The male gaze not only controls content, but it also appropriates how and what is seen. Ann E. Kaplan argues in ‘Is the Gaze Male?’ that ‘Many of the mechanisms we have found in Hollywood films … reflect the unconscious of patriarchy.’40 In fact, the prevailing mise en scène, or the visual and pictorial arrangement before the camera, is one such filmic mechanism that reproduces ‘the dominant ideological concept of the cinema’, according to Laura Mulvey.41 Likewise, Shakespeare’s Oberon has command over the mise en scène that he arranges and produces; he stages scenes of falling in love in the dazzling forest of Athens, as well as falling out of love in the same moonlit woods. The fairy king’s directives reinforce his power and sovereignty, just as Hays’s regulation of cinematic content increases his authority to control significations. As Barbara Freedman states, ‘Power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is both optical and patriarchal; patriarchal law determines perspective and operates through the control of that perspective.’42 Just as the PCA strove to broadcast censorship by controlling the visual and thematic content of film, censorship is performed in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by visual manipulation: managing how and what is seen. Yet the Reinhardt-Dieterle production of Shakespeare’s play emphasizes the need to keep the ‘dream’ of fairyland vibrant: a shelter for creativity to take root and flourish. As Huntly Carter states, ‘If there is one thing that Reinhardt understands, it is the child-like

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spirit of fantasy which is contained in Shakespeare’s comedies.’43 The emphasis on the magical realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with a critique of artistic and political oppression, lies at the core of Reinhardt-Dieterle’s directorial impulses. Yet the making of this Shakespeare film reveals the extent to which Hollywood understood cinema as a vital broadcast medium. On the one hand, the industry’s regulators realized the tremendous impact movies exerted on audiences and thus sought to police and standardize cinematic content and design. Even a successful studio such as Warner Brothers would profit from self-regulating material. The studio’s production of the play sought to combine the entertainment value of stylized comedy with highbrow Shakespeare, marketing the film as a global sensation transmitted to thousands around the world. On the other hand, Reinhardt and Dieterle drew on the vast power of film media to convey their artistic message. Not only do movies possess the ability to provide global amusement; they also supply a vehicle for innovative, state-of-the-art communication. Reinhardt functions less as a singular auteur than as part of a dynamic involving the cinematic medium, industry, regulators and of course Shakespeare.

2 Broadcasting the Bard Orson Welles, Shakespeare and War Robert Sawyer

In March of 1910, Guglielmo Marconi’s business conglomerate proposed to the British government an ‘Imperial wireless chain’ that ‘hit all the right patriotic buttons’ and one which would prove the power of radio in both times of peace and war: ‘The Imperial wireless chain would comprise eighteen stations’, according to Marconi’s recent biographer, ‘one thousand to two thousand miles apart, that would circle the world’.1 Each would be located on ‘British territory’ and ‘would be worked commercially in peace time, and be handed over to the government in times of war’. The proposal was intended ‘to undermine German efforts to challenge British communication supremacy’.2 Marconi’s plan was not just altruistic, however, for this plan represented ‘the easiest, most efficient, and most profitable way to establish a global network’.3

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In 1912, Marconi moved his business operations to the Marconi House located just west of the Aldwych Theatre, in the Covent Garden area of London’s West End. On the first floor landing of this nine-story building, which included Italian Renaissance features and stained glass on every floor, the company engraved Puck’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ According to his wife, Marconi promised to be even more rapid in circling the world: ‘I’ll do it much quicker than that’, he promised.4 While Puck’s line from Shakespeare was initially inscribed on the walls of the Marconi building, the genius of Marconi’s invention would soon enable Shakespeare’s texts to travel through the global ether as well. Wireless sound quickly came to be considered the most promising vehicle for future communication, as Ezra Pound noted in 1918, when he called poets and artists ‘the antenna of the race’. Pound, like Marconi, was fully aware of the imperialist propaganda uses of radio and would later put them to use in the Second World War broadcasts.5 However, it would take the years between the World Wars, combined with innovative leadership, to expand the reach of the ‘antenna’ to the public ‘receivers’. As Lisa Gitelman foregrounds, the ‘introduction of new media … is never entirely revolutionary’; in other words, ‘new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning’.6 I would add, however, that it often seems like a rupture due to the capitalist innovation which follows the introduction of new media. Shortly after the armistice in 1918, for example, AT&T charged their research division, known as Bell Laboratories, in order to mainly manufacture radios, and so they founded the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). The following year, the very first commercial radio station in the United States, Westinghouse station KDKA, began to broadcast from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By 1925, RCA and Victor reached an ‘entente’ which allowed companies to combine the phonograph (discussed in Joseph Haughey’s

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chapter below) and the radio by incorporating Radiolas into the new line of Victrolas coming that fall; later that same year, RCA purchased Victor. Once the label became ‘RCA Victor’, the newly merged company began to dominate the state-side market for half a century. But in the late 1920s, the Depression loomed over the country, punctuated by the Stock Market Crash of October 1929. In spite of the economic downturn around the globe, however, the new innovations in recording prompted families to invest in ‘sound devices’, and by the mid-1930s, many dwellings in the United States had both a radio and a record player of some kind. This created a new audience for radio broadcasts in seemingly contradictory ways and for various purposes; in less than a decade, one of them was for patriotic propaganda. The paradoxical nature is best explained by William Howland Kenney, who refers to the activity of these audiences as listening ‘alone together’,7 not unlike Marconi’s operators had done by using headsets, so each heard an isolated audible noise, even as they were grouped together in cramped cubicles. In the United States, for instance, even though the average listener at home may have heard radio broadcasts while being ‘alone’, or, more likely, alone with his or her family, the person felt connected to a large wave of nationalist sentiment rushing across the country. Moreover, these new ‘sound events broadcast by radios’, as Jonathan Sterne notes, ‘were primarily not existing ones but manufactured ones’,8 and this was never more true than in patriotic broadcasts in the run-up to and the declaration of war in 1941 following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December of that year. One week after the bombing, John Houseman, the celebrated actor and Shakespearean director, was summoned to Washington, DC, for a meeting at the State Department. Once he arrived, he was asked by the government representative if he would lead the propaganda branch of the Office of War Information. He was also cautioned that the project had ‘no equipment or personnel and no clear notion of what form U.S. wartime propaganda should take’.9 In spite of the lack

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of resources and vision, Houseman heartily agreed, and he soon became director of the nascent radio programme grandly entitled the ‘Voice of America’, which first began to broadcast in twenty-seven languages around the globe in 1942. As Holly Cowan Shulman points out, Houseman ‘wanted to create a special American sound, a sound which would announce to the overseas listener that this was America speaking’.10 The project was intended to unify the voices for the war effort from a singularly American viewpoint. ‘As director of the Voice of America [Houseman] could be found everywhere’, Shulman continues, ‘directing the shows, editing the scripts and providing a great fund of ideas for the propaganda broadcasts’.11 One British critic claimed in June 1943 that Houseman was a natural propagandist, ‘an executive who combined dramatic ability with real driving power’.12 Just five years before Houseman’s appointment to the VOA, Houseman combined this ‘dramatic ability’ with Orson Welles, in order to produce a groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar in 1937 at their new venue, The Mercury Theatre. Subtitled ‘Death of a Dictator’, and commonly referred to as the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the play clearly attacked tyrants such as Hitler and Mussolini by using recordings and sound clips, as well as newsreel-type footage, to contextualize the message of the actors onstage.13 The reviews of the tragedy were uniformly excellent, and a number focused on the voices in the play by its dual authors, Shakespeare and Welles. John Anderson, for instance, declared in the New York Journal and American newspaper that in ‘the racing mobs howling for the dead tyrant’, Welles had ‘lifted an Elizabethan voice into the modern world of dictators’, resulting in a ‘lusty shout of protest’ against all demagoguery.14 When they broadcast the production over the airwaves on 11 September 1938, Welles ingeniously employed H. V. Kaltenborn, known by ‘millions of radio listeners’ as the primary American voice reporting on Nazi aggression in Europe, to do the narration.15 In fact, at the same time that Kaltenborn was working on Caesar for Welles by providing

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commentary as the plot progressed, he was also broadcasting daily on the imminent invasion of Czechoslovakia. Acutely attentive to the ways in which new communication technologies would facilitate its project, the State Department knew of Houseman’s multimedia production credits for the Caesar production, and they were also aware of his multilingual speaking assets.16 I suspect that these reasons led the government officials to believe that Houseman, who was less associated with any radical agenda than was Welles, might be the perfect person to initially produce the Voice of America programme, an entity still broadcasting today. The ability to record, then amplify and then rebroadcast Shakespeare was enabled by the growing diversity of media technology available in the period, including advances in the telephone, the telegraph, the tape machine, the radio and the gramophone, leading in some cases to sound trumping sight as the primary sensory aesthetic experience due to the growing notion of the ‘theatre of the mind’. Such recordings, it has been suggested, are ‘intrinsically more receptive to the spoken word’, in part because radio broadcasts can ‘produce an exciting aural experience that allows the listener’s imagination to work in ways unknown to the other media’.17 After looking at Welles’s engagement with Shakespeare in a more general manner, I turn my attention to the evolving enterprise of broadcast Shakespeare during this era, including both pedagogical and popular innovations, the former employed in the closed classroom, the latter crackling though the ‘ether’ of radio airwaves or cut into the grooves of phonograph records. I further examine Welles’s use of this emerging technology to enhance the productions of his beloved Bard. In an interesting intersection of Shakespeare’s cultural capital during a second threat of a world war, the new-fangled radio technology seems to have trumped Shakespeare on the stage as a method for transmitting his authority. Unlike the singular sound of Houseman’s Voice of America, however, Welles’s broadcasts of Shakespeare were diverse, complex and oftentimes as radical politically as they were technologically.

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Welles and Shakespeare Welles’s interest in Shakespeare began early. As Kenneth Tynan claims, ‘by the age of two he spoke fluent and considered English’, and before he was three, he ‘was familiar with the plays of Shakespeare from his mother’s readings’.18 During his time at Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock Illinois, and always encouraged by its enlightened headmaster Roger Hill, Welles starred in, directed and produced a number of Shakespeare dramas, including a production of Julius Caesar (when he was only twelve), in which he played Marc Antony, the Soothsayer and Cassius; he later ‘edited, illustrated, printed and published his own acting version’ of the tragedy.19 Welles, prompted by Hill to ‘[t]ell other teachers some of the tricks we used at Todd’ to make Shakespeare ‘popular in the classroom as well as the stage’, worked with Headmaster Hill to produce a co-edited volume, entitled Everybody’s Shakespeare (using the rarely employed Todd Press, which had laid dormant and dusty for some time). The educational effort to expose students to the Bard had been previously more academic if not somewhat elitist. The ‘aim’ of this ‘Shakespeare project’, as the Saturday Evening Post claimed, was to ‘interest the student in the words of the poet, instead of causing him to hack away at the footnotes’. The Welles-Hill plays, the writers add, ‘have been edited for reading and staging, not for psychoanalyzing the dramatist or the Elizabethan Age’.20 First published in 1934, the volume contained three plays, reprinted and edited using modernized spelling: Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.21 Originally issued as single editions, the targeted audience for the stand-alone editions, as well as for the compilation, was high-school and college students, not so much as a way to increase the students’ critical understanding of the plays, but instead as an attempt to engage them emotionally with the works. This idea was signalled immediately in the introductory essay entitled ‘Advice to Students’ for ‘Studying Shakespeare’s Plays’, for it was

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followed by the single word ‘Don’t’, followed by an exclamation point for emphasis. Instead, Welles instructed students to ‘Read them. Enjoy them. Act them.’ In an attempt to ‘evoke live performance’22 as much as possible, Hill ‘cut the texts [and] Welles created nearly 500 drawings to illustrate the plays’.23 The two felt so strongly about this aspect that the ‘Advice to Students’ concluded by offering the following recommendation: ‘After you have read and re-read his plays; after you have come to loving terms with them; after their music sings in your heart … then is time enough for the literary dissection table.’ As Michael Anderegg suggests, Welles’s engagement with the Elizabethan dramatist seems to be a specifically American approach, with Welles ‘attempt[ing] to wed Shakespeare and education’, a theme which runs throughout his Shakespearean ventures, and one that reveals a ‘pedagogic impulse that was a central element in his artistic life’.24 Welles and Hill also shared editorial essay duties and collaborated on stage directions. Not only was this a task of somewhat sophisticated team editing; but one should not forget that Welles was only nineteen when it was first published.25 Indeed, such collaboration in his editing, in his numerous illustrations and in his focus on performance as opposed to merely studying the plays suggest an early ability to multitask in a way which would become even more prominent in his later work both at the theatre and on the radio. Welles’s adolescent theatrical activities not only foreshadowed his later career, but they also harkened back to the notion of speech and voice being primary bearers of meaning to many, a vehicle which only the emerging radio technology could enable. As the announcer highlights in his introduction to the episode of Julius Caesar, radio broadcasts bring ‘the works of this immortal dramatist to millions of people who had never had the opportunity of enjoying them before’.26 It may also have been a way to compensate for the missing maternal voice in his life. By sharing his mother’s love of Shakespeare with ‘millions of people’, surely his sense of loss was softened by his championing her devotion to the Bard, even in her dying moments.

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When Welles went to Dublin in 1931 at the age of sixteen, he auditioned at the Gate Theatre, and based almost solely on his voice, he was hired to play a leading role. The accounts vary, like many other milestones in Welles’s life, but the focus on his enunciations dominates all the accounts. In Welles’s version he admits to being so ‘anxious and eager to impress’ that he employed ‘all the tricks and resonance’ of rhetoric which he ‘could conjure up,’ an almost magical summoning of sound which would certainly seep into his radio broadcasts later.27 Michéal MacLiammόir, who was also present during the auditions, claimed that Welles’s ‘diction was practically perfect’, even as his voice sounded ‘like a regretful oboe’.28 Following his Dublin stint, Welles soon returned almost entirely to Shakespearean projects and made his Broadway debut three years later in December 1934, playing the Chorus and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet; he starred in and directed a production of Hamlet in 1936, as well as a radio version of Julius Caesar in 1938; and his multimedia Shakespeare activities continued throughout his life.29 Yet, for all his depth in working with certain plays from the canon, Welles’s breadth remained fairly restricted, as he tended to focus on a limited number of Shakespeare texts, specifically Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, the Falstaff plays and The Merchant of Venice; a number of these favourites, such as Julius Caesar, were reproduced over and over again in different formats, including a textbook version, a radio version, a stage production, two audio versions and at least three planned film versions, none actually ever shot.30 His version of Julius Caesar for the Mercury theatre and the Mercury Theatre on the Air was his most notable effort during the interwar period, not only for its overwhelming success but also for its commentary on fascism itself. The tragedy of an overreacher, such as a Caesar, a Macbeth or a Mussolini, seemed to particularly and pervasively haunt the dark recesses of Welles’s imagination (it is worth recalling that Welles also produced a celebrated version of Doctor Faustus in January 1937). In fact, his first directorial credit

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on radio was a half-hour abridgment of Macbeth for CBS Columbia Workshop on 28 February 1937, and it set the tone for all his broadcast Shakespeare by developing a strong degree of intimacy between speaker(s) and listeners, ‘a sense that we are overhearing, rather than being talked at, by the actors’.31

Broadcasting the Bard Toward the end of the same year as the Macbeth radio broadcast, recordings of full-length Shakespeare plays began to be promoted by educational journals as a way to teach Shakespeare in the classroom to facilitate a more acting-based version of the dramas. But Shakespeare’s plays were also set free from the sometimes-stifling air of the classroom to travel through the ‘ether’ of the dominant radio waves of the era, so much so that Newsweek magazine referred to the competition between CBS and the NBC-Blue Network during the summer of 1937 as both the ‘Battle of the Bard’ and ‘The Shakespeare Wars’.32 The radio ‘competition’ was initiated when William Paley of CBS decided to produce and highly promote ‘The Columbia Shakespeare Cycle’ in the summer of 1937. The sequence presented one-hour productions of eight Shakespeare plays which were broadcast on Monday nights in primetime, and also included a large promotional budget, heralding the series as ‘the first major radio production of William Shakespeare’s plays’. CBS decided to use well-known actors and actresses for the lead roles. Burgess Meredith played Hamlet, for instance, and Edward G. Robinson played Petruchio, while the performance of Twelfth Night cast Tallulah Bankhead as Olivia opposite Orson Welles as Orsino. Yet, as Douglas Lanier points out, even with the star power of a Welles or a Bankhead, the ‘adaptations emphasized plot rather than characterization’, and ‘ensemble’ acting rather than single star performances.33 The NBC-Blue network,34 attempting to play catch-up when word reached them of the CBS shows, and trying to

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one-up the rival network in iconic power, hired John Barrymore to perform all the leading roles in its six-part series called ‘Streamlined Shakespeare’, each play condensed to forty-five minutes in length. Usually John Barrymore co-starred with his wife Elaine Barrie, and the Barrymore productions employed a limited cast of extras. Indeed the aging Shakespearean stage star often doubled roles in each production. For example, he played both Hamlet and the Ghost in Hamlet, not a particularly unusual doubling, but in The Tempest he read the lines of both Prospero and Caliban, rarely done, while his wife doubled the roles of Miranda and Ariel. The decision by Barrymore to play both the protagonist and one of the main antagonists of the play not only was an innovative for the time but also anticipates postcolonial readings of the play, most notably Aimé Cesaire’s The Tempest.35 More central to my argument, however, is that in both these re-readings of the plays today and in the re-voicing of them in the late 1930s, assumed cultural hierarchies begin to be unsettled and shifting, as these radio productions produced a type of mash-up of cultural markers, most notably corporate branding and celebrity status, slowly moving Shakespeare to the edges of the audio frame, so much so that the sound of Barrymore’s speeches seemed most prominent to NBC’s marketing. Each episode reminded its listeners of this point, proclaiming at the opening that the productions were ‘the words of William Shakespeare’ spoken by ‘the voice of John Barrymore’. By the time The Tempest was broadcast, the announcer mentioned Barrymore’s voice three times, while an angelic-sounding harp was strummed in the background. Following the same intro above, the narrator then reverses the order and refers to the broadcast as ‘Featuring the voice of John Barrymore in readings from Shakespeare’, and finally, just before Barrymore speaks his first lines, the narrator calls the programme ‘Twelfth Night and the voice of John Barrymore’.36 Not only was the word ‘voice’ repeated three times like a sorcerer’s incantation, but even Shakespeare’s name was made to disappear, highlighting Barrymore’s name instead

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by using the newly available auditory means of repetition and modulation.37 It was fairly obvious even at the time, however, that some midsummer Bardolatry did not infect the brass at two of the leading radio networks of the day, as John Royal, the vice president for NBC programming, made clear that year. ‘We didn’t put it on because we were great enthusiasts for Shakespeare’, Royal confessed; instead he claimed, ‘we put it on for Exhibit A, to show educators … that we were adding something to culture’.38 This was not the first attempt to use Shakespeare to supply cultural capital to an emerging media type in the United States, including the dominant media technologies which had emerged just prior to the wireless, and alongside the developments in radio. Agreeing with Alan Galey that ‘it matters when new technologies use Shakespeare to test, to demonstrate, and authenticate new media prototypes’,39 it is worth pausing over some of these. For example, Thomas Edison employed Richard III’s opening speech ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ for the experiments he was performing with his so-called ‘electric pen’, a forerunner in many ways of latetwentieth-century fax machine.40 Alexander Graham Bell used Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be speech’ so often in his public demonstrations that Avital Ronell claims the speech became ‘the telephone’s most sacredly repeated declamation before an audience’.41 As Katherine Rowe argues, using Shakespeare as ‘launch content’ for any type of emerging new media ‘provides continuity and a standard against which to measure technological invention’; in other words, if the transmitted audio ‘can be recognized as Shakespeare’s, the technology has passed a symbolic threshold, conveying meaningful language, not just noise’.42 During the exact same year as the so-called ‘Shakespeare Wars’, and perhaps as a result of the interest they had generated, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, unveiled a box that had first been the property of Bell and his partners, including his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter. Five decades earlier in 1881, the group had granted the

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Smithsonian their prototype phonograph machine as evidence against any other possible patent claims, including a potential one by Edison, well known for his legal challenges to his competitors. Since it never had to be used as evidence, as no patent challenges were filed, the box had never been opened. But in October of 1937, with Bell’s daughters in attendance, as well as the major newspaper reporters of the day, the wax cylinder was played for the public with much fanfare. According to the New York Times on 28 October 1937, the first full sentence was an appropriate one from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed [sic] of in your philosophy.’43 However, the collateral interest in the Bard via the Shakespeare radio wars was not the only conflict brewing in 1937, for the storm clouds over Europe began to darken once again, so I suggest the radio broadcasts also represented an increased Anglo-American alliance via the ‘voice’ of Shakespeare just as it had at the outset of the First World War. For instance, during the initiation of the earlier conflict (on the occasion of Shakespeare’s 350th birthday in 1914), and only two years before the first declarations of war, international ceremonies scheduled for 1916 had been eagerly anticipated in London by a committee which even included some German professors. But by the ‘tercentenary of his death in the middle of the First World War’, any global celebrations were delayed and so the warring nations, in particular, ‘had to do their separate and reduced homage’, ultimately ‘encourag[ing] the use of Shakespeare as a cultural weapon’. Even though the Germans ‘pithily asserted the German conquest of Shakespeare’, a ‘London speaker of a memorial lecture set matters straight: it was not that Germany had conquered Shakespeare but that the English national poet had conquered Germany as well as the British Empire and the rest of the world.’44 Some writers also began to compare German emperor Wilhelm II to Coriolanus, the eponymous protagonist in Shakespeare’s tragedy. In fact, in April of 1916, and when the United States had not yet declared itself a member of the allied forces, ‘the tercentenary was observed in grand, serene,

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and, on the whole, politically neutral style’; one hope was that ‘when Europe would be busy repairing war damages’, it would soon be America’s mission to keep alive the “sacred flame of art”’.45 Yet, in Europe generally, and in Germany and England specifically, ‘the antagonized Shakespeares, once established, lingered on and were revived in World War II’,46 a climate in which Welles and Hill also participated. Another important event connecting the Bard with broadcasting also occurred in 1937. In that year, Welles and his high-school mentor, Roger Hill, co-authored an essay in The English Journal called ‘On the Teaching of Shakespeare and Other Great Literature’. After attacking the ‘German idea of scholarship through specialization’, with its obvious patriotic bias, they claim that many classroom teachers fail due to a flawed ‘pedagogical system’, specifically the ‘scientific approach’ to studying literature.47 Recorded versions of stage performances were enthusiastically embraced by educators writing in professional journals, specifically the use of Shakespeare phonograph records in the classroom. Arguing that most ‘classroom renditions’ of Shakespeare are ‘doomed from the start’ due to inadequate training in speaking poetry, Welles and Hill conclude with a ‘practical suggestion’ for helping teachers to make learning more enjoyable, by highlighting, as Haughey notes in his chapter, ‘the growing library of phonograph recordings’ of Shakespeare, including speeches by John Gielgud, John Barrymore and Johnston Forbes-Robertson. They also point out, however, that ‘Columbia has now recorded almost a complete version of the Mercury’s current production of Julius Caesar’, which was, of course, the production which Welles directed and in which he also starred.48 But lest this personal plug only seems to smack of self-promotion (although it surely was in part), my argument is that the Mercury records, culled from his radio broadcasts of Bard, came to be one of the most sought-out recordings of Shakespeare during the interwar period because it was not a collection of single-voiced snippets, but instead a various-voiced cast reading a nearly ‘complete’ text of the four plays eventually produced.49

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Welles, war and broadcast technology The theatre of the mind concept mentioned earlier also informed the Caesar production broadcast on 11 September 1938. While Welles used basically the same cast as the onstage production, this was an even more abbreviated version than the theatrical performances but, as noted earlier, Welles added H. V. Kaltenborn, the ubiquitous political commentator of the period, to read intermittent passages from Plutarch throughout the production. In this manner, Welles elided the difference between Shakespeare’s tyrant and current political leaders in Europe by borrowing from persuasive radio techniques of the time. As Holly Shulman notes, unlike live theatre, a message on radio is conveyed by ‘pure sound’ with no visual distractions, consisting only of ‘verbal patterns of pitch, duration, and rhythm’.50 The scene of Marc Antony’s most famous oration (in 3.2 of Shakespeare’s text) employed such devices. After his lines which start with ‘Look you here. / Here is himself marred, as you see with traitors’, one distinct voice cries out, ‘O Villians’, while another proclaims, ‘O Traitors’, followed by a pause of silence before another voice whispers ‘revenge’. Slowly and quietly that word is repeated, rising in pitch and length till near the end of Antony’s speech we hear a series of ominous verbs chanted in unison over and over by multiple voices: ‘seek, burn, kill, slay.’51 When Antony proclaims, ‘every wound of Caesar … should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny’, the now-quieted mob is silent, suggesting Antony’s total control over them.52 To highlight such ominous voices in the radio production, Welles played Brutus as ‘low-key’, if not ‘a little soporific’, in order not only to suggest the bewildered feelings of many liberals of the time stuck between the far-right and far-left but also to provide sound space for the more extreme voices of the other characters, including George Coulouris as Antony and Joseph Cotton as Caesar.53 As fascism swept through Europe by marching across frontiers, the ideology also invaded the consciousness of the

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United States, and Welles made certain his productions would reflect his own opposition to tyranny of any kind, sometimes by employing propaganda techniques himself by tapping into the emerging field of broadcast psychology. Just two years before the Caesar episode aired, for example, the German psychologist Rudolf Arnheim had observed that ‘the wireless addresses those millions, in the audience, not as a mass but as individuals. It talks to every one individually, not to everyone together’.54 It is also clear from all accounts that the Germans had so nearly perfected the art of radio propaganda following the First World War that many critics now believe, for example, that France ‘collapsed within weeks of the German assault’ in the Second World War because the French nation’s ‘will to resist had been undermined by Nazi propaganda’.55 Catching the zeitgeist of the time in the theatre and on radio, ‘Welles played on his audiences’ current paranoia – the threat, to which it had become habituated, of fascism and impending war’.56 Such paranoia was part of Welles’s purpose in a number of broadcasts, whether talking about the past, the present or the future. As he pointed out in the Press Release for the stage production of Julius Caesar, his version ‘gives a picture of the same kind of hysteria that exists in certain dictatorruled countries of today … our moral, if you will, is that not assassination, but education of the masses, permanently removes dictatorships’.57 But there was a darker side to this effort to engage in mass hysteria seen most obviously when Welles created what some observers regarded as a national panic in 1938 with his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, coming the same year and in the same episodic series as his Caesar at the Mercury Theatre on the Air. Moreover, many observers also link this broadcast to the format Houseman later used at the VOA: dramatic readings of scripted persuasion. As Houseman himself explained, by ‘slid[ing] swiftly and imperceptibly out of the “real” time of a news report into the “dramatic” time of a fictional broadcast’, Houseman discovered there was ‘no extreme of fantasy’ that the audience ‘would not follow’, and he was right. In numerous

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interviews with those falling for the prank broadcast on Halloween, many ‘identified the invaders as Germans; still others as Japanese’,58 whether it was an invasion from Mars or a dramatized version of VOA propaganda denouncing Nazi atrocities and calling for European resistance.59 When Welles did broadcast the War of the Worlds episode on Halloween night, not only did it make the front page of the New York Times the next morning, after reaching an audience of six million, but in the month following the programme, more than 12,500 articles had been published on it. Even those who had not heard Welles’s anxious voice live still heard about his fretful vocal tone from others, as well as from reports in various media.60 And, as previously noted, some listeners thought he was reporting a Nazi invasion not only because they had not heard the opening of the broadcast but also because the US listening audience trusted the new media to report only truthful events – partly as a result, perhaps, of the new cultural capital of Shakespeare broadcasts – particularly those related to any militaristic threat. While Welles never served in the military (due to ‘flat feet’), he joined the war effort when it suited his own career, and five years after his Caesar, and in the same year as Houseman began working for the government, Welles was also approached about a project he had been considering for his next film for RKO studios (following the breakout success of Citizen Kane and during the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons). This project, the filming of two segments of It’s All True in Brazil, was suggested by Nelson Rockefeller, who had in 1940 just launched the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA). While the film segments are usually described as a ‘tropical misadventure’, the endeavour was conceived as a ‘tool of diplomacy and cultural understanding’,61 or, less euphemistically, propaganda. The film ‘documentary’ focused on the Carnival season in Rio, with the OCIAA quietly picking up part of the tab for production. Not unlike the disguising of identity by masks and costumes during carnival revelry, Welles’s broadcast was similarly disguised as both ‘real’

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and ‘true’, but in reality hovered between documentary and docudrama. The OCIAA helped to subsidize the work because they saw a double benefit. Not only would it help by ‘disseminating good will in the form of culture from the U.S. throughout South America’, but it would also provoke some ‘interest in the people of the U.S. in their neighbors to the south’.62 Not unlike Welles’s love of magic tricks, this was to be an illusion conjured up by Welles appearing to be in service of his country, but when the smoke cleared, it came off as a way to avoid the films being shut down because he was so overbudget. As I have argued elsewhere, Welles did eventually act on behalf of the Allied effort, at least when he needed corporate sponsors for his radio broadcasts: for example, after his return to the United States from Latin America in 1942, ‘he designed and starred in two shows on CBS radio, both designed to aid the war effort. The first, entitled Hello America, continued the South American diplomatic effort every Sunday evening by relating stories to the U.S. listening audience about their neighbors to the south’.63 The other show was called Ceiling Unlimited, and it focused on the ‘aviation aspect of the war effort’.64 It should come as no shocking revelation that ‘the major sponsors of the program were the Lockheed Company and the Vega Aircraft Corporation, the latter a subsidiary of Lockheed which produced most of the aircraft for its parent company during World War II’.65

Conclusion Just a year after his Julius Caesar was performed on stage (1937) and the same year it was broadcast on the air (1938), Welles addressed the Workers Bookshop Symposium (subsequently printed in the official communist paper, the Daily Worker), where he summed up his mission with Houseman at the Mercury. After noting that the ‘great majority of plays on

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Broadway today are escapist’ because directors are ‘very much tempted … to try and divert people from life and the main currents – political, cultural, moral and spiritual’, he claims their intent at the Mercury Theatre and their subsequent broadcasts on Mercury Theatre on the Air had always been just the opposite.66 He also proclaimed that ‘[w]hen our art has some contemporary connection, some valid and live relationship’ with such things as reported in the evening news (here an editor added in brackets in the printed version ‘[such as Hitler’s invasion of Austria]’), then ‘it is worth’ the effort to produce them, whether on stage, or in the theatre of the mind.67 This connection between artistic life at home and battlefield conditions abroad could also be seen on a more material level, for many of the advances in audio technology in the era were developed from, or were accelerated by, the two global conflicts. From the so-called War Tubas, acoustical horns aimed at the heavens to detect enemy aircraft, through the sound-ranging systems strung across numerous battlefields to calculate enemy gunfire, to new forms of weaponry, such as the German U-Boat – so silently destructive that the Allies rushed to invent new listening devices to locate them – numerous innovations were occurring across the sonic landscape. These inventions enabled, in part, the various voices and sound effects of Welles’s Shakespeare productions in the United States in the interwar period. In an ironic twist, of course, the government’s efforts to unify the voices for the war effort also allowed dissonant voices to be amplified. As Mark Wollaeger explains, even while artists were employing rapidly changing technology to challenge existing conventions in the ‘media ecology’, they also ‘were forced to compete’ with more ‘organized efforts to use those media to manage the public’.68 I think that it has also become clear, however, that the so-called singular Voice of America style of broadcast by the government in 1942 was as much an ideological myth then as it is now. While the singular voice of the VOA may be a myth, the artistic voice of the Mercury radio productions seems harder to dismiss, for no

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one believes that Welles was not in complete control of them. If not a puppet master per se, he obviously controlled most of the ‘artistic strings’, in every sense of the word. In any case, Welles’s voice and vision remained so prominent in all of his radio productions that Lanier concludes that ‘Welles brought auteurship to radio’ by controlling every element of his shows, from writing to directing to acting to sound effects.69 To end where we began, Welles was ‘reading a Whitman poem on a patriotic Sunday programme’ on 7 December 1941, ‘when someone ran into the studio and shouted into the mike that Pearl Harbor had been attacked’.70 In Welles’s account, however, ‘Nobody paid any attention’, as they ‘just shrugged and said, “There he goes again”’, referring to the broadcast of the War of the Worlds.71 In short, Welles had used innovations in audio technology, particularly radio broadcasts, to collapse the distinction between fact and fiction, between news and literature, between science fiction and social commentary and between Shakespeare’s Rome and contemporary Europe in order to broadcast his own artistic challenge to fascism at home and abroad. From all accounts, his message came across loud and clear, particularly when it suited the government’s agenda, so for the time being at least, all was well with Welles when he was broadcasting the Bard just prior to the Second World War.

3 This Distracted Globe, This Brave New World Learning from the MIT Global Shakespeares’ Twenty-First Century Diana E. Henderson

Unlike most people reading this page, I grew up thinking ‘broadcast’ commonly referred to only one thing: the three major commercial television networks in the United States known by their acronyms NBC, ABC and CBS (B for Broadcast/ing, providing the common ground). They competed to define reality for 1960s Americans via the nightly news, and filled our evenings’ ‘prime time’ with dramas, comedies and variety hours like The Ed Sullivan Show. A few smaller channels showed old movies with more frequent advertising ‘breaks’ than on the networks, and a local educational station (WETA) would eventually become part of the non-commercial Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in

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the 1970s, but those were minor players in the 1960s. (This was before the arrival of Sesame Street, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and Masterpiece Theater, the last of which would be formative for my imagination of the Tudor world, thanks to British imports The Six Wives of Henry VIII, starring Keith Michell, and Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth R.) If one were thinking of what ‘everyone’ watched, it was fairly easy to keep track, be the choice between Walter Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley as news anchors or Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Bonanza on weekend nights, back when parents could limit the hours children got to watch the shared family console. If pressed, my friends and I would have acknowledged that we had heard the words ‘radio broadcast’, but for us, the real issue with radio was whether you got FM (cool) or just AM (Top 40). What a difference a halfcentury makes. But what a difference a decade makes too (as I write, it is only a decade since YouTube took off). Or even a mere two years, now that the digital revolution has become the new normal: several of the examples cited in Stephen O’Neill’s Shakespeare and YouTube have since disappeared or at least become difficult to access.1 Not only do we live within a much more diverse, fragmented media landscape, but even description of specific productions and technologies is remarkably fluid, changing radically between the moment a hand types words into a computer screen and the moment when those words are shared in codex form. Moreover, in a glorious step forward, the normative ‘we’ of my first paragraphs now can function accurately in most cultural scholarship only as autobiographical, not as an unconsciously generalized assumption of shared humanity premised on false grounds never genuinely shared. It is into this brave new world that the most recent of MIT’s numerous Shakespeare-related projects have ventured, trying to illuminate and support certain possibilities of twenty-firstcentury broadcasting while cognizant of its many shortcomings. When I was first asked to write here about the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive in particular, I hesitated because of my insider/outsider status on that one

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among several ongoing Shakespeare projects at MIT; I have been (and still am) more directly involved in collaborative performance and pedagogical initiatives that have perforce lived behind ‘firewalls’, rather than being an active shaper of this latest public iteration within a twenty-five-year parade of digital research sites. Moreover, even some of those more closely associated with the project have published descriptions that are not entirely accurate, in part because the medium shifts so quickly: for several quite good reasons besides inertia, academic print culture has a temporality that has not caught up with the digital.2 Upon reflection, however, these seemed precisely the complexities needing attention in the present, and this is exactly the time to address perceptual and other related challenges for the archive: to provide a frank ‘under the hood’ look at where such projects have arrived, what choices and problems they continue to confront and where they fit within a newly enriched and indeed privileged field which is simultaneously being challenged by some of its founders for being – and not being – the digital humanities.3 The larger questions of location and dynamic change in both digital and academic arenas are pressing. Having survived a nine-year stint as a university administrator that overlapped in time with the rise of YouTube and the MOOC ‘bubble’ that has not exactly burst but rather metamorphosed, I have an urgent sense that more of those professionally involved in both Shakespeare and humanities education need to be learning about the emergent and dominant strategies that are shaping our opportunities to create and share broadly our research about video, digital and textual artefacts. There also needs to be more collective conversation about how those in the humanities can revise their methodologies and individualistic biases without sacrificing core principles, including close aesthetic and historical analysis as well as space for modes of cultural critique and performance studies developed over the past forty years. This is true even or especially for those, like myself, who are not temperamentally the ‘early adopters’ or fans of new technologies per se.

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At the risk of alienating my target audience, then, and offered in a spirit only half tongue-in-cheek, what follows is a SWOT analysis – a format those in business and project management practice almost unthinkingly. (The acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, headings marked on whiteboards or easels at work retreats or lengthy meetings with breakout sessions assessing the organization’s current health.) Although focusing on the Open Access site, this analysis provides the rationale for the other projects currently jockeying for attention alongside that archive in the daily life of Shakespeareans at MIT, which in turn provides a case study that may assist others wrestling with the challenging, changing digital/Shakespeare studies landscape.4

Strengths The strengths of the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive (henceforth the Global Shakespeares Archive) begin with its plural name and non-Anglophone emphasis: having begun with a predominantly Asian collection thanks in great part to Alexa Huang’s own personal archive but then intentionally expanded to other regions underrepresented within Shakespeare studies (in South America and the Middle East as well as Europe), the Global Shakespeares Archive adds a much-needed level of visibility for those outside the Bardbiz ‘hub’ and for less commercial but still professional-quality theatrical companies. I use that set of adjectives knowing each can be challenged, yet to signal that the archive does involve advocacy and quality assurance by those who are scholars and artists in the areas being represented: each choice is carefully vetted by regional editors knowledgeable about its performance practices and language, even if there are not the resources at present to provide full transcriptions and extensive metadata. As of August 2016, the collection included ninetyfive full-length videos available online and more than 160

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productions catalogued, among which Brazil was the country most heavily documented (22 per cent of the collection), followed by Taiwan, Italy, China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Egypt, Singapore and India, all in single-digit percentages but more than double the representation of the United States or UK (or Yemen, Russia and Macedonia, all at 1 per cent, with Argentina and Kuwait at 2 per cent).5 Some productions are of course hard to delimit to a single country or language, allowing one to quibble about their identification, but the percentages do give some sense of the proportions and of the attempt to supplement rather than replicate the broadcast dominance of, most obviously, the English export market that now includes BBC co-productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre Live and the Shakespeare’s Globe videos (as well as subscription services such as Digital Theatre Plus, whose advertised ‘theater from all over the world’ is predominantly Anglophone and indeed British, followed in distant second place by the United States; similar biases appear on Kanopy, Drama Online and Theatre in Video). These other performance archives have emerged more forcefully in recent years, but when the Global Shakespeares Archive was first in development, it was far more challenging to get professional companies to share their productions, much less to gain access to rehearsal processes.6 Especially in that climate, and because led by Professor Peter Donaldson – whose earlier Shakespeare Electronic Archive (henceforth SHEA, conceived in 1992 and available on the World Wide Web as of 1997) had been trend-setting in collecting variant Folio texts and then extending into quartos, visual arts and limited film selections for Hamlet – the Global Shakespeares Archive’s decision to focus on videos of theatrical performances (as well as film where copyright law did not interfere with the Open Access commitment) was a major step forward in breaking down the well-worn, unhelpful binarism between text and performance, in and beyond Shakespeare studies. Moreover, it usefully complicates the more recent opposition between archive and repertoire emphasized by Diana Taylor, in ways also consonant with Alan Galey’s helpful reminder

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(in discussing SHEA) that all archives involve editorial decisions, are always dynamic and cannot evade the complications of their postmodern condition.7 Even more implicated than text-centred archives in the entertainment economics of late capitalism, digital performance archives such as the Global Shakespeares Archive can make a valuable intervention by decentring both English and the playscript without denying the value of either as components in an intercultural, dynamic process of transmediated (and hence historicized) live performance events. This is no longer the domain of a performance studies model whose emphasis on ‘liveness’ remains haunted by Hamlet’s ghost, nor is it the domain of film struggling to maintain its medium specificity against all odds – although the archive allows a space for these concerns, as well as for searching by Shakespearean playtext.8 Clips from Jonathan Miller’s 1970s televised The Merchant of Venice cohabit with the complete Taipei opera stage version Bond, and Sulayman AlBassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit (with its mixture of live theatre and video feeds, its commentary on contemporary Middle Eastern politics) is quite literally a click away from the deeply cinematic trailer for the Chinese martial arts film The Banquet, directed by Xiaogang Feng. In other words, still-current critical dichotomies are challenged not through exclusion or denial, but rather through de-privileged inclusion in a diverse collection. Another positive result of the project is less directly visible, but arises from its decentralized editorial design: it has provided a powerful professional opportunity for the (often younger) scholars who help locate and describe the videos. Energized by, and energizing, this international collaboration and the scholarly networks it has helped facilitate, many of the regional editors have established themselves in the field as authorities working at the intersection of archive and broadcast, research and performance. Donaldson calls their productivity ‘astounding’, noting that in 2006 when he was initiating the first part of the collection centred on Asia, the very field of ‘Global Shakespeares’ did not yet exist, and that this group has played a major part in establishing it.9 Especially at a time when the proportion of secure long-term academic positions is

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declining (in the United States, from 75 per cent on tenure-track or tenured faculty lines a generation ago to 25 per cent now, and with comparable shifts in many other parts of the world, particularly in the once-dominant literary humanities), such opportunities become all the more consequential; they mesh well with the changing responsibilities involved in those fewer professorial positions.10 Given the increasing comfort and digital fluency of younger scholars, as well as the pressures on them to establish their names, their participation should not in itself be a surprise at this point, but it was an unforeseen aspect of the project about which Donaldson is particularly happy. Beyond the crucial role of these regional editors, Peter is not the only one who works week in, week out to create the archive at MIT itself. His most stable partner in all his digital projects is the least visible, but her technical expertise has been essential to the archive’s success: this is Belinda Yung, an MIT graduate who stayed on to help create SHEA, Hamlet on the Ramparts, the Global Shakespeares Archive, the Lear Is Here teaching module and more over the past two decades. Only recently, with the rise of digital humanities as a recognized subfield, have the skillsets and contributions of technical staff begun to be acknowledged appropriately; like our partner librarians, these professionals are creating the conditions of possibility for twenty-firstcentury humanities scholarship. Especially given that such projects are seldom well supported by a larger institutional infrastructure or its budget priorities, it is essential to have a dedicated programmer and designer who has deep familiarity with both the archive’s content and code and experience of the changing media landscape that necessitates vigilant storage and adaptability to new hardware and software.11

Weaknesses The primary weakness of ‘boutique’ DH and other scholarly projects is the difficulty of sustainability over time and through

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personnel changes. The hierarchical structures that privilege senior faculty members, sometimes decried in progressive critiques of the neoliberal university, are usually the reason these projects are maintained for long periods at all, in my experience: recognized ‘productive’ scholars have the clout and freedom to argue repeatedly for multiyear funding, staffing and space.12 That said, the inherited scientific lab model for most such academic projects tends to overemphasize one name on the door, whereas an enterprise such as the Global Shakespeares Archive simply cannot work without a much more extensively collaborative network. Furthermore, when the goal is to maintain an expanding, dynamic archive that can be accessed easily around the world, the need for platform interoperability becomes essential: this is not a short-term computer science project where the goal is to produce a rough-and-ready tool or to attain a patent and then spin off to a company that will provide infrastructural support. Most DH projects suffer at the stage that in industry is called ‘the Valley of Death’ phase, the two-to-four post-start-up years before an innovation has become fully integrated into the daily operations of a company. As with all theoretically dynamic websites, the demands of development compete with the mundane updating of existing content, and the smaller and more dispersed the operation, the harder to stay current. Moreover, when the content is being provided for the most part on a volunteer basis by scholar-teachers with papers to grade and other writing deadlines, providing a blog on the Global Shakespeares Archive falls low on the list. The ‘concentric circles’ model of organizational commitment certainly pertains here, and to avoid frustration needs always to be kept firmly in mind: the further from the centre of power in the enterprise, the less that can be demanded of those one wishes to remain engaged. In the case of the Global Shakespeares Archive, these general challenges intersect with some specific realities such as the basis upon which its international network has come into being. They in turn contribute to a fairly high degree of randomness

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within the collection itself. For while Donaldson began with a vision and priorities, the archive’s realization developed primarily through the interactions that result from professional networks, conference travels and selected viewing and reading, that is, a somewhat haphazard series of personal encounters (arguably, reflective of the state of Shakespeare studies as a whole). Among the larger set of performing groups, regions and scholars, those whose paths have crossed and who then showed the enthusiasm and tenacity to help attain quality videos are the ones who have created the archive’s collection. Obviously the choices must fit the Global Shakespeares Archive’s mandated parameters, but equally obvious are the gaps and many alternative possibilities as yet unrealized. As a way of beginning a collection, it made perfect sense; indeed, I doubt any other approach would have so quickly generated the amount and diversity of material therein, which includes not only the fulllength videos but over 250 short clips for individual study. Nonetheless, when the process becomes a product, audiences are likely to posit more intentional significance to the selections and overall design than may be warranted, given that there was no scientifically systematic attempt at representation based on number of performances in a region, popularity of the source play or other plausible criteria one might imagine. In this, it is also unlike the dominant algorithmic models of search engines and YouTube.13 Although this level of representative randomness may be a weakness in terms of accurate audience perception and even in comparison with an empirical mapping of global Shakespeare performance, it has the merits of honesty, resistance to claiming such an overarching idealized perspective on the part of the editors, and it preserves a space for what those in the humanities are still for the most part trained to do: advocating for the value or importance of particular artefacts using multiple qualitative measures.14 Akin to historians’ recent resistance to singular master narratives, the Global Shakespeares Archive establishes a middle path between mass populism and ceding the importance of qualitative methods

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and evidence; it builds on grassroots involvement by those with established forms of expertise. However, in 2016 a search by region that reveals only one item out of 443 matching ‘Africa’ – and that being a promotional trailer for the 2012 Globe to Globe festival in the UK – can no longer be deemed acceptable, even granting that such a search excludes Egypt as instead being part of the ‘Arab World’: better to vacate the category until videos have been attained. As the collection continues to grow, the archive staff also need to develop more elaborate forms of tagging and searching, which should address as well the variety of screen forms represented. (For instance, although one can search for ‘film’ and find therein entries classified as ‘silent’, one cannot search successfully for ‘silent film’.) From what I have heard, most of the people who search the archive are indeed looking for its video footage and sometimes are frustrated by finding only portions of productions: given that, it seems apt to include more information about why those fragments are included. And given the editorial assessment of quality as a factor in inclusion, perhaps it is also time to include more explicit discussions of value in the descriptions; conversely, some entries that provide no such rationale (such as the Africa entry above) should probably be removed. This is particularly true in instances where the lower production values of the available video might unintentionally contribute to reinforcing rather than destabilizing ideas of cultural centrality. Here the multiplicity of criteria for quality and value comes to the fore, as well as the consequentiality of that explosion in British broadcasting and export of highbudget Shakespeare productions from the RSC, Globe, National Theatre and to a lesser extent in Canada by the Stratford Festival. As desirable as recordings of these performances may be in themselves, the unintended consequence may be to create a less patient, attentive online audience for the work of small companies without access to top-tier documentary filmmakers. Without the extensive metadata and captioning prioritized on a site such as Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive

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(A/S/I/A), for example, many of the Global Shakespeares Archive’s videos will fail to capture a cross-cultural or student audience. Nonetheless, the openness of the site to scholarly contributions and the availability of otherwise invisible material for use by local viewers and teachers with expertise may offset such concerns in the present; moreover, prioritizing legibility on the basis of a financially biased criterion would collude in helping ‘the Empire to Strike Back’, and given MIT’s own position, how should we be the ones to determine which locally endorsed videos ‘don’t work’ elsewhere? More optimistically, through wider exposure the archive may over time assist in raising the profile of certain companies or directors, with filmmakers or funding to follow. Of course, the most obvious external constraint on growing a high-quality collection of complete films (as distinct from volunteered theatrical companies’ videos) remains copyright law: commitment to Open Access, that is, true broadcast, means only ‘fair use’ of film and television clips is possible in many instances. Such clips are often quite valuable as indicative of an era, a particular style, or as a glimpse of a famous performance: the small sampling of The Merchant of Venice openings, which allows comparison between the 1973 Jonathan Miller televised version and the Michael Radford 2004 film, provides one illustrative case (even for my students, who for the most part have never heard of the former production’s star Laurence Olivier). The links with YouTube allow some inclusions that MIT itself could not legally host, providing a temporary supplement, even if it is not fully satisfying or reliable into the future. In its comment spaces, the archive invites its users to suggest ways to make it more helpful, and, although copyright may limit some ideas, the staff welcomes them.

Opportunities For the archive itself, opportunities abound. By having established itself early in the field, many practitioners around

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the world are already turning to the Global Shakespeares Archive for both research and teaching purposes: in the past year, colleagues in more than five countries have expressed thanks (not due) to me for its contents. In a world of increasingly ‘monetized’ online sites, the not-for-profit integrity of this archive is becoming all the more valued. Whether working with graduate students in Portugal who are interested in pursuing professional theatre careers or teaching humanities classes to undergraduate engineering students in Singapore, creative instructors are finding helpful ways to use the Global Shakespeares Archive to enliven their subjects. The increasing commitment to Open Access by institutions such as MIT but also in later years the Folger Shakespeare and British Libraries, among others, offers another exciting opportunity for collaboration and broadcasting. Until quite recently, SHEA required password access because of its use both of illustrations drawn primarily from the Folger’s collection and of the Oxford Shakespeare as its modern edition alongside the many Folios and some Quartos that anchor it. Now, by making the Oxford link inactive and through generous shifts in libraries’ missions regarding their archives, SHEA has become fully Open Access, and can be found through the Global Shakespeares Archive’s ‘Links’ (http://shea.mit.edu /shakespeare/). By providing more crosslinks within the Global Shakespeares Archive’s metadata on individual productions, perhaps we can begin to direct the general public towards MIT’s more reliable scholarly projects, rather than the still ubiquitous complete works site (shakespeare.mit.edu). The last one, created in 1993 by student Jeremy Hylton in MIT’s characteristic hacker mode using the outdated Moby edition to provide ‘HTML versions of the plays’ without notes or corrections, was at the time a form of broadcast breakthrough – the site still begins with the (disputed) claim ‘Welcome to the Web’s first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare’. But unfortunately it still overshadows and is sometimes confused with higher-quality scholarly outputs such as SHEA and the Global Shakespeares Archive, especially

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for those relying on basic search engines. (Similarly, in Google searches, MIT’s extracurricular student Shakespeare Ensemble outpaces reference to either the Theater Arts program’s Dramashop productions or Literature’s Shakespeare offerings, and even this last refers to a twelve-year-old version of the undergraduate Shakespeare class, epitomizing the problem of algorithmic frequency models.)15 Fortunately, by adding ‘Global’ before MIT Shakespeares, one does now arrive swiftly at the Global Shakespeares Archive. Many more collaborations and forms of participation beckon, as more users heed the site’s ‘Call for Participation and Materials’ link: the possibilities include contributing brief summaries, video clips, reviews, interviews, script excerpts and bibliography, in addition to the blogs and announcements linked to the homepage. As Pascale Aebischer observes, ‘A database such as the MIT Global Shakespeares can have the paradoxical effect of making its user keenly aware of the inaccessibility of archived performances as live events: even as they are only one click away, digitized performances are marked by their geographical, historical, and linguistic remoteness, opening a window onto an event that cannot be experienced in real time and space.’16 For those of us in the privileged position of having fairly frequent access to live productions, this experience of distance strikes me as a very good thing, a reminder of the experience of major portions of the human population. If those in ‘remote’ locations begin to have more visibility in the blogs and articles, the archive’s mission of decentring and inclusion will only benefit. In 2016, I led a new MIT Global Shakespeares initiative that hopes to take advantage of another technological change, using the increased ease of video capture as a means to generate performance footage before the fact when a particularly exciting opportunity appears on the horizon. In this instance, the occasion was the first performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Venetian Ghetto Nuova, part of the 500th anniversary commemoration of that originary ghetto and the 400th commemoration of Shakespeare’s death.

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With help from MIT’s Council for the Arts and the prospect of integrating some of the resulting footage into an online teaching module for MITx, two recent graduates of MIT accompanied Professor Shankar Raman and myself to Venice for two weeks of filming, including rehearsal footage and interviews as well as multiple performances of the site-specific production’s six-night run. All of us were amateurs, although we collaborated with a two-person documentary filmmaking team in some of the performance capture. The primary point is that while commercial media outlets wanted to film only segments of the show, the ease and relative inexpensiveness of basic videotaping allowed us to document the whole; gaining permissions and trust between the company and ourselves was of course still a prerequisite, but being there to film in detail provided us not only with a remarkable experience and access but also with a way to circumvent the stranglehold of copyright held by commercial giants (or just reticent small business owners who need revenue in order to release their films). While the first result of the collaboration is a module for use within our residential education (following in the wake of several password-protected modules we have generated over the past four years), the hope is to produce a broadcast version in the year ahead, as well as an Open Access version of all or part of the performance for the Global Shakespeares Archive. Stay tuned.

Threats As in any project, the prior three categories imply the threats to its development: the opportunities are not seized, the strengths are eclipsed by better alternatives and the weaknesses are not addressed and they multiply. More useful than worrying about all of this is to prioritize the order of specific ‘imminent threats’ only, so that one can fend off as many disabling crises as possible without letting general anxieties displace positive

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development. (We as academics are sometimes better at imagining the general than recognizing the imminent.) Because of my years running an administrative operation, I am especially aware of the loss of knowledge that changes in staffing bring, and would consider that, along with software changes that require revamping the website’s delivery system, the most immediate concern for a small-budget operation such as the Global Shakespeares Archive. Obviously, these are not the intellectual or political topics that most professors take as starting points for analysis. But some of the pragmatic technological challenges do indeed intersect with ideological biases, in terms of which functionalities institutions regard as crucial to develop and maintain. As Alan Galey observes, ‘Those involved in Shakespearean new media projects today, especially the coders themselves, know the long hours, false starts, and conflicting imperatives that may leave their mark on the code, documentation, media files, data sets, and other layers of a digital project.’17 Similar concerns arise for administrative ‘business owners’ and project managers overseeing the processes involved in maintaining a broadcast site, even in these days of easier storage and more user-friendly tools: it is much easier to update than when, for example, Donaldson oversaw the design of a system (XMAS) that relied on HyperCard laserdiscs to closeread film clips. Nonetheless, the subsequent learning modules and annotation tools we in Literature at MIT have developed cannot easily be integrated into the university’s dominant online platform, and my attempts to represent humanities activities in MITx remain plagued by its science/lecture-focused design. Credit for what success we have managed in creating the Merchant Module goes primarily to Sarah Connell, my postdoctoral associate hired through a short-term MITx grant, and she will have left for a well-deserved fulltime position at Northeastern University’s Digital Humanities Center by January 2017. If even a small version of what we developed that is educationally true to our actual teaching styles and values is to become part of Open Access MITx, more grant-writing, hiring, training and advocacy will be required.

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Even the simpler process of incorporating our filmed footage of The Merchant in Venice production into the Global Shakespeares Archive is slowed by the need to prioritize grant outcomes and the limits of interoperability, security and different functionalities. For example, the Global Shakespeares Archive runs on WordPress because, at a moment when MIT’s Tech TV could no longer be trusted, it was the best alternative; but it does not allow links easily to HTML-based sites, including MITx’s, and the latter’s own Studio development site for internal use does not mesh easily with their broadcast version. These are not the issues on which I wish to spend my time, but maintaining an Open Access alternative to corporate for-profit ownership demands it: writing articles lamenting the dominance of social science methodologies or decrying the rise of DH will not by itself change capitalist models. Nor will it counter the reactionary biases within many IT organizations, educational start-ups and broadcast providers: I have elsewhere referenced the need for more female leadership within the Wild West of MOOC development, and that remains true even as the particular format of broadcast education may change.18 But enough of SWOT. The political divisiveness of the present – at least in part a less desirable consequence of the changed definitions of broadcast from those with which I began – may seem to dwarf other threats that could be named, such as those linked with the distracted globe of my title (itself now an overused phrase, Hamlet’s difficulty keeping focus having become a handy tag for globalized media saturation). Yet of course those concerns are interconnected, and connect as well with the decreasing proportion of students who wish to read carefully rather than swiftly survey ‘analog content’, or whose anxious parents allow them to do so if they wish. But I am not generally a fan of dystopian fantasies (Station Eleven being an exception) and am especially sceptical of those my age who forget their own distracted youths: all those Disney movies and episodes of The Mod Squad have helped rather than hindered my Shakespeare teaching, in the long run. The point of doing a SWOT analysis at all is to move beyond amorphous

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ambivalence (or panic) about the present state of things and on to next steps, and in this regard, Global Shakespeares both as an archive and as an emergent subdiscipline is most assuredly on the move. Despite the desires of demagogues, time as we collectively experience it does not go backwards; in the United States, there will be no return to community created through the three broadcast networks with which I began these reflections. The many countries, regions and media represented in the Global Shakespeares Archive have undergone comparable yet distinct transformations, and through them ‘Shakespeare’, like ‘broadcast’, has become even more multiple despite the seeming singularity of its referent. Acknowledging this, humanities scholars and performance artists alike can celebrate, mourn or do both. But whatever our personal reactions, I believe we all need now to be striving against hyper-fragmentation and to resist mini-wars over tiny territories of authority, in part through honest sharing and collective as well as individual projects and actions. Stressing the collective is understandably more popular among those attempting digital humanities projects than among some other Shakespeare scholars, in part because of collaboration’s co-option by neoliberal administrators and government downsizers. In using a SWOT model to speak primarily to those in the arts and humanities, I have made space for a useful irritant from another domain, but in calling for more collaborations, I am turning to my own scholarly discipline and the performance traditions from which it derives, rather than to what are indeed often threatening – even when not intentionally hostile – outside forces. Whether or not my audiences will hear this as I intend is another matter. For in writing as in speaking across fields and professions – itself another form of broadcasting – we are perforce thrust into a political minefield, yet a minefield we cannot now avoid. My own sociopolitical consciousness was shaped both by my local experiences (of sexism, racism and, of course, that 1960s world of nightly news anchored by white men, reflective of

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broadcast norms) and by academic gender analysis, which taught me how to dance through the minefields.19 For others, their geographical locations on this spinning earth may have been the most salient factor in shaping their academic or performative consciousness, while for still others in positions of academic or theatrical authority, there still too often remains little sign of their adapting their rhetoric to the new media and social contexts in which they speak. It is with this landscape firmly in mind, then, that I reiterate the need to speed up and better strategize about our collaborations across institutions, about the interface between our research and increasingly impatient publics and about how the Bardbiz can avoid being subsumed by for-profit forces without becoming ossified or indeed reactionary. Whatever the on-the-ground realities, the manner in which Shakespeare’s Globe announced in October 2016 the termination of Emma Rice’s tenure as Artistic Director after her first season (resorting to conservative rhetoric that ostracized much of the active theatre community and encouraged alternative narratives of the Board’s sexism and ineptitude) illustrates how badly public relations can go awry now that Shakespeare is being broadcast on a variety of media platforms by diverse users, especially when one turns to origins and traditions for argumentative defences that exclude much of the presentday intended audience.20 A look around the real globe to Shakespeare’s myriad transformations seems an especially useful corrective, and the Global Shakespeares Archive one tool in that important process: in a 24/7 all-broadcast world, the languages of academia as well as those of the past all the more urgently need enthusiastic translators. But the scale of the enterprise also demands far more coordination and less emphasis on our individual talents, going public (even in blogs and on social media) not to carp about details but to do what we can to get the facts right. Broadcasting Shakespeare provides an opportunity to remind embattled humanities scholars that we still have roles to play, assistance to give as gracefully as we can, be it to a

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newspaper columnist or an undergraduate. And by building on the model of the Global Shakespeares Archive in holding a clear progressive vision, acknowledging diverse local expertise and skills and making space for those with the creativity and tenacity to recreate Shakespeare, academic Shakespeare studies can expand its vitality to embrace even more of those born digital, without forcing them to speak (exclusively) in the field’s traditional languages.

4 ‘Once more to the breach!’ Shakespeare, Wikipedia’s Gender Gap and the Online, Digital Elite David C. Moberly

Since the self-styled online encyclopaedia came into its own in the mid-2000s, few informational resources on William Shakespeare have been accessed as frequently as Wikipedia. Its central article on the playwright alone, ‘William Shakespeare’, is available in more than 170 languages and accessed over 70,000 times a day, or once about every 1.2 seconds.1 A number of studies have examined the impact of Wikipedia on the sciences and the humanities, in college classrooms and on society as a whole.2 Among Shakespeare scholars, the popularity of the site continues to attract the concerned attention of some, while provoking curiosity and inspiration in others. Indeed, in academic circles, Wikipedia is both a

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pariah for its perceived amateurism and a powerful example of the positive potential of digital media. Still, despite frequent passing acknowledgements of the widespread influence of the site for good or ill, no study has, as yet, endeavoured to take a close look at exactly how Wikipedia’s Shakespeares operate within their unique medium, or how Wikipedia’s editors see themselves in relation to the playwright they describe. This line of inquiry is all the more necessary in an academic climate in which college and university students around the world (to say nothing of the general public) are increasingly looking to Wikipedia to frame their questions, their research papers and their understanding of the world.3 Because of its wide audience, in the end, the site presents not so much a problem as an opportunity for scholars to present Shakespeare to the public with all of the rigorous accuracy and global diversity that our work has achieved in recent years, diversity that remains, today, invisible to the typical Wikipedia reader and digital amateur. This chapter analyses Wikipedia’s Shakespeares with the aim of complicating recent presentist readings of Shakespeare and his works that have made the moment of consumption of a text an ever-more primary focus. For a medium such as a wiki, in which production and consumption often inextricably intertwine, the presentist method must be examined and re-adjusted. What, for example, happens when the identity of the consumer and the identity of the producer combine? What happens to Shakespeare on the self-styled ‘encyclopedia anyone can edit’, a place where presumably any audience member can contribute directly and immediately to such a widely used resource? As a radically participatory website, Wikipedia has encouraged a new set of speakers to see themselves as part of Shakespeare discourse in a way that would have been impossible just fifteen years ago; yet, as this chapter will show, despite the promise of openness, the Shakespeares this site creates do not escape other paradigms of exclusivity.

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‘Too low for high praise’?: Wikipedia in Shakespeare scholarship Despite its widespread public impact, Shakespeare’s presence on Wikipedia, where it is not ignored by Shakespeare scholarship, is virtually always mentioned only in passing and characterized both in terms of its potential to disseminate only superficial Shakespearean knowledge and – more often and more crucially for the purposes of this chapter – as a threat to (or much sought-after deviation from) traditional academic hierarchies, as ‘anarchic’, ‘collaborative’, ‘participatory’ or ‘democratic’ in nature.4 Christopher Shamburg and Cari Craighead, for example, state that ‘participatory culture … is evident in Wikipedia’.5 Jeremy Ehrlich warns of the ‘[a]narchic pitfalls of the wiki’ in the Shakespeare classroom, and Christie Carson acknowledges many scholars’ view of Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia as ‘a threat to academic hierarchy and authority’, in reaction to which ‘some want to reinforce barriers, others want to engage with them in new ways’.6 Jenni Ramone argues that Wikipedia is a ‘collaborative digital technology’ that ‘destabilizes notions of authorship’, while Alexa Huang characterizes Wikipedia as an ‘immense user-generated resource’ that influenced the collaborative, participatory design of the Shakespeare Performance in Asia database.7 All of these scholarly interventions acknowledge Wikipedia as a site of dispersed power, whether characterized as anti-hierarchical anarchy or as a space of productive, collective, democratic engagement. Two rare pieces that feature more lengthy analysis of Wikipedia’s Shakespearean material are, first, James Shapiro’s 2010 book entitled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?8 and second, Matthew Steggle’s analysis of Wikipedia’s article on The Tempest (published in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique), which dedicates considerable space to judging its accuracy and concludes that the individualistic and anti-academic philosophy of Wikipedia has brought the article to its ‘current’ state (as of about 2009) as an

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anti-Stratfordian voice supporting the Earl of Oxford’s authorship of Shakespeare’s works. He states at one point: [A] cogent explanation of Anti-Stratfordianism’s strength in this project is that there is a natural affinity between it and the intellectual structures of Wikipedia. On the former, Emma Smith, building on the work of Steve Clark, has noted that anti-Stratfordianism shares with many other conspiracy theories an ‘individualistic view of the world which derives a perverse comfort from the apparent fact that everything is humanly controlled and ultimately knowable’ … As a result of this intellectual kinship, Wikipedia provides something of a natural home for anti-Stratfordianism.9 Like Steggle, James Shapiro, by far the most prominent Shakespeare scholar to discuss the playwright’s coverage on Wikipedia in more depth, devotes a portion of his book to the site’s coverage of the authorship question, also connecting Wikipedia’s ‘Oxfordian’ tendencies to what he sees as the site’s democratic nature. He states at one point: ‘Those who would deny Shakespeare’s authorship, long excluded from publishing their work in academic journals or through university presses, are now taking advantage of the level playing field provided by the Web, especially such widely consulted and democratic sites as Wikipedia.’10 Both Steggle and Shapiro, then, in examining Wikipedia’s Shakespeare content, focus their attention on its accuracy (especially in terms of the authorship question) and describe the site as essentially or naturally democratic or individualistic, with the loudest, most numerous voices winning out over the most traditionally authoritative. One problem with the approaches of Steggle and Shapiro is that Wikipedia, rooted as it is in hyperlinks and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), is a unique text that cannot be read simply and solely as words on a page. It is fluid, changing and dynamic.11 Sometimes the page might promote authorship issues and sometimes not. As Steggle states in a postscript to his article, ‘It took around eighteen months for this paper to

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be researched, written up, peer-reviewed, and copy-edited for publication. In that same period, the Wikipedia entries taken as exemplary have, of course, continued to change.’12 As I write this today, in 2017, the Oxfordian-leaning passages on which Steggle based his conclusions regarding Wikipedia’s obsession with authorship issues are completely gone and have been consistently so for quite some time. One might ask how this is possible in the context of Steggle’s argument that authorship arguments are ‘naturally’ drawn to Wikipedia’s individualistic ideology.13 Shapiro has run into a similar problem with confronting the ever-changing nature of Wikipedia content. Since the publication of Contested Will, he has kept an eye on Wikipedia’s coverage of Shakespeare, praising the site for its pro-Stratfordian arguments in October 2011 in a piece for ABC News. He stated then that Wikipedia ‘has (as of this writing) a compact, illuminating and trustworthy treatment of “The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship” to be found under the entry “Shakespeare Authorship Question”’.14 Clearly, then, even the most in-depth reading of a Shakespeare Wikipedia article in its ‘current’ state does not sufficiently tell us how the site is influencing the way Wikipedia readers and editors around the world perceive Shakespeare and their relationship to him. Given the editorial arc Wikipedia’s coverage of the authorship question has followed over time, it appears that the site is not nearly as anarchic or individualistic as has been argued. On the contrary, the site, over the long term, tends towards orthodoxy, favouring traditional, authorized positions. This is certainly true for the authorship question, as what once served as a platform for dissent (in the form of Oxfordianism) has since become a platform for positions (agreeable to most of us, but not to anti-Stratfordians) of established Shakespearean institutions. As will be shown in a later section, the same trend also holds true as regards the site’s bias on another topic that has been in the past (and is, at times, even presently) neglected by the historically maledominated academic elitism of Shakespearean orthodoxy: the role of women in Shakespeare’s world.

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‘I will make myself a knight presently’: Wikipedia, Shakespeare and authority Before addressing the additional ways in which Wikipedia’s Shakespeare tends to reinforce and disseminate orthodox positions, however, I must point out one obvious reason traditional readings of Wikipedia – applied as though it were a traditional text – are inappropriate (and perhaps a major reason why the site has been misread in the past). Wikipedia is a relatively new and unique medium. It is, first and foremost, a hypertextual medium, making any reading of it as ordinary text alone essentially reductive. Hypertext, according to Bertrand Gervais, can be defined as ‘a non-linear text composed of nodes connected together by hyperlinks. It is not just written, it is imbedded, a HTML [HyperText Markup Language] code’.15 An explanation of this definition as it relates to Wikipedia is perhaps necessary here, first as regards hyperlinks and second as regards its status as imbedded HTML code. In the context of Wikipedia, a hyperlink is text that can be ‘clicked on’ to lead the reader to another page or to a different section of text on the same page. For example, if a user is reading the ‘William Shakespeare’ Wikipedia article, he or she might choose to click on the hyperlinked word ‘English’ in the first sentence and be led to an article on ‘English people’, or they might click on the words ‘Stratford-upon-Avon’ later in the text and be taken to an article on Stratford. These various links and alternate pathways to content make the article a complicated, non-linear text, as users are encouraged to jump from article to article, or from one section to another within the same article, in any number of combinations by clicking (or not clicking) on hyperlinks as they choose. As such, hypertext, such as that used in Wikipedia’s ‘William Shakespeare’ article, is highly participatory, allowing users to alter and redirect the text they are reading on command, re-forming and adapting it in a variety of ways and creating their own associations between texts.

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These associations can be quite surprising. As George Landlow says in Hypertext 3.0, ‘On the Web, links can … associate one’s work with unexpected or unwanted materials.’16 Readers, for example, might begin at the ‘Low-alcohol beer’ article, read until they get to the words ‘small beer turns up in the writings of: William Shakespeare’ and then click on his name to be taken to his Wikipedia article, reinforcing for themselves an association between Shakespeare and beer as they read the text. And this is only one of countless ways in which readers might find themselves reading Shakespeare’s Wikipedia article. Over 8,850 separate Wikipedia entries link directly to Shakespeare’s on Wikipedia, including those on such odd topics as ‘Spanking,’ ‘Pancake’ and ‘Assassination.’17 Wikipedia’s hyperlinks, then, make its Shakespeare page incredibly participatory, allowing readers to form highly unusual and unpredictable associations and intertextual connections as they wish, so long, of course, as they have the technical expertise. And yet, as impactful as hyperlinks are, Wikipedia, like other hypertextual media, is also participatory in another way. As Gervais says, hypertext is imbedded HTML code. A direct reproduction of the first words of the Shakespeare page in its ‘source code’ will begin to illustrate. What shows up on the screen as ‘William Shakespeare (/’ʃeɪkspɪər/; 26 April 1564 (baptised)–23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright’ is rendered in HTML source code as:

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) [nb 1] was an English poet and playwright Thankfully, this is not what the typical reader has to wade through when he or she visits the page. It is, however, an

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example of the basic structure of hypertext that underlies the words made visible to the average computer user. In hypertext markup language, words are surrounded by tags such as, in the example above, ‘’ or ‘.’ These tags instruct each computer user’s internet browser (such as Internet Explorer) as to how to present the text between them. The ‘’ and ‘’ around the words ‘William Shakespeare,’ for example, tell the internet browser to present ‘William Shakespeare’ in bold on the screen. Countless similar hypertextual tags control everything in the article from its presentation of images to the size and colour of its font. Perhaps the most powerful thing about hypertext tags, as it relates to the Shakespeare Wikipedia article and elsewhere, is that the suggestions they make as to how to present the text leave a lot of leeway for individual browsers. Depending on how Wikipedia readers set their browser, they might see the Shakespeare page in very large or very small font. They might see the page machine-translated into Russian with all of the images removed, moved or resized. They might not even see the text at all, but have it read to them aloud by a computerized voice of their choosing. They may hear portions of the article read to them via Apple’s SIRI app or Google’s voice search in answer to a question spoken into their phone or tablet. They may have their browser set to block certain words. If they were, for example, offended by the word ‘Stratford’, or ‘Oxford’, they could set their browser to put asterisks in place of such a word. Users may even set their browsers to block entire pages containing certain words. HTML source code allows for all of these possibilities. Thus, the source code is very much like a playtext, and each presentation of the page like a performance of the HTML code contained within it. Each time the page is presented on a screen for view, it is carefully ‘adapted’ from the source code according to the rules specified by the reader’s browser. The number and variety of possible variations on the ‘performance’ of the ‘William Shakespeare’ page on Wikipedia, then, is as limitless as the desires, expertise and technical capacities of its readers and their machines.

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These characteristics of Wikipedia’s hypertext – its hyperlinks and its imbedded, ‘performative’ nature – are part of what creates a new kind of participatory reading, referred to by some as ‘hyperreading’. Mark Leahy describes this kind of reading by saying that with digital texts ‘There is … a materializing of the action of reading, reading as being with the text and of moving in relation to the text … The space the text is located in is the space that the reader occupies.’18 In other words, the reader’s role becomes more visible, more ‘material’ in hypertextual reading since readers are more aware of the choices they are making to ‘change’ the text, for example, by clicking on a hyperlink or by changing a setting on an internet browser. Unlike reading on a page, with hyperreading, readers’ choices manifest themselves in actual, visible, immediate changes to the text on the screen, changes that can be verified by other, objective viewers who might be looking over their shoulder. By its very hypertextual nature, then, the Shakespeare Wikipedia article is highly participatory, and yet in being so, it is not really any different from other free, online encyclopaedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica, which also has hyperlinks (though not nearly as many in-text), and also contains embedded HTML code. Wikipedia’s article, however, is different in one very significant way from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry in that it is not merely hypertext. It is hypertext with an added dimension of participation. Unlike typical hypertext, Wikipedia’s source code, or ‘wikitext’, can be directly edited and altered by its readers, and those changes will present the text in a different way to every other reader of the text until someone else changes the code. Even hypertext’s radically participatory nature falls short of this level of public collaboration. With most hypertext, readers are able to alter the way they see the text, but have very limited ability to change the way others see it. With hypertext, they can change the way the text appears on the screen to them and to anyone who might be looking over their shoulder, but with wikitext, all readers become potential writers.

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This level of participation dramatically changes the way many readers see Wikipedia’s text in relation to themselves. When readers of a public medium such as Wikipedia begin to see themselves not only as readers but also as writers or editors, they begin to see Wikipedia as our text or my text, not his, her or their text. Rather than being passive readers and absorbers of information on the ‘William Shakespeare’ page, they begin to see themselves as having authority over the text, to question, challenge or modify it as they desire in the face of outside authorities or hierarchies. As Yuejia Zhang says it, ‘Wiki technology makes an immediate challenge to the text possible’, and this is certainly true of Wikipedia’s Shakespearean content.19 The talk page of Shakespeare’s Wikipedia entry – where Wikipedia readers and editors comment on the ‘William Shakespeare’ article as they create it – is full of examples of editors identifying with the text they are creating, which in turn causes them to identify with Shakespeare in unique ways. Any reader who finds something on the page objectionable can change it immediately and publicly. This capability allows its readers to see themselves as policing the borders of Shakespeare, thus ensuring that an ‘accurate’, ‘unbiased’ view of the man is articulated in the text. A look at editors’ comments on their own edits to the Shakespeare article reveals the sense of empowerment they feel in their public objections. Says one editor after making an edit to the ‘Sexuality’ section: ‘only some commentators see the sonnets as autobiographical’. Another says, ‘success was in gloving not aldering’ in explanation of an edit to information about Shakespeare’s father. Still others simply say, ‘remove drivel’ as commentary to an edit, or ‘revert vandal’ after the page has been blanked or someone has added ‘This whole page is horribly infested with AIDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!1’20 Each of these comments expresses ownership and authority not only over Shakespeare’s Wikipedia page but also over the very image of Shakespeare himself.

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Thus, these and many other Wikipedians see Shakespeare as something they can defend and protect, as a collection of ideas that they can personally and publicly celebrate, treasure and police. This idea of ‘policing’ is directly inscribed into Wikipedia’s culture, as editors of the site are encouraged to join the ‘Recent changes patrol’, a group of users who monitor recent edits to Wikipedia for vandalism. People who join the group are even encouraged to put an icon of a policeman on their userpage (a personalized space in which users identify and distinguish themselves) along with the words ‘This user is a recent changes patroller.’ They may also post their ‘police badge’ as a sign of their role on Wikipedia.21 Wikipedia has, then, made ‘Shakespeare,’ in the minds of many ordinary internet users, not an idea that is articulated to them by academics, but one that they have a duty to protect and inform the public about accurately and fairly. Frequent Wikipedia editors of the Shakespeare page often see themselves as bringing the ‘Bard’ into the internet world while simultaneously initiating themselves as writers into the exclusive, heady and exciting realm of public Shakespeare discourse. Several editors reflect this line of thinking in their comments on the Shakespeare article’s talk page and on its on-site peer reviews. One editor, in 2007, after a lengthy collaborative effort undertaken by a large group of editors to improve the article and bring it to a coveted ‘featured article’ status has failed, attempts to rally the Wikipedia ‘troops’ to continued pursuit of their goal by quoting Henry V, saying: ‘Once more to the breach dear friends, once more.’22 In this, he portrays himself and his fellow Wikipedians as taking part in their own kind Shakespearean performance as they edit Shakespearean content on Wikipedia’s highly public stage. Like noble Harry, they are banded together to accomplish the impossible. Later, when it becomes clear that Wikipedia’s Shakespeare article will successfully meet the criteria for the featured-article designation, one Wikipedia reviewer states, quoting Timon of Athens, ‘In the words of the poet and the painter: “Tis a good Peece. This comes off well, and excellent.”’

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Here again, the reviewer poses as a Shakespearean performer, using the playwright’s own words to authorize Wikipedia’s collaborative text, and echoing the repeated, almost ritualistic way in which Shakespeare has been used to christen new media since at least the radio and gramophone.23 Yet another reviewer even composes a sonnet in honour of the article and in honour of one of its main editors, Qp10qp. The sonnet mimics Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, pondering (only half-mockingly) the eternal nature of the new ‘featured’ article that has been created (‘But thy eternal “feature” shall not fade, / Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;’) and the glory that it will surely grant to its editor (‘So long as netheads click, or GNU can see, / So long lives this, and gives life to qp10qp.’).24 Here again, Wikipedians use Shakespearean language to authorize and glorify both their creation and themselves in a kind of highclass romp. The article’s success represents their own victory, Wikipedia’s victory and the ‘Bard’s’ victory. Shakespeare becomes ‘their’ man, and they become Shakespeare’s.

‘All things shall be in common’?: Shakespeare and Wikipedia’s gender gap The culture of participation, policing, duty and celebration surrounding the ‘William Shakespeare’ article on Wikipedia demonstrates that its Shakespeares are contributing more to online, public discourse about the playwright than whatever the text of the article might say on any given screen at any given time. Wikipedia’s hypertextuality and editability has created radically participatory Shakespeares, changing the way in which many see themselves in relation to the man and his works. It would seem that the medium, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, is the message, and Shakespeare adapted to this relatively new interoperable medium has rendered ideas about Shakespeare

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more challenge-able, more reproduce-able, more police-able – in general more publicly participatory in the minds of more people than they have perhaps ever been before.25 But before getting too caught up in the heady ideals of this radically participatory Shakespeare, the question must be asked: Participatory for whom? Whose image of Shakespeare is being policed, protected and celebrated by Wikipedians? Wikipedia portrays itself as essentially open and democratic. The words ‘Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit’ are emblazoned on the main page of the site.26 Shakespeare scholars, as pointed out earlier in this chapter, have described the site as an ‘anarchic’, ‘collaborative’ and/ or ‘democratic’ levelling agent. And yet, if one is to believe recent studies, it is clear that the site is far from any true global, egalitarian, democratic ideal. Instead, it is controlled by a mostly male digital ‘elite’. As Alan Galey and Ray Siemens caution, ‘No technology has an essential nature detached from cultural contexts and local practices.’27 Wikipedia is no exception. It is portrayed as being open, free and democratic, but in reality it is hampered by the limits of the technology, education and bias that people have access to and experience in the real world. To illustrate, beginning in 2010, a number of studies have exposed the extent of Wikipedia’s ‘gender gap’, or the degree to which more men than women participate as editors on the site. A March 2010 survey of Wikipedia users carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation found that only 12.64 per cent of contributors to the site were female.28 The study also found that, across all age groups, female Wikipedians were approximately 20 per cent less likely to make the jump from reading Wikipedia to contributing to it than males.29 A later 2011 study confirmed the existence of a gap (with only about 16 per cent of new editors in 2009 being female). It also found that those women who did contribute to the site made fewer total edits than their male counterparts (with only 9 per cent of total edits made coming from women) and that female editors were likely to leave the site and abandon editing activities sooner than males.30 Another 2011 study drew similar results,

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finding that women constituted only about 18 per cent of editors and that female editors made fewer contributions than men, while a 2013 study put the percentage of female editors at 16.1 per cent.31 Altogether, these studies put the number of female editors on Wikipedia at somewhere between about 12.64 per cent and 18 per cent, an astonishingly low figure. Similar studies undertaken over the same period indicate that Wikipedia’s gender gap manifests itself in the textual content of the encyclopaedia, as the site has a strong general tendency towards extensive coverage of ‘male-oriented’ topics. A 2011 study, for example, found that ‘female-oriented’ topics were both less likely to be developed by Wikipedia editors and less likely to receive higher-quality or importance ratings from fellow Wikipedians.32 A recent 2016 study further found that the threshold of notability women had to meet to have an article about themselves on Wikipedia was higher than the threshold for men, causing articles about women on the site to make up a mere 15.5 per cent of all biographical articles. The same study also found that articles about women were likely to spend more text talking about domestic issues, as well as personal and family life, than articles about men. Lastly, the study found that articles about women tended to be less ‘networked’ within the site, meaning that far fewer articles on Wikipedia linked to other articles about women than to other articles about men.33 The news media has shed light on a number of anecdotal examples of other ways in which Wikipedia’s gender gap has manifested itself in terms of content. Feminist scholars of digital media such as Anita Sarkeesian – whose work on video games has led to her receiving death threats online – often face harassment on Wikipedia, as well, in the form of mob vandalism, defamation and even death threats carried out on their biographical Wikipedia pages. Sarkeesian’s page was targeted in 2012 by vandals who replaced photos of Sarkeesian with pornographic images, peppered it with racial slurs, referred to her as ‘it’ and made false claims about her sexual preferences. Screenshots of the vandalism were then posted on web forums

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for harassers to gloat over and to encourage others to join in the ‘fun’.34 Later, internet trolls nominated her Wikipedia biography for deletion from the site, arguing that her only notability came from the harassment she had received.35 Nor is this an isolated incident, as novelist Amanda Filipacchi found her Wikipedia article similarly vandalized after writing a New York Times op-ed piece about sexism on the site.36 Wikipedia’s gender gap, then, at times contributes to an online environment that provides a forum for outright misogyny – a place where cries for the ‘deletion’ of women can ring quite loudly.37 How, though, does Wikipedia’s gender gap manifest itself in its coverage of Shakespeare, if at all? The ‘William Shakespeare’ article on Wikipedia has been edited and revised over 12,200 times as of this writing, with just over 4,000 editors contributing. The top ten editors, however, are responsible for 25 per cent of all edits to the page and most of its current content.38 Of these editors, eight identify as male, while two have an unknown gender identity. The gender demographics of the primary editors of the page, then, roughly mirror the broader gender demographics of Wikipedia editors as a whole. This, however, is not the only place in the Wikipedia article where gender becomes an issue. The article’s section on Shakespeare’s influence mentions a total of eleven prominent male authors influenced by Shakespeare’s work, but not one woman is named.39 The ‘Critical Reputation’ section, which summarizes in a few paragraphs over four centuries of Shakespeare criticism, likewise mentions twenty-four famous critics of Shakespeare by name, every one of them male. A reader of the main text of the article, then, might be left to assume that no woman has ever had anything truly significant to say about Shakespeare or made any significant artistic contribution to the world under his poetic or dramatic influence. In contrast, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry for ‘William Shakespeare’ contains numerous references in its body text to specific women who have contributed to the world of Shakespeare. Margaret Cavendish and her 1664 praise of Shakespeare, for example, is mentioned, as well as

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Charlotte Lennox’s and Elizabeth Griffith’s contributions to the field in the eighteenth century, Sarah Siddons’s and George Eliot’s in the nineteenth and Caroline Spurgeon’s and Virginia Woolf’s in the twentieth.40 Both the Encyclopedia Americana and the online Encyclopedia Britannica also contain similar references to Siddons, Spurgeon and others.41 Wikipedia, then, demonstrates a strong male bias even in comparison to other similar encyclopaedic or tertiary sources. In fact, in keeping with the pattern pointed out by the aforementioned 2016 study of gender bias in Wikipedia’s biographical content, all of the eight women mentioned by name in the main text of Wikipedia’s Shakespeare article, with the exception of Elizabeth I, are described in terms of their domestic and/or family relationship to him. These women include: (1) his mother, Mary Arden; (2) his wife, Anne Hathaway; (3 and 4) his daughters, Susanna and Judith; (5) Elizabeth Hall, his granddaughter; (6) Mary Bellott, the daughter of Christopher Mountjoy (with whom Shakespeare lodged for a time in London); and (7) Margaret Wheeler, a woman with whom Shakespeare’s son-in-law, Thomas Quiney, had an illegitimate child. Taken all together, the omission from the body text of the article of every woman (other than Elizabeth I) who has made any contribution to Shakespeare in any way, other than in a domestic setting, is stunning, and has potentially far-reaching effects among its millions of readers.

Conclusion Wikipedia’s adaptation of Shakespeare, then, while it is radically participatory, is so only for certain privileged groups of people. The site suffers from many of the same problems Tarleton Gillespie points out regarding YouTube, in so far as the division between real and self-marketed or self-promoted neutrality, openness and democratic nature is concerned.42 Not everyone does or even can engage in the collaborative celebration – the allure of being part of something big, of

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policing and protecting something as important as the ‘Bard of Avon’ that Wikipedia provides – in quite the same way. The site remains plagued by a gender gap that manifests itself in its Shakespearean content in disturbing ways. As such, the English version of the ‘William Shakespeare’ article on Wikipedia, both as ‘text on a page’ and as a unique medium, has created an adaptation of Shakespeare that is as male-centric as it is widespread and influential. Despite this, for those who are not pleased with the current state of things, there is much that can be done to address the problem of Wikipedia’s bias. Some Shakespeare scholars already have. In 2011, a small team of Shakespeareans both amateur and professional managed to revamp the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Question’ article from a state of Oxfordian bias to one that clearly laid out the mainstream, scholarly case for Shakespeare’s authorship. These editors received high praise from both the Wikipedian and Shakespearean community, with the article in question not only gaining ‘Featured’ status, Wikipedia’s highest quality ranking, but also, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, acknowledgment from authorship scholar James Shapiro. The article now serves as a powerful (and highly recommended) outline of the strong historical evidence for the ‘Stratfordian’ case that can and does offer a balance to the popular material circulating on the internet. To conclude, then, I suggest Wikipedia’s authorship case as a model for how Shakespeare scholars might, in the future, utilize digital technology in general, and Wikipedia in particular, to help break the many barriers modern society has placed between the typical citizen of the world and up-to-date, thorough, rigorous educational material about Shakespeare. Thus far, most online, digital Shakespeare projects undertaken by scholars are hosted by scholarly institutions (such as MIT’s Global Shakespeares Archive discussed in Diana Henderson’s chapter), theatres, archives and museums. They boost the image (and, in some instances, the profits) of the host institutions that make up much of the Shakespearean ‘elite’. Of course, for the Shakespeare scholar in an academic world

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that remains suspicious of digital achievement, it certainly helps to have the name of a prominent scholarly institution (certainly not Wikipedia!) attached to said achievement on a CV. And yet, for those scholars who are serious about public engagement and public education regarding Shakespeare, if we are not satisfied with Wikipedia’s status quo and the gendered effects of digital privilege, if we wish to change the malecentric Shakespeare that Wikipedia has created, it will require stepping outside of our institutions, and the ‘digital walls’ that surround them, and contributing to sites in the public forum, such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia may not truly be ‘the encyclopedia anyone can edit’, but Shakespeare scholars, many if not most of whom are privileged enough to have access to both digital technology and basic digital know-how, are certainly in the subgroup that can. To be sure, Wikipedia’s current edition of Shakespearean material is as much a manifestation of the traditional biases of the field as of any of its anonymous editors. The sources these Wikipedians cite are written by Shakespeareans, after all, and published, for the most part, by academic presses. Still, Wikipedia, in a way unique even in the digital world, presents those who wish to critique and push past the traditional biases of Shakespeare studies with an opportunity to broadcast and disseminate publicly a more rigorously accurate and complex picture of the man, his work and the diverse body of people who have contributed to it. A small, committed network of Shakespeare scholars could turn things around, diversify and broaden the content of the site and not only offer millions of people worldwide greater insight into Shakespeare’s world, but also offer them a greater ability to see themselves and people like them as participants in that world.

PART TWO

Genre and Audience

5 Emo Hamlet Locating Shakespearean Affect in Social Media Christy Desmet

Recent theories have focused on the vagrant nature of affect, seen not as the property of individuals but, instead, as circulating through networks that link multiple minds and bodies. This perspective is reinforced in social media through its particular mechanisms, a combination of algorithmic logic and accident that governs the contingent linkages between artefacts, whether on YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest or other applications. The pedigree of ‘emo Hamlet’, which this chapter explores as a site for representations of affect on social media, was established between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period spanning the careers of David Garrick and Laurence Olivier. Garrick communicated Hamlet’s response to the ghost through extreme gestures and, infamously, a hydraulic wig that made his hair literally stand on end with fright.1 At the other end of the historical spectrum, we find Laurence Olivier’s languid prince, whose words, often delivered in voiceover,

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are spoken only within his own head.2 In contemporary media, emo Hamlet’s swings between explosive emotion and silent withdrawal find their quintessential expression in the sullen teen prince of Michael Almereyda’s film of Hamlet.3 Almereyda’s preoccupation with media obsolescence also finds a corollary in emo culture. Both dramatize the inevitability of death and disappearance, and they find a congenial context for this obsession in social media’s generally brief life span. Who, or even what, is emo Hamlet? Here is definition #2 for ‘Hamlet’ from the Urban Dictionary: ‘Main character in Shakespeare’s famous (infamous?) play by the same name. Total whiny, self-centered jerk. Seriously. I’m not kidding. See also emo and whiny crybaby’. Emo Hamlet also lacks the eloquence usually associated with Shakespeare’s royal poet, preferring instead the laconic pronouncements of teen culture, such as this example from the Urban Dictionary: ‘My name is Hamlet and my life sucks. Maybe I should kill myself. But then again, maybe not. I dunno. Should I? Should I not? Eeny meeny miney mo… .’ Urban Dictionary defines the term ‘emo’ itself as a brand of punk music identified with ‘unenthusiastic melodramatic 17 year olds who don’t smile’ and wear ‘tight wool sweaters, tighter jeans, itchy scarfs (even in the summer), ripped chucks with favorite bands [sic] signature, black square rimmed glasses, and ebony greasy unwashed hair that is required to cover at least 3/5ths of the face at an angle’.4 Almereyda’s Hamlet fits this paradigm well. Whether sulking in the company of Gertrude and Claudius in the back of a limousine, hunched over his computer monitor, or ripping the surveillance equipment from Ophelia’s neck, Ethan Hawke’s prince epitomizes the awkward, moody adolescent of emo culture.

Picturing emo Hamlet In 2016, examples detailing the appearance of emo Hamlet can be found all over the internet, in places ranging from DeviantArt to Pinterest. Emo Hamlet is characterized first and

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foremost by his clothes. He wears the black garb that Hamlet himself links to ‘that within which passeth show’;5 clothing, hair and posture combine to produce an ambiguous gender identification. In one example, Hamlet wears an Elizabeth ruff and doublet with puff sleeves over a white shirt and tights, but high black boots and hair pulled over one eye confirm that this is emo Hamlet – half goth, half fem.6 Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick has become a popular meme; ferocious frowns predominate in those versions of emo Hamlet that lean towards the goth end of the artistic spectrum (e.g. ‘click’),7 while large eyes evocative of manga highlight the fragility of the post-gender Hamlet (e.g. ‘Hamlet’).8 Depictions of emo Hamlet occasionally gesture towards the figure’s cinematic forebears. A reproduction of Olivier holding the skull, with a crudely drawn mop of black hair over the original’s blond pageboy, is adorned with slogans written in texting lingo: ‘deprezzion’, ‘I h8 everything’, ‘don’t look at me’ and ‘fjuk u Claudius’.9 Although I did not find an example of Hawke’s Hamlet as the basis for a cartoon figure, certain tropes associated with emo Hamlet are found in the Almereyda-Hawke version of the character. For instance, in the lyrics to ‘Emo Song’, which is widely distributed and parodied on YouTube, the narrator says that ‘sulking and writing poetry are my hobbies’ and that ‘girls keep breaking up with me’.10 In an extra-diegetic scene from the film, Hawke is shown penning confessional verses to Ophelia while sipping coffee in an all-night diner, only to have Ophelia ‘break up’ with him. An amateur video on YouTube highlights the similarities by pairing clips from the Almereyda film with the canonical emo song ‘Teenagers’ by My Chemical Romance. Juxtaposed in this manner, the plot lines of contemporary emo music and Shakespeare’s play dovetail nicely. The song’s refrain, for instance, concludes with sentiments that might have been spoken by Hamlet as he is about to be sent off to England: They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me They could care less as long as someone will bleed

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So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose Maybe they’ll leave you alone but not me.11 Emo Hamlet, although legion in amateur popular art distributed on the internet, has also migrated to more mainstream publications. Works of two artists that show the influence of the figure are Dan Carroll’s ‘Stick Figure Hamlet’, a web comic that then was published in print form, whose protagonist the cartoonist specifically identifies as emo in an interview,12 and Ryan North’s ‘choose your own adventure’ hypertext of Hamlet. In Carroll’s case, the stick-figure Hamlet, pared down to his geometric essentials, lacks the iconographic features of the emo gestalt, such as the hair draped over one eye, that are replicated so carefully in amateur art. The connection is made, rather, through scene, as when Hamlet delivers the ‘To be or not to be speech’ to Ophelia on a brooding cliff overhanging the ocean, familiar as the site where Olivier delivers that soliloquy.13 North’s ‘choose your own adventure’ version of Hamlet evokes the emo tradition up front, explicitly describing Hamlet as an ‘emo teenager of about thirty years’.14 The illustration of Hamlet in the book portrays a mild version of the emo prince; the tunic has short, puffed sleeves over black tights, but his hairstyle is only mildly spiky and does not obscure his face. His brow is creased by a mild frown as he holds aloft a skull. Choosing to traverse the plot as Hamlet when making my own ‘adventure’, between the point when Hamlet receives news of the ghost’s appearance from Horatio and the excursion of 1.5, I chose to ‘play solitaire’: ‘You, Hamlet, prince of Denmark, are now sitting in your bedroom and playing solitaire for hours and hours and hours and hours, which is a pretty colossally useless waste of your time, especially since you keep cheating.’15 It is not difficult to recognize North’s mindless card player as a cartoon version of Hawke’s Hamlet, endlessly editing video footage in his high-tech, adolescent man-cave. These connections, however, are fleeting in North’s novel, their refusal to coalesce

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into a consistent character exacerbated by the contingencies of choosing a path through the mini-hypertext. For instance, the reading in which I, as Hamlet, chose to play solitaire while awaiting the ghost’s appearance, through a series of additional choices, ended up with Hamlet and Ophelia happily married and their two children successfully reared and now off earning good livings in foreign locales. Emo Hamlet is just one possibility among many for North’s reader.

Emo Hamlet on the small screen On YouTube, emo Hamlet can now communicate with millions, up close and personal on the tiny screen. In a parodic video of ‘Emo Hamlet’ delivering the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, the speaker looks much like the description from the Urban Dictionary, with pale face, long ebony hair, mascararinged eyes and a tattoo visible on the hand raised dramatically to his forehead. This adolescent actor sticks primarily to his Shakespearean text, peppering the familiar speech with awkward pauses and filler words. He begins, ‘Hey, you guys, like… To be … or not … to be … is … like the question.’16 ‘Hamlet: The Emo Spectacular’, a sustained dramatic effort at almost twenty minutes in length, directly mimics the Almereyda film, which is relocated from the urban penthouse of Hawke’s capitalist father to the suburban ranch of the young videographer. Hamlet, shrouded in a black hoodie, sits in bed fiddling with his Apple laptop computer. Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, whose protagonist perpetually ‘walks a lonely road’, is his theme song. He moans, ‘My life sucks lately; everything is just so wrong’ and ruefully laments, ‘Look at me, alone in my room, excited about being on Tumblr.’ ‘I don’t want to be close to anyone, and that includes you’, he tells Ophelia, in a whiny tone.17 This pattern is followed, with greater or lesser success, in other efforts from the class project genre. In one of the

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better ones, Hamlet stomps upstairs, and when invited by Claudius to sit down at the kitchen table and ‘talk about it’, he bursts out with, ‘No! I am going to go on MySpace.’ (Like many of his kin, this Hamlet is engaged with a legacy media platform.) Back down in the basement, Hamlet is confronted by a rather bedraggled ghost. The plot moves fast, and in no time, Hamlet falls to his knees in front of Ophelia’s coffin, uttering an anguished ‘O… M… G!’ Laertes, upon entering, shakes his fists to the heavens and intones, ‘W… T… F’.18 Typical for teen productions, the video lavishes a fair amount of time and attention on the logically complicated final duel, conducted this time with razors in a suitably emo gesture, to the accompaniment of heavy metal music. In ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Emo’, the entire Danish court seems afflicted with emo ennui. One of the guards watching the peregrinations of Hamlet Sr.’s ghost, for instance, avers that she would be afraid were she ‘not so suicidal’. In this version, blond Ophelia sports the sweeping bangs over her eyes that are normally associated with the prince, and in their ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ exchange, both characters are equally laconic and foul-mouthed. In the Mousetrap scene, the murder of Hamlet senior is translated into slit wrists, continuing the emo theme, and Claudius’s response to Hamlet’s final assault is a mere ‘I gotta go’. Ophelia, in the midst of uttering her ‘heynonny-nonnies’, actually begins reciting lyrics from the ‘Emo Song’: ‘I’m an emo kid, non-conforming as can be; you’d be non-conforming, too, if you looked like me.’ When Fortinbras arrives on the scene and Horatio informs him that ‘Hamlet said you should be king’, the Norwegian interloper merely says, ‘That’s chill.’19 Grainy black-and-white footage and heavy metal accompaniment complete the video’s self-indulgently dark mood. From these examples, we can see the beginnings of a YouTube genre for emo Hamlet. The figure of Hamlet himself is composed, in terms of hair and clothing, as a recognizable visual gestalt. He displays as well a recognizable set of behaviours, epitomized by adolescent outbursts within the

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patriarchal home; and he relentlessly translates Shakespeare’s verse into ‘plain English’, including an infusion of textspeak, vulgar language and heavy doses of irony and selfsatire. Further plot patterns emerge. For instance, Hamlet the volatile teenager retreats in pique either up or down the stairs to his lair, where he logs on to his laptop to lose himself in an outmoded, no longer ‘cool’ media application (Tumblr, MySpace or Blogger). These parodies thus give a knowing nod to the media lag in Almereyda’s film, where Hamlet delivers his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in a Blockbuster video store at just the moment when VHS technology is becoming obsolete. On YouTube, emo Hamlet resists his own obsolescence by preserving a past whose confinement to legacy media ironically signals its certain oblivion. Although YouTube Shakespeare’s heyday as a site for amateur drama may well be behind us, the emo Hamlet genre itself is vibrant, witty and self-referential. Ethan Hawke as Hamlet lives on in imitations by US high-school students as the genre develops and expands. That said, I do not think that the emo Hamlets solidify into a robust internet meme, defined by Limor Shifman as a ‘popular clip that lures extensive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups, or other derivative work. Such derivatives employ two main mechanisms in relating to the original memetic video: imitation (parroting elements from a video) and re-mix (technologically-afforded re-editing of the video)’.20 For while the young people producing these Hamlets clearly engage with the emo gestalt, they do not imitate, much less remix, one another. Perhaps because of a decrease in amateur activity on YouTube, which may interfere with an efficient threading of videos, and the shallow scope of surfing behaviour, YouTube’s potential for intense imitation and appropriation is currently held in check.21 The proliferation of social media applications means a certain diffusion of aesthetic energy as artefacts, by moving from one platform to another, lose their original context and thus much of the wit that comes from repetition and self-referentiality.

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Facebook offers a case in point. Searching for ‘emo Hamlet’ among Facebook’s photos brings up funny comics (Gertrude complaining about her teenaged son’s ‘morbid T-shirts’, in this case a graphic representation of ‘2B’ and ‘not’ 2B),22 followed in a non-sequitur by an advertisement for the American Shakespeare Center’s production of the play.23 Several of the emo Hamlet skits posted on YouTube make their way onto Facebook, and there are additional videos, as well; but the path through the emo Hamlet material on Facebook seems random rather than suggestive and the videos, lacking the robust metadata and commentary often available on YouTube, fail to produce either imitations or scholarly interpretation. (For instance, YouTube videos often identify the source of their music, while those on Facebook generally do not, thus making it difficult to draw conclusions about the aptness of particular song lyrics.) Facebook’s algorithm, furthermore, privileges popularity and the user’s individual interests over the content of postings.24 ‘Emo Hamlet’s Vlog’,25 for instance, is an addition to Facebook not found on YouTube that points in sophisticated ways to the Almereyda film. Not only Hamlet’s general affect but also the video’s steep camera angles, grainy black-and-white texture and sensitivity to media’s role in unpacking the heart (‘To be or not to be’ ends with a jarring telephone ringtone that announces a call from Ophelia) pay homage to its highart predecessor. Within the Facebook environment, however, ‘Emo Hamlet’s Vlog’ cannot readily contribute to a broader discussion of emo culture, vlogs or teen Hamlets. To this extent, the emo Hamlet videos scattered through Facebook mimic ironically the ethos of their subject matter. Disaffected, disconnected, disenchanted, emo Hamlet reflects the state of social media in the age of platform proliferation: random videos distributed across the communicative landscape, with no ability to forge connections or propagate. But emo Hamlet, as a social media phenomenon, also points us towards the transformation of emotion (as the possession of individuals) into affect (feeling distributed socially along webs and networks) in the new media.

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From emotion to affect in social media Arguably, the genealogy of emo Hamlet extends back into the early-modern period through humours psychology and Galenic medicine. Gail Kern Paster initiated the argument that people are embedded, both intellectually and emotionally, within an extensive, porous and volatile ecosystem comprised of many actors – some human, some not; some sentient, some not: ‘To understand the early modern passions as embodying a historically particular kind of self-experience requires seeing the passions and the body that houses them in ecological terms – that is, in terms of that body’s reciprocal relation to the world.’26 While Paster is focused particularly on the constitution of the early-modern self, she points as well to more recent cognitive theories for support. Landmark studies such as Joseph Ledoux’s The Emotional Brain (1996) argued not only that cognition and emotion worked hand in hand but also that emotion is crucial to human survival and functions as an evolutionary device.27 This theory, by focusing not on emotions per se, but ‘instead on circuits that instantiate functions that allow organisms to survive and thrive by detecting and responding to challenges and opportunities’,28 is congenial with recent theories of distributed cognition and social networks, where the social sphere is understood to be constituted by traces and relations rather than material entities or persons. To describe cognitive and affective relations in the digital sphere, new media studies have turned to models more removed from the organic world, such as Bruno Latour’s actor-networktheory. Latour’s governing metaphor for networks of affiliation among ‘actants’ – many of whom are mechanical, non-sentient and resistant to anthropomorphism – is the ‘assemblage’.29 Affect theory tackles the question of how emotion or affect operates within these networks. While the relationship between affect and emotion is much debated and defined variously, the dematerialization of affect – it is neither contained within individual bodies nor ‘owned’ by individual people – is

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compatible with the ghostly connections envisioned by actornetwork-theory. Eric Shouse emphasizes the relational nature of affect: ‘An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential.’ ‘Unformed and unstructured’ affect is never located in one place, but rather, ‘transmitted between bodies’.30 The introduction to Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader uses a similar vocabulary. Affect is characterized by its position ‘inbetween’ and ‘be-sides’, a ‘shimmering’ of signification that cannot be pinned down: Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that likewise can suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.31 Constituted as forces that drive us onwards or put us ‘in neutral’, alternating movement with stasis, affect (rather than emotion) is the essence of emo Hamlet in the tradition of Olivier, Hawke and their social media descendants. For studies of social media, focusing on circuits of affect rather than on individuals’ emotions acknowledges the tendency of such feelings to spread easily in digital contexts. Despite the fact that online media often provide fewer social cues than other interactions,32 a recent study conducted by Facebook itself concluded that emotions are ‘contagious’ on the application. A controlled experiment manipulating the number of positive and negative words in a user’s feed was shown to affect proportionately the mood of the user’s own postings.33 Theorists of affect on social media sometimes turn to musical metaphors to characterize the spread of mood independent of semantic content in new media contexts. As Shouse writes, ‘Music provides perhaps the clearest example of how the

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intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can mean more to people than meaning itself.’34 Adi Kuntsman also explores media as soundscape as she considers how ‘feelings and affective states can reverberate in and out of cyberspace, intensified (or muffled) and transformed through digital circulation and repetition’.35 Music is also used as metaphor for emotional relations in Hamlet; consider, for instance, Hamlet’s accusation that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to play him like a pipe (3.2.354–63). Music as metaphor emphasizes the need for performance in communicating affect. According to Anna Gibbs, whether innate or socially constructed, the circulation of affect is mimetic, accomplished by a sharing of form from one entity to another.36 Mimetic communication or contagion, argues Gibbs, is crucial to ‘the making – and breaking – of social bonds. This forms a basis for a sense of “belonging”, and, ultimately, of the polis’.37 While faces accomplish much of this work in live situations, Gibbs says that in digital media the repetition of visual logos, textual slogans and musical refrains contribute to affective contagion. She stresses as well that mimicry works beyond the level of the individual,38 involving a selective sharing of formal characteristics that is roughly comparable to current definitions of internet memes as pastiche and remix or transmission plus imitation.39 This metaphorical perspective on communication as music or sound separated from sense does not mean, however, that affect wanders free from ideological impact and political significance. Sara Ahmed’s exploration of the politics of emotion inverts the psychological model for emotion, postulating that emotions come not from within, but from without – making their way into individuals through social dissemination.40 Repeated behaviours create social norms, but what interests Ahmed particularly is ‘how subjects become invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death’.41 Among the emotions she investigates are pain and disgust, both relevant to the ethos of emo culture. Even these highly intense, personal feelings are socially constructed

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and transmitted. It could be argued that this quasi-musical vision of endlessly circulating affect is, for Hamlet ‘himself’, a condition ‘devoutly to be wished’ (3.1.64). Just as the vision of Alexander progressing through the guts of a beggar might displace anxieties about the soul’s fate by a fatalistic image of corporal dissolution, so too emotional contagion from the Player – a man playing someone he is not performing an emotion he does not feel – might rescue Hamlet from affective paralysis.42

Refrains of emo Hamlet The ‘in-between’ character of affect that moves between minds and bodies like music is particularly applicable to the ethos of emo culture, in that its participants, despite their stance of social alienation, congregate in groups, often through participation in or spectatorship of hard core musical bands. Musical imitations of Hamlet are relatively plentiful, ranging from teen adaptations of One Direction’s ‘You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful’ to a metrically challenged version of ‘Hamlet, Gangnam Style’ and an exuberantly youthful performance of Hamlet’s plot via ‘Thrift Store’.43 Several examples of music video have emerged that mimic the circulation of affect (and lack of affect) in emo culture and offer ironic commentary on it as a social phenomenon. These videos employ music and sometimes lyrics from two mainstream popular songs: Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ and Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’. Parodies of ‘Wrecking Ball’ that evoke emo culture are a YouTube genre in their own right. In ‘Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball PARODY’, for instance, a cross-dressed, bikini-clad ‘Miley’ sports the trademark mascara-ringed eyes and heavily painted lips of emo figures, but has, as well, a noticeable day’s worth of beard that highlights the ‘in-between’ gender of its protagonist.44 This highly polished sample, just one of the

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performer’s many parodies, exploits all the resources of social media and by 10 January 2016 had logged 98,795,288 views and inspired many imitations. Shakespearean contributions based on this song from the youth sector are more variable, mixing genders for Hamlet and Ophelia but turning Cyrus’s raunchy sexuality into a more clean-cut youthful romance. Some harken back to an earlier day of YouTube by rewriting Hamlet as Ophelia’s tragedy,45 emphasizing her pain, insanity and unfulfilled passion. In ‘Wrecking Ball – Ophelia (Hamlet) Version’, two teenaged ‘talk-show hosts’ discuss film footage ‘dating back to 1610’ that gives insight into Ophelia. Facing the camera, she sings, ‘The king, the queen, say that I’m crazy. It’s true, and I will tell you why. We kissed, I fell under Hamlet’s spell, a love that my father did deny.’ While some of the teen rewritings emphasize Ophelia’s sexual fulfilment, leaning heavily on Branagh’s extra-diegetic scene of Hamlet and Ophelia in bed together, this emo Ophelia remains true to tragic type: ‘I listened to my dad, I just walked away, but I will always want Hamlet.’ Hamlet himself eventually ‘wrecks’ Ophelia, as she complains repeatedly (‘I can’t take it all, I’m in so much pain’). In this version, Ophelia is the wrecking ball that uncovers Denmark’s rottenness, destroying all in the process when in actuality, romantic Ophelia ‘never wanted to start a war; I just wanted you to let me in’.46 The video is crude in its production values – the sole singer has a shaky voice, the videography is static and the moviemaker finally gives up, rolling the Hamlet-themed text over Cyrus’s own voice and lyrics – but explicates the plot of Hamlet in full and revels in its emotional extremes. In ‘Hamlet Wrecking Ball Parody’, which is narratologically more complex, Claudius sings a Hamlet-themed adaptation of the song as he and his colleagues pantomime the elder Hamlet’s murder by poison in the ear. The song then leads into the Hamlet-Ophelia confrontation, as first Ophelia scrunches up her face to make her love complaint and a female Hamlet responds, ‘Get away from me. You’re a crazy bitch. Get thee to a nunnery… I won’t ever want you.’ This time it is Hamlet

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who opines, ‘I never wanted to start a war. I just wanted to bring back my dad. And I always think too much.’ A tire swing, standing in for Cyrus’s wrecking ball, hosts successive characters who sing the song’s refrain: ‘My mom is a wrecking ball, Ophelia is a psychopath; and now my uncle is my dad.’ Hamlet finally dies mouthing the words ‘I love you’ as he clutches to his breast a newly clipped poodle-mix dog.47 This video is amateur Shakespeare parody at its best. Like the ‘Wrecking Ball’ parodies, two videos based on Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ either reproduce or ring changes on the song’s lyrics to highlight the appropriateness of its narrative to Hamlet’s subject matter. The insouciant production team of ‘Some Dead Body (That I Used to Know) – Hamlet Parody’ employs the cross-gendered casting and paper crowns of many Hamlet parodies, and while the singing is sometimes off-pitch, the revised lyrics can be funny. The female Claudius, for instance, sings smugly, ‘Now and then I think of all the things I stole from my brother’, before hurling a pillow at the thin, pale, distraught ghost with dark smudges under his eyes, who retorts petulantly in song, ‘You didn’t have to kill me, bro.’48 Much more sophisticated and much more interesting from the perspective of affect in social media is the professional-grade video by Christina Panfillo and Matt Schwader, ‘Hamlet & Ophelia Somebody That I Used to Know Parody’, which features two actors from the American Players Theatre of Wisconsin. The company also produced Hamlet, with these two actors in the roles of Hamlet and Ophelia, during the 2013 season. Here, not a word of the original song is changed. Mimicking the mise en scène of Gotye’s official video,49 this parody intersperses close-ups of Hamlet and Ophelia lip-synching the Gotye song with parodic scenes of them dressed as Hamlet and Ophelia. It relies for its effect on the viewer’s ability to both recognize the visual quotations from Gotye and also acknowledge the appropriateness to Hamlet of much of the singer’s emo complaint about his ‘loneliness’ in the beloved’s company, his admission that ‘you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness’ and the repeated outbursts that

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‘you didn’t have to count me out’.50 The video rings a further change on its original by assigning the male voice to Ophelia and the female rebuttal to Hamlet. While representing the swings of emotion now associated with emo Hamlet, this video also reflects on the power of affect as music separate from semantic content by showing how the intonation and pacing of Hamlet’s nunnery scene can be evoked with words entirely different from the wellknown verse of Shakespeare. To use Kuntsman’s term, the emo affect ‘reverberates’ between actors who mouth silently the words of others as the song’s chorus hammers home the social structuring of Ophelia’s emotion, assigned to her and normalized as her character by the play’s plot and its accumulated body of representations across time in different media. As Seigworth and Gregg write, ‘At once intimate and impersonal, affect accumulates across both relatedness and interruptions in relatedness’, a circuit of connections and missed connections that mark out a body’s movement between ‘belonging and not belonging’.51 This dynamic, a movement between excess and defect of connection, also marks the textual and visual palimpsest of ‘Hamlet & Ophelia Somebody That I Used to Know Parody’. The emo affect playfully orchestrated by this Hamlet and Ophelia accumulates with the relentless refrain, ‘You didn’t have to count me out’, and an ironic overemphasis placed on the harsh enunciation of ‘body’ in the repeated phrase ‘some-body that I used to know’, mimicking a disjointed body in the digital state. While the play Hamlet never fulfils its hero’s desire for a more perfect emotional union, this highly self-conscious video mimics the circulation of affect between bodies as the Hamlet and Ophelia characters exchange roles to sing at one another, reaching a cadence, but never a satisfying resolution of their romantic dispute. In Networks Without a Cause (2011), Geert Lovink defines social media as creating an experience of ‘living-aparttogether’.52 Although meant as a critique of media’s impact on interpersonal relations, the phrase describes accurately the workings of emo Hamlet, where the ghostly traces of

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relationship are all that remain of accumulated affect in digital spaces. There the self-absorbed teen prince of Ethan Hawke plays out his angst as a poetic refrain on an endless loop. That emo Hamlet has become the emblem for Shakespeare in the age of social media, as both an object of mourning and satire, comes through vividly in the casual remark of a South African visitor being interviewed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, who celebrates Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the ‘first and finest emo’.53 Perhaps not for all seasons, emo Hamlet is nevertheless a man for our times and a fitting emblem for circulating affect within the social media in which ‘he’ participates.

6 ‘It Is Worth the Listening To’ The Phonograph and the Teaching of Shakespeare in Early-Twentieth-Century America Joseph Haughey

The earliest Shakespeare phonograph recordings, the very first examples of broadcast Shakespeare, were produced in the mid-1890s by the Berliner Gramophone Company, a recording of Mark Antony’s curse in 1894 (see Figure 6.1), and one of Hamlet’s soliloquies in 1895. For some three centuries before, Shakespearean actors’ voices without exception had been ephemeral, vanishing a moment after projection and audible only in their direct vicinity, but with these first recordings,

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FIGURE 6.1 This 1895 recording of ‘Mark Antony’s Curse’ is one of the very first examples of phonograph Shakespeare, and of broadcast Shakespeare. Though such technology would not be commonplace in schools for some quarter of a century to follow, its invention would forever change how students learned and experienced Shakespeare.

Shakespearean actors’ voices gained a sense of permanency. The new media, the very idea of an alternate media to the stage or book, along with other broadcast innovations to follow – radio, film, digital – would eventually also reshape the study of Shakespeare in American schools and forever change students’ school experience with Shakespeare. By the 1910s, innovative

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English teachers had already taken notice. They set student performances to music, inside and outside of the classroom, and by the 1920s were playing Victor, Columbia and Edison recordings of Shakespearean scenes for their students, bringing popular actors into the classroom in ways previously unfathomable (and equally undesirable: American teachers almost universally through the nineteenth century distanced themselves from Shakespeare’s seedy and lowbrow theatrical reputation). Through the 1930s and 1940s, Shakespeare recordings evolved from snippets of Shakespeare on single discs into full (albeit edited) plays constituting multiple discs, while the library of phonograph Shakespeare offerings grew to include competing vocal interpretations of the same plays, and gave high-school English teachers opportunities to incorporate increasingly sophisticated methods in their teaching. Much of this journey was documented in the early articles and notes of English Journal – one of the earliest educational periodicals in the United States to give every day high-school English teachers a voice – as its contributors logged their classroom successes and failures, foreshadowing similar paths soon to follow with radio and film technologies, and suggesting how advancing digital technologies in the twenty-first century might impact high-school classroom experience with Shakespeare in years to come. In the twenty-first century, the word ‘technology’ has become synonymous with the many new digital technologies that are reshaping not only how students understand Shakespeare but how humans fundamentally interact socially, politically and culturally. The internet and its host of digital technological cousins, though, are only the most recent in the long line of technological advances in learning and teaching, and the study of technology’s influence on the classroom requires a broader historical conceptualization of technology in order to recognize repeating patterns that can inform richer, contextualized understandings of technology’s role in teaching today. A brief analysis of school texts in the nineteenth

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century, for example – it was print technology centuries before that made Shakespeare study even possible – provides insight regarding phonograph Shakespeare in the twentieth century (as well as radio and film Shakespeare, though outside the scope of this chapter). The earliest school texts to include Shakespeare in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been called readers, and were anthologies of excerpted passages from a variety of authors. Through much of the nineteenth century, an understanding of Shakespeare came either through seeing his plays performed on stage – as Lawrence Levine has pointed out, though, nineteenthcentury stage Shakespeare was a very different experience than stage Shakespeare today: popular, rough and lowbrow; democratically involving lower socioeconomic strata; often intermingled with dancing, juggling and other variety-showlike acts; and almost entirely without the cultural and academic reverence associated with his plays today – or through the study of these snippets of text Shakespeare in schools from the readers.1 As the nineteenth century progressed, however, Shakespeare’s theatrical reputation gradually matured towards its highbrow place today, and single-volume school texts of complete plays replaced the earlier readers. The first of these, beginning in 1870, edited by Henry Norman Hudson, introduced a new formula for Shakespeare in schools, one founded on the aesthetic and philological study of full texts. Hudson explained that ‘a need has come … of a selection of Shakespeare’s plays, prepared and set forth … not of mere … fragments of the Poet, but of whole plays’.2 Hudson went on to add, however, that he still would ‘tolerate nothing theatrical’, but insisted ‘on a clean, clear, simple, quiet voicing of the sense and meaning; no strut, no swell, but all plain and pure; that being [his] notion of tasteful reading’.3 For several decades at the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, this shift in print from passages to whole plays, though it clung still to its disdain for the theatrical, proved the defining technological advance in terms of school Shakespeare.

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Phonograph technology in the early twentieth century, soon followed by radio and film, along with new progressive theoretical perspectives in education, would eventually simultaneously challenge some of the older methodological assumptions while still advancing their emphasis on spoken language. The first English Journal contribution to mention phonograph technology in the teaching of Shakespeare was printed in 1913, the second year of the venerable publication’s print history, by Helen O’Lemert. Like other early English Journal contributors who discussed phonograph technology, she was most interested in juxtapositioning music against student performances and literary selections. She described a complete performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream given at her school to Mendelssohn’s musical rendition of the play.4 Two years later, Isabel Graves added that Mendelssohn’s interpretation of Shakespeare can be just as useful in the classroom as in a school performance. In her article ‘A Plan for Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ she wrote, ‘the pupils should have an opportunity to hear Mendelssohn’s translation into music of some of the feeling and atmosphere of the Dream.’5 Felix Mendelssohn had composed the overture to his A Midsummer Night’s Dream symphony in 1826, less than a century before, at the age of seventeen. It would later become his signature work, its ‘Wedding March’ today perhaps the most recognized classical selection in Western culture. If Mendelssohn could be so inspired from Shakespeare at such a young age, it seemed reasonable that the teenage students of the first English Journal contributors could likewise be inspired from the bridge between music and Shakespeare. By 1921, the use of music to accompany the teaching of literature and Shakespeare had become so popular that it inspired Jessie Thompson to compile a list of useful selections, complete with identifying Victor and Columbia catalogue record identification numbers. Like O’Lemert and Graves, she advocated that Shakespeare’s Dream should be taught alongside Mendelssohn’s music:

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The correlation of music with English literature in the high school, though a comparatively new idea, is meeting with the warm approval of many teachers … they are beginning to realize that music is an art which is even more closely related to literature.6 Working from a number of general and special catalogues – A New Graded List of Victor Records for Children in Home and School; A New Correlation issued by Victor; The Grafonola in the Class Room and Literature and Music, both issued by Columbia – Thompson outlined appropriate musical selections to accompany an entire four-year high-school curriculum in literature, including many for teaching Shakespeare. Laura McGregor added in 1924 that ‘many teachers have already recognized the possibilities of richer aesthetic experience through the alliance of these two modes of expression’ and that ‘the use of the musical theme in connection with dramatic readings are already familiar’.7 Another teacher the same year, Max Herzberg, writing of literature and music as ‘twin arts’, went on to say that Were one to take Shakespeare alone, a whole catalogue might be compiled of the many composers who have sought to present the essential music of his plays in musical form … Sometimes Shakespeare has merely set the composer meditating musically and to fine effect; sometimes the connection between words and music is direct and evident.8 An English Journal note from the same year reported that at the proceedings of the Utah Educational Association, members celebrated the tercentenary of the First Folio with musical selections from Shakespeare given on the Victrola.9 By the 1920s, Shakespearean vocal recordings, in addition to Shakespearean musical selections, had also sparked interest

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among teachers. Victor advertisements directed towards teachers marketed a number of educational recordings, the most prominent of which was Shakespeare (see Figure 6.2). These suggest the response of the commercial educational market to the innovative ideas presented by early English Journal contributors, just as contributors reciprocally described their use of Victor vocal recordings in their classrooms through the 1920s and 1930s. Helen Francis, for example, wrote of playing the records in the auditorium for groups of students in 1926: ‘If a Victrola can be heard distinctly there, the records from Twelfth Night by Southern and Marlowe, and the ones from Julius Caesar, are stimulating.’10 Frances Ross Hicks went on to suggest in 1934 that English teachers take it upon themselves to find opportunities to infuse their regular lessons with elements from other fine arts, including music, and specifically suggested using the Victrola in the playing of Shakespeare.11 Juanita Small Peck, later the same year, described the ideal English classroom, complete with a stage and two dressing rooms, comfortable and moveable furniture, a phonograph and a movie-projecting machine.12 Not all classrooms, though, had equal access to emerging phonograph technology, particularly as the Great Depression took its stranglehold on school budgets. While some praised the phonograph’s affordability – Louise Mortenson, an Iowa teacher, wrote in 1932, ‘Now that phonographs are so inexpensive, a small investment will bring the means of introducing A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the playing of Mendelssohn … Surely there is no more beautiful gateway to the fairy realm’ – other innovative teachers were forced to use what was available to them.13 Ruth Messenger complained in 1934 that ‘if you or your school is so inconceivably wealthy as to possess a portable Victrola and a small yearly sum for records, you may account yourself blessed among mortals’, but suggested that teachers working in schools unable to afford the equipment or records could still simply bring in a guitar or play on a piano and have students sing along to Shakespearean songs, just as they had in years prior to

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FIGURE 6.2 The Victor Record Company, the premiere record publisher of the early twentieth century, was producing recordings of famous passages from a number of literary works to meet an emerging educational market, including dozens of Shakespearean audio recordings and songs from and inspired by his plays, which were then advertised in the English Journal. Featured is their full-page advertisement from February 1923, which makes use of Shakespeare’s likeness in convincing teachers of the ‘wonderful interpretative powers’ possible through phonograph technology.

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the invention of the phonograph.14 Sheet music for popular Shakespearean music was available to this end and often discussed as well; one popular text of the time was Fifty Shakspere Songs [sic]. In addition to issues of phonograph affordability, there also existed at the same time, just as today, an influential conservative camp that remained hesitant of pedagogical progressivist strategies, such as the phonograph, which they believed failed to provide the vigour of close reading and traditional literary instruction. Though outnumbered, these voices were representative of many practical-minded, text- and reading-focused teachers, and made their way as well into the pages of English Journal. Joy Leavitt Nevins, for example, described in ‘Hamlet in 1937’ her students turning ‘to the varying notes in the four editions available’ as well as ‘the Variorum [which] was in the hands of a different pupil each day’; as she continues in her description of the class proceedings, which shortly thereafter turned to ‘the assignment of [critical] readings’, with most students being assigned various critical perspectives’ except for ‘pupils of mediocre ability [who] chose among newspaper and magazine articles’, it becomes clear that there was little room in her classroom for emerging phonograph technology.15 Writing of his radical peers, Henry Simon lamented that ‘the English literature class [had become] a circus ring for educational stunts’.16 He defended the close reading of Shakespearean text, ranting against those teachers who would have their students acting, making costumes, building sets and collecting admissions as part of their study of Shakespeare. Such newfangled methods had no proper place in the teaching of literature. If the purpose of the English classroom were to instil in students skills for such activities, then Simon facetiously suggested choosing selections better suited for the purpose than the plays of Shakespeare. Further, if there were students incapable of appreciating Shakespeare through close reading, then they should be taught something else. English teachers who disagreed likewise should be teaching something else: only those teachers ‘who have achieved an understanding of him [Shakespeare] and

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can maintain a perspective on the reason for reading him’ should be afforded the opportunity to teach his plays.17 Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, teachers transitioned further from their emphasis on Shakespearean song and music towards using the phonograph to bring professional actors’ voices into the classroom. The most popular of these was Orson Welles, who produced and marketed the Mercury Shakespeare Records, a set of four Shakespearean plays – Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth – on phonograph, each accompanied by an innovative performance text complete with notes, stage directions and rough drawings he sketched himself (for further analysis of Welles’s influence, see Robert Sawyer’s chapter in this volume). Perhaps most famous today for his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and 1941 film Citizen Kane, Welles was foremost a Shakespearean, first on the physical stage – at the tender age of sixteen as a visiting actor doubling as the ghost and Fortinbras in Hamlet at the Gate Theatre, Dublin; then touring the United States as Mercutio at seventeen in the old nineteenth-century style, blending Shakespeare with lowbrow culture (even later in his career he performed Las Vegas magic shows alongside Shakespeare); and by the age of twenty on the New York stage, where he earned prestige for his ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth and Fascist Julius Caesar – and afterward over the course of his career in various forms of broadcast media, adapting his Shakespearean talents to radio, phonograph, motion picture and even television, thriving in a historical borderland of technological advancement and shifting media. In this, Welles was a figure who gazed backwards historically into the nineteenth century while simultaneously trailblazing ahead into the twentieth century through innovative experimentation with emerging media. It was Welles’s work with phonograph recordings, though, that proved most influential in affecting everyday classroom experience with Shakespeare. Whereas earlier Shakespearean phonograph recordings had consisted of either musical selections or short wellknown speeches and scenes by prominent actors and actresses, his were full-length adapted recordings of whole plays. Michael

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Anderegg writes that before Welles, ‘recordings existed almost entirely for preserving a famous actor’s reading of a set speech, … an attitude that sees his plays as predominately a collection of purple passages and wise saws’; similar to the school texts prepared in the nineteenth century by Henry Norman Hudson, Welles’s phonograph productions, though, ‘offered something new – Shakespeare’s plays themselves, cut somewhat, of course, but nevertheless plays rather than turns’.18 Before Welles, teachers played recorded excerpts from Shakespeare for their students – one of Hamlet’s soliloquies or Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar – but after Welles, students listened to plays in their entirety. Like Mendelssohn, Welles was young when he made a name for himself as an artist. After graduating from a prestigious preparatory school, Welles never attended university, but he quickly earned fame on stage and radio. With numerous successful acting and directing roles already to his credit, he produced his phonograph Shakespeare series at just twenty-two. For Welles, the lines between art, entertainment and pedagogy always remained blurred. He was still twenty-two when he co-authored an English Journal article together with his beloved former English teacher and headmaster, the distinguished Roger Hill of the Todd School, who remained a father figure and mentor to Welles throughout his life: A Shakespearean play is no cadaver, useful for an autopsy. It is a living, vibrant entity that has the power of grasping us by the hand … ‘But I can’t understand Shakespeare’ says the high-school boy. ‘It takes a gray-bearded professor to know what he is talking about.’ You are wrong, Johnny. It’s the gray beard that you can’t understand. He has asked you to read Shakespeare with a pair of glasses smoked to a dull and dingy gray. Take them off. It was written for you, for the groundlings and the unscholarly Globe patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. Only those folks whose blood courses hot through their veins can understand these tingling lines. Shakespeare said everything – brain to belly, every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it

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with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats.19 The two believed that phonograph technology could be used to a greater end than merely recording great actors’ voices for posterity: it could serve as a stage, a performance space in its own right. It could make Shakespeare alive for students, providing teachers the capacity to model proper Shakespearean pronunciation and delivery, and improve students’ ability to do so themselves too – a tool teachers desperately needed to give Shakespeare’s language the vibrancy to inspire students of the mid-twentieth century: So many teachers are incapable of reading Shakespeare aloud or instructing their charges in adequately reading Shakespeare aloud, that classroom renditions are doomed before they start. There is [though] a considerable and growing library of phonograph recordings which are tremendously helpful.20 That ‘growing library’, which included such prominent Shakespeareans of the time as Gielgud and Barrymore, as well as the snippet versions of phonograph Shakespeare that came before, also promoted Welles’s own four Columbia Shakespeare recordings. Welles would draw the ire of some for his liberal rearrangements and edits, though, as he would again in later years for his work with film Shakespeare, but overall teachers’ reactions to both his phonographs and accompanying school texts were positive. In a 1940 study, Welles’s recordings were provided to some twenty-five schools, to be used as teachers saw fit, and the results reported back; these were ‘overwhelmingly favorable’.21 The study’s conclusion remarked how in the nineteenth century, schoolbook editor Henry Norman Hudson, like Welles, had lamented teachers’ and students’ failings in proper vocal reading when he called for the ‘clean’ and ‘clear’ voicing of Shakespeare, explaining how

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Hudson, the great teacher, seventy years ago stressed the power of Shakespeare in offering classes an enjoyable opportunity ‘for conversing with the truth of things’. Precursor of modem procedures, Hudson made students’ oral reading of the lines an important part of his method.22 In this, though technology had shifted, and though Welles was willing to blur the lines between theatrical and literary Shakespeare in ways Hudson would never have been, their underlying shared principle emphasizing the need for students to hear Shakespeare aloud, cleanly and clearly, and to learn to read him aloud well themselves, remained quite similar. Another 1941 report of a pair of a New Jersey tenth-grade classes found that the Welles recordings of The Merchant of Venice proved an ‘effective means of intensifying and rendering more enjoyable the experiences of the students with literature … that good recordings add effectiveness to the teaching of drama’.23 William Ladd, in 1944 added, ‘Orson Welles … has published a version of Macbeth on records … which is admirable from many standpoints.’24 Dora Palmer, after introducing the Welles phonographs to her classes in 1946, was likewise convinced: It is amazing how easily all five acts slip down the most obdurate throats. When I think of all the years during which I struggled to have pupils read this play silently for homework! Never again. Shakespeare wrote primarily to be heard, not read. Next to an actual production, recordings are certainly best.25 In 1947, Cecilia Gray commented, ‘Orson Welles has made an excellent recording of the entire play … and these have made the teaching of Julius Caesar to high-school sophomores more of a lark than a duty.’26 Welles’s accompanying texts also received favourable reviews. Carl Wonnberger dismissed concerns that they were not scholarly enough: ‘This Macbeth is alive; the stage directions, the notes, and the drawings are

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not routine; they are born out of love for the stage which gave us the play and for the play itself … one might call the text revision bold.’27 As the decade progressed, further phonograph productions of whole Shakespeare plays also became popular with teachers, building upon Welles’s success. The Columbia recording of Maurice Evans’s Hamlet, for example, became the authoritative school recording of Hamlet – Welles had never produced his own Hamlet recording – as eventually did Evans’s Macbeth, which did compete against Welles’s version. Evans’s Hamlet was quickly challenged itself, though, by the phonograph soundtrack of Laurence Olivier’s film version of the play in 1948. With multiple recordings of the most popular plays available, some teachers asked their students to compare and evaluate different actors’ readings – one teacher explained that the two Hamlet recordings ‘can be turned to use by the imaginative teacher to illustrate … the obvious contrast in the Evans and Olivier interpretations’ – a pedagogical approach impossible in previous decades.28 Much like the nineteenth-century shift in print from passages to whole plays and eventually, in the twentieth century, to thematic studies of related texts, the study of recorded Shakespeare had evolved first from the study of spoken passages and scenes to whole plays and then to comparative studies of multiple performances. The phonograph not only opened roadways to bring professional vocal performances of Shakespeare into the English classroom but also through evolving personal recording technology – by 1940, RCA had been manufacturing recording instruments ‘on a scale wide enough to effect a price level within the reach of the school budget’– allowed teachers and students to produce, record and even, to some degree, distribute their own vocal recordings.29 Lother Klein, who would develop in his own right into a respected composer later in the twentieth century, was the subject of a contribution by one such teacher. Mary Wells, in 1949, wrote of his extraordinary classroom activities: an exceptional term

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paper on Shakespeare’s musical influence delivered to the class, accompanied by selections on the piano, some of which were recorded and kept for future students.30 His story is an example of a gifted young person from the twentieth century, much like Mendelssohn in the nineteenth, inspired to engage musically with Shakespearean drama, the difference being that by the 1940s there existed the means to make an audio recording of the achievement. Another such teacher, Charles R. Morris, of Massachusetts, also in 1949, wrote of an assignment in which his students, in groups of four or five, rehearsed and recorded scenes from Hamlet and Macbeth. Morris reprinted a number of their written reflections in his English Journal contribution, emphasizing their creative process. One of these explained that after reading their assigned scene together several times, they next listened to the Mercury version of Macbeth; each then tried ‘his best to sound as much as possible like Orson Welles’ [sic] recording’.31 Another reported thus: Although we had been skeptical in class, we found truth in the words, ‘You must understand the meaning of what you are saying.’ Here began a long series of discussions as to what Shakespeare had meant. Each of us had different ideas about each line. There were innumerable arguments, but slowly we began to discover the many hidden meanings, and the plot began to fall together.32 Yet another detailed the importance of ‘distinct diction’, explaining that ‘slurred letters and indistinct pronunciation will ruin all the other good qualities of your speaking. It is a common defect and should be very carefully corrected’.33 For Morris’s students, and for Lother Klein, the phonograph provided an engaging tool not only to listen to and study Shakespeare but one that also enabled them to mimic and craft their own musical and vocal performances as well. For teachers in the early twentieth century struggling to make Shakespeare relevant, and in a nation in which Shakespeare’s popularity was increasingly associated with scholarly study

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and less as an agent of popular culture, classroom tools that engendered student engagement with Shakespearean study were often welcome. Compared with the organic relationship Shakespeare’s plays had had with common American culture in the nineteenth century, the pedantic Shakespeare that dominated school study in the twentieth century oftentimes proved lifeless otherwise to many young people. For the progressive brand of teacher writing for and reading English Journal, the use of music and vocal recording to enhance the study of Shakespeare was well received. Students’ interactions with Shakespeare were not lessened but intensified when blended with that of the composer or actor. The students see and hear Shakespeare not just through their own ears but also through the sharper more detailed senses of a Mendelsohn or a Welles. Competing technologies would emerge over the course of the twentieth century, but phonograph records would remain nonetheless a dominant educational technology for a long time. These were still used as late as the 1980s in many high-school English classrooms, arguably the most enduring educational technological advancement to date, and even today, the vinyl discs of yesterday have left a lasting legacy on how teachers and students read, study and think about Shakespeare, as well as a blueprint for understanding technology’s role in shaping future Shakespeare study in schools. Looking back from the twenty-first century, and considering emerging digital methods available today to broadcast Shakespeare such as social media retellings, multimedia mashup performances, searchable hypertext archival text and video resources, side-by-side performance and text, tablet apps – the very first instances of innovative recorded Shakespeare in the classroom foreshadow lessons to come. The first examples of film Shakespeare, from the silent era, were short snippets of scenes, though Hollywood by the 1930s would begin producing full (albeit edited) plays. When educational Shakespeare films produced and marketed almost exclusively for use in schools, a fascinating genre that receives little attention today, began to

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appear in the late 1940s, these too originally were just fifteento twenty-minute snippets of scenes from Shakespeare, but also grew over time into fuller, more deeply contextualized whole versions of Shakespeare. And while it may be difficult to even imagine new technologies and applications yet to be invented or coded, the best will likely emphasize deep connections with Shakespeare’s spoken language, just as Hudson’s and Welles’s work did. Hearing the words helps determine meaning and, to be meaningful in the classroom, successful new technologies will need to engage students’ ears to make the language alive. The best new technologies will also connect students with the most intriguing, creative and engaging Shakespearean minds of their times, particularly those actors that thrive on the borders between highbrow and lowbrow culture, sowing Shakespearean seeds in new media for new generations: the Mendelssohns, Hudsons and Welles of tomorrow.34 Wellesian ends have, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, been served by such actors as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender who, among a younger demographic, are best known for their roles in the X-Men movie franchise.35 This association may lend Stewart’s and Fassbender’s respective productions of Macbeth in 2010, as a TV adaptation, and in 2015, as a film, some currency in the modern classroom. Yet, the second decade of the twenty-first century brings its own equivalents to the phonograph in the form of apps for iPad and other mobile devices.36 However, as the history of the phonograph demonstrates, a new medium does not replace an older one but exists alongside it. Other continuities are evident, as in the aforementioned McKellen’s participation with Arden Shakespeare and Heuristic Media on The Tempest app, the first in a scheduled Shakespeare series. Released in 2016, The Tempest app combines text, video and a host of digital resources to make the text accessible to twenty-first-century readers in a highly interactive mode. As Heuristic Media claim, ‘The apps are not meant to be a replacement for seeing the plays in the theatre or on the screen but instead bring the text to life and help readers understand the language.’37 They do

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so largely by trading on such an actorly or quintessentially Shakespearean a voice as McKellen’s. Similar Shakespeare app products aimed at the education market make bolder claims about the affordances of digital devices and platforms: for instance, the app ‘Re: Shakespeare’, a collaboration between Samsung and the RSC, uses the strapline ‘Using technology to unlock Shakespeare’.38 Here too, however, the new technology draws upon the celebrity of the actor, with David Tennant – known to Anglophone audiences for his Shakespearean roles as well as popular TV shows as the BBC’s Doctor Who and ITV’s Broadchurch – featuring prominently alongside Akala, the British hip-hop artist and founder of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company.39 In their early stages, it is also reasonable to expect emerging technologies to begin with more limited focus, perhaps on single scenes, moments or experiences, but as they evolve they are likely to emphasize deeper contextualized understandings of Shakespeare’s whole plays and interconnections between plays and other works, as well as between Shakespeare and other contemporary elements from students’ worlds. The best new technologies and methods will allow students inside the technology to participate in the meaning-making process themselves, just as Luther Klein and Charles Morris’s students did in making their own phonograph recordings. While it is vital to hear and experience Shakespeare’s plays through the filters of master Shakespeareans, higher orders of learning demand that students themselves also take part in the synthesis of crafting their own learning.40 Shakespeare and technology will remain indefinitely vital ingredients in the recipe of the work of the English teacher, and as English teachers move forward through the twenty-first century and even into the twenty-second, new technologies will continue to influence and advance their work, and successful implementation of these demand that teachers think carefully and holistically not only about their own teaching and methods but more broadly on technology’s influence on the reception and teaching of Shakespeare in schools throughout the nation over the last century as well.

7 Juliet, Tumbld Fan Renovations of Shakespeare’s Juliet on Tumblr Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer

((…and Juliet is totally a domme. Just, btw.)) – ‘Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love’ As I write this, Word is open in one window with Tumblr right beside it on a twenty-seven-inch monitor. I see two GIFs out the corner of my eye, one of Romeo first seeing Juliet at the masked ball scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet and the other of Leonardo DiCaprio walking towards Juliet’s bier at the end of Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. The GIFs are distracting. I keep glancing at them. They keep showing the same things. But I keep glancing at them. It is distracting.

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Late in 2014, as part of an ongoing project to understand the character of Juliet and her place in contemporary, popular culture, I began to wonder about how Juliet was constructed on the social media site Tumblr. Primary among my questions were what Tumblr users made of Juliet, not just what they thought of her but also what Juliet they made through their online activity, how the users engaged with her, what Tumblr Juliet offered in so far as understanding her character and what the uses to which Juliet was put might reveal about Tumblr and its users. I had no idea what I was getting into. My initial forays suggested that Tumblr was a panoptic and disorganized horror of hypermediation and postmodern superficiality. However, further engagement revealed something richer, revealing not just ways in which Juliet is ‘read’ but an energetic, engaged fan culture that celebrates Romeo and Juliet generally and Juliet specifically. On Tumblr, ‘Juliet’ is an assemblage of hundreds, if not thousands, of ‘touches’ on the character by hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals, all busily constructing their own notions of a character they celebrate. Certainly there are many conservative, traditional representations of Juliet on Tumblr, but set in contrast to these (if not reaction or even opposition) is the less visible but highly energetic, participatory fan culture that uses the affordances of Tumblr itself as well as the affordances of their own subculture on the site to create a character I have come to know as Tumblr Juliet. Sampling, recombining and riffing on elements of their Shakespearean source, traditional critical readings of the character and the panoply of popular culture references available to them, these users create headcanons and alternative universes that upend the Shakespearean original and create a strong, agentic Juliet who wields considerable social power and is, in the end, happy. They have renovated Juliet and made her their own.

Tumbling for Juliet Juliet is foundational in Western (and increasingly world) literature’s understanding of female adolescence and

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womanhood. She is Shakespeare’s ‘most famous teenage girl’, if not the most famous and influential teenage girl in all of literature.1 Despite her familiarity, Juliet is a disruptive character about whose influence there is no firm agreement: ‘too strong … and too well adjusted to be an apt depiction of a contemporary [suffering] teenage girl’, notes Jennifer Hulbert;2 but also ‘a strong teenage girl who’ models defiance of ‘both [social] conventions and her parents’;3 and a site where individuals explore and express a variety of personal dilemmas and subject positions.4 Conceived ‘as a more visual alternative to existing blogging platforms and social media, with a focus on curation and personal expression’, Tumblr’s brand identity centres on its claim that it is ‘a global platform for creativity and selfexpression … deeply committed to supporting and protecting freedom of speech… We want you to express yourself freely and use Tumblr to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, and stand for’.5 Its reach is broad, with some 500 million users reported in early 2016 ‘with double-digit growth’ and 85 million ‘pieces of content … uploaded each day’6 and ‘nearly 300 million blogs’ overall.7 In their description and analysis of the platform and its users, Chang et al. describe Tumblr as ‘a vibrant community for information propagation and sharing’.8 Of course, Tumblr’s public presentation of itself to its users elides the benefits to the company of being such a vibrant community for all of those happy creators, and restrictions on behaviour on the platform are similarly cloaked, tucked inside pages deep in the site and made less authoritarian by the lighthearted tone of those pages’ wording.9 Used to the more linear architectures of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google, I found the Tumblr interface to be a dazzling, intimidating array. The query ‘Juliet’ returns a mosaic of jpgs, GIFs, text elements, text boxes, embedded video, hyperlinks and hashtags; some frames contain nothing but text, but most display combinations of images and text elements. At the bottom of the scroll bar, Tumblr communes

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with itself before unspooling another wave of digital objects. The screen is not static – GIFs move, after all, in twitchy, obsessive cycles – and it is not restful. The tiled layout, the busyness of the screen and search results, delivered in waves, are three of Tumblr’s affordances. Aimee Morrison defines these as ‘the set of possibilities for action [that] an environment presents to its users’, which ‘guide and structure our uses of these objects’.10 According to Morrison, affordances ‘reduce the amount of cognitive friction involved in moving through the world’,11 an assertion that (at the time) I would have regarded as laughable, given the visual onslaught I was contending with. Four screens’ worth of results included just shy of a hundred separate frames, some containing multiple frames. I felt oppressed by everything I was supposed to be taking in. Tumblr searches are far from simple, indicating the platform’s constraints, ‘features that restrict user action’ and ‘discipline … actions by making some potential actions more obvious than others and even making other actions impossible. Manipulating affordances and constraints, a well-designed object teaches us how to use it without us very consciously puzzling the matter out’.12 For instance, the homepage the user lands on if he or she does not have (or is not logged into) an account coaxes users by providing only two options: ‘Explore Tumblr’ or ‘Sign up’. When and how one searches on Tumblr has a significant bearing on the results. Searches performed once logged in (using Chrome) return different results from searches performed without logging in (using Safari).13 Different Tumblrs appear, while those that are the same appear in different order and in different proximate relationships to each other.14 Searches on different days return different results. Some of the same Tumblrs appear but are arrayed differently. Some that are the same ‘announce’ themselves differently because the users have added new posts. Some are new to the searcher or Tumblr itself; some Tumblrs have disappeared, not appearing in searches, and attempts to navigate straight to their URLs yield a negative result. There is no indication

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that they ever existed.15 This is a pairing of affordance and constraint. After the initial ‘Eeep’ effect wore off and I accustomed myself to how Tumblr displays its search results, I was invited to explore the platform through a variety of indexical signs that prompted a response: the cursor as magnifying glass or manicule; images, hyperlinked hashtags, ‘Expand’ prompts, blog names, the reblog and heart icons, the ‘notes’ indicator and the invitation to ‘Follow’. All of these, along with ‘Explore’ and ‘Sign up’, are what Morrison calls coaxing technologies, ‘style sheets that organize display of user-generated materials; the input prompts that coax and restrict user action by turns’.16 Having created an account, Tumblr immediately urged me to blog as well as follow, like and reblog other Tumblrs; the question quickly became whom to follow. After some vexed rummaging, a strategy: follow who Tumblr suggests and do what Tumblr users do, that is, explore – an instance of successful coaxing. I followed the five blogs Tumblr recommended and, based on hashtag searches and investigating posts reblogged by the five original candidates, I settled on another twenty-five. To the novice, searching on Tumblr is a proverbial pain in the neck, a constraint on the researcher and a significant distinction from a more surfable site like YouTube. One has to ferret out info on Tumblr, a gate-keeping mechanism that announces to the world that ‘You aren’t one of us’ and ‘You’re part of the club.’ As represented on even a limited number of Tumblrs, Juliet is no simple creature. Because an individual Tumblr is not one thing but a collection of things (possibly quite a large collection, dating back years with dozens of posts per month), any scheme classifying Tumblr search results will be inadequate: a user might adore Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, or Shakespeare one day and hate them the next, might even shift within a single post; posts can float in a context-less aporia, so it can be difficult to discern what a user intends to ‘say’ with, say, a still of Claire Danes as Juliet in angel wings, leaning on a balustrade and gazing up at the sky when the user provides no explanation, the hashtags are merely descriptive – #clairdanes, #romeoandjuliet – and surrounding

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posts do not appear to have anything to do with Shakespeare, Juliet, Luhrmann’s film or that film’s themes.

Juliet, remediated Remediation represents ‘one medium in another’,17 the crucial element of the process being that the second medium ‘always intervenes and makes its presence felt in some way’18 and ‘is offered in terms of an improvement’. While ‘the new is still justified in terms of the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium’s character’,19 the implicit assumption is that there is a ‘lack’ or a ‘fault in its predecessor’.20 For example, remediations of John William Waterhouse’s Juliet pop up all over Tumblr. The new medium makes its presence felt through mousing over and clicking on the reproduction, and it improves on the original through ease of access (the original Waterhouse is in a private collection), magnification and supplementary materials. While there are dozens of ways in which Tumblr bloggers remediate Juliet, this chapter focuses on three: riffing, sampling and recombining. These acts of remediation help to reveal Tumblr’s and its users’ role in participatory culture, which Henry Jenkins defines as a ‘Culture in which fans and other consumers are invited to actively participate in the creation and circulation of new content.’21 Such a culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices … members also believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another.22 This culture can be found on Tumblr: easy(ish) to access, supportive, engaged.

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Renovation as remedy The most immediately observable remediated Juliets on Tumblr demonstrate conservative, even reverential, impulses towards the character. This group includes nearly all of the stills and GIFs of a single female hashtagged Juliet, who is there to be looked at.23 Many of the remediations emphasize Juliet’s beauty and her purity and deemphasize her desires, the emotional turmoil that she may be feeling or the trauma she will experience. A welter of GIFs indicate the ecstatic nature of her relationship with Romeo: Juliet swept up in Romeo’s arms; Juliet cuddling with Romeo; and Juliet in a wedding dress, running towards Romeo through a grassy field. None of the GIFs pays off on its promise: her (and our) desires are never fulfilled. Those reverential posts that do indicate the violence to come also tend to be romanticized, such as a GIF of Juliet and Romeo on her bed, surrounded by candles and religious icons, prefiguring the two of them, dead arm in arm in the church. While primarily visual, the reverential thread has a textual side: one post deploys metonymy to describe Juliet as ‘a white dress laid on a newly made bed; fresh-picked lavender and heather in a vase upon the sill … baked biscuits, pressed flowers, the texture of parchment and the satisfying, smooth roll of a new pen over a blank page’.24 Many of the idealizing posts are one-offs on Tumblrs that are not centred on the character, play text or Shakespeare, or are intensively focused on non-Shakespearean Juliets. For example, ‘Enigma’ has only two posts that are about Juliet, one a still of Lily James and Richard Madden from the poster for Kenneth Branagh’s 2016 production at the Garrick, the other two GIFs from Luhrmann, including Danes as angel on the balcony with fireworks falling by. Some Tumblrs have nothing to do with Juliet beyond the URL (http://tumblr.juliet.com).25 Though connected to Juliet in name only, this blog’s overall aesthetic, beautiful but also suggesting loneliness and alienation, reinforces the general pattern of the reverential Juliets.

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A cluster of Tumblrs focuses on non-Shakespearean Juliets, possibly allowing Tumblr users to read the Shakespearean character through the lens of these ‘other’ Juliets, reinforcing the Shakespeare-specific blogs’ and posts’ idealizing impulse. One such is ‘Ballerina Project,’ an extensive, curated collection of Dane Shitagi’s ballerina photographs. The serene pictures and the beauty of the dancer’s bodies mirror the aesthetics of the Shakespearean Juliet imagery.26 A variety of blogs are in foreign languages, sometimes with English elements, indicating the way in which Tumblr disrupts borders: Juliet is not ‘just’ for English speakers – here she is Portuguese,27 elsewhere Spanish28 and Polish29 and (one presumes) Chinese, Indian, Canadian. Tumblr shows that these general ideas about Juliet (to say nothing of Shakespeare himself) have gone global. There are also Tumblrs about individuals or couples through whom Juliet and her relationship with Romeo can be read and understood. One is ‘mijuliet’, a fan blog dedicated to Lee Mijoo of the South Korean girl group Lovelyz, whom fans refer to as Juliet because she played Juliet in the music video for ‘Last Romeo’, by South Korean boy band Infinite. ‘mijuliet’ is heavy on stills and GIFs, mostly of Mijoo dancing and goofing around: combined with her clothing, a traditional schoolgirl outfit, this blog reinforces the narrative of Juliet as young, carefree, high-spirited, even playful.30 Even when the singer is not pictured in her role as Juliet, photos and GIFs are tagged Juliet, eliding the performer with the role: Juliet is young, pretty, a playful schoolgirl who can twirl, hair-flip, pop and hip roll with the best of them. Few posts that I have found resist the impulse to idealize Juliet by trying to take her down a peg or three. One meme that appears now and again is a snippet of a modern-language version of Romeo and Juliet, concluding with Romeo saying, ‘The one I love doesn’t love me.’31 The implication? Juliet might not reciprocate Romeo’s feelings. Readers familiar with their Shakespeare will recognize that this exchange is about Rosaline, but those who do not know the story could take it as being about Juliet.32 Another meme that pops up

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here and there implies that there is something in the Romeoand-Juliet relationship that is not worth emulating: ‘Romeo & Juliet? No, I prefer you & me’ (‘Dream’).33 None of these posts specifically addresses Juliet, choosing rather to reject the romance narrative. More active than the reverential crew and the sceptics are the Tumblrs who engage with and renovate Juliet. These are Tumblrs who circulate critical readings of the playtext, who attempt to reframe conceptions of Juliet and the nature of her relationship with Romeo. The renovators celebrate, even adore Juliet, but are less conservative and more critically engaged (at least more explicitly engaged) in their consideration than the reverential Tumblrs, and within the larger group of renovators, there is a clear subset of what can best be described as Romeo and Juliet fans. The fan is one of the foundation stones of participatory culture. Jenkins identifies four core elements that make a fan a fan. One is the individual’s relationship to the source: ‘Undaunted by traditional conceptions of literary and intellectual property, fans raid mass culture, claiming its materials for their own use.’34 The second is the ‘interpretive practice’, treating source texts ‘as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions. Fans seemingly blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, speaking of characters as if they had an existence apart from their textual manifestations, entering into the realm of the fiction as if it were a tangible place they can inhabit and explore,’35 and this leads directly to the third element, the active production and manipulation of meaning.36 The fourth element is the individual fan’s relationship to other fans: fans join together, forming interactive and engaged communities.37 These four elements – raiding, reworking, making meaning and joining in community – are all on evident display in the Juliet renovators, and all are nicely demonstrated in the Tumblr ‘sakorbsims’. This Tumblr is almost entirely dedicated to curating iterations and explorations of twenty different Sims characters that the blogger has created and developed. One of those characters is Juliet Enna Montague. In a relationship

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with Ronnie, Juliet is an American of Sicilian descent, a tattoo artist/piercer who owns her own parlour; she has brown hair, green eyes, stands 5’ 10” and was born on 1 December. Juliet recently gave birth to twins, Mathilda and Oscar, and now is working out to ‘get rid of the baby weight’; the blog documents her pregnancy and the twins’ growth in real time.38 This Juliet is an AU, or alternative universe. An AU begins with but diverges from the facts of the source text, shifting events in time, mashing up characters or their characteristics, redesigning plots, adding events that would be improbable or outright impossible to account for in the original source’s narrative. An AU is part of the renovation processes Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe label sampling and recombination: the ‘selection, extraction, and reuse of’ source material, then ‘recombining [it] with other material in ways that let us’ understand the source differently.39 ‘sakorbsims’ samples Shakespearean source material (raids, in Jenkins’ terms) and recombines it with twenty-first-century aesthetics to create a new ‘up-to-date’ Juliet who has gaged out her earlobes, has a Twitter and ‘Still cries watching Titanic’. She has siblings, two, both older. Her ‘parents kicked her out when she turned 18 bc they couldnt stand her tattoos … and her want to become a tattoo artist, appearance is everything to the Montagues’. ‘sakorbsims’ grabs a bit of Jessica (from The Merchant of Venice) and recombines her in this biographical element: Juliet ‘“took” (she stole … like a lot) some money from her father before she left’ and used it to build her shop. She ‘hasnt spoken to her parents … or any other member of her family for 8/9 years’ and ‘secretly misses her family but tries not to think about them’. Juliet planned on keeping the pregnancy a secret from her family ‘because she doesnt want them … turning everything toxic’, though a tentative reconciliation appears to be developing. ‘sakorbsims’’ followers often inquire about how Juliet is doing and how the babies are. Followers also ask about the techniques used to create her skin, hair and clothes. These overtures are universally complimentary, and ‘sakorbsims’

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expresses delighted gratitude for the feedback and queries and provides the requested information.40 Engaged in similar AU-building, ‘the bard writes’ also has developed multiple headcanons, or ‘one’s personal interpretation of something not explicitly stated’ in the source text.41 Headcanons contain ‘[e]lements and interpretations of a fictional universe accepted by an individual fan, but not found within or supported by the official canon’.42 This may sound like an AU, but the distinction is that a headcanon could reasonably be assumed to be true, based on the facts of the text, whereas an AU shifts from the facts of the source, sometimes radically.43 An example of a headcanon would be ‘Juliet doesn’t wear jewelry often, but she does sometimes wear a cross necklace that her mother gave her at a young age’.44 It is not impossible that Mom gave her a present like this. An AU would be ‘Romeo gave her seven pairs of earrings during the times they were together (and for her birthdays+Christmas when they were apart because they’re still friends regardless).’45 Headcanons are expressions of riffing, a renovation process in which the creator ‘improvis[es] freely and sometimes with heavy distortion, but always return[s]’ to the original source, such as a Shakespearean phrase,46 ‘in ways that are more and less recognizable, depending on the listener’s familiarity with the source’, doing ‘their artistic work … whether they are recognized or not’.47 ‘the bard writes’ also offers AUs on his or her own AU, asking, ‘Can you just imagine Juliet on her first gay™ date and she’s like sitting with her girl but then FUCKING MERCUTIO JUMPS FROM OUT OF NOWHERE AND STARTS DRAMATICALLY SINGING “KISS THE GIRL” bc I can.’ In addition to headcanons, AUs and curating electronic memorabilia about productions of the play text, ‘incorrect shakespeare quotes’ and ‘well, what was yours?’ engage in fancasting, a practice common to Web 2.0’s participatory culture: an individual identifies the performers he or she would most like to see act in a given role.48 Not only that but both Tumblrs contain multiple AUs and headcanons which are not internally compatible, alongside more traditional critical engagement with the source text. For instance, ‘incorrect

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shakespeare quotes’ examines Romeo and Juliet’s complicity in their deaths, the amount and kind of humour in the text, whether being funny makes a text a comedy, the meaning of Romance, and Mercutio’s role in the text, while ‘well, what was yours?’ provides commentary on a variety of Romeo and Juliet stage and film productions, discusses the play text’s generic complexity, advances a character-based analysis of ‘why the Capulets are so protective of Juliet’ and investigates how characters like Benedick, Beatrice, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet disrupt poetic metre in their respective plays, in keeping with how ‘they’re all like #super disruptive to the world of the plays they’re in’.49 By advancing multiple (sometimes contradictory) headcanons and AUs, these two Tumblrs ‘actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions’.50 The bloggers imagine an idyllic past for Juliet: Tybalt was ‘Juliet’s best friend when they were kids. How can we not just imagine tiny Juliet making him go dress shopping with her and braid her hair, play dolls, etc.,’ with ‘tybalt just moping throughout all of it (but secretly really enjoying spending time with his little cousin)’.51 Over on ‘well what was yours’, Juliet’s nuptials are rom-com cute, with squabbles over flowers, seating arrangements, Tybalt sulking because he wants to be the maid of honour and ‘mercutio doing best man speech like “one time when we were eight romeo ate a snail and i remembered that just so i could embarrass him in front of his wife have fun kissing him juliet”’. Afterwards, she and Romeo live on in Mantua, naming ‘their kids after everyone that died because of them’. This activity is the tip of the iceberg, demonstrating fans’ refusal to ‘preserve a radical separation between readers and writers. Fans do not simply consume preproduced stories; they manufacture their own’.52 The great majority of these posts are not original: they are reblogs, often reblogs of reblogs. It is common to see the same post appear in different Tumblrs, and they don’t originate from the same source. The ideas circulate freely among a community.

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These bloggers clearly are ‘members of a group of other fans who [share] common interests and [confront] common problems’,53 and taken together with the Web 2.0 practices described above, their activity demonstrates fully flowered fan culture engagement. These fans ‘speak from a position of collective identity … forg[ing] an alliance with a community of others in defense of tastes which, as a result, cannot be read as totally aberrant or idiosyncratic’.54 This is a major affordance that Tumblr offers to its general usership and to its Juliet subculture in particular: not just members of a group, but members of a sharing and supportive community. In this, the Juliet Tumblrs seem to carve out for themselves an exception to a practice common elsewhere on the platform and on the internet more broadly: the ship war, an argument (sometimes intense and unpleasant) over AU or headcanon pairings.55 Within that community, another affordance is the freedom, in fact the encouragement to perform queer readings and renovations of the play text. Juliet Enna Montague, by ‘sakorbsims’, is ‘bisexual with a preference for males’, and ‘well, what was yours’ situates Juliet as ‘bisexual and disappointed in everyone’; ‘incorrect shakespaere quotes’ ‘like[s] to think Rosaline and Juliet would be lesbians or just really close platonic girlfriends like they get together every Saturday to drink Starbucks and roll their eyes at the fuckboys always starting street fights. PS they met at bible study’, while ‘the bard writes’ imagines that Juliet is ‘fluxing between cassgender and agender’. This latter Juliet is ‘insecure about her sexuality because she has an on-and-off relationship with Romeo, but is otherwise only attracted to girls. She makes a lot of posts about being gay, and gets backlash like “lmao but don’t you have a thing with that guy?”’. She is currently in a relationship with Ophelia (an excellent example of sampling and recombination). Most of the queer energy I have found on Tumblr is directed towards the male characters: there may well be a deep reservoir of queer Juliets on the platform, but I have not encountered it. However, it does not strike me that this indicates resistance or rejection of a queer Juliet, but rather

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a greater investment in gay relationships. Whatever the case may be, these disruptions of the heteronormative relationship Juliet shares with Romeo are indicative of slash couplings, speculative narratives (in essence, AUs) about romantic relationships between ‘same sex characters that in the parent narrative are avowedly or assumedly heterosexual’.56 In slash fiction, ‘The queering of the narrative … represents a clear and conscious break from the status quo – from embedded assumptions that result in oppressive identities … a break through the reconfiguration of reality into queerly aberrant configurations, liberating the characters … from heterosexist norms.’57 Via their AUs and headcanons, the fans are creating for themselves an alternative community that both embraces and undermines the Shakespearean source, one that (unlike society more generally) seems safe and welcoming. Interest in Juliet’s emotional life seems much greater than what she does in bed and with whom she does it. This is not to say that the bloggers haven’t considered the idea. ‘well, what was yours?’ proposes a Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio. Think about it … Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him … Romeo and Benvolio could get a ‘bachelor pad’ right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love. This AU addresses Juliet, but she is passive (banged, not banging), the focus really being on the menfolk. Other Tumblrs are more explicit about Juliet’s interests. Although containing no posts about the Shakespearean Juliet, ‘Juliet’s Closet’ implies that Juliet is energetically sexual: this Tumblr for an ‘adult toys, lingerie and novelty items’ store houses an extensive collection of explicit stills and GIFs of good-looking people having lots

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of sex, by themselves or with each other, along with sex tips and chats about favourite sexual activities.58 Interestingly, it is among the reverential Juliets that one finds another Juliet who verges on overt displays of sexuality: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ situates Juliet (via Mijoo) as a person with sexual drives, or at least an interest in sexiness: a series of erotic photographs appears early in the blog’s evolution. A young woman whose face is never shown poses in Agent Provocateur lingerie; along with this appear pictures of panties, pink makeup and pink roses lying on pale-pink sheets and shots of Agent Provocateur boxes and a copy of the Virgin Suicides photobook, also on the pink sheets. These images sexualize Juliet, but more to the point, they sexualize and romanticize Juliet’s death: despite their semi-explicitness, they’re still fairly conservative in their read on the character and even in their conception of erotic visuals.59 Then there is this fascinating tidbit: ‘((…and Juliet is totally a domme. Just, btw.))’60 Appearing at the end of a well-developed, often reblogged post ‘talk[ing] feminist Juliet’, it is hard to know just how to read this comment. The double parentheses might suggest hesitancy (though I doubt it) or an extra special secret, just between us BFs. The phrase ‘Just, btw’ lends the post a Tumblresque sprezzatura and simultaneously minimizes the sentiment. Together, I take them to be energetic litotes, doubling down on the ironic understatement to emphasize the point that Juliet is the dominant member of a BDSM couple.61 The Juliet of ‘incorrect shakespeare quotes’ is more direct in expressing her desires, saying, ‘I respect you respecting me. I’m gonna respect your dick later’ and ‘He put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time.’ These may be raucous restatements of ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite’ and ‘God joined my heart with Romeo’s’, but in a way, it does not matter what these are riffing on.62 The point that Tumblr is making here is that Juliet is sexually hungry and forthright about stating her desires and describing her activities, a far cry from the demure, ethereal Juliets posited

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by the reverential crew. Additionally, these posts demonstrate another affordance of both community and platform: NSFW Juliet is OK, even encouraged.

The politics of Tumblr Juliet Why the renovating Tumblrs renovate Juliet in these ways is a question. Why any of these Tumblrs engage with Juliet in the ways that they do is a question, as is the Tumblrs’ role in constructing an overall notion of Juliet’s identity. The core of the answer may lie in the last word of that sentence: ‘identity’. As Jenkins argues, ‘Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media.’63 The literature on the role of social media in constructing and negotiating identity is extensive.64 The impulse to impart more agency to Juliet than the play text provides her seems linked to the nature of Tumblr participation itself: a Tumblr fandom is qualitatively different than fandoms elsewhere, a distinguishing characteristic being authenticity.65 It is reasonable to wonder what ‘authentic’ even means on a platform where one does not need to authenticate one’s self: I do not know who the authors of these blogs are, but that anonymity is central to Tumblr’s aesthetic. Tumblrs can be whoever they are, whoever they wish to be, in communities of their own choosing, without (much) fear of reprisal and with considerable support and affirmation.66 Further, it is well established that the online world and social media are places where users can create ‘an online identity to escape problems they encountered in their real lives’67 – it may be that the generally thriving Juliet that the renovators propose is a means by which users reconfigure familial difficulties or conflicts regarding their friend groups, sexualities or even their own geeky interest in Shakespeare. Similarly, Tumblr users ‘with stigmatized real life identities’ may be using their Juliets ‘to disclose online embarrassing aspects of their life,

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which would jeopardize their relations with other people in real life’, or they could be otherwise happy individuals playing with different identities, genders, sexual orientations, family structures and friend networks simply because the platform’s anonymity, freedom and generally accepting nature afford them opportunities to do so.68 Users might be working through unacknowledged conflicts without even realizing this.69 It is impossible to say with certitude what they are up to, though the result seems clear: Tumblr users are engaged in a complex project to construct Juliet in ways that suit their tooth. The Tumblrs have used the platform’s agentic affordances to create their more agentic Juliet. Following Tarleton Gillespie, ‘the very possibility of acting’ in this way has been ‘encouraged’ by the platform, helping the user to ‘experience culture … as raw material for more production and to experience themselves as having agency with that material’: it affords its users the room to be creative with Shakespeare and rewards them with followers and approval and belonging when they act on those affordances.70 Many Tumblrs create a much happier life for Juliet than did Shakespeare, the overall impulse of the renovating Tumblrs being to improve on Shakespeare by endowing Juliet with social power. Freed from the constraints of the Shakespearean text, Tumblr Juliet steals money from Dad, owns her own business and sleeps with whom she wants, and how she wants. She is not a just a pretty face, staring into the distance all by her melancholic lonesome. Rejecting the dreamy, romanticized, conventional Juliet, Tumblr Juliet rejects denunciations of Juliet, too: far from ‘prefer[ing] you & me’, the renovators argue that Juliet has a place in the world, a value, a role. Beyond the character herself, the renovators perform a complicated acceptance/rejection of Shakespeare and all of his cultural authority: Shakespeare is valuable – Juliet’s ‘his’ – but his name and his authorship don’t come up much. What acknowledgements there are appear in the titles of the blogs, the headnotes or the URLs, a push-pull relationship paralleling that which Maurizio Calbi discusses in his examination of the ‘doubled-edged movement toward

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and away from Shakespeare’.71 ‘incorrect shakespeare quotes’ is not saying it is Shakespeare – it is saying it is not – but it also is Shakespeare, with its curated catalogue of production photos and critical essays. With its catalogue of headcanons and AUs, ‘the bard writes’ is not Shakespeare, but it is informed by the details of the play text no matter how far afield from those details the blog may range. ‘This world is no prison’ has nothing to do with Juliet beyond its URL, yet that URL explicitly connects the blog to the Shakespearean character.72 Writing this chapter, with Word open in one window and Tumblr hot beside it, I see two GIFs out the corner of my eye, one of Juliet Sims swinging back and forth, making kissy faces at me, one of Claire Danes staring at me through a tank of pretty tropical fish. They are distracting, I keep glancing at them and they keep showing the same things. But looking further, the fans have been busy: ‘well, what was yours?’ has reblogged an announcement for ‘an open community for shakespeare bloggers to share their work and meet new people! anyone is welcome to join as long as they post some shakespeare content and want to make new friends!’; ‘the bard writes’ is describing Juliet’s favourite outfit; ‘come what sorrow can’ has posted photographs of Juliet’s home in Verona and some behind-the-scenes production shots from the 1940 Vivian Leigh/Laurence Olivier Romeo and Juliet; and over in a new blog that I have never seen before, ‘So Anyway, Hello,’ Juliet and Romeo are having this conversation: ROMEO

Juliet, my love thou eyes art like the stars, smiling down from the heavens. Thy love is like a raging fire that completeth me to thou my belovJULIET

Deflower me, baby. ROMEO

…73 It is too much to take in and it keeps showing me more but I did ask to see it and now I cannot stop seeing it. This participatory,

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chaotic and contradictory community has created a dynamic character, complexly understood, that snubs and honours her Shakespearean source. The Juliet that these Tumblrs are broadcasting, Tumblr Juliet, is passive yet demanding, agentic but giving up control, reflecting the contradictory nature of the platform itself.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2015 Shakespeare Association of America annual meeting. My thanks to Sara Thompson, Sarah Rasher and Stephen O’Neill for their comments on that first version and to Stephen O’Neill for his patience and support during the revision process. This chapter is dedicated to Barb and Jerry Heseltine, my ‘other mother and father’.

8 ‘Certain o’er incertainty’ Troilus and Cressida, Ambiguity and the Lewis Episode ‘Generation of Vipers’ Sarah Olive

One of the concerns of this book is to explore the broadcasting of Shakespeare, in the sense of distributing him widely. Adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare are predominantly figured as facilitating his broadcasting to expansive audiences, for better or for worse: non-Anglophone audiences, young audiences, nontheatregoers, to name a few. Critics and theatre practitioners have discussed the way in which adaptation and appropriation are seen to achieve the broadcasting of Shakespeare by making him seem more relevant, updating him and making him anew.1 However, this chapter examines a counter-case, the ‘Generation of Vipers’ episode of the ITV series Lewis, part of the larger

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Morse/Lewis/Endeavour print and television ‘franchise’ (running since 1987).2 It argues that the episode constitutes an instance of the interpretation and cultural production of Shakespeare, specifically Troilus and Cressida, which eschews recent critical championing of the play’s gender and sexual politics – as ambiguous, permissive and queer. Its scriptwriter, Patrick Harbinson, instead reads Troilus and Cressida retrogressively, through twentieth-century criticism, and older notions of gender and sexuality (sometimes gendered sexuality) evident therein, in order to appropriate the play into a genre that peaked in print in the early twentieth century but retains a certain popularity on British television and beyond: the Golden Age detective genre. In this sense, the chapter considers the effects of the genre on the cultural production of Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida, observes R. A. Foakes, ‘seems deliberately to open up conflicting or contradictory perspectives on the main characters and themes’.3 The play might then appear an unusual candidate for appropriation in a gentle, detective series drawing on the traditions of the Golden Age of crime fiction, especially given the genre’s need for ultimate certainty to conquer initial ambiguity and for multiple possible meanings to give way to a single, fixed interpretation of ‘whodunit’. Rising to the challenge, ‘Generation of Vipers’ appropriates Troilus and Cressida. It takes its title from Pandarus’s dialogue with Helen and Paris about characteristics that he contends betoken lust – passionate, sexual thoughts and deeds – rather than love.4 This quotation is the most overt way in which the episode stakes its identity as part of a richly allusive series, one that intermittently references early-modern drama, but had not previously used Troilus and Cressida.5 Such appropriation is not an unskilled or uncreative labour, and although situated within popular rather than literary culture, it has sometimes been seen as inferior to Shakespeare’s celebrated use of source texts to complicate or challenge literary or theatrical convention.6 Lewis’s use of Titus Andronicus and Verdi’s operatic reworking of Othello in various episodes courageously eschews the phenomenon, articulated by Susan Baker, of the

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detective genre appropriating the comedies.7 Instead, the series participates in a contemporary cultural project of engaging a wide non-specialist audience with previously neglected, unpopular or problematic texts in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the putative (but now uncomfortably stereotyping, even racist) comedy The Merchant of Venice.8 To give a sense of its reach, it is worth noting that Lewis is broadcast in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several non-Anglophone countries in Europe and South America. In the UK, the audience for the series appears to be around the six- to eight-million mark on an episode’s first broadcast, figures that compare favourably with prominent reality television shows and other prime-time drama.9 The episode’s writer Patrick Harbinson skilfully negotiates the tensions outlined above, mindful of audiences’ expectations of the genre and series, a testament to his extensive experience in writing and producing crime drama and thrillers. He is, as Douglas Lanier explains of many writers who appropriate Shakespeare, suitably ‘opportunistic’, manipulating earlymodern drama and other literature ‘in ways that suit [his] immediate purposes’.10 For Shakespeare-cognizant viewers, the decision to appropriate such an ambiguous text initially seems likely to compromise the episode’s generic credentials, since the play must be made to support the Golden Age detective subgenre’s objectives of seeing chaos brought to order and justice being done, thus privileging ultimate certainty and resolution.11 However, because Harbinson’s appropriation is reactionary rather than radical, prescriptive rather than permissive, especially in its treatment of women and morality, ‘Generation of Vipers’ succeeds as part of this well-established franchise specifically, and as a piece of drama within this subgenre. On the downside, Lewis’s indebtedness to Golden Age detection – which makes it highly popular with ITV audiences (who also enjoy the broadcaster’s Miss Marple and Poirot adaptations, alongside the more recent ‘cosy’ Midsomer Murders) – ultimately and counterproductively limits its attempts to present a more gender-equal society.12

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Golden Age detection, originally conceived to refer to interwar detective fiction, is characterized by several elements: its ‘closed’ nature (readers or viewers do not know the identity of the killer, but discover it alongside the detective through the systematic examination of evidence, persisting through false leads and red herrings); the absence of graphic sex or violence; the presence of one ‘great’, most frequently male, detective at its core; the extraordinariness or artfulness of the crime; its inevitable solution; and the capture of the criminal by the detective.13 The terms ‘whodunit’ and ‘classic/al’ detection are used synonymously with these two referring to many of the same authors.14 Writers on these genres have widely and warmly acknowledged their formulaic nature, as have Shakespeareans writing about his and other early-modern dramatists’ recurring tales, to choose examples that are pertinent to Troilus and Cressida, of slandered but virtuous women and male jealousy over a woman, consider Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Two Noble Kinsmen and Two Gentlemen of Verona.15 Marty Roth explains that much of the genre’s allure resides in the writer’s creativeness in ensuring that ‘the sameness’ – which is a ‘crucial relay of meaning and pleasure’ in this genre, if not in literature – ‘hide[s] behind nominal signs of change’.16 Such sameness in the Lewis/Endeavour/Morse franchise includes its consistently ‘Sumptuous Oxford setting… Complex family relationships… Well-heeled academics you don’t trust … [and] Candid conversations down the pub’.17 Throughout this chapter, the term ‘appropriation’, rather than ‘adaptation’, is used to denote the way in which Shakespeare is ‘employed’ here in the service of the genre’s requirements.18 Annalisa Castaldo has categorized writers’ agendas for using Shakespeare: to test the ‘cultural literacy’ of one’s audience, borrow Shakespeare’s ‘cultural authority’ and ‘re-think’ or talk back to Shakespeare.19 The first two purposes are evident throughout the series, going beyond Shakespeare to use Sophocles and Keats in fulfilment of these needs of the series; the last is harder to discern in Lewis. Susan Baker has discussed

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Shakespeare’s function in classic detective writing specifically as author/authority (both evident in the episode, they are explored in detail later), motive (not evident here), clue, oracle and signal of and qualification for high rank (all evident in a dispersed, fragmentary way but not as single cruxes which viewers can solve and thereby solve the mystery). ‘Appropriation’ best captures the way that Shakespeare is an element of this programme, rather than its totality – whereas Shakespearean adaptation very often applies to a film or television production of one of his plays.20 Julie Sanders has previously used the term ‘fragmentary allusion’, in opposition to ‘sustained reworking and revision’, to describe the phenomenon.21 However, ‘fragmentary allusion’ risks evoking the quotation of plays and poems, rather than a wide range of sustained and coherent appropriations. In using appropriation, however, I do not wish to invoke the moralistic and censuring connotations of appropriation as theft, infidelity or as a disservice to the author of the appropriated text. It is possible that alternatives to ‘appropriation’ are neither plentiful nor popular because writing on television Shakespeare continues to be dominated by play adaptations and biographical material, although there is growing attention to user-generated audiovisual media such as YouTube as well as the Morse franchise.22 In what follows, I consider the appropriation of characters, themes and tone from Troilus and Cressida in ‘Generation of Vipers’. These include Cressida, Troilus and Thersites; in/fidelity, violent and monstrous love; and cynicism and pessimism. The episode’s resolution exonerates two of its female protagonists of all wrongdoing – positioning them as victims of men’s flawed actions and attitudes, as well as unsisterly competition – and punishes the male leads for their misogyny-rooted failings.23 However, its ability to offer an assured feminist reading of the play is constrained by its writer’s adherence to the genre. ‘Generation of Vipers’ elides the play’s moral ambiguity, replacing it with a conservative, unequivocal moral code typical to Golden Age-style detective series, which merely swaps one chauvinist stereotype of Cressida as whore for the polar opposite of ‘victim’.

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‘Generation of Vipers’ overview For the uninitiated, a brief synopsis of the episode: having successfully arrested a criminal gang in an action-packed, highstakes drug raid, DI Lewis and DS Hathaway are immediately assigned a new case.24 Oxford English lecturer Miranda Thornton has been found dead after a video she submitted to an online dating agency (run by an old fellow student, Susanne Leland) was made public on a gossip website. TheBarker.biz is the brainchild of another college peer, Kit Renton. Miranda had no close family or friends, despite having been famous in the 1990s for a popular but controversial book in which she argued that women could live without men. She leads a lonely, reclusive, romantically unfulfilled life.25 The police initially suspect that she committed suicide. However, on discovering that an answerphone tape has been removed from her home and fingerprints wiped from it, their thoughts turn to murder. One line of inquiry for Lewis and Hathaway involves Miranda’s opposition to property developer, and one-time lover, David Connelly’s attempts to buy land belonging to their college. Another is her relationship, initiated via the dating agency but ultimately platonic, with the unhappily married journalist Francis Mitchell – not to mention his wife, who had discovered his use of the dating site and posted abusive messages in the discussion thread beneath the video. Yet another suspect is Miranda’s embittered ex-student Sebastian Dromgoole. Upset by the poor reference with which she supplied him, depriving him of the chance of further study at an Ivy League university, he has been struggling to make his mark with an audio-recording of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Working with a group of friends and his girlfriend, he is in the midst of recording Troilus and Cressida when Miranda dies. This set of circumstances is typical of the Golden Age genre: Castaldo has noted that ‘a large number of … young adult novels and murder mysteries, have productions of Shakespeare as a backdrop’.26 Indeed, this series has previously used the ploy of students staging Shakespeare.27 Sebastian

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admits to posting Miranda’s video while working for Barker. biz. In the course of the investigation, Hathaway asks Sebastian’s girlfriend, Briony Keagan, to discover the identities of those involved in leaking the video. The next morning, she is found murdered. Unpicking the history of Miranda and her peers, Lewis and Hathaway discover that David had abandoned his then girlfriend, Miranda, after an article written in a student newspaper by Kit, published under the pseudonym Thersites, alleged that she had cheated on David with several men. She had written to him protesting her innocence, but he had returned all the letters unopened and had determined to revenge her by building a housing estate on the fields they frequented as lovers. Since parting, both had remained perversely loyal to their lost relationship: not seeking further relationships, redirecting their energies into their careers. Finally, however, Miranda joined a dating agency, although her dates led to shared stories of relationship woes rather than sexual encounters. Meanwhile, Susanne, infatuated with David, had long nursed a jealousy of Miranda. Convinced that Miranda still stood in the way of her goal and David’s happiness, she killed her. This is consistent with the conventions of the subgenre that construct the perpetrator as ‘a single individual’ whose personality ‘is formalized and conventionalized, generally embodying a single drive or passion that accounts for the crime’.28 She also murdered Briony in an attempt to conceal her identity as Miranda’s killer. The allusive possibilities of several characters’ names will already have become apparent: the choice of an inescapably Shakespearean name for the first victim, an odd one (‘Admired Miranda!’ from The Tempest) to apply to a rejected lover and, as I will demonstrate, Cressida-type; Kit (as in Marlowe?) for a writer, provocateur and generally shady character; and Sebastian Dromgoole for an ambitious thespian.29 Sebastian is the name of characters in Twelfth Night and The Tempest and is used fleetingly in Two Gentlemen of Verona and All’s Well That Ends Well. Dominic, Jessica and Patrick Dromgoole are all British directors, the first having led the Globe as its artistic director for a decade, while his uncle Nicholas Dromgoole

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was a theatre critic with the Sunday Telegraph for thirty years. Additionally, this episode approaches visual quotation in its choice of Toby Stephens – renowned for his Shakespearean roles in the theatre, as well as screen work – to play David. It also incorporates shots of various academic publishing houses’ editions of Shakespeare, establishing the scholarly credentials of Miranda and Hathaway (a former theology student). Characterization aside, this is part of the playfully rich web of allusion that followers of the franchise have come to expect.30

Why Troilus and Cressida? Allusion is used to typologize characters and to lend credibility to the series’ settings in the university and colleges of Oxford, and England throughout.31 The series’ literariness is one element of its ‘brand image’, which inspires ‘brand loyalty’ among its viewers.32 Morse’s creator, Colin Dexter, was an Oxonian classics scholar, who worked for an Oxford exam board and was (much like his invention) a crossword fanatic. His Morse novels and their adaptation to the small-screen reference Chesterton, Khayyam, Kipling, Marlowe, Milton, Shakespeare and Virgil, a tradition that has been upheld and further developed by the subsequent series’ writers.33 However, the choice of Troilus and Cressida as a source for appropriation in a Golden Age detective series might seem unlikely given the rather different views and treatments of killing in military and civilian contexts. Death on the battlefield is a spectre that haunts the play, including through the description of corpse-filled armour (Hector on the ‘most putrified core’ of a slain soldier, 5.9.1) and the ends of Patroclus and Hector. Yet these killings, occurring in the context of war, are arguably not unexpected or unjust. They are not the acts of a criminal perpetrator but part of an ongoing bilateral struggle in which the use of violence to obtain power over an enemy has been legitimated. In contrast, death in the detective genre disrupts an otherwise peaceful civil society. However, these

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are two contexts that Harbinson himself embodies, perhaps explaining his ability to interweave the two and foreground their similarities. The question ‘why Troilus and Cressida?’ might be partially answered with reference to Harbinson’s professional biography. An Oxford graduate, he served briefly as an officer in the British army, before developing a successful career as a screenwriter and producer in the UK, and later in the United States. He spent most of his early career at Central (a contractor owned by ITV) – first as a script editor, then the Head of Drama Development – where he worked on Morse, doctoring, and even rewriting, scripts without credit.34 His work is dominated by forces drama. The police unsurprisingly feature in his previous Lewis episode ‘The Mind has Mountains’, Heartbeat, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit but Harbinson has also written about the military police in Red Cap; forensic psychologists/profilers in Person of Interest and Millennium; hostage negotiators in Kidnap & Ransom; security agents in The Waiting Time (featuring Morse’s lead actor John Thaw in the main role), Homeland and 24; firefighters in Steel River Blues; A&E workers in ER and general practitioners in Peak Practice. He has made a career out of writing within the detective genre, police procedural and genres deriving from them. ‘Generation of Vipers’ avoids alluding to plays whose meanings now seem overdetermined in British education and culture, for example, Romeo and Juliet as speaking to the passionate intensity of teenage love and the futility of family conflict. This is in keeping with the series as a whole: other Shakespeare plays it has drawn on include Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus. Endeavour has pushed this further by alluding not to the plays but historic adaptations of them: the episode ‘Fugue’ features quotation, verbal, visual and musical to Verdi’s Otello. The franchise has become so well established over four decades now that there is a discernible practical requirement for the scriptwriters to avoid repetition, laying out red herrings that are transparent to fans through familiarity, and thereby also boring, in their use of allusion. Literary allusion in the series offers viewers opportunities for

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active engagement and participation beyond the usual armchair sleuthing associated with the detective genre through a game of ‘whose line is it?’ as well as whodunit.35 Harbinson’s seizing on Troilus and Cressida rewards viewers for their level of reader competence. And, when understood within the context of his individual writing career, the choice of Troilus and Cressida appears less anomalous than when viewing it in terms of which Shakespeare plays are appropriated in detective works or popular culture more generally.36 Although it is not usually the only or main hurdle to solving the case, the literary puzzle usually needs working out by Lewis’s detectives before they can discover the identity and motivation of the murderer. The series adheres to the Golden Age genre’s neoliberalinflected ‘fair play’ conventions whereby the audience has the same amount of information available to them in attempting to solve the crime as the detective (so any viewer who does decipher the literary puzzle in an episode theoretically stands a chance of outpacing the detectives).37 If familiar with the play, viewers may feel that they have rather more insight than the detectives do.38 However, the likelihood of solving the mystery is low given that the viewer would need to read the play in the same way as the scriptwriter and the literary scholarship underpinning their reading. Those viewers who read the play divergently from them may well have to wait for the moments of denouement that build pace towards the end of the episode. In ‘Generation of Vipers’, the reader is likely to be prevented from ‘outwitting the author’/detective by Harbinson’s now unusually conservative interpretation of the play.39

Themes: love, violence and monstrousness conflated Appropriation in ‘Generation of Vipers’ establishes thematic intersections with Troilus and Cressida through the war plot as well as the love plot. Its quotation echoes the images of

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violence on screen, reinforces the theme of justice and facilitates reflexivity about its nature. Shakespeare is frequently mis/ quoted as an expert on the latter in fictional and real criminal cases.40 For example, the titular phrase ‘generation of vipers’ is appropriated by Harbinson to refer not to the act of procreation as invoked by Pandarus/Shakespeare (3.1.126) but to a cohort of venomous people, college contemporaries shown to be ‘machiavels … sulking narcissists and slippery selfdeceivers’.41 The phrase, ‘generation of vipers’, is spoken twice in the episode. In a sequence where the individual members of the cohort ponder Miranda’s death while seemingly continuing their daily routines, the lines from Pandarus’s speech are provided by Sebastian playing back and editing the recording of the line. Similarly, Pandarus’s preceding line ‘hot blood begets hot thoughts’ is made to invoke explanations of the violent feelings that might underpin murder as well as connote sexual desire (3.2.123–25). Later, we read and hear it in a screenshot of Briony’s accusatory email to Sebastian on discovering his involvement in the case: ‘Talk about a “generation of vipers”. I can’t believe what you did to that woman.’ Her accusation is all the more emotionally forceful for her quoting a play they have worked on together while lovers, playing another set of paramours, and spitting it back at him as an indictment of his ‘true’ nature, even – in an inversion of their characters’ roles – his betrayal of their relationship. In keeping with the detective genre’s orientation around killing and justice, the episode opens with the action of a drugs raid overlaid with a sound recording of Ulysses’s lines ‘When the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander’ (1.3.94–95). Snippets from this speech are selected to construe policing as a necessary measure against society’s regression into criminal ‘disorder’, ‘chaos’, ‘ultimate anarchy’ and ‘individual license’, which threatens the state.42 Fragmenting the speech into a series of statements rather than a dialogue avoids the questions usually extrapolated from the whole speech about whether justice actually inheres ‘on the side of the right,’43 or in the ‘endless jar’ between wrong and right44 or its interpretation

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as a commentary on social mobility.45 Images of wrongdoers vanquished by the forces of law and order and Shakespearean lines combine to reinforce, rather than problematize, the absoluteness of moral value. Selective quotations of the play converge with the Golden Age genre’s and television medium’s conventions to present Shakespeare, somewhat predictably, as a repository of moral values. Hathaway later questions his own morality in pressuring Briony to act as an informant – yet another betrayal, in the sense of his exposing her to danger. This is typical of his characterization throughout the series as a self-doubter and outsider to the force who struggles with its role and methods. His concerns are swiftly dismissed by Lewis, in a way that is indicative of the latter’s certainty about the value of his role, his organization and the rightness of his moral compass. Like Hector holding that ‘value dwells not in particular will; / It holds his estimate and dignity / As well wherein ‘tis precious of itself / As in the prizer’ (2.2.54–57), Lewis insists on intrinsic rather than relative value. The episode’s highly selective use of the play denies Frank Kermode’s claim that Troilus and Cressida ‘will not yield a single ethical sense’.46 Order, authority and justice might be contested during the course of the episode, relative values debated or doubts about courses of action aired, but they are reinstated, with the episode having settled on the ultimate superiority of the law over any other systems of justice, ‘wild’, ‘divine’ or ‘providential’, before its conclusion. Another problem with appropriating the ‘planets’ speech within the Golden Age genre is the fatalism of its reliance on astrological explanations: Ulysses is stating that bad or disturbing situations and events occur as a consequence of misalignment in the cosmos, something seemingly at odds with the detective genre’s predication on apportioning criminal responsibility to individuals and punishing them accordingly. However, Lewis goes beyond allocating individual blame on several occasions in the episode, questioning the social and technological conditions that create internet hackers and trolls as well as humour based on deriding other individuals’ misfortunes.47 Just as Ulysses

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rails against the inversion of nature, which has led to a time of conflict and unnaturalness – ‘Each thing melts / In mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters / Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, / And make a sop of all this solid globe; / Strength should be lord of imbecility, / And the rude son should strike his rather dead’ (1.3.110–15) – so Lewis apostrophizes against the cruel misuse of social media, protesting against the lack of morals and compassion on the part of some users and developers of gossip websites. Any discrepancy between the speech’s fatalism and Lewis’s insistence on agency is subdued by its juxtaposition with visuals showing the criminals enacting lawless violence and the police initiating their capture. Despite the limitations imposed on the appropriation of the play by the formulaic nature of the detective genre, perhaps Harbinson perceived a tonal fit between the two which perhaps made it worth persisting with ways to incorporate them. For example, they both share a ‘gloom and cynicism’ as well as a preoccupation with ‘failure and human weakness’.48 The play’s critical reception has identified its ‘spirit of bitterness and contempt’.49 John Dover Wilson writes of the play’s ‘disillusionment and cynicism’, adding that ‘the air is cheerless and often unwholesome … the bad characters contemptible or detestable, the good ones unattractive’.50 For Kenneth Muir, the play amounts to a ‘sombre examination of a fallen world’.51 The latter is heightened in Lewis by its juxtaposition with the physical beauty of Oxford and the apparent privilege and success of its inhabitants’ lives. Furthermore, the particular structures of Troilus and Cressida – with various characters including Thersites, Ulysses and Pandarus persistently observing and commenting on the action at the ostensible centre of a scene, before, sometimes, proceeding to shape it – match those of the detective genre. Lewis and Hathaway frequently stalk and shadow figures in the crime, discussing their perceptions with colleagues face-to-face, relaying them via phone or radio transmitter before acting. There is a demonstrable preoccupation, even fascination, in both texts with the notion of a thin line between love and

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violence. This idea is a mainstay of the crime and thriller genres within which Harbison works, with killers such as Susanne, one of the villains of ‘Generation of Vipers’, frequently confusing the two (I say one of the villains because while David is legally innocent of all wrong, he bears the brunt of Lewis’s moral wrath). Sebastian too displays a warped affection for Briony, constantly labelling her with terms applied to the ‘promiscuous’ Cressida. In a similarly perverse manner, Troilus speaks of love’s monstrous and contradictory aspect: ‘This is the monstrosity in love, lady: that the will is infinite, and the execution confined: that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2. 79–82). More graphically, he figures his love as ‘scabs pus and running sores’ that, as Maurice Charney argues, ‘ooze throughout the play’.52 Cressida’s beauty could be the ‘oil and balm’ for his festering heart, but Pandarus’s praise of her is grotesquely described by Troilus in terms of twisting the knife in a pre-existing wound: ‘thou lay’st in every gash that love hath given me / The knife that made it’ (1.1.64–65). Love in this episode, as in the Golden Age genre and Shakespeare’s play, tends to be ‘thwarted and unfulfilled’;53 or ‘frustrated, unsatisfactory, compromised’;54 and, it is rarely heroic or romantic.55

Character types: Troilus, Cressida and Thersites References to Shakespeare’s characters by, and in relation to, those in ‘Generation of Vipers’ signal affinities between them. There are, for example, identifiable sets of Troilus and Cressida types among the characters. Boyfriend and girlfriend, Sebastian and Briony explicitly blur their identities with those of the play’s eponymous characters as shown above. Sebastian half-jokingly refers to himself as ‘dopey Troilus’ and to Cressida as ‘played by my tart of a girlfriend’, here enjoying the frisson of sexual betrayal and promiscuity associated with this typing. His phrasing of their roles invokes a widespread

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interpretation of the pair: ‘She was a slapper; Troilus a twerp not to have noticed’.56 Like Troilus, he is depicted as a ‘naïve’ or ‘adolescent’ sensualist whose ‘fantasy-laden sense of love’ is very sexualized,57 though sometimes couched in ‘courtly language’.58 Sebastian’s fantasy, fuelled by his interpretation of Shakespeare, constructs women as sexually voracious whores. In keeping with her boyfriend’s fantastic or jocular construction of their pairing with the play’s leads, Briony describes herself to DS Hathaway as ‘faithless Cressida’. Perhaps encouraged by her reference to this infamous role, the literature-loving Hathaway encourages Briony to betray Sebastian, not sexually, but by investigating his role in leaking Miranda’s video. Where the motivations of Shakespeare’s Cressida in betraying Troilus are arguably obscure or nonexistent – her relationship with Diomedes is sometimes conceived of as inevitable in the circumstances – Briony’s are in evidence.59 She is shown to be unselfish and (legally and morally) just: her doubts about her boyfriend’s behaviour, particularly his allegiance to their morally dubious boss, and desire to intervene to save another woman’s reputation triumph over her desire to protect Sebastian. Where the fate of Shakespeare’s Cressida remains uncertain, Briony is indirectly but fatally punished for her betrayal – killed by Susanne in an attempt to cover up Miranda’s murder. Sebastian as Troilus is left to rue his own behaviour – his refusal to immediately confess to his involvement in posting Miranda’s video – as the cause of losing his ‘Cressid’. Sebastian’s receipt of these ‘just deserts’ is one way in which this appropriation of the play erases its arguably relative moral values. In addition, David and Miranda, lovers who parted years before the action of the episode commences, are posited as a kind of sequel to the play’s love plot. Questioned by the police about his apparent dislike of Miranda (‘What did she do to you?’), David answers like a latter-day Troilus, with wounded pride: ‘She made a fool of me once. I won’t let her do it again.’ Viewers first encounter Miranda mid-flow, lecturing undergraduate students on women in Shakespeare:60

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For every female in Shakespeare who conforms to society there is one who flouts it: so for every Desdemona a Cleopatra, for every Ophelia a Lady Macbeth. But before one applauds him as a proto-feminist, it is important to remember that for these women to deny themselves society, they must also deny themselves as women. Witness Lady Macbeth’s ‘Unsex me here’, Cleopatra trying on Anthony’s sword; Cressida … who wished she was a man, or indeed Cressida who said of women, ‘Who shall be true to us, when we are so unsecret to ourselves?’ The cameras cut away from this scene, leaving us with Cressida’s predicament hanging in the air, literalizing the narrative’s reduction of women’s agency. It also leaves unspoken the fact that – unlike Cressida, who is at least alive at the end of the play, and other Shakespearean comic heroines like Olivia in Twelfth Night, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and Isabella in Measure for Measure whose initial intentions to remain unmarried are overcome by the plays’ ending – women who flout convention in these tragedies die within them, as demanded by generic and formal conventions (as does Miranda within the episode). One of the next pieces of information we receive about Miranda is that, like the female characters she invokes and interprets, she has wished to place herself outside social/gender conventions and denied her sexuality. Her monograph is interpreted by theBarker .biz as ‘man-hating’, further identifying her with Cressida, described by David Bevington as ‘eager to put men down’ (as well as the proud and scornful Beatrice of Much Ado).61 Taking in these multiple aspects of Miranda’s character and experience, she resonates with Jan Kott’s description of Cressida as ‘cynical, or rather would be cynical. She is bitter and comic. She is passionate, afraid of her passion and ashamed to admit it’.62 Furthermore, like Cressida, Miranda has been ‘unsecret’ to herself, declaring her loneliness and desire for a male partner in a video for an online dating agency, which has now ‘gone viral’

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and is being watched and commented on by her students. Its public consumption, violating the ownership and control of it she believes she has, parallels Cressida’s treatment during the kissing scene that marks her arrival in the Greek camp. Lines from this scene, including ‘most dearly welcome to the Greeks, sweet lady’, ‘Is this the lady Cressid? Even she’, and ‘were better she were kissed in general’ (4.5.17–21), are played throughout the episode. This reaffirms the detectives’ preoccupation with fixing the nature of Miranda’s character, with choosing from several (supposedly) rigidly bounded possibilities presented to them during the investigation: is she a frigid feminist, treacherous whore or a wronged woman? Despite the control over her own life that Miranda’s modern context should bring that should set her apart from Cressida, she is shown by Harbinson to be as vulnerable in terms of society’s treatment of her desires and sexuality as her predecessor. Men do her wrong and get her wrong, as does the Golden Age genre. Jonathon Crewe’s postulation of the play’s (and many Shakespearean comedies’) dominant meaning as being that ‘a single woman will always be at the disposal of whichever male “protector” successfully lays claim to her’ is shown to be no less true of Miranda than Cressida.63 Both characters’ reputations are largely decided by men (in Miranda’s case, her partners, colleagues, fellow alumni and finally the detectives), and the conclusions they reach about it become her truth. Like Cressida to Troilus, Miranda had written to David. Whatever Cressida says in the letter, the contents of which are never shared with the audience, is dismissed by Troilus as ‘words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’ (5.3.108). Miranda’s letters were dismissed summarily and absolutely, returned to her unopened. Evoking Troilus’s early declaration that ‘I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar’, David comes to realize that he can only come to a true understanding of Miranda through the detectives’ mediation. Lewis gives David the unopened letters, hissing ‘read and weep’. ‘We could have been together’, David opines, to which Lewis answers, ‘Yeah, you just had to open the letters’,

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pointing to David’s betrayal of Miranda by concentrating on her supposed ‘infidelity’ and, perhaps inadvertently, summarizing the crux on which so many Shakespearean plots hinge. Whereas the play ends shortly after Troilus receives Cressida’s message, the episode depicts David being punished (as a false lover for his willingness to believe the hearsay and malicious lies of a gossip columnist, his lack of faith in the conduct of his beloved and his refusal to engage with her explanations) with a loss of his beloved that is permanent and irreparable. The play’s appropriation within the detective genre blatantly steers the audience’s sympathies away from David, in a way that capitalizes on, and but ultimately resists, its ambiguity. Supplying the tragic end that Shakespeare denies audiences in his play, Miranda is killed before her Troilus, and David realizes her innocence. Once dead, Miranda becomes the mysterious woman Troilus figures in the first scene of the play, beseeching Pandarus: ‘Tell me … what Cressid is’ (1.1.98–99). The police’s job is, at least in part, to find witnesses who can tell them what Miranda is: suicide or murder victim? The slurs on her sexual behaviour, published in a student newspaper by a columnist named Thersites, are revealed through the offices of the two detectives to be slanderous. Thersites, it is discovered, is the onetime pen name of Kit, who was motivated in writing the article – not by his desire for her, for David, sexually or platonically (as in other Shakespearean narratives featuring allegations of female adultery) but by his jealousy that Miranda, a woman, had beaten him in a college election. His character echoes some critics’ interpretation of Thersites: Foakes writes that he is ‘no more than a sick-minded, irresponsible exhibitionist, who regards everyone with gloating contempt’; a spiteful, conniving ‘master of insult’; a ‘box’, ‘cur’ or ‘core’ of ‘envy’, with a perspective ‘that is not to be trusted’.64 This is in contrast to the detached, intelligent and perceptive Shakespearean character other critics such as Tony Dawson have perceived.65 Harbinson’s reading of Thersites – and his creation of Kit – as a redoubtable villain (even if he is ultimately only criminally

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responsible for libel and hacking, rather than murder) best fits the character scheme required by Golden Age texts.

Generic influences on appropriating Troilus and Cressida in detective drama Troilus and Cressida is arguably appropriated within this episode because of its writer’s anachronistic perception of – if not quite an innate fit – enigmatic intersections between the play and the detective genre on multiple points. These include typological (character), linguistic (quotation) and thematic (fidelity, justice) resonances. Yet, its appropriation of the play potentially rewrites – for those audience members without early-modern expertise – not only Troilus and Cressida but also Homer, Chaucer and other sources that Shakespeare drew on (which, in themselves, rewrote their predecessors). There is no need for interpretation in performance or criticism to pardon Miranda – one of Harbinson’s Cressidas – no need for ‘an extenuating “perchance”’ to redeem her’: she was evidently never guilty.66 The Shakespearean source for Lewis fails to ‘write’ the role of Cressida in the way that Chaucer foredooms Shakespeare’s Cressida. Miranda as Cressida is configured as a wronged, innocent woman, slandered by one man and condemned to bitterness and loneliness by another’s reaction to local gossip about her. Yet, before one applauds Harbinson as feminist or in any way radically writing back to Shakespeare – in rescuing Cressida from the sometime popular but reductive view of her as a wanton, treacherous woman – the episode ultimately reaffirms traditional moral values and gender roles. Harbison’s reading of Cressida bypasses one reductive, polarized stereotype for another: whore for virgin. In ‘Generation of Vipers’, as in the Shakespearean comedies mentioned above, women are to be loved and honoured, or failed, by their male ‘friends’ and lovers, who are either exploitative and malevolent

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or gullible and fickle. Their bodies and reputations are to be protected or salvaged by the male detectives.67 Miranda as Harbinson’s Cressida is not a woman celebrated for her sexual freedom or her female desire, as were third-wave feminists, nor for her academic prowess or feminist views. The latter are held by other characters to have been undermined by her apparent ‘hypocrisy’ in privately craving a soulmate while publicly urging others to stay celibate and by the revelation that her battle against David’s development was romantically motivated by the wish to preserve the place ‘where they were happy’. She is mourned, conservatively and conventionally, as a good, conforming woman and a victim. The episode initially imagines a modern Cressida (educated, an influential and rational thinker, financially independent and fulfilled through work rather than relationships) but ultimately eschews her creation. The most apparent impetus behind this reactionary appropriation is the need for Harbinson to fulfil the manifold requirements of the genre and franchise – now totalling over sixty episodes across the three programmes, its producers and audiences – rather than questioning or challenging them.68 This includes subscribing heavily to a conservative nostalgia: Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, even within the Golden Age genre, exhibit this in the extreme, normalizing a privileged sphere of educated existence and offering up a ‘class porn’ that is more usually the province of ITV’s period drama, such as Downton Abbey. In this way, writing within the series sits uneasily with Harbinson’s youthful intention of ‘working with interesting, exciting people doing powerful political dramas’.69 Golden Age detective texts objectify women, largely using them to signify ‘sexuality, to flesh out male desire and shadow male sexual fear’.70 If not occupying one of the main roles in the plot, women are frequently deployed as red herrings, ‘to distract the privileged male players’.71 They dichotomize women too: as victim/perpetrator, innocent/damned, virgin/whore and ingénue/femme fatale. As Sally Munt argues, ‘women, if appearing at all, do not act, they react to primary characters – men’.72 Male detectives engage in ‘games women cannot

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play’ where the women are ‘the game all along’, for example, motivating the criminal to murder and the detectives to secure their safety, reputation or affection.73 Spinsters, such as Marple, are arguably allowed a detecting role because their age is seen to confer androgyny or asexuality.74 Unlike recent international crime drama such as The Bridge, Hinterland and Trapped, Golden Age texts ‘refuse to tell love stories’ of detectives, usually loners whose private lives are only rarely glimpsed or relegated firmly to a domestic other world so as not to ‘distract from the business of crime fighting’.75 Instead, voyeurism and fetishism are privileged across the genre: watching the violence unfold – often sexual or sexually motivated; usually ‘little more than a demonstration of individual power and a cathartic release of rage’; and almost always aesthetically pleasing or erotic – provides a way of ‘witnessing and enjoying [it], albeit perhaps in a shuddering, shameful and guilt-ridden way’.76 In spite of the franchise embracing a female forensic officer who is there to contribute to the solution of the case but also to be flirted with and dated (usually outside the episodes’ action) by its detectives (see firstly Morse and Dr Russell, then Lewis and Dr Hobson, whose home life together is increasingly depicted within the programme), its women are variously, and sometimes simultaneously, objects of pity; lust (contrasted with love); fear and disgust of their behaviour, especially their supposed irrationality; their desires;77 and their decomposing bodies. This is in contrast to Shakespeare’s predilection for lingering over oozing and leaky bodies in Troilus’ imagery.78 Harbinson’s use of Troilus and Cressida augments rather than rewrites Golden Age detection.79 The franchise has always been at least one step behind the times in handling gender equality. While ITV’s Morse itself progressively toned down the seedy, male-chauvinist side of Dexter’s great detective across the series, it retained plenty of casual and structural sexism.80 Critics have similarly remarked on the problematic representation of women in other detective programmes and thrillers to which Harbinson has made a significant contribution. He might subvert the ambiguity many critics

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have discerned in Troilus and Cressida in his appropriation of it, in a reactionary way, but he does not subvert the conventions of the genre for which he is writing. Looking to the later instalments of Lewis (a series now ended) and the future of Endeavour (still ongoing), in spite of established trends of writers like Harbinson’s past output, perhaps the producers will increasingly allow the series to break from Golden Age traditions, since these are in tension with their latterly redoubled efforts to reflect women’s presence and power in the police force (through the continuing roles of Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent and, since 2014, Lewis and Hathaway’s fellow officer DS Lizzie Maddox). Furthermore, Endeavour has seen the producers change tack, between seasons, regarding the conservativeness of content and style: the first episode of the second season mixed freemasonry with 1960s feminism and veered away from Morse and Lewis’s staple idyllic, sunny Oxfordshire, ushering in a more urban ‘Scandi-cool’ style.81 This shift is uncharacteristic of detective series given their reliance on sameness. Whether this means writers of future episodes will be allowed to similarly meld traditional Golden Age and currently ubiquitous Nordic Noir conventions – and to strive for more radical interpretations of Shakespeare in the future – remains to be seen in Endeavour’s subsequent seasons.82

PART THREE

Broadcast the Self: Celebrity and Identity

9 Vlogging the Bard

Serialization, Social Media, Shakespeare Douglas M. Lanier

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the teen Shakespeare film was the dominant form for adapting Shakespeare to popular culture. Born out of the extraordinary success of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), a film which deftly melded a contemporary urban setting, a postmodern MTV-style aesthetic, a pop music soundtrack, youth market-savvy casting and an unabashedly mainstream romanticism, the teen Shakespeare film cycle quickly dropped Shakespeare’s pesky language and extended the ‘Shakespeare plus teen social dynamics’ formula to a string of Shakespeare comedies and tragedies set in high schools: consider, for example, 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999), Never Been Kissed (dir. Raja Gosnell, 1999), Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver, 2001), O (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001), Motocrossed (dir. Steve Boyum, 2001), She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006), Rome and Jewel (dir. Charles T. Kanganis,

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2006), High School Musical (dir. Kenny Ortega, 2006), Were the World Mine (dir. Tom Gustafson, 2008), Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (dir. Eve Annenberg, 2010) and Private Romeo (dir. Alan Brown, 2011).1 The subgenre had several things going for it: Shakespeare provided copyright-free, market-tested material as the basic armature; the high-school milieu targeted the most reliable and lucrative segment of the multiplex-going market, the eighteen to twenty-five demographic; and these films commanded a considerable aftermarket in the classroom, where they were used to teach Shakespeare (and so teachers became unwittingly enlisted as promoters of the genre). At the height of its vogue, this subgenre even became internationalized, though the action was rarely set in high school and the protagonists were not exclusively in their teens. Examples include Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000, from Singapore), Amar te Duele (dir. Fernando Sariñana, 2002, from Mexico), Gedebe (dir. Namron, 2003, from Malaysia) and Iago (dir. Volfango De Biasi, 2009, from Italy).2 Though these films did much to popularize Shakespeare among American millennials, making Shakespeare seem cool, a necessary part of teen experience, by the middle of the 2000s the teen Shakespeare film cycle seemed to sputter to an ignominious end. Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet (2013) spun a variation on the formula, casting attractive teenage leads (though not as well-known as Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio), using contemporary language and remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s plotline, but opting for a period mise en scéne, in a curious blend of teen and heritage film. Like his 2000 Hamlet, Michael Almereyda’s 2015 Cymbeline kept faith with Shakespeare’s language while taking up many of the tropes of 1990s indie films including brooding, disaffected young protagonists, a blocked teen romance, a concern with hipsterism and resistance to the cultural mainstream, and an interest in contemporary digital culture. Despite some clever marketing to cover the perceived problems with these films – the posters for Romeo and Juliet covered up the fact that it was a period film, and producers tried to recast Cymbeline as a Sons of Anarchy analogue, with the film titled Anarchy for the UK

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market – both films were critical and box-office duds. Even TV series designed to tap into the appeal of contemporized youthmarket Shakespeare – Skin (2003–4), 10 Things I Hate About You (2009–10), Kings (2009), Star-Crossed (2014) – tended to fade quickly.3 The only teen Shakespeare film produced recently that has seen some market and critical success is Warm Bodies (dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013), an adaptation of Isaac Marion’s 2011 novel which reimagines Romeo and Juliet as a blackly comical zombie-human teen romance; its modest status as a minor cult film owes far more to it being an offbeat zombie film than to its attenuated relationship to teen Shakespeare.4 Where film once was the primary vehicle for providing Shakespeare with hip youth culture appeal, the teen Shakespeare film cycle seems, at least at the present moment, to have come to a close. My contention is that the impulses which fuelled the recent Shakespeare film boom have not so much disappeared as migrated to another cultural arena and mutated into something new – the Shakespeare web series. The Shakespeare web series as a genre emerged after the success of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in 2012–13, a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the form of a vlog (video blog) diary. In the wake of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, web-based productions of classical texts proliferated – other books from the Austen canon, Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Phantom of the Opera, Anne of Green Gables, Sherlock Holmes stories, even tales by Edgar Allan Poe. All of these series follow a similar adaptational strategy: •

The vlog is the primary means for adapting their originating text’s narrative;

•

The narrative is distributed across multiple media channels at once (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr);

•

Narratives are updated to contemporary teen culture, with the protagonists recast as high-school or college students or young professionals;

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•

The number of individual postings in a series tends to be quite long (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries runs to 100 episodes), providing an immersive experience of the world of the original text;

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Judging from comment pages, viewers tend to be women (or at least they tend to identify themselves as such);

•

Many of these series offer viewers interactive opportunities by supplying questions for Q&A postings, providing recipes viewers can make or creating contests in which viewers can send in short exchanges between series characters that the actors will act out.

Though these individual elements are hardly new in new media, their combination in the form of the web series constitutes a fundamental change in the style and scope of digital storytelling, a departure from what Barbara Hodgdon has called the ‘(highly addictive) snack culture’ quality of Shakespeare on the internet,5 a substantial advance over the sorts of literarythemed postings that have hitherto been typical of YouTube: the literary parody,6 the English class project,7 the lit-and-pop mash-up trailer, the riff upon teen-lit movies, and amateur or ‘street’ performances of individual scenes or speeches. In 2015, Shakespeare became the single most popular source for literary web series, providing by my last count fiftytwo separate series, with several more in advanced stages of development.8 The reasons for Shakespeare’s popularity are not difficult to understand. Shakespeare provides copyrightfree material familiar to a web, geek, or student audience, and web series are cheap to produce and free to post to YouTube. What is more, Shakespeare remains imbued with a degree of cultural capital, though his potency in the contemporary cultural marketplace may be largely residual, and Shakespeare has long had a presence on YouTube in the now-venerable form of the ‘school Shakespeare project’ post. Though some of the series have their beginnings in classroom assignments or appear on school-sponsored YouTube channels, they

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differ sharply from school project videos, where the primary adaptational strategy tended to be reduction of Shakespeare, often parodic, to one or at most a few scenes. Shakespeare web series, by contrast, seek to encompass the full narrative arc of its Shakespearean source and so are quite different in ambition and tone when it comes to conceiving of performing Shakespeare on the net. These series take a variety of forms. Some, like the productions of the Ready Set Go Theatre, are in effect lowbudget films, designed with a cinematic sensibility but broken into episodes for posting on YouTube. Others, such as Shakes, Shady Business, A Bit Much (a version of Much Ado), Shakespeare Republic and Titus and Dronicus, are in effect low-budget television series that use the web for distribution, in some cases in order to attract interest from cable networks. Within this group one might also include Shakespop comedy mash-ups like The Real Housewives of Shakespeare and The Adventures of Shakespeare and Watson. Still others are sequences of Shakespeare postings within another series – the Macbeth sequence in Classic Alice, for example, the feminist rereadings of Shakespeare’s heroines in CassieAggressive’s All the Web’s a Stage, or the Shakespeare episodes in Sassy Gay Friend or Thug Notes. And there are sui generis series like Stripping Shakespeare (which is exactly what it sounds like) or the web sitcom Blank Verse, which reimagines Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers as snarky students in a modern Master of Fine Arts programme. In this chapter, I want to examine those Shakespeare series which adopt the ‘canonical’ format of the literary web series, a sequence of vlog posts.9 What I offer here is not so much close readings of particular series as a consideration of the affordances of this new media format for adapting Shakespeare. Vlog-based web series depend upon two formal elements that illustrate the challenges and potential rewards of this new adaptational genre – serialization and social mediatization. In addition, the vlog format’s ‘reality effect’ – and the production of these adaptations by teens themselves – allows

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adaptors to draw the Shakespearean narrative more fully into the social dynamics of online teen culture. If part of what gave Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet its special frisson for teen audiences of the 1990s was that it adopted an MTV aesthetic, the signature youth-culture style of its day, vlog-based Shakespeare web series use the signature youth-culture media style of the current generation, a style whose DIY aesthetic and reality-video qualities offer a very different ideological orientation towards adaptation of Shakespeare to teen culture than its previous avatar. The literary web series draws upon strategies of serialization from recent television. Classic television series rarely told an extended plot through a series of episodes. Rather, they established a set of characters and an overarching situation which could yield myriad self-contained narratives that could be initiated and resolved within a thirty- or sixty-minute period. TV scholars have dubbed this form ‘the procedural’. One of the innovations of recent TV serialization has been their experimentation with long-form plotlines that extend over multiple episodes and seasons.10 TV scholars have dubbed this ‘the serial’ proper. Indeed, the serial is rapidly becoming the dominant format of television series, enabled by the phenomenon of binge watching. Like contemporary TV, the literary web series uses long-form serialization. However, because it is posted on the web, it need not obey the arbitrary time frames of the conventional television episode or season. Instead, the originating narrative is typically resegmented into chunks of one to eight minutes, the average length of a YouTube post. In the case of Shakespeare, the basic narrative unit becomes not the scene but the single dramatic beat, of which one or at most two are allotted to each posting. This approach allows the Shakespearean narrative to be extended to an extraordinary number of postings. Kate the Cursed, a version of The Taming of the Shrew, lasts thirty episodes, far longer than Shakespeare’s twelve scenes; Lovely Little Losers, an adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, runs to eighty episodes, plus two bonus Christmas episodes, behind-the-scenes videos

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and various trailers, bringing the total to 155 episodes, more than seven hours of viewing. As extensive as these vlog diaries might be, the Shakespearean narrative is often extended even further across different social media platforms. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook feeds as well as specially created websites offer additional information, some of which may be crucial to the storyline.11 This type of web serialization, extended far beyond the bounds of a typical TV series, presents viewers with a kind of immersiveness once confined to the reading experience of the classic novel. This, Jim Collins has perceptively argued, is the new digital, post-print incarnation of literariness.12 But that immersiveness is of a somewhat different order. Jill Rettberg argues that the diaristic vlog format prompts a different sort of narrative desire than does a classic novel or play. Whereas the reader of the classical novel (and, one might extrapolate, the audience of a Shakespearean play) is propelled towards a narrative conclusion, the audience for the diarist vlog is propelled always towards the next post. The web viewer hopes that the open-ended experience of the vlogger’s world will have no end, for ‘an end would not tie up all the loose ends, answer the questions, and make the narrative into a neat, comprehensible whole’.13 The diaristic nature of vlogged Shakespeare, then, pushes against the narrative drive towards closure, offering the viewer the opportunity to extend the pleasures of inhabiting the play’s narrative world, particularly for those who are using the vlog version to revisit the source. Because the vlog is a first-person medium, vlog serialization requires that the plot also be distributed across several narrative points of view. For example, Jules and Monty, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set at a small college, offers two perspectives, one from Monty’s (i.e. Romeo’s) vlog posts, the other from Nancy (i.e. the Nurse), who sometimes shares her camera with her roommate, the web-naive Jules. Nothing Much to Do, an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, deploys four channels, one for Beatrice, one for Benedick (called Benaddickion), one for Ursula and one for Dogberry

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and Verges (called The Watch). To get the full story, one must work across several channels and piece together the narrative from individual first-person strands. The viewer’s experience of the narrative is thus prismatic, even more than in the kinds of cross-cutting one expects in conventional filmmaking. Unlike public social space in Shakespearean stage narrative, which we experience as viewers in the forms of present-tense enactment and dialogue, we rarely see social space in the literary web series directly represented, even though, paradoxically, the social media nature of the format works to exert a more pervasive social pressure upon the characters, who know their postings will be seen and judged by others. That is, our experience of the narrative is less of a cause-effect event sequence within which characters reveal themselves in dialogue, than of a loosely interlocking web of soliloquies out of which our understanding of the narrative and the larger social network emerges. This account raises a question about the function of the originating Shakespearean narrative: do such Shakespeare web series require prior knowledge of the originating play for the experience to cohere? Is this form then primarily a means of re-experiencing the Shakespearean narrative? Or is part of the viewer’s pleasure precisely this inversion of priorities between narrative and character? In addition to the desire to create a particular kind of immersiveness, there is another less high-minded rationale at work: such an approach encourages subscription. The reigning measure of popularity and thus success on YouTube is number of views, and so serialization works to commit viewers to the channel(s) in order to fully experience the tale. And because many viewers of literary web series can be counted upon to be fans already, there is some pressure to build in some revisionary surprises for those already familiar with their Shakespeare, something beyond the pleasure offered by updating the tale to present youth culture. In most cases so far, those surprises turn primarily on the queer sexualities of characters. In Shrew That, Bianca is explicitly asexual, attracted to neither men or women rather than being coquettish as she is in Shakespeare’s

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version; Like, As It Is, a version of As You Like It, substitutes for Shakespeare’s Rosaline the character of Ross, a nonbinary, agendered figure; and whereas Shakespeare’s Much pointedly leaves Don Pedro without a marriage partner in the final scene, the ending of Nothing Much to Do provides Pedro with a boyfriend, the musician Balthasar, revealing in a little surprise at the conclusion that Pedro is bisexual. This principle of queering the canonical Shakespeare narrative affiliates the Shakespeare web series – at least in these revisionary moments – with the aims of classic ‘fan fiction’ to extend the erotic possibilities of master narratives beyond conventional heterosexuality. Writing in 1991, Constance Penley observed that slash fanfics were, perhaps surprisingly, primarily authored by women, so it is notable that this kind of revisionism occurs most often in web series created by women.14 The other element that distinguishes these Shakespeare web series from other new media adaptations is the vlog format itself. These series make witty use not only of the traditional vlog form (a person speaking to a camera in first person, typically from a private space like the bedroom) but also of various vlog subgenres like the Q&A, the cooking or makeup demonstration, the room tour, the list of ‘tips’ or interviews on the street. Stephen O’Neill has provocatively suggested that the vlog has affinities with the signature formal element of Shakespearean drama, the soliloquy.15 Like the soliloquy, the vlog is ‘first-person’ drama, intimate, confessional. Both forms offer the speaker’s seemingly spontaneous thought-inmotion; both privilege intense emotional responses to events that, strictly speaking, occur outside the soliloquy. However, the Shakespearean soliloquy provides a rare moment of unfiltered access to private personality, a moment when narrative flow pauses to accommodate the revelation of inner psychology. By contrast, the Shakespearean vlog focuses our attention relatively exclusively on the first-person revelation of character, interrupting that process of personal revelation only occasionally to introduce narrative elements that occur

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elsewhere, off-camera. In short, the Shakespeare vlog inverts the relationship between narrative and characterization in its approach to the Shakespearean original. That is to say, the diaristic vlog format tends to denarrativize its source in favour of immersive characterological revelation. In practice, these web series work to strip the Shakespearean plot down to its essentials, and instead devoted their energies to extending our knowledge of the characters’ personalities with additional episodes not relevant to the plot. In Nothing Much to Do, for example, Beatrice and Hero spend episode forty-nine making chocolate chip cookies for her sixteenth birthday party (the occasion of her slut-shaming by Claudio). The episode adds no new narrative information, but it does communicate charmingly the deep bond between the two girls and, not incidentally, it enables viewers to participate vicariously by making the recipe themselves. Another device for extending characterization is dense networks of pop culture allusions. In addition to targeting a millennial audience and suturing Shakespearean characters into a larger youth culture metaverse, these allusions economically flesh out the personalities of those who make them. In Shrew That, Bianca’s obsession with details of Spiderman films establishes her as nerd-bait for the geeky boys who pursue her, and Dogberry’s screwball imitations of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes in Nothing Much to Do (a gag that runs throughout his YouTube feed The Watch) brilliantly communicates his oddball, wannabe intellectual nature. The formal apparatus of traditional cinematic storytelling works to elide our awareness of the camera’s presence as a mediator between characters and audience. In realist cinema, the characters do not look into the camera; they do not acknowledge the viewer’s eye. This convention poses a significant problem for filming a Shakespearean soliloquy where in the theatre characters and audience are pointedly co-present to each other. (Notably, in most Shakespeare’s films it is the villains who look directly into the camera for their soliloquies, as if their violation of cinematic convention compounds their

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moral monstrosity.) By contrast, the Shakespearean vlog by its very nature foregrounds the presence of the camera and acknowledges the co-presence of characters and viewers. That ‘co-presence’, however, is fundamentally different from that of stage actor to audience, for it is mediated by the camera and by the apparatus of social media, all carried out under the eye of the internet ‘public’. Neither we nor the characters are allowed to forget the camera’s intervening presence – the first two posts in Jules and Monty, for example, involve Monty being self-conscious in front of the camera with several false starts, and Nancy, Jules’s roommate, fiddles with the lens and spends considerable time trying to coax Jules to appear on camera. Moments when characters ask, ‘is this thing on?’, and small jump cuts, a formal signature of the vlog, remind us of the filmic apparatus even as they lend an unpolished immediacy to the tale-telling. As vloggers who address themselves to the ‘people of the internet’ – Beatrice’s wry opening line in the first episode of Nothing Much to Do – the characters of these series understand the camera not just as a recording device but as a vehicle for social relations. The conduct of those social relations, however, is often complicated by the unpredictable nature of online media, an environment in which the relationship between the intimately private and the potentially infinitely public invites mischief and misinterpretation and amplifies their consequences. This may explain why web series producers have gravitated towards Shakespearean plays in which the dynamics within small social communities, especially the relationship between private and public, are fraught: Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and Othello. Indeed, these series frequently treat Shakespeare as uncannily anticipating the ever-on-camera environments created by social media.16 In Nothing Much to Do, the creators use Shakespeare’s gossipy world of Messina to mirror the digitally mediated nature of teen community. The boys and the girls broadcast their romantic aspirations and imagined slights on gender-separate YouTube channels rather than communicating

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face-to-face, thereby radically expanding and intensifying the culture of mutual ‘noting’ that Shakespeare sets at the heart of Messina’s social dysfunction. These vlogs and counter-vlogs indeed constitute a kind of virtual community, but on the web that community is an audience larger than the vloggers imagine and in that arena their vlogs have far more power to wound and humiliate. Hero’s slut-shaming at her birthday party, already horrible enough, is filmed by different vloggers and posted on multiple YouTube channels, magnifying its terrible power. But, as the series makes clear, the vlog format can also be a catalyst for reconstituting community, even though it is pointedly not the means for its reconstitution. The reuniting of Claudius and Hero comes at a group vlog intended to cheer up the humiliated teen who, everyone thinks, is at the hospital, driven to illness by events. As the vlog is being filmed, Hero unexpectedly shows up at the gathering, and she and Claudio reconcile face-to-face. Benedick and Beatrice too are forced to declare their mutual love face-to-face when Claudio and Hero reveal romantic postings they have stored on their iPhones. In the end, a sense of proper community is restored at a group picnic where all the cast members, even Don John, share each other’s physical company and engage in play in a public space. Ironically, the picnic becomes the subject of a vlog montage, with ‘Sigh No More’ as its soundtrack. But here the vlog serves as a form of commemoration made all the more poignant by the students’ coming of age, a record of community rather than its constituting vehicle. The comic redemption at the end of Nothing Much to Do is as much of the vlog form itself as of the teen residents of Messina, an establishment of its proper place in the adolescent social order. As Beatrice observes in her final post, face-to-face communication leads to fewer misunderstandings, but in an irony she acknowledges, she makes this observation as a vlog post. The vlog post can also be a vehicle for tragedy, as we see in two series, Jules and Monty (based upon Romeo and Juliet) and The Soliloquies of Santiago (based upon Othello). In Jules and Monty, the Romeo and Juliet figures (Monty and Jules)

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are new to internet culture. They rarely seem to understand the implications of posting their thoughts and desires online or appreciate the evidentiary power of the camera. They often unwittingly leave the camera on, so that it accidentally captures events and can thereby serve the function of fate in the series’ narrative. Sometimes the camera’s evidentiary power serves as a benevolent force. It records, for example, Ty spiking the drink of Mark in order to best him during a fraternity drinking contest, the series’ equivalent of the swordfight between Tybalt and Mercutio. Though this event propels Monty into a fight with Ty, the video record of Ty’s action is exculpatory for Monty, though not enough to prevent his expulsion from Verona University. An unattended camera also captures Jules’s brother Cliff (the father Capulet figure of the series) when he beats her savagely for refusing to date his friend Pierre (i.e. Paris). Jules’s roommate Nancy, a nursing student (i.e. the Nurse), posts the footage online, shaming Cliff into repentance. In fact, the two videos, as public records of the kinds of dishonourable behaviour feuding leads to, precipitate reconciliation between the rival sets of fraternity brothers. But the camera can also be a source of tragedy. After Monty is expelled, Nancy the nurse, thinking to help Jules through her heartbreak, blocks all contact between her and Monty; Jules, believing Monty has abandoned her, decides to transfer to another university. Jules’s final vlog is a bittersweet signoff, sadder but wiser, but she accidentally leaves the camera on after she goes, and it captures Monty’s confession of love to her when he rushes in her room, too late to stop her. The camera here functions like the Capulet’s tomb, the site of the lovers’ final declarations of devotion to one another, their potential sharing of love cruelly prevented by happenstance. Of course, there is the possibility that the two might overcome fate were their vlogs to find their way online, but Nancy discovers the posts and, tragically, deletes them, perhaps to cover up her own complicity in their doomed love affair. Throughout the vlog, the web-savvy Nancy has had special power over the couple’s fate as one who knows how to use a camera and how

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to edit and post video footage – she alone seems to understand fully the social dynamics of the vlog form. Her ‘deletion’ of the lovers’ final posts leads to the series’ tragedy – Jules and Monty will never know of each others’ undying love – and is a fascinating reflection upon the evidentiary power of the vlog, even (or especially) in its absence. And of course the poignant irony is that we as viewers have special access to the vlog Jules and Monty will never see; the tragic truth lies in knowing what ends up on the cutting-room floor. In The Soliloquies of Santiago the camera also has tragic power – as a weapon. Jake Santiago, a frustrated actor and the Iago figure of the series, is furious when Othello, a Hollywood actor and director, casts his lover Desmond in the lead role in a college production of Hamlet instead of him. To take revenge, he hacks Othello’s laptop webcam and posts pictures of Othello (who has not been public about his bisexuality) and Desmond online, all in an effort to ruin his reputation and send him packing. Othello responds by appealing to the public through a vlog, a strategy which is at first successful. Jake next targets Desmond, who, he discovers, is a transsexual who has not revealed his former identity to Othello or the world. This strategy too seems doomed to failure, because before Jake can expose Desmond, Desmond resolves to level with Othello and even use his transsexual identity as the basis for his interpretation of Hamlet’s character. One of the most moving sequences in the series is Desmond’s discussion of his sexual history with Emily in episode fourteen, in this version a former lover of Othello who is now a sexual harassment officer at the university. Their relationship provides a model of face-to-face intimacy that, so the two think, is private, unmediated by the camera or the dynamics of social media, and so it becomes the counterpoint to the tainted nature of relationships conducted within the volatile world of social media. In this version, the source of Othello’s tragic downfall is not his sexuality, jealousy or racial politics, but professional ethics, his failure to manage public reputation. Having cast his lover in the lead in a project he is directing, Othello falls afoul of university rules governing

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sexual relationships with employees. Because the university is concerned about its reputation, Othello eventually loses the directing job, Desmond walks out on him and, because of the professional scandal, his agent dumps him, destroying his Hollywood career. And in the process Jake is hoist by his own petard. He learns that there will be a second audition for the Hamlet production under the new replacement director, a prospect which opens up the possibility that he might lose the small role he has in Hamlet. The series ends with Othello and Jake sitting side by side in despair, their prospects ruined by the unpredictable consequences of social reputation and their responses caught, in a withering irony, on Jake’s own laptop webcam. This discussion brings me to the final and perhaps most powerful element of the vlog format for Shakespeare web series, its ‘reality effect’. As a sequence of postings recorded with minimal editorial intervention or scripting, the format promises unfiltered access to the vlogger’s private thoughts and lifeworld, uncompromised by self-censorship, the intrusion of external authority or thoughts of long-term consequences. The vlog form, at least in its ‘classic’ incarnations, leaves an impression of spontaneity and homemade authenticity, an impression actually enhanced if the vlogger speaks in one long unpolished run-on, rambles, stumbles in delivery or overemotes. The fact that vlog posts are typically occasional (in the sense of being prompted by an event in the vlogger’s life or by someone else’s post) suggests that what we are watching is an open-ended, moment-by-moment depiction of the vlogger’s ‘real life’. Of course, the truth is that vlogs, particularly popular ones, have become far more scripted over time. Some of their formal hallmarks – the eye-level close-up, the long static faceon shot, jump cuts and false starts, one-second reaction shots by the vlogger, clumsy repositioning of the camera – have now become visual conventions connoting the vlog’s ‘reality’ and ‘authenticity’. This powerful ‘reality effect’, evoked in patently fictional vlogs like literary web series, serves the ideological imperative of ‘relatability’, the sense that we are seeing ‘real’

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teen lives filtered through a Shakespearean narrative, rather than watching the Shakespearean narrative being updated to an artificially heightened representation of teen culture, so often the effect of teen films of the 1990s. The actors in these series are clearly themselves the ages of the teen characters they portray, and their acting is often unpolished and amateurish; the minimizing of distance between speaker and character seems calculated to mute our awareness that we are watching fiction. This is, however, not to claim that viewers of Shakespeare web series do not know these blogs are fictional. Rather, it is to claim that what gives this adaptation format a particular cultural authority for its target viewers is its ‘reality effect’, not primarily its Shakespearean content. The audience and actors’ pleasure in these series is to subject Shakespeare to that particular ‘reality effect’, that is, to (re)immerse oneself in the Shakespearean narrative and fictional ‘universe’ through the vlog series format, not to seek validation for youth culture through tales from the Bard. It is perhaps too early to claim that web series have superseded cinema as the dominant format for adapting Shakespeare to youth culture. The literary web series is a form still in its infancy, still too often hampered by problems of craftsmanship, in some cases not yet free of the sophomoric YouTube projects from which it sprang. It too can suffer from the tendency, long ago lamented of teen Shakespeare films, to use Shakespeare (and literary culture generally) to universalize the social dynamics and identity categories of teen life.17 That said, it is debatable whether Shakespeare functions as a special signifier for characterological universality for young viewers rather than just another perennially popular set of tales in the literary pantheon. It is also worth noting that many Shakespeare web series have included characters who visibly stand outside the conventional hetero- and ethnonormative categories that governed earlier teen Shakespeare adaptations. These series are by and large queer-positive in their depictions of sexual- and gender-fluid identities, and a few feature multiethnic casts, such as Like, As It Is, a recent adaptation of As You Like It, and

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Twelfth Grade (or Whatever), a version of Twelfth Night. Of course, one needs to ask some questions about the queering of Shakespeare in these series: should we understand this development as socially progressive, a reflection of the gender and erotic fluidity in Shakespeare’s comedies of cross-dressing, and a movement away from the cliquishness that preoccupied earlier teen Shakespeare films? Or does the queering of Shakespeare in these series serve as a form of easy iconoclasm, a means for lending a rebellious veneer to a now-dated genre? However one might answer these questions, what is safe to say is that the Shakespeare web series signals the arrival of a significantly different kind of youth-culture Shakespeare than we saw in the late 1990s.18 The Shakespeare web series is YouTube Shakespeare 2.0, a genre which has moved well beyond parody, the once-dominant mode of Shakespeare on YouTube, and also beyond class projects, one-off scenes or speeches or trailers for theatre productions. Though these series feature moments of humour and parody, their ambition is to use the resources of digital video to retell Shakespeare’s stories and revisit his fictional worlds, while jettisoning what remains a barrier for their audiences, the period language and milieu. This is Shakespeare for ‘prosumers’ (similar to the kind of user previously discussed in Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer’s chapter), that is, teen consumers who are simultaneously producers, rather than the creations of adult producers crafting Shakespeare adaptations for teen consumers using adult conceptions of what teen life is like. This new teen Shakespeare is hyper-conscious of the social medium it exploits, especially attentive to the vexed relation between revelations of intimate private identity and their circulation in the public mediasphere. Its ‘reality effect’ positions the viewer in a different relation to the fictional world than have teen Shakespeare films of the recent past: the viewer is less voyeur, watching the narrative from outside the fictional world, and more confidante, implicated within the social media world of the fiction (albeit vicariously). The aesthetic – do it yourself, immersive, participatory, often mildly transgressive in its social politics – repudiates the commercial exploitativeness

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of its cinematic predecessor. It is Shakespeare après theatre, après cinema, après television – a new mode of Shakespearean storytelling. Here is where the energy of teen Shakespeare migrated in the twenty-first century and currently thrives.

Appendix: A list of Shakespeare web series I have not listed one-off Hamlet vlogs and Ophelia vlogs, which are practically their own genres. The Adventures of Shakespeare and Watson (2013; Chris Miskiewicz and Christopher Piazza), https://www.youtube .com/playlist?list=PLHDJpOSYe3hG2ifMaPMAC3zOOG eG-Sah4. All the Web’s a Stage (2015; CassieAggressive), https://www .youtube.com/channel/UCg3iDlV4SmxN-E5b1e_n0BQ/ playlists. All’s Fair Play (2014; Kalama+Tea Productions; loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream), https://www.youtube .com/user/KalamaTea. And I for No Woman (2015; one episode only), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=-wA6Pg9zWys&list=PLQMskEbs H9KafjZtGHmtEy1leGsxM7xFB. Any Other Vlog (2015; Losers and Bruisers; loosely based on Romeo and Juliet), https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=NxkvSsJQZ0I&list=PL1Rqd1MHsyB -b7yHG42SjqzgUXjyeNDk4. Backwoods Bard (2015; Kaelan Strouse), https://www.youtube .com/playlist?list=PLITRCqDlznL5K-wP5qJqhmkIuZiT0 _bK3. Ben Jonson’s Vlog (spinoff of ‘Blankverse’, 2014), https://www .youtube.com/user/BlankVerseTV/feed. A Bit Much (2014; Colleen Scriven), https://www.youtube .com/channel/UCkgQkE2IUYDsU1JqUSW3eew.

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Blank Verse (2014; Aaron Adams, Arlen Kristian Tom, Xander Williams), https://www.youtube.com/user/BlankVerseTV/ feed. Bright Summer Night (2016; The Candle Wasters), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL48MamfxeA&index=95& list=PLgyveADib3M6R7HvIHGA91QnBQLLvlQ1P. Call Me Katie (2015, Australian production), https://www .youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRPZ2r0HL8KGABsNjDgnSJ QAuRDOvJKL9. Classic Alice (2014; specific episodes relate to Macbeth; Kate Hackett), http://classic-alice.com/narrative/#macbeth. Complete Works (2014; Adam North and Joe Sofranko), http://completeworks.tv/. Dear Disturbed Diary (2015; Tasha Kon), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=mpj2XcuUuuI. A Document of Madness (2016; Better Strangers), https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UC3bjaZPJ9brfM4IIkAJyt6A/ videos. Hamlet: The Webseries (2014; Bob J. Koester), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=GiohsZ5Zw8I&list=PLzPXayAeH9 uzFllWOSAL0yQlKprVG59yg. Hashtag Hamlet (in development; Jay Bushman), http:// jaybushman.com/Hashtag-Hamlet. Henry4 webseries (Indiegogo), https://www.indiegogo.com/ projects/henry4-web-series-shakespeare-fundraiser#/. IE Shakespeare (in development; Picasso Mendez), http:// www.ieshakespeare.com/. Jules and Monty (2014; Imogen Browder and Edward Rosini; Tufts University), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCiLEjV1vcwMB-lEJQ7G2ibw. Kate the Cursed (2014; Emily Lubbers and Zoe Lorenz), https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCvhoFhZFfgEsJ7kwDTkxBOw. A Labour of Love (2015; Beth and Anna Whitaker), http:// labourofloveforesworngodessstudios.weebly.com. Like, As It Is (2015; Jules Pigott, Sarah Goodwin and Julia Reinstein), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UC4HXrMGC3M5LvGyb1gwnQdA.

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Love in Idleness (2016; Slap Happy Studios–a group of University of Minnesota students), https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=89_NfPkgPDY&list=PLcbVeJyKTbr6nrnSn BxX8DuveTPzD3tzo. Lovely Little Losers (2015; The Candle Wasters), https://www .youtube.com/user/pedrodonaldson. Mac & Beth (2015; Insubstantial Pageants; Casey Radner and Megan Runge), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCsGxf7q-GmnILZS6BDd2sQg/playlists. Macbeth (2016; A Little Project), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sLMiMLoRNGE. A Midsemester Night’s Dream (2014; Julia Seales, Rachel Brittain and Lauren Mandel), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rtINzoDcbUY&list=PLZA6VTgR_i1Cj4GguTYqX7KhT4inrJR. Monday Night Shakespeare (2016; Erin Coleman; a two-part series on Romeo and Juliet), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6mo9jeTdgwU. Much Ado (2014–5; Madelyn Tomko), https://www.youtube .com/channel/UCauBGsbe2XKF9Gvz13F5Y2w/videos. Nothing Much to Do (2014; Claris Jacobs, Elsie Bollinger, Minnie Grace, Sally Bollinger, aka The Candle Wasters), https://www.youtube.com/user/nothingmuchtodovlog/ videos. Offstage (2015; concerns an actress in a pub theatre Macbeth production; Amani Zardoe and Hatty Jones), https://www .youtube.com/user/OFFSTAGEwebseries/videos. Othello (2014–5; imaiden; the play in 30 second snippets), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4SNek_cdDY. Othello: The Webseries (2012; Ready Set Go Theatre Co.), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPAezv-aro4&list=PL 8TwmUUlINhXOiZq4ZLYvYgIN18kQMh6E. R&J: The Webseries (2014; Ready Set Go Theatre Co.), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN3b3FgMQAk&list=PL8T wmUUlINhWeSCBSHcHiqi_xtoLGNOTV. The Real Housewives of Shakespeare (2016; not to be confused with the promotional for the Great Rivers

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Shakespeare Festival), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCtZMpoaUhU4vv9ya3njO-w. The Real Housewives of William Shakespeare (2012, two episodes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjmvJXLbPFA Richard 2.0 (2015; Tasha Kon; as of yet, only a trailer), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJmN606aGMI. Romeo e Romeo (2016; Brazilian series, from Canal ArtWeb; gay-themed), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCYMYZ4LQeZujUO12aURbpYg/videos. Sassy Gay Friend (2010–11; individual episodes), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=jnvgq8STMGM&list=PLA43590C EDA1EEB62. Shady Business (2014; Brett Marley, Ross Johnson and Jake Buchanan), https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC -dz3spuQ0VsigdYGo5H3kQ. Shakes (2014; Kathryn Ormsbee and Destiny Soria), https:// www.youtube.com/user/shakeswebseries; http://www .shakeswebseries.com/. Shakespeare on Trial: The Webseries (2016; in development; Jeremy Webb), https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCuviEn723Ukfb7WbBlRW46A. Shakespeare Republic (2015; dir. Sally McLean), https://www .youtube.com/channel/UCnpE-a9bFnyxTtGkUH0A68g. Shrew That (2015; Rachael Laing and Katie Struck), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqG2T02_tE4&list=PLXYOz lprX_14wVOyvmnN5XaFoygPZ33QM. The Soliloquies of Santiago (2015; R. J. Lackie), https://www .youtube.com/channel/UCcutQqAgoX3tVCpe3uSW_6A. Stripping Shakespeare (2014; Nicol Razon), https://www .youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnAsrW7oNh5RlJmxOfghDr quaeNpPvgzW; http://www.strippingshakespeare.com/. Thug Notes (2013–15; individual episodes), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=A98tf9krihg&list=PLghL9V9QTN 0h2n6Rd8gz4brC_wFp3tZF6. Titus and Dronicus (2015; Megan Kelly for Better Than Shakespeare Company), https://www.youtube.com/user/ BetterThanShakes.

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Twelfth Grade (or Whatever) (2016; same team as for ‘Like, As It Is’), https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Aos6cZ -mUxgWreHGvC1S5dY5IHq3Am6. Weird Sisters (2016; from the team behind ‘Shakes’; very loosely referencing Macbeth), https://www.youtube.com/ user/shakeswebseries. The Writing Majors (2016; includes a character called ‘Will’, modelled on Shakespeare), https://www.youtube.com/playli st?list=PLEmQieiFpEckcSVLbbZaKeDW6Q39kn6zQ. The web series A Plague on Both Your Houses contains no Shakespeare.

10 Tweeting Television/ Broadcasting the Bard @HollowCrownFans and Digital Shakespeares Romano Mullin

New media and digital technologies have transformed television broadcasting. Audiences now engage with their favourite television programmes across a variety of platforms, sometimes simultaneously and often using social media sites like Twitter to share their viewing experiences in real time with like-minded individuals. Fundamental to this chapter is a concern with how Shakespeare is imagined, talked about and broadcast within this digital environment. In short, it will evaluate how a group of Twitter users utilize that platform to share their own iterations of Shakespeare within an online context in which the line between producer and consumer is increasingly blurred. It is not an appraisal of digital performances of Shakespeare, such as the RSC’s 2010 Such Tweet Sorrow.1

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Rather, it considers how Twitter can be utilized as a broadcast platform to create, drawing on Lev Manovich’s work, digital Shakespearean objects.2 These objects can be as diverse as usergenerated artwork, memes, GIFs or video mashups, but they are significant in that they circulate alongside other, older forms of Shakespearean production such as film adaptation, and are regarded by the online communities which create and view them as authentic on their own terms. By using the Twitter group @HollowCrownFans as a case study, this chapter will explore the place of Shakespeare on Twitter, and interrogate how social media has reanimated the parameters around discussions of the Bard, his work and his multiple legacies. It will begin by discussing how @HollowCrownFans developed as a response to the 2012 broadcast of the BBC’s The Hollow Crown, observing that it reflects the ways in which that series hoped to distil what Mark Thornton Burnett has argued is Shakespeare’s status as a ‘cultural property of global proportion’.3 It then goes on to analyse the ways in which @HollowCrownFans signals its status as a digital community through a participatory culture that prizes direct active intervention with the Shakespearean text. It will also propose to view @HollowCrownFans as an example of online fan culture, as it mediates both the series and Shakespeare more generally via a complex melange of paratextual references to television programmes and films that have large cult followings. Whilst the chapter proposes that Twitter is opening out Shakespeare for a new digital generation that does not just watch the plays onstage or onscreen but also engages directly with the Bard, it also questions the limitations of Twitter as a platform to broadcast a truly egalitarian, twenty-first-century Shakespeare. One of the many problems with Twitter is that users often find themselves engaging with people who are just like them and share their views – an echo chamber effect which calls into question just how radical or challenging Twitter Shakespeares can actually be. With around 310 million active users each month, Twitter has achieved a prominent place within the rapidly developing digital mediascape.4 Launched in 2006 and headquartered in

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San Francisco, Twitter is a microblogging site in which users update their followers with messages of 140 characters or less. Users can utilize the hashtag function in their tweets to prioritize a particular subject or topic – such as #ShakespeareSunday or #TheHollowCrown – that enables Twitter users from across the globe to access a stream of related tweets. Furthermore, Twitter makes it easy for users to upload images and videos, and in 2016 the site introduced a searchable GIF tool allowing users to access GIFs relating to a wide variety of concepts, codified via mood, such as ‘happy’, ‘mad’ or ‘hungry’. The retweet or RT function allows users to forward tweets to their own followers, further permitting the dissemination of tweets throughout the wider Twittersphere. In this manner, the process of tweeting aligns with the original eighteenth-century use of the word ‘broadcast’ as something that is ‘scattered abroad’.5 Unlike the social-networking site Facebook – another hugely popular conduit for the digital zeitgeist – Twitter is defined as social media, as it prizes widespread dissemination and consumption over connecting with already-constituted social networks, such as friends and family. Arthur Jue, Jackie Marr and Mary Ellen Kassotakis have defined social media as ‘the many and relatively inexpensive and widely accessible tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on a common effort, or build relationships’.6 Twitter users can, and do, tweet about any number of things: from terrorist attacks and wars, global catastrophes and natural disasters, to general elections, celebrity affairs and the quotidian recounting of breakfast, lunch, dinner, television programmes and work. Twitter offers its users the opportunity for unbounded interaction between strangers – opening out to a potentially ever-expanding audience who can curate their own Twitter feed and decide who to follow and what subjects to engage with. As noted by Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter has frequently been heralded as challenging traditional media hierarchies and levelling the field of broadcasting, ultimately creating new kinds of media influencers such as the citizen journalist.7 Indeed, commentators such as Gilad Lotan have accorded

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Twitter a prominent role in the development of the Arab Spring and the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt in 2011.8 Others are more critical of Twitter’s democratizing capabilities, such as Christian Fuchs, who argues that such a view of social media is often inflected by a parochial Western view of media more generally.9 Similarly, Daya Thussu has argued that the academic appraisal of social media requires a ‘decolonisation of thoughts and theory’, not least when considering its democratizing potential.10 The impact of Twitter on the academy has been felt for some time. Katherine Rowe cautioned that academics should not ‘decline to reflect critically’ on their place within the digital sphere as to do so ‘would be to court irrelevance’.11 Over half a decade later, it is arguable that Twitter use has arrived at an informed, reflective and purposeful role within Shakespeare studies, in a similar manner to how YouTube and Vimeo clips have been incorporated in the classroom as pedagogical tools. However, the use of Twitter within Shakespeare studies is still in its infancy, and the same arguments made by Thussu and Fuchs in relation to Twitter as a democratizing force can be levelled at the role of the site as a revolutionizing tool within the academy – appraisal of academic use of the site must be cognizant of its emanating from a privileged Anglosphere. Twitter has seen a blossoming of numerous academic profiles that are committed to promoting Shakespearean research, upcoming conferences, advertising jobs and asking for assistance on accessing resources.12 Within Shakespeare studies more generally, there has been increasing work on digital Shakespeares.13 A cursory glance at the annual Shakespeare Association of America conference programme shows a growing number of seminars dedicated to digital humanities, online performances of Shakespeare and the status of the digital text. Often, Kate Rumbold has observed, work in this area is figured as ‘a twenty-first century extension’ of Shakespeare appropriation and adaptation on television and film.14 On Twitter, the growth in academic profiles sits alongside non-academics with an interest in Shakespeare, who have also contributed to the Bardic presence online, tweeting

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about their favourite plays and adaptations, their attendance at Renaissance Fairs or their own experience of Shakespeare at school or university. The @HollowCrownFans Twitter page is situated at the intersection of these various groups, with academic and non-academic followers alike and broaching discussion across a polyphony of digital voices that share an interest in Shakespeare. @HollowCrownFans was established in July 2012 as the BBC broadcast the original series of The Hollow Crown. A lavish four-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy – Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V – The Hollow Crown was broadcast on BBC Two as the flagship offering in a season entitled Shakespeare Unlocked. The season was part of the Cultural Olympiad, a showcase of British art and culture that accompanied the 2012 Olympic Games in London and which, in the words of Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, ‘ushered in a new era of global Shakespeare appropriation’.15 Regarded by Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck as ‘quintessentially British’ and also ‘globally dispersed’, the Olympiad was intended by the then coalition government to reaffirm the UK’s place as a twenty-first-century cultural powerhouse.16 Broadcast in June and July 2012, The Hollow Crown starred internationally recognized British actors such as Patrick Stewart (X-Men), Tom Hiddleston (Thor) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey). This extensive theatrical, cinematic and television experience concentrated across 500 minutes of airtime signalled that the series was intended to be the highpoint of the Shakespeare Unlocked season. Indeed, The Hollow Crown proved so successful that the BBC commissioned a sequel – The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, based on the first tetralogy of King Henry VI Part 1, King Henry VI Part 2, King Henry VI Part 3 and Richard III – broadcast in 2016 as part of the celebrations of Shakespeare’s life and work based around the four hundredth anniversary of his death. Again, The Wars of the Roses boasted a plethora of internationally lauded British actors, including Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock)

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and Michael Gambon (Harry Potter). The presence of actors like Cumberbatch and Hiddleston in both series also meant that The Hollow Crown appealed to an audience comprised of their fans – which in turn provided another filter through which the afterlife of the series was mediated on Twitter. The fact that @HollowCrownFans was established during the original broadcast, and rapidly developed a global following, underlines the various ways in which Shakespeare retains his significant global cultural cachet. The Hollow Crown franchise contributes to the now-embedded notion of Shakespeare’s presence as a ‘market asset in the global economy’ that can signify across both local and global concerns.17 The globalized positioning of The Hollow Crown is evident in the composition and output of the @HollowCrownFans Twitter page, which currently boasts over fourteen thousand followers worldwide, and has produced some eighty thousand tweets. Defining itself as a ‘Fan Group for BBC Shakespeare Series “The Hollow Crown”’, @HollowCrownFans aims to promote the series, share Shakespeare trivia, and provide a platform for its followers’ own Shakespeare-related creations, including GIFs, memes, mash-ups and links to fan fiction and YouTube videos.18 The @HollowCrownFans page clearly aims to foster a feeling of online community, as evidenced in its Twitter bio. For Geoffrey Way, social media can be delineated as an online space which encourages users to ‘enact a type of social performance, where specific practices signal their membership’ of a digital community with shared interests.19 An interest in Shakespeare and the status as viewer or fan of the BBC’s The Hollow Crown constitute a first step into the @HollowCrownFans community – but many Twitter users choose never to engage with the accounts they follow. It is the practice of online participation with the @HollowCrownFans account that signals a user’s membership of the wider online body. Central to these interactions are the user-generated objects such as memes, which are shared across Twitter as a form of what Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture, working to broadcast digital iterations of the Bard across social media.20

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The nature of participatory culture on Twitter enables users to intervene in both The Hollow Crown franchise as well as the original Shakespearean play text. Jenkins has identified participatory strategies as a key aspect of fan culture. His work theorizes fans as ‘textual poachers’, where audiences appropriate and rework texts for themselves.21 More recently, Jenkins has focused on the growth of convergence culture, where consumers ‘make connections among dispersed media content’ – of which @HollowCrownFans is a clear example, drawing together television broadcasting and digital forums.22 The impact of digital culture on television broadcasting, leading to what William Boddy has called the ‘end of simultaneity’ as audiences turn to streaming sites or on-demand services to watch programmes, means that Twitter is an ideal platform for fans to participate in viewing experiences.23 This development requires an adjustment to Jancovich and Lyons’s definition of ‘must-see’ TV wherein viewers ‘organize their schedules around their favourite TV shows’.24 In the age of Netflix and file sharing, ‘must-see TV’ increasingly happens at the viewer’s own discretion, sometimes before the series is even legally released in their own region or country. However, digitization does not signal the end of communal viewing events, as can be testified by the @HollowCrownFans Twitter feed following the initial broadcast of King Henry VI Part 1 in May 2016. During and following the broadcast, users tweeted their experience of the episode and their views of major plot points, signalling a shared investment in both the text and the platform as a means of connecting with other users. It is here that Jenkins’s theorizations about convergence culture as the collision of old and new media become especially salient, as viewers utilize Twitter to become active participants in what is now the ‘collective process’ of broadcasting.25 Following the broadcast of Henry IV, user @GuyLucas tweeted that ‘The #BBC’s #HollowCrown is one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time!’.26 @GuyLucas’s decision to utilize the hashtag option, rather than directly addressing the @BBC Twitter

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account, may signal his, perhaps unconscious, desire for other users, most of whom he will not know, to notice his tweet and to agree or interact with him. His praise of the BBC is also a valuable insight into the strategies Twitter users can deploy to interact with larger, traditional media formats – here, the tweet is complementary of the corporation’s decision to air the series. Coming as it did days before the UK Conservative government released a White Paper on the future of the BBC, @GuyLucas’s tweet can be interpreted as a tacit criticism of any proposals to dismantle the BBC or jeopardize its production of similar programming.27 Other users, like @SherlocksiPod, tweeted images of white and red roses and playfully questioned which side users were taking in the Wars of the Roses.28 Here, Twitter works to reframe the original broadcast on television, and place it within a digital arena in which multiple users can participate in conversations about both the original play and the adaptation. The fact that Twitter affords its users a digital immediacy – sharing their views live as the programme is broadcast – means that watching a programme becomes an event itself. This may signal the renewal or restoration of television programmes as ‘must-see’ events, driven by the digital conversations produced by fans within the Twittersphere. Participatory culture is often underlined by the production of, and participation in, what John Gray, drawing on Gerard Genette, calls ‘paratexts’, which are produced by fans in relation to core texts – such as fan fiction based on The Hollow Crown or usergenerated trailers hosted on YouTube.29 These paratexts become an intrinsic part of the meaning-making process generated by fans. With @HollowCrownFans, paratexts circulate as signals of participation within the wider online community – they are generated by users in order to be viewed and shared by other users, with Twitter forming a nexus of exchange. Perhaps the most salient example of this form of participatory culture on @HollowCrownFans is the weekly #ShakespeareSunday event. #ShakespeareSunday encourages users to share Shakespearean quotations, often unified around specified themes or commemorative events. These themes – as various as war, family,

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kings and queens, the plague, the environment or Remembrance Sunday – enable users to demonstrate their knowledge of Shakespeare. The theme-related tweets are then retweeted by the @HollowCrownFans account, often featuring user-generated animations, pictures, videos and GIFs. These enable users to display their own digital dexterity to an appreciative audience, whilst also ritualizing the event, further underlining a notion of communal identification with the platform. The use of Twitter during live broadcasts also provides opportunities for disruption, and in some cases, confusion. The time delay between The Hollow Crown’s initial broadcast in the UK in 2012, and its transmission in the United States a year later, means that users coming to the series for the first time in the United States would be deploying hashtags and tweeting about the series long after the initial Twitter discussion. As a result, despite the seemingly time-constrained nature of #ShakespeareSunday, users watching the series many weeks, months or even years later can intervene belatedly with the event. The phenomenon of #ShakespeareSunday also raises interesting questions about social media’s ability to intervene in the Shakespearean text, as well as the site of @HollowCrownFans at the intersection of old and new forms of media. Following the broadcast of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses – Henry VI Part 1 in May 2016, the theme for #ShakespeareSunday was ‘Kings and Queens’. The theme aligned with the broader concerns of the episode itself, which deals with the power struggles between two factions at court following the death of Henry V and the accession of his infant son. Unsurprisingly, many users tweeted quotations from 1H6, accompanied by publicity stills and user-generated screenshots from the recent broadcast. The @HollowCrownFans account itself tweeted a picture of Sophie Okonedo as Queen Margaret and Sally Hawkins as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, from the first episode of The Wars of the Roses. It was accompanied by the caption ‘“Give me my fan: what, minion! can ye not?” – 2HenryVI #ShakespeareSunday Team Eleanor or Margaret? #TheHollowCrown’.30 The tweet directly addressed the theme

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of the week, illustrating a pivotal scene in the power struggle depicted between Margaret and Eleanor within the text of the play. By also acknowledging the quotation’s original placement in Henry VI Part 2, the image and accompanying text subtly highlight the process of adaptation from which The Wars of the Roses emerges. The tweet also encourages @HollowCrownFans followers to participate in competitive fan rivalry, asking them to choose sides between the two characters – a common feature of cult television and film, perhaps most famously exemplified in the development of Team Jacob and Team Edward following the success of the Twilight (2008–2012) franchise. The adoption of a rivalry between Margaret and Eleanor generated a number of responses, including user @KTraxton, who asked ‘What about Team Joan? #ShakespeareLives’, referring to the character of Joan of Arc, who dies in episode one.31 @KTraxton’s inclusion of the hashtag for the Shakespeare Lives programme also opens the conversation out to users who may be from an academic or theatrical background and who are browsing #ShakespeareLives online.32 User @Bassett12Carol replied to the original tweet with a declaration that ‘Margaret is a manipulative bitch. Can’t wait for her, Somerset & Suffolk to get their dues’ – a reply that was re-tweeted twice by other followers.33 What these tweets demonstrate is the circulation of debate within the digital space afforded by Twitter which accords with Matt Hills’s definition of ‘the mainstream cult’, which sees activities like ‘online posting and fan speculation’ increasingly attach to television shows which would traditionally be outside the remit of ‘cult TV’.34 Following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in June 2016, @HollowCrownFans amended their plan for #ShakespeareSunday and put forward the theme of ‘positivity, after all that has happened’.35 Users responded from a variety of opposing ideological positions, including @RosieBlackadder, who tweeted ‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain #ShakespeareSunday #Brexit’ accompanied by an image of grinning UKIP leader Nigel Farage.36 Conversely,

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user @ashleydye3 tweeted ‘`Ban, `Ban, Cacaliban has a new master: get a new man. Freedom, hey-dey! #ShakespeareSunday #Brexit’.37 Both tweets responded to the prompt of ‘positivity’ in ways that undercut @HollowCrownFans intention – @RosieBlackadder by foregrounding the Hamlet quote on untrustworthy smiles, and @ashleydyer3 by associating the vote to Leave with the positivity of freedom in The Tempest. What these tweets, along with @Bassett12Carol’s tweet about Queen Margaret, demonstrate is how Twitter provides a platform for viewers to broadcast their own emotive attachments to the text and generate debate and forms of resistance, often within highly charged and controversial parameters. However, beyond these rather straightforward utilizations of Shakespearean quotations for #ShakespeareSunday, the ritual enables users to generate complex networks of references and allusions, which frequently cohere around the body of the actor. This has been observed by Tanya R. Cochrane in relation to cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). Cochrane identified that in the Buffy fandom, the body of the actor ‘becomes a site for narrative transubstantiation’, allowing for complex reading strategies across various dispersed texts which feature the same actors.38 Such a strategy is evident in @HollowCrownFans, as users invoke various other screen texts that feature actors from The Hollow Crown, or that fall within the similar category of what Ramona Wray has categorized as a relatively new mode of television programming with ‘historical and literary adaptation at its heart’.39 Alongside images of The Hollow Crown series, users frequently include images and GIFs from The Avengers movie franchise, James Bond, ITV’s Downton Abbey, the BBC’s Sherlock and AMC’s Turn. Each of these texts either utilize actors from The Hollow Crown or align with a shared aesthetic taste for historical dramas. They provide users with an opportunity to reconfigure traditional Shakespearean quotations into new and innovative forms, drawing on a melange of texts across various genres, using intertextual flourishes to create complex networks of references. It is also significant that frequently, it is the male

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body – of actors such as Hiddleston – that is prioritized in these iterations of The Hollow Crown. The masculine, militarized body of Hiddleston as Henry V’s warrior king – often using shots from the Battle of Agincourt – is frequently contrasted with the slimmer and more elaborately dressed Loki in The Avengers.40 In response to the ‘Kings and Queens’ #ShakespeareSunday prompt, user @Kirsten_STR tweeted ‘“My liege, beware; look to thyself; thou hast a traitor in thy presence there” R2 5.3 “ShakespeareSunday”’.41 Accompanying the text, @Kirsten_STR included a still of Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tom Hiddleston as Loki from Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 superhero movie Thor. The focus of the image is undoubtedly Hiddleston, arising from his appearance as Henry in the original The Hollow Crown. The image and the text work together to refract Hiddleston across two roles – he is constructed as both Marvel princely villain and as Shakespearean hero king. The Richard II quotation, although shorn from its original referent, still embodies the thematic concerns of the text, as in Thor Loki betrays his family and attempts to seize power. Indeed, Kenneth Branagh has commented that he sees direct links between Thor and Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, with both having similar narrative trajectories.42 The Richard II quotation, containing a warning about traitors, also works to recall the plot of the second tetralogy, and how Hiddleston’s Henry inherits a throne seized by his father through ‘bypaths and indirect crook’d ways’.43 In fostering a link between Thor and The Hollow Crown, @Kirsten_STR is explicitly equating a shared narrative lineage between the epic sweep of the Marvel superhero film and Shakespearean drama, demonstrating how Twitter users bring together seemingly disparate sources to create their own iterations of the Bard that can be shared across the wider community online. Stephen O’Neill makes the connection between the bricoleurs of the Renaissance stage who put together their plays from multiple sources already circulating in the wider cultural milieu and the work of twentyfirst-century YouTubers who also ‘engage in a creative imitation

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of their predecessors and peers’.44 Twitter users employ a similar strategy, revelling in complex and playful instances of intertextual reading and self-reflexivity. @HollowCrownFans goes beyond making connections between disparate texts in their development of individualized Shakespeare texts. Melissa Croteau has argued that screen Shakespeares regenerate the Bard ‘in our own images’, her pluralization cautioning us to remember that the Shakespeare of the screen is multifaceted and diverse.45 The historical accuracy in costuming and set design in the BBC’s representation of the two tetralogies reinforces the fact that for many viewers, such dramas are the primary mode through which they access the past. As a result, the Shakespeares we see evoked on the Twitter group are viewed through a particular historical lens, one that is conditioned by the BBC’s own prioritization of its status as cultural arbiter within the UK. But the @HollowCrownFans group, via #ShakespeareSunday, also encourages users to make connections between the Shakespearean text and the present. In this respect, the Twittersphere is a rich field of study for those engaged in presentist analyses of Shakespeare. For Terence Hawkes, presentism ‘begins with the material present and allows that to set its interrogative agenda’ – privileging the site of reception over the context within which the words were written.46 The now-ness of @HollowCrownFans’ engagement with Shakespeare is conditioned by a number of factors, not least of all the fact that the group is positioned at the intersection of old and new media. This demonstrates how, despite the much-lauded revolutionizing potential of Twitter, the platform is still shaped by interaction with television media. However, it is still important to take account of the ways in which the platform shapes those interactions – the medium itself conditions how users relate to the series, the contours of digital discourse providing a channel through which to express their views. As a result, @HollowCrownFans accesses Shakespeare through the lens of television, and all the connections they make in their bricoleur-like assemblage of a digital Shakespeare are

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conditioned by the pre-existing dominance of the screen text and its various affective qualities, including the paratextual possibilities embodied within its actors. This also firmly sets the Shakespeare enunciated online within the context of the present – Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Okonedo are clearly very much part of The Hollow Crown’s now-ness, and as a result the meaning-making that is produced on Twitter is contingent on a recognition of The Hollow Crown as part of the contemporary Shakespearean milieu. Through #ShakespeareSunday, @HollowCrownFans emphasizes this present-based production of Shakespeare online. For example, themes such as ‘the environment’ can clearly be read across contemporary concerns related to climate change and sustainability. Each year, the @HollowCrownFans page marks the commemoration of Remembrance Sunday by encouraging users to tweet their favourite Shakespeare quotations about remembrance, commemoration, war and loss. During Remembrance Sunday 2015, user @TopazDragonfly tweeted from Henry V: ‘From this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember’d’ beneath the image of a weeping Canadian soldier kneeling at a graveside in a military cemetery.47 Other tweets from the same day repeatedly privilege images of the poppy, the traditional symbol of commemoration for Remembrance Sunday. Another common feature of the day was the use of the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, with the excerpt ‘we happy few, we band of brothers’ (4.3.60) finding a particularly prominent place in the @HollowCrownFans group’s commemorative practices. The juxtaposition of depictions of contemporary warfare and its effects on soldiers along with Shakespearean text work together to produce a reading of Shakespeare that privileges honour, sacrifice and the value of commemoration. But it also encourages a reading of contemporary Shakespeares that align with Hawkes and Hugh Grady’s interpretation of the role of the past in such texts. For them, it is ‘always the present that makes the past speak’ and it speaks exclusively to and about ourselves.48

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With @HollowCrownFans’ utilization of Shakespeare for Remembrance Sunday, it is evident how users deploy the Bard to produce meaning for their own contexts. These are also users for whom their point of access to Shakespeare is the now-ness of his iteration on the screen. Whilst the #ShakespeareSunday event for Remembrance Sunday is generally followed by the @HollowCrownFans community as a collective, other themes can also be co-opted to comment on contemporary concerns by individual users. On 3 April 2016, the #ShakespeareSunday theme was ‘blood’. The majority of users replied with quotations that delineated blood as consanguinity and tied the theme to the complex machinations of civil war and family strife broadcast as part of the Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses. User @anne_ obrien tweeted ‘I have no more sons of the royal blood for thee to murder’ whilst @lissybeth91 tweeted in a similar fashion, ‘ … out of my blood He’ll bleed revengement and a scourge for me: #henryiv #shakespearesunday #dysfunctionalfamily’.49 However user @ItsYourDadAherr drew a different meaning from the theme. In response they tweeted ‘#ShakespeareSunday #Brexit’ along with a text box containing the lines ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ from Richard II.50 The quotation, spoken by John of Gaunt, has often been deployed as way of reinforcing a sense of Britishness and/or English identity. Here, @ItsYourDadAherr is explicitly viewing the text through the lens of the UK’s national referendum on European membership – viewing both Richard II and the #ShakespeareSunday theme through the prism of a particular set of contemporary concerns. The tweet also embodies notions about the place of Shakespeare, in Elizabeth Klett’s words, ‘the icon who needs no first name’, within the firmament of British national identity. The present has conditioned this user’s interaction with the @HollowCrownFans community, and his intervention into the text has been to figure Shakespeare, implicitly, as allied with similar concerns and desires as the UK Leave campaign. Yet the fact that his response is to a prompt about ‘blood’ certainly does work to highlight troubling

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questions about nationality, identity and ethnicity which may be subsumed beneath the iconicity of the Bard. This is far from the globalized Shakespeare espoused by the coalition government and the BBC with Shakespeare Unlocked and The Hollow Crown, but it does serve to demonstrate the various lives that Shakespeare can live online, as well as the extent to which users can individualize their own renditions of the Bard. The mosaic of references and texts that feed into the various visions of Shakespeare on @HollowCrownFans Twitter exemplify Jenkins’s argument about convergence culture. Jenkins has argued that the phenomenon of convergence culture does not arise directly from media appliances. Rather, ‘convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers’ and via social interaction with others.51 Just as @HollowCrownFans users extract and construct their own meanings from multiple sources, convergence culture enables consumers to piece together their own texts, often in a collective process. However, although Twitter does not produce this kind of convergence in and of itself, it is an affect of the platform’s ability to connect people and disperse information. Within this maze of information, the question arises of what kind of Shakespeare is being broadcast through Twitter. The sheer multiplicity of Shakespeares produced via the @HollowCrownFans community alone means that any attempt to locate or accommodate a definitive version of the Bard is fruitless. Each user’s rendition of Shakespeare, whether attaching to the superhero world of Thor or circulating alongside other heritage-based texts such as Downton Abbey, is authentic on its own terms because the user is responding to an environment in which pastiche, parody, video mashups, humour, GIFs and superhero movies are blended together to repackage Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. The prevalence and placement of Shakespearean quotations as part of Twitter users’ rendition of the Bard may recall Hawkes’s argument that citations of Shakespeare no longer have any intrinsic meaning, because ‘Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare’.52 Thus, the St Crispin’s Day speech

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becomes a vehicle for meaning through the text, rather than the text supplying meaning for the reader. Twitter may appear to be simply about pure connectivity, rather than supplying any specific meaning to Shakespeare; instead, he becomes a conduit through which connectivity in an increasingly globalized world is made. Yet it is clear from the ways in which @HollowCrownFans group utilizes Shakespeare that Twitter is an arena of multivalent meaning-making processes and that for its users the platform is a valid means of accessing and reproducing the Bard, reflecting how, for them, his works are situated within a digitized cultural firmament. Locating Shakespeare alongside Sherlock Holmes, Loki and Lady Mary may prove to be challenging when the audience is bombarded by the predominance of the visual. Nearly every #ShakespeareSunday tweet revels in its own ability to skilfully juxtapose visuals with text. At first glance, it may appear that @HollowCrownFans have developed the phenomenon observed by Douglas Lanier, writing about the surge in screen Shakespeares in the 1990s: the creation of the ‘definitively post-textual Shakespeare’ that prizes plot over language.53 However, whilst @HollowCrownFans does indeed utilize screen Shakespeare texts as varied as The Hollow Crown, Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet, 10 Things I Hate About You and a variety of non-Shakespearean works, the users still valorize the original text of the plays. The ritualized nature of #ShakespeareSunday further underlines the privileging of the text, giving space each week for users to create their own renditions of Shakespeare and his work. The almost competitive nature of the #ShakespeareSunday event, driven by a desire to represent witty, pithy, moving or profound Shakespearean products within the constraints of an image and a mere 140 characters, means that users do fully engage with the text in a multiplicity of ways. However, it is important to question what kind of Shakespeare @HollowCrownFans represents, and for who. As noted above, Daya Thussu has urged scholars engaged in critical work on Twitter to decolonize their thoughts and their theoretical

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approaches to social media more generally. Sanjay Sharma posits that ‘modes of online communication and digital identities have been revealed to be far from race-neutral’ – and it does appear to be the case that by and large, theories around Twitter have been shaped by the lived experiences and commercial networks of predominantly white Western users.54 Sharma goes on to argue that ‘developing digital-race methods and interventions will become imperative for committed researchers and net-activists’, and the challenge of overcoming the echo chamber effect of Twitter is one that many users take up, but often seems insurmountable.55 Whilst Twitter can bring together like-minded people, there is a distinct lack of what Jeff Connor-Linton described over a decade ago as ‘cross-talk’, or conversation between people of antagonistic views that many commentators view as ultimately good for civic society.56 Indeed, following the UK general election of 2015, many commentators questioned the usefulness of Twitter, as many of its politically engaged users had been convinced of a Labour victory or a hung parliament, neither of which transpired.57 This illustrates the cultural or political silos within which users often operate: the hashtag function may indeed encourage a tweet to spread around the world, but someone with an interest must first search for a particular term before they engage with it. This undoubtedly has an impact on the kind of Shakespeare which @HollowCrownFans produces. The Shakespeare that @HollowCrownFans presents to the world is one in which seemingly relatively conservative takes on the Bard predominate, although as noted above in relation to #ShakespeareSunday tweets on Brexit, there is great potential for ironic iterations of Shakespeare. However, despite drawing users from all over the globe, the Shakespeare that circulates within the @HollowCrownFans universe is Anglophone and appears to be predominantly white. The inclusion in Henry IV Part 2 and Richard III of Sophie Okonedo, a black British actor, does little to affect how users dissect, digest and broadcast Shakespeare within that environment. There are few examples of world Shakespeare

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adaptations cited by users, while the group frequently focuses on events that take place within the Anglosphere. Indeed, the time frame for the posting of #ShakespeareSunday tweets reflects the demographics of the overall group. The Hollow Crown Fans website writes that ‘retweeting starts Sunday morning London time and ends at 7 pm New York/Eastern time’.58 This restriction on retweeting times may reflect the limits of labour involved in running a relatively successful Twitter account, but it also underlines the fact that the forms of Shakespeare being deployed on the group are in many ways homogenous, following Anglo-centric, Western rhythms and not facing any major challenges. It is clear that the Shakespeare of @HollowCrownFans is not an isolated icon, situated within a postmodern pantheon of literary and filmic greats. Instead, within the framework of Twitter, the Bard inhabits the same digital space as superheroes, a fictional detective, early-twentieth-century aristocrats and their servants and the internet’s enduring predilection for images of kittens. Within what can often seem like white noise, where exactly is Shakespeare? What can Shakespeare mean within such a context? For Richard Burt, the rise of so-called ‘glo-cali-zation’ signalled the end of the opposition of ‘high to low culture, authentic to inauthentic, serious to parody, sacred to profane’, and as a result, Shakespeare the icon no longer belonged ‘squarely on the side of hegemonic culture’ nor indeed ‘counter-hegemonic, resistant, subculture’.59 The Shakespeare enunciated by @HollowCrownFans and its followers manages to inhabit each of these categories – parody, profane, serious, resistant, hegemonic. Attempting to locate any sense of authenticity within this environment is problematic, because the terms of authenticity have changed: each user’s own recognition and deployment of the Bard is considered authentic on its own terms. As a result, Twitter Shakespeare embodies both the potential and the constraints of Twitter itself – full of ingenious and inventive iterations of Shakespeare, but also in danger of eliding nonAnglophone, non-Western representations of Shakespeare

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and his works. However, it is clear from a brief overview of @HollowCrownFans and the ways in which it disseminates individual visions of Shakespeare that the Bard, in many different guises, is rapidly becoming a twenty-first-century denizen of the digital world.

11 ‘Somewhere in the world … Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it’ Tom Hiddleston Performing the Shakespearean Online Anna Blackwell

A commonly used adjective to describe a certain kind of actor or mode of performance, the concept of a ‘Shakespearean’ performer contains within it implicit value judgements, often conjuring popular associations relating to class, race and gender. A recent example of this phenomenon and its significance for understanding the body of the actor as a participant in Shakespeare’s continuing adaptive legacy – whether on stage, on screen or online – is the English star Tom

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Hiddleston. A former Etonian and University of Cambridge student, his case study reiterates the success that similarly upper-middle-class peers such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne have had in the UK and in Hollywood, with their potent combination of mainstream recognition and critically validated dramatic ‘weight’. Unlike Cumberbatch or Redmayne, however, this cultural value has been articulated in an increasingly determined way. Hiddleston’s apparent connections to Shakespeare and thus his ‘Shakespeareanism’ have been confirmed first in casting and then later elaborated upon in social media and internet culture. Indeed, as an active social media user and a performer seemingly aware of the expectations of his Englishness, Hiddleston has activated the qualities associated with his Shakespearean stardom – which include an indication of cultural sophistication, gentility, profundity, savoir faire and a romantic allure – through a number of online performances. Through the reading of Hiddleston’s online and offline performer identity, this chapter will thereby invoke and question what potentially conservative judgements are bound up in and broadcast online through the loose but persistent attribution of particular texts, modes or individuals as ‘Shakespeareans’. As John Gaffney and Diana Holmes observe, performers can ‘restate, often in new and modern forms, old identities and values, as well as calling a society towards newer and perhaps confused, emergent values’.1 Of course, opportunities for audiences to engage with star performers are not unique to the multimedia platforms that proliferate online spaces. Stars, too, have found ways of reifying and commodifying their fame throughout history, and Shakespeare and stardom have thus long intersected. Stanley Wells’s Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh, for instance, acknowledges the role which some of the earliest performers of Shakespeare – ‘stars’ such as Richard Burbage, Will Kemp and Robert Armin – had in not only popularizing his plays but shaping their meaning.2 What is new to this mode of stardom or celebrity, though, is the scale on which it occurs: the speed with which texts can be shared and observed by

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community members, the wider public, companies and even the stars themselves. Digital media presents a space in which fans can talk back to the qualities associated with their chosen star by the media, and which might be reinforced through casting choices, or further fed by national, cultural or gendered associations. By framing contemporary performers like Hiddleston within star studies as sites where Shakespearean meaning circulates in a frequently self-reflexive mode, the critical discourse thus offers a unique opportunity to explore the affordances of digital culture and fandom in relation to Shakespeare’s continuing cultural legacy. It invites consideration of sites where Shakespearean capital traditionally accrues alongside popular culture’s wider citational landscape. By focusing largely on Hiddleston’s breakout role as Loki, the antagonist of comic book adaptations Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011), Avengers Assemble (dir. Joss Whedon, 2012) and Thor: The Dark World (dir. Alan Taylor, 2013), this chapter details the construction of Hiddleston’s ‘Shakespeareanism’ from the particular cultural values he possesses as a successful male, upper-middle-class English actor in the contemporary moment. This will be done in relation to not only the ‘live’ cultural texts that Hiddleston has performed in, or his representation in the media, but how he has participated in the construction of his social media avatar and how fans have, in turn, depicted him online.3 To borrow again from Gaffney and Holmes, what potentially ‘confused, emergent values’ could occur when the ‘old identities and values’ that continue to be associated with Shakespeare meet with the new cultural modes, creative practices or means of proliferation that characterize contemporary popular digital culture?4 Speaking with typical self-awareness, Hiddleston recently revealed his first professional theatre review, in which his critic denounced him as ‘Too young, too RADA, and projecting about as much masculinity as Graham Norton’.5 Whether warranted or not, the assessment (and its implicit dismissal of the gay celebrity Norton as a model of normative masculinity) accurately judged not only Hiddleston’s professional

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background but the kind of performer identity that was attached with the actor in his early career. Hiddleston was cautioned early on by his own agent that he would be frequently cast in period dramas – a comment that was affirmed by Joanna Hogg, his director on Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), who observed the ease with which he could be placed in a ‘conventional framework’ as a period actor.6 Casting directors appeared to agree, with Hiddleston’s early television career including roles as Randolph Churchill in the acclaimed BBC/HBO production, The Gathering Storm (2002), a small part as John Plumptre, the would-be suitor of Fanny Austen in ITV’s Miss Austen Regrets (2008) and William Buxton, a young romantic lead in a two-part special of the popular BBC serial Cranford – Return to Cranford (2009). For Hiddleston’s agent, Hogg, the unnamed critic and the casting directors, the former Etonian actor presented at that time a particular kind of masculinity that found its most immediate expression in the well-spoken, manner-bound and frequently upper-middle-class world of British period drama. Other minor but repeated non-period roles during this period code Hiddleston’s masculinity similarly, including the naive gap year student Bill Hazeldine in the TV series Suburban Shootout (2006) and the put-upon errand boy of his police station, Magnus Martinsson in Wallander (2008–16), also starring Kenneth Branagh. Released within a year of Hiddleston’s performance as Loki in Thor in 2011, meanwhile, the roles of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen, 2011), the doomed First World War cavalry officer Captain Nicholls in War Horse (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2011) and the demobbed RAF pilot, Freddie Page, in The Deep Blue Sea (dir. Terence Davies, 2012) demonstrate not only the swift consolidation of Hiddleston’s fame during this period but the persistent association of his identity with an upper-class masculinity. This association between Hiddleston’s social class and his appropriateness for particular kinds of roles has persisted, moreover, confirming Martin Shingler’s statement that the individual’s attainment of stardom ‘rests on being pigeon-holed’. This is something that

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happens in spite of the star possessing ‘several different kinds of identity’, their own multifaceted character and those they portray.7 In Hiddleston’s case, this has largely resulted from a focus by the press on his upper-middle-class upbringing and its apparent cultivation of a performer identity that is variously quintessentially English, courtly, old-fashioned and sophisticated. Educated first at Eton (boarding at the same time as Prince William), then at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where he studied Classics, Hiddleston’s upbringing indeed testifies to his upper-middle-class status and the world of privilege and tradition still evidenced in such institutions.8 For both casting agents and the media, this distant and foreign world of privilege and tradition is one that evokes a sense of a time gone by. Jan Moir, for instance, remarks that Hiddleston ‘is possessed of a surfeit of British old-world charm not seen since the halcyon days of David Niven’, while Xan Brooks expresses this nostalgia for a type of masculinity long past in his description of Hiddleston as the individual who ‘best embodies fragile, gilded youth’.9 This fascination with Hiddleston’s biography, and its apparent romantic glamour, extends almost to the self-parodic with John Naughton noting drily, ‘Hiddleston, as it is compulsory to note in all interviews, was educated at Eton.’10 As the rest of Naughton’s article testifies, however, such self-consciousness is usually absent in the media’s often-effusive depictions of the star. Despite the exclusivity of the establishment, James Mottram writes that, ‘with his Eton education, [Hiddleston] seems quintessentially English’.11 Giles Hattersly observes adoringly that Hiddleston is ‘spookily perfect’, ‘costume drama fodder’ and ‘straight out of a Rattigan play’.12 Ben Beaumont-Thomas, meanwhile, commenting on Hiddleston’s ‘brand’ of ‘guileless, old-school grace’, notes that it is ‘small wonder’ that producers ‘want to cast him into the past, installing him as an emblem of the … sweet, sad decline of the landed gentry’.13 The press’s focus on Hiddleston’s perceived ‘quintessential’ Englishness is, though effusive, nevertheless significant and indicates the field of reception which the star’s performer

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identity has to negotiate. Their insistence on repeating his biographical details, for instance, underlines the same connection between Hiddleston’s class and that of the characters performed in his early career; as Hiddleston acknowledges, ‘I suppose I fill a slot.’14 In the case of Jan Moir’s description, the publication of her comments in the right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail suggests the investment of not only individuals but institutions in particular notions of old English identity – notions which familiar class stereotypes such as Hiddleston’s clear diction, Home Counties accent and measured eloquence further confirm. His tendency to dress smartly on most occasions (e.g. wearing a shirt, tie, navy suit trousers and matching waistcoat to Wimbledon in 2013), as well as the classical rather than trendy cut of his hair, similarly contribute to an overall impression of poise and a seriousness of intent which often veers into the earnestness for which Hiddleston is also known. These personal qualities recognize the fact that the associations drawn between Hiddleston and a paradigm of English gentility are not only constructed by the press but purposefully cultivated by the actor, however. His ‘quintessential’ Englishness simultaneously ghosts and animates Hiddleston’s status as a Shakespearean to the extent that the actor’s Englishness and his Shakespeareanism function synecdochically for each other. From Thor onwards, however, Hiddleston’s capital becomes more explicitly expressed in cultural texts in dialogue to his perceived Shakespearean identity. It is in the intersections between his popular cultural and theatre work that we continue to see the clearest expression of Hiddleston’s cachet as a Shakespearean performer – a pattern that has since been followed and elaborated upon online. Hiddleston graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 2005 and shortly after joined theatre company Cheek by Jowl for their productions of The Changeling in 2006 and Cymbeline in 2007, playing Alsemero and Posthumus/Cloten respectively. This was followed in 2008 by Othello and Ivanov at Wyndham’s Theatre, playing opposite Branagh. The fruits of

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even a relatively smaller role in a highly publicized production such as Othello, directed by Michael Grandage and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor, were apparent. In 2008 Hiddleston began to establish himself as a theatrical performer, earning both the Ian Charleson Award (Third Prize) and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer for his performance in Cymbeline (he was also nominated for his performance as Cassio). It was Hiddleston’s work on Ivanov that would ultimately hold more significance for his career, however. It was during the run of Ivanov that Branagh was confirmed as director of what would become the fourth release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): a live action adaptation of the Thor comic book series. The decision, which resulted in Hiddleston’s breakout role, marked the actor’s entry into a network of male Shakespearean stars and a symbolic passing-on of masculine cultural privilege. To wit, only a year after Thor’s release, Hiddleston – frequently described as Branagh’s heir apparent – took the titular role in the first screen adaptation of Henry V since the elder actor’s 1989 film version (Branagh, viewed by many as his generation’s Laurence Olivier, has also echoed his predecessor’s career in a number of ways).15 Originally invited by Branagh to audition for the eponymous Thor on the grounds that he was ‘tall and blonde and classically trained’, Hiddleston was later urged to re-audition for the role of Thor’s scheming malcontent brother, Loki; a better match for an actor who Branagh noted couldn’t ‘turn off’ his intelligence.16 The distinction between the heroic Thor (ultimately played by the muscular Australian actor Chris Hemsworth) and the antagonistic Loki was thus externalized through their opposing physical characterization as powerful but taciturn and weak(er) but loquacious. Indeed, Thor’s adherence to a stereotype of Viking primitivism articulates his character in line with dominant cultural assumptions about masculinity as that which is physically powerful and which, as Peter Lehman observes, ‘hold[s] language in reserve’ because it is not needed.17 While replicating familiar behaviour on the part of both broader cultural norms and their superlative expression

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in action blockbusters, the relationship between language and characterization in Thor holds further significance for the MCU’s commodification of ‘high’ Shakespearean capital, however. In the Marvel comic series, the Norse gods’ alterity from contemporary Earth is given utterance through the dynasticism of their Asgard homeworld and through their formalized, pseudo-Shakespearean mode of address. It was for this reason and because of the risk which the series’ distinct stylistic differences held for a mainstream audience that Branagh was initially chosen as director, with Marvel’s executive producers cognisant that Thor’s sometimes operatic quality needed shaping by an individual who had a proven record of translating ‘high’ culture into a mainstream screen vernacular. Branagh’s task of making Thor’s high science fiction subject palatable to mainstream action blockbuster audiences thus began, somewhat ironically, with rooting its narrative in a stock dramatic trope: family conflict. The conflict between Thor and Odin (Anthony Hopkins) that forms Thor’s central emotional narrative was articulated to its stars by Branagh as a retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad, with its shared maturation narrative in which the heir apparent fails to demonstrate his suitability to rule. For Branagh this ‘classical’ structure worked to situate Thor within a long cultural tradition as a ‘family, dynastic story’ about ‘fathers and sons … sibling rivalry, ancient feuds’.18 As this quotation demonstrates, it was these dynastic narratives that were also widely used in promotion to defend Thor’s cultural validity to a suspicious British press by articulating the film’s connection to the kind of highbrow texts that had established the director’s cultural capital.19 Indeed, on another occasion in which Branagh had to defend the worth of his blockbuster project, the Shakespearean adaptor referenced his personal and professional familiarity with the sequence of history plays, stating: ‘In fact, you could say that I sort of made a version of Thor with my first picture, Henry V [1989].’20 But despite Branagh’s disclaimer that any Shakespeareanism in the film sits equally alongside popular cultural influences

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such as the western High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952) – ‘they’re all from the same tool box’ – Shakespeare’s influence functions on a number of intertextual levels, existing neither purely paratextually or arriving exclusively via Branagh’s own Shakespearean capital.21 Although the construction of Hiddleston as a ‘Shakespearean’ (and the distinction of his cultural value from similarly privileged upper-middle-class peers such as Cumberbatch) would continue to develop over subsequent years in response to the Marvel films, the intelligence which Branagh identified in Hiddleston’s performances was thus utilized in order to enact the film’s Shakespearean intertexts. Both Branagh and Hiddleston confirmed that in developing Loki they used characters such as Cassius in Julius Caesar, Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear ‘as a touchstone’. Hiddleston, for instance, stated that he had to keep a strict diet before the start of filming because Branagh wanted ‘Loki to have a lean and hungry look, like Cassius in Julius Caesar’.22 Iago’s characterization could similarly be brought to bear upon Loki, with their shared ‘immaculate and terrifying talent for improvisation’, while Loki’s emotional characterization mirrors the sentiment behind Edmund’s musings on bastards in King Lear.23 In the context of the film, these references are instructive, inviting us to refocus the rationale behind Loki’s treachery in order to glimpse the shadows of those Shakespearean characters who usurp (or try to usurp) the existent power structures of their society supposedly in order to protect it. With his patience and intelligence, Loki views himself as the more suitable heir to the throne; indeed, as Hiddleston has mused, ‘every villain is a hero in his own mind’.24 As with Cassius, Iago or Edmund, however, the audience’s ability to view the purity of such beliefs is inevitably compromised by our knowledge of the characters’ darker personal motivations. Even if not identified by cinema audiences (or, indeed, believed by the British press), the Shakespearean framework for Thor’s family dynamic and the involvement of classically trained actors such as Hopkins or Hiddleston thereby exist to reduce the alterity and flamboyance of the science fiction

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world the characters inhabit by focusing on familiar dramatic narratives.25 The film’s association with Shakespeareanism (or problematic lack thereof for his critics) offers Branagh and his cast a through line to dramatic weight and the potential promise of cultural capital. The film’s Shakespearean framing influences Thor’s cinematic vocabulary, for instance, which, although typical of the genre in its ‘appeal to a discourse of “realism”’, offers equivalent insight into characterization to a theatrical aside.26 Branagh’s composition frequently lingers on Loki even as it locates him within, or narrowly outside the conversation being framed; his placement indicating not only his alterity and outsider status but also revealing the truth of his machinations: his purposeful manipulation of Thor’s pride in order to undermine Odin’s trust in his son. Like Branagh or Hopkins before him who acquired cultural capital through Shakespeare and who now, in turn, revivify Shakespeare through popular cultural performances, Hiddleston’s performance also exists in conversation with mainstream generic tropes. Yvonne Tasker argues of the wider action film genre, that the blockbuster’s (typically male) ‘spectacular’ bodies dramatize ‘narratives of power and powerlessness, exclusion and belonging’.27 Loki’s body, though less explicitly muscular than Thor’s, is no exception to this tendency and, in contrast to his brother whose heroic narrative ultimately returns to a position to power, the MCU places repeated focus on Loki’s emotional characterization and emotional volubility. Indeed, Marvel’s framing of Loki in this way established not only the legibility of Hiddleston’s body to the film’s audience (who, as demonstrated later in this chapter, have continued to create their own representations of both actor and character), but its intersecting value as a commodity to be looked-at. Beyond Thor, Loki’s appearances in Avengers Assemble and Thor: The Dark World have also continued to develop ‘both the thematic significance of the character’s Shakespeareanism and Hiddleston’s continued contribution to this effect’.28 In contrast to Thor’s broader use of Shakespearean capital as

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a means by which to validate the text’s dramatic narrative, Avengers expresses Loki’s ‘high’ cultural cachet and theatricality as part of a critique of his dictatorial intent. The ideological differences between the film’s villain and its heroes are transposed onto the distinction between Loki’s ‘high’ cultural sophistication and the Avengers’ pop cultural vernacular. Hiddleston’s cultural and social capital is thus used to convey Loki’s disdain for the free will people of Earth in a manner that draws upon the hauteur stereotypically associated with socially exclusive tastes. Thor’s depiction in Avengers affirms this reading. Unlike his brother, Thor is able to adapt his language to suit Avengers’ earth setting. Outraged by Bruce Banner’s (Mark Ruffalo) claim that Loki is ‘crazy’, Thor asks him to ‘take a care how you speak’. When Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) responds that Loki has killed eighty people in two days, however, Thor’s language shifts to the informal admission: ‘He’s adopted’. Despite the negative values attributed to ‘high’ cultural capital by Marvel, the popularity of the association between Hiddleston and Shakespeareanism is evident. Ironically, it is precisely Loki’s marginalized status within the MCU – as an antagonist whose agency is repeatedly limited by the heroes and Hiddleston as an actor who remains relatively lesser known in comparison to stars such as Robert Downey Jr – that inspires Hiddleston’s popularity online. Fan-authored macros work to extend the dramatic lives of their fictional and non-fictional representations. Humour is created by positioning character as the result of conscious and artificial performance and by signalling the transparency between actor and character in a manner that the film text mostly seeks to elide. A recurrent theme of Hiddleston memes draws attention to Loki’s surprising and sometimes contradictory appeal, therefore. In the characteristically succinct language of most memes, Hiddleston received lowest billing, is not even pictured on the poster and played the villain but ‘has more fangirls than the hero’.29 A parody of the teen comedy, Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters, 2004), and its introduction

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of the tyrannical high-school student, Regina George, revels in similarly exaggerated statements of Hiddleston/Loki’s potent appeal. The series of macros relating to the Avengers characters, which include the gossip that ‘One time he [Loki] met Scarlett Johansson on a plane … and she told him that he was pretty’, culminate with Tony Stark admitting, ‘He threw me out of a window once… It was AWESOME!’ Memes such as these repudiate the previous function of Shakespearean capital in the MCU. Instead, the Loki that remains in digital form is one whose emotional complexity and cultural alterity provide an appealing counterpoint to the Avengers’ anodyne pop cultural world. The refocusing of the audience gaze by fan-authored texts onto secondary characters, which has played such a crucial role in ensuring Loki’s continuing popularity onscreen and online, also occurs in different modes. The fan video Seven Devils by Malfoyinmyheart4ever, for instance, constructs a narrative that mirrors its titular soundtrack by Florence + the Machine.30 The song’s ominous warning, ‘for what has been done / Cannot be undone / In the evil’s heart / In the evil’s soul’, here provides an appropriate tonal framework for a video that dramatizes Loki’s increasing desperation and madness. When matched to stylized, edited excerpts from Thor and Avengers Assemble, the song’s emotive lyrics create a new narrative from previously seen film footage, with its deliberately slowed-down pace allowing viewers to linger over the minutiae of Hiddleston’s performance. Malfoyinmyheart4ever’s comment in the description box beneath the video further reveals the sympathetic purpose of the video: ‘he’s my poor little baby asdfghjkl. Why can’t he just be happy!? *lies down in fetal position and drowns in my own tears* [sic]’. Malfoyinmyheart4ever’s response is typical of much Loki-centric, fan-authored content. In the lexicon of internet culture, Loki’s online afterlife represents the phenomenon of the ‘woobie’: a character who induces pity in his or her audience, sometimes in spite of their canonical morality. As the subtext of countless other memes that

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similarly affirm Loki’s popularity despite either Hiddleston’s lack of fame or Loki’s villainy reveals, Hiddleston’s success in the role was in hinting towards the vulnerability that lay behind his character’s Shakespearean ambition. Texts such as Seven Devils should be read, therefore, not only as expressions of desire for more content (and for more of Hiddleston) than the hypotext provides but as creative solutions to the problems that Loki fans consequently encounter: Loki’s relative lack of onscreen time in comparison to Thor as protagonist, but the character’s perceived depth and complexity. Hiddleston’s broader, continuing relationship to Shakespeare thus perpetuates fan investment in his performer identity, building upon the old-fashioned allure that characterized his early career in order to confirm an association (onscreen and off-) between the playwright, meaning and romanticism, sincerity and inspirational sentiment. Hiddleston’s performances in The Hollow Crown (2012), Coriolanus (2013) and, later, the BBC television adaptation The Night Manager (2016) express his characters’ masculinity in an increasingly conventional mode, therefore. Crucially, however, Hiddleston’s masculinity functions in these texts by way of their acknowledgement of his increasingly muscular body as a legible and desirable, looked-at object. All three texts echo the scrutiny placed on Hiddleston or his characters by fan creative practices in order to present an image of the actor that complicates Laura Mulvey’s split between agentive masculinity and passive femininity.31 In Henry V, Hiddleston and director Thea Sharrock’s ambivalence towards their titular character results in his evolution from mischievous Loki-esque Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (dir. Richard Eyre, 2012) to an idealized and romantic depiction of King Henry. Tellingly, despite the Henriad’s consistent scepticism towards heroic masculinity, Hiddleston has stated his belief in Henry’s ‘piety’ and ‘chivalric code’.32 The Donmar Warehouse’s production of Coriolanus similarly affirms the rapid creation of Hiddleston’s Shakespearean capital during this period. Under Josie Rourke’s direction, the play’s repeated concern with the (in)ability of Coriolanus’s body to demonstrate

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martial prowess or honour affirms the newfound potency of both Hiddleston’s Shakespeareanism and his masculinity. After all, the former had been latent in his early theatrical work but not particularly determined by either the press or Hiddleston himself, while the actor’s slimmer physique was deemed appropriate for secondary characters or boyish romancers, but not conventionally muscular action heroes. Indeed, it was the absence of this combination at the time of auditioning for Thor that led Hiddleston to Loki rather than the title role. The progression of Hiddleston’s star identity towards more conventional markers of masculinity alongside the delineation of his upper-middle-class cultural value as ‘Shakespearean’ has thus been cultivated both by his post-Loki stardom and very much as a result of it. For Rourke, as for Sharrock and Susanne Biers (director of The Night Manager), masculinity is performed gesturally through coded poses or strip-teases that reveal and revel in the power of Hiddleston’s body, therefore. In Coriolanus, Hiddleston’s newly muscled body functions as an interpretive nodal point for the play’s thematic concerns and the production’s wider ambition to produce a Shakespeare play with mainstream appeal and sexiness. His body, as a site of multiple but ultimately compatible meanings, is invoked throughout the production and in its promotional paratexts on occasions such as a shower scene, trailers which focus on the actor’s physical preparation for the role, promotional posters of Hiddleston topless or Rourke’s comment during the play’s National Theatre Live cinema broadcast that her star is ‘passing sexy’.33 The Night Manager similarly relishes in Hiddleston’s to-be-looked-at-ness, providing viewers with scenes in which Jonathan Pine’s body is framed as a central spectacle, such as Pine running barechested on a beach, or being measured for, and then dressed in a bespoke suit. These are moments which have little direct narrative significance and which, instead, function as examples of Mulvey’s scenes of ‘erotic contemplation’.34 Hiddleston’s perceived public persona confirms the receptiveness of not only his performances but his stardom

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to these romantic qualities, described by David Schilling in one article on the actor and his alleged romance with global pop star Taylor Swift, as ‘performative chivalry’. For Schilling, the couple – described as the closest that popular culture will get to ‘two memes dating’ – are calculatingly aware of the potential of their digital selves as avatars for further identity performance, whether done personally or by their fans.35 Indeed, while Hiddleston has stated his intention to present a ‘vision’ of himself that is authentic, the actor’s online persona is characterized by a high degree of self-awareness and, in Beaumont-Thomas’s words, an ‘innate understanding of what makes internet memes tick’.36 His familiarity with the creative practices of internet and fan culture is evident in his willing involvement in digital phenomenon such as the ‘accidentally groping’ meme (in which Hiddleston mimicked Natalie Portman’s coquettish pose on the international poster for Thor: The Dark World). The popularity of these viral texts (a video of Hiddleston performing the Melbourne Shuffle on Korean television gained over 1.1 million views in its first month on Reddit) and their humorousness is derived largely from the contrast between Hiddleston’s conversance with popular cultural modes and his perpetuation of a genteelly English identity.37 Particularly when viewed from an American or international framework, it is Hiddleston’s performance of these latter qualities that demonstrate his awareness of the expectations of Englishness and that playfully speak back to the wider construction of his Shakespearean capital. As the example of Hiddleston foregrounds, ideas about English identity form through cultural practices. Katherine W. Jones, writing on the relationship that British expatriates living in America have towards their national identity, argues that identities emerge from how individuals ‘use’ cultural practices in their daily interactions: ‘what we say, what we wear, how we act and how others interpret our actions’.38 Jones’s description of the self-constructed nature of her subjects’ identities is strikingly apt. Hiddleston’s Twitter handle, for instance, illuminates the increasing sophistication of his professional

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identity and the way in which the actor’s attitude towards his Englishness has continued to change with his growing fame: Actor. Prince Hal/Henry V. Loki. Capt Nicholls. Fitzgerald. Freddie Page. Edward. Magnus. Oakley. Also: brother, son, friend, runner, dancer, prancer, loon. With its etymological origins as early as the fifteenth century and Shakespearean employment (‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’), the term ‘loon’ cultivates a sense of Hiddleston’s idiosyncrasies.39 Its relative lack of use in modernday parlance demonstrates his historical knowledge, while its employment simultaneously undercuts the implications of its use by creating a sense of foolishness and mischievousness. ‘Prance’ similarly alludes to an antiquated idiom that is offset by the light-heartedness of its definition. From 2013 onwards, however, Hiddleston’s handle changed to the short affirmation of simply ‘Actor’. This, his current tag, demonstrates a greater seriousness of purpose and an absence of the potentially effeminate, light-hearted connotations of ‘dancer, prancer, loon’, as well as the quasi-archaisms associated with Shakespeare (as evident in Thor). It is also suggestive of the same desire to move beyond genteel archetypes to the darker characterization seen in more recent releases as Crimson Peak (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2015) and High-Rise (dir. Ben Wheatley, 2015) or to the more conventional, active heterosexual masculinity of figures such as Coriolanus, Jonathan Pine or Hiddleston’s first action lead role in Kong: Skull Island (dir. Jordan VogtRoberts, 2017). Despite Hiddleston’s efforts to broaden his performer identity through roles such as these, however, online representations of the actor continue to associate his attractiveness with qualities that are regarded as uniquely English. These qualities exist variously in terms of high cultural capital; a perceived mild eccentricity; and politeness, or the sometimes old-fashioned and courtly manner of his address (his fans’ adaptation of the Ryan Gosling ‘Hey girl’ meme to ‘Hello Darling’, for

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instance). Video content of Hiddleston draws similarly upon the actor’s perceived probity and the unwillingness to be ‘dispassionate’, also evident on his personal Twitter account with its details of charity work and motivational comments.40 A viral video produced by the American network and home of Sesame Street, PBS, involves Hiddleston teaching Cookie Monster on the virtue of restraint, for instance. A recurrent theme across memes of Hiddleston is thus the expression of his national identity as that which is restrained and deferential, with examples elaborating upon stereotypically British traits or pursuits, including compulsive tea-drinking or apologizing. Engagements with internet and fan culture reveal a receptiveness towards Shakespeare’s works and the popular association made in America between Englishness and perceived ‘high’ cultural knowledge. During an interview for the Nerd Machine with the website’s founder and Hiddleston’s Thor: The Dark World co-star, Zachary Levi, Hiddleston recalls an encounter with Branagh: You know, Kenneth Branagh is a big mentor of mine and he said something the other day … from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which is four words: ‘take pains, be perfect’. And it’s, I think, his way of saying, you know, don’t be afraid of caring.41 The line, delivered by the bathetic figure of Bottom, here becomes a site of meditation for Hiddleston: an invitation from the more senior Branagh to invest emotionally in his characters and performance. A later question from a fan on Hiddleston’s favourite Shakespeare line provokes a similarly thorough response on the beauty of Shakespeare’s language. Ultimately unsure, Hiddleston apologizes to the audience, stating ‘that wasn’t a very good answer, was it?’, to which Levi responds, ‘it was a great answer. I’ve just never felt more uncultured in my life’.42 Levi’s relative lack of Shakespearean knowledge in comparison to Hiddleston is, for the American actor, a negation of all cultural capital. The frequency with

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which Hiddleston’s fans return to the topic of Shakespeare during the hour-long conversation is also worth remarking upon. Despite the Nerd Machine’s purpose, created to celebrate conventionally marginalized cultural modes such as science fiction, and despite Hiddleston’s own involvement in the Marvel franchise, Hiddleston is asked about Shakespeare on two other occasions and references the playwright a further five times in total. This occurs to the extent that Levi responds to another characteristically fulsome answer from Hiddleston with the sardonic put-down: ‘I’ve read all of Shakespeare, I’ve performed all of Shakespeare … I just didn’t want to talk about it.’ Hiddleston’s conversation with Levi and its insistent circling back to the topic of Shakespeare thereby enacts the process by which American anglophile sentiment ‘reinforce[s] old distinctions between “high” and “low” culture’.43 Memes that are predicated on the apparent visibility of Hiddleston’s Shakespeareanism speak to a similarly conservative iteration of the playwright’s cultural capital as that which, as ‘high’ culture, requires expert decryption. One macro, for instance, pairs an image of Hiddleston listening alertly with the caption ‘Somewhere in the world … Someone misquoted Shakespeare. I can sense it.’44 Meanwhile another photograph of the actor looking at art house filmmaker Jim Jarmusch features the interpolation, ‘What did you say about Shakespeare, Jim? Say it to my face.’45 The content of these macros (which are by no means unique) and their continued circulation in internet spaces affirm the definition of Hiddleston’s cultural value as ‘Shakespearean’. But more significantly, perhaps, these memes betray an implicit fear that the ‘Shakespearean’ is something that requires specialist knowledge to unpack and which only Hiddleston, as an upper-middle-class British actor, possesses the correct credentials to do. Shakespeare’s use in such memes evokes not simple enjoyment or understanding but, instead, concerns about correctness: Who is the right person to quote Shakespeare, or what is the right way? And yet, this concern about accuracy is atypical, or rather absent, in other macro depictions of Shakespeare, which instead

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frequently comment upon the compatibility of his works or his popular persona with contemporary popular cultural modes. Indeed, a repeated feature of Shakespeare macros is the juxtaposition of a historical Shakespeare (invoked through well-known representations of the playwright such as the Cobbe, Chandos or Droeshout portraits, reference to his plays, mock-anachronisms or comparable sites of ‘high’ culture) with modern vernacular or contemporary internet phenomenon, as in pairing the Cobbe portrait with the statement ‘Think he has no swag … Invented the word’.46 Similarly themed macros of the Chandos portrait proclaim, ‘Oh you liked Macbeth?… I was freestyling,’ ‘I killed most of my characters… before Game of Thrones’ or, in a parody of Cartesian rationalism, ‘I meme… therefore I meme.’47 The humorous effect of such macros functions through the reader acknowledging an implicit disparity in cultural capital between Shakespeare and the popular cultural world with which he collides. Significantly, however, they do so while underlining the mutability of Shakespeare’s online capital and its accommodation and assimilation of influence from popular internet culture. Indeed, other memes of Hiddleston in character demonstrate a similarly ludic relationship to Shakespeare, including a GIF of the star-as-Coriolanus thrusting with the caption ‘Gurl ru ready for sum poetry!?’ [sic].48 It is also as a direct result of Hiddleston’s willingness to move between ‘high’ and popular cultural modes that the potential flexibility of Shakespearean capital in contemporary culture is manifest, whether invoked in traditional sites of performance like Coriolanus or in the multimedia exchange spaces of digital culture. When Hiddleston’s star persona, rather than his capacity as an actor, is used to express Shakespearean capital online, however, the playwright’s works appear exclusive and restricted to those individuals who have sufficient knowledge to unlock them. The construction of Hiddleston’s Shakespearean identity atop of pre-existing social and cultural capital thereby reveals the potential social, cultural and national exclusivity of Shakespearean interpretation. Hiddleston is at once a purveyor

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of mainstream Shakespearean entertainment and Shakespeareinspired culture but also its jealous gatekeeper (‘Say it to my face’) – a site where distinctions between ‘high’ and popular culture elide and an agent of their reformation, where the Shakespearean comes to denote, quite problematically, a traditional or quintessential Englishness. If, in detailing these processes, this chapter makes Hiddleston a Shakespearean, it also seeks to broadcast a critical analysis of his performer identity and the uses to which it and Shakespeare are put.

Afterword: Special Affects Performing Resistance Through Narrowcasting Courtney Lehmann

On 19 November 2016, eleven days after the travesty of the US presidential election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a Broadway performance of Hamilton, the smash hit musical that took the 2016 Tony awards by storm and garnered the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Greeted with a mixture of boos and applause upon his arrival in the theatre, Pence sought to exit swiftly during the standing ovation. At that moment, lead actor Brandon Victor Dixon stepped forward to quiet the audience and read a statement directed at the fleeing Pence: We, sir – we – are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.1

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Suddenly, Hamilton morphed into another kind of performance; the fourth wall was broken and the diegetic reality of the musical – itself a politicized celebration of diversity and American pluralism – melded with the lived experience of the audience. Dixon proceeded to encourage audience members to record, post and tweet their message because ‘we’re all here sharing a story of love’. A classic example of media convergence, spreadability and guerrilla tactics, Hamilton’s post-show theatrics created a wave of special affects, that is, a spontaneous performance of relationality prompted, in this case, by the intersection of artistic autonomy and rights discourse. Indeed, in the age of post-broadcast media, Hamilton’s instantly viral epilogue originated as a form of ‘narrowcasting’ – but not, perhaps, in the traditional sense of the term. Functioning not as a digitalized niche campaign aimed at organizing a brand community, the narrowcasting I refer to is, at its most granular level, person-to-person interaction. In this respect, narrowcasting might be understood as a form of localized resistance to the digitally enabled modes of communication that have come to dominate our daily lives. My interest in what follows lies not in lauding the rise of digital media nor in lamenting the decline of broadcast media; rather, I wish to explore what forms of resistance are possible when new and old media converge against the backdrop of participatory culture, as well as how rogue performances that never go viral may nevertheless be mobilized against hegemonic interests, neoliberal ideology and cognitive capitalism. David Moberly, in his contribution to this collection, warns us that despite the seemingly radical participatory nature of Wikipedia, for example, new modes of oppression and control may persist in the form of a growing white male digital elite. Shakespeare, it goes without saying, has been appropriated historically by an array of voices – some of the most prominent belonging to women. But Wikipedia occludes mention of any female authors, let alone artists, who have engaged with Shakespeare, just as its largely male-controlled entries and

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hyperlinks marginalize the work of the site’s female editors. This kind of epistemic violence harbours the potential to turn real within fan communities; in the context of the global gaming industry, for example, feminist bloggers like Anita Sarkeesian regularly receive rape and death threats for calling out the industry’s constitutive misogyny and critiquing its general failure to produce empowering female roles. Hence, we must be careful not to oversell the positive affects generated by words like ‘participatory’ and ‘openness’ when, in practice, their effects are not necessarily salutary. In Spreadable Media, Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green contend that the ‘shift of the dominant means of communication from broadcast to digital may in the process loosen the grip of corporate control over many types of content, resulting in the active circulation of a greater diversity of perspectives’.2 Despite the disturbing persistence of a digital divide, barriers to connectivity and participation are as low as they have ever been – especially in the light of the DIY movement. And yet, Anna Watkins Fisher admonishes us to recognize that corporations, in their effort to establish brand communities around positive feelings of customer loyalty and product integrity, engage in the mere performance of openness.3 Indeed, the performance of openness is largely a shadow invitation to participate; worse, as Fisher insists, it is also the ‘predominant mode by which neoliberalism operates today’.4 By vastly overstating the power of the individual in online spaces, neoliberal ideology seeks to commodify cognitive labour and individual attention in ways that can potentially convert human beings, as Jonathan Beller argues, into ‘a standing reserve of information’, enjoining them ‘to see and therefore produce the world and themselves in accord with capital’s accounting’ – the very definition of cognitive capitalism.5 Before we concede to such fatalism, we might consider how a Shakespearean example of the double-sided ‘performance of openness’ employs narrowcasting in ways that complicate this perspective. I refer here to the Globe’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank programme, a form of youth outreach

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designed specifically for high-school and middle-school students.6 Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank revolves around the in-depth analysis of a single play as the Globe actors develop and rehearse it over a period of eight weeks. An interactive website enables students to watch and listen to week-by-week performance notes and commentary by the cast and crew, as well as to respond to imaginative prompts related to choreography, marketing and other dimensions of theatrical production. The programme culminates in a live performance of a different play each year and tends to run around onehundred minutes, both to make the plays accessible for younger audiences and to address the reality of school groups travelling to and from the Globe in a single day.7 All shows are free of charge, resonating as a literal ‘performance of openness’ in the best sense of the term. On the other hand, in relying for its economic survival on Deutsche Bank, the Globe is thrust into a Faustian bargain with the banking giant that played a key role in the Libor scandal. And in this regard, Deutsche Bank needs the Globe – and more specifically Shakespeare – to polish its tarnished social contract with its clients, especially after it was found guilty of manipulating interest rates during the financial collapse of 2008. Seeking to erase its more nefarious history, which began with the expropriation of Jewish funds to aid the Nazi regime, Deutsche Bank’s support for Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre creates a variation of the ‘warm glow effect’, a term from behavioural economics that identifies positive affect and feelings of increased utility with philanthropic acts. Hence, Deutsche Bank clients experience a ‘feel-good’ relationship between the product and the internal satisfaction associated with charitable deeds – precisely the formula for what James Andreoni refers to as ‘impure altruism’.8 Indeed, just as the Globe anticipates increased traffic to the theatre through Deutsche Bank’s support, Deutsche Bank, in turn, expects customers to invest in its unique brand of finance capital, which becomes all the more appealing when tethered to its ‘priceless’ cultural investment in Shakespeare.

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Albeit a case of impure altruism, it would be remiss not to point out that since its inaugural sponsorship year in 2010, Deutsche Bank has brought more than 700,000 students to the Globe to attend a live performance of a Shakespeare play. The Globe’s annual Playing Shakespeare with Deutsch Bank productions are thus a powerful example of narrowcasting. Intended neither for tourists nor the satisfaction of critical acclaim, the programme is designed for youth audiences across London and Birmingham only. Yet in 2016, these narrowcasts arguably reached a much wider audience when Deutsche Bank withdrew its plan to add 250 new jobs to its location in Cary, North Carolina, as a means of protesting the state’s antitransgender law known as HB2. These special affects, or what we might think of as the sudden expression of deep affinity with other causes, might very well have been a serendipitous effect of the play chosen for that year: Twelfth Night. As Susan Bennett observes of ‘Bard Branding’ in her essay on ‘Sponsoring Shakespeare’, the relationship between the Royal Shakespeare Company, British Petrol and the ‘other RSC’, namely, the youth-inspired organization known as the Reclaim Shakespeare Company, is considerably more complicated.9 The Reclaim Shakespeare Company regularly infiltrates BPsponsored exhibitions at the British Museum and crashes performances at the real RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon as a means of waging resistance to oil-based sponsorship of the arts. The work of the other RSC is built around what Sunita Nigam refers to as ‘feeling-actions’, a phrase that she employs as ‘a way of conceptualizing risky forms of appearing and feeling in public’.10 Through their ‘anarcho-thespian’ interventions, members of the other RSC count on fomenting spontaneous outrage as they highlight BP’s record of environmental degradation. Not coincidentally, it was in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon Spill of 2010 – the worst marine disaster in US history – that BP initiated its sponsorship of the RSC, seeking, like Deutsche Bank, to ‘greenwash’ its image by way of Shakespeare. Indeed, Cameron McCarthy warns that even the practice of so-called ‘corporate philanthropy’ is becoming an arm

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of global capitalism that is deeply imbricated in neoliberal ideology, as companies employ cause-related marketing to manipulate consumer affect in the interests of building brand share. The disruptive narrowcasts of the other RSC call BP’s greenwashing or ‘cause-related’ bluff; their performances create what Richard Lanham calls ‘attention traps’ in which Shakespeare functions as a counter-brand, inciting audiences to reject affinity with a particular product.11 A classic example is the oft-repeated Macbeth-inspired chant: ‘Double, double, oil is trouble. Let’s reduce BP to rubble.’ A typical flash mob performance of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company in the British Museum, for example, begins with a non-hostile takeover, as a procession of eager, partially costumed protestors fan out across the lobby and into the crowd while a small group of main actors proceed to occupy some kind of ‘stage’. Within the museum space, the actors often choose a landing structure where patrons seeking to travel between floors are briefly stalled and forced to watch, or to walk through, the performance. The interactive protest often turns into an impromptu passion play in which a kitschy effigy of BP – frequently depicted as a massive, multi-armed sea monster peppered with BP logos or as Macbeth clad in a green and gold BP-inspired frock – is killed, humiliated or otherwise expediently dispatched. Using the attention structures associated with Manichean allegory, performers in the role of BP often blacken themselves with oil grease in a vaguely auto-erotic fashion, cavorting about the playing space until the audience subdues them with their chants of ‘out damned logo!’ In this way, the Reclaim Shakespeare Company generates affective intensities that may turn into what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘conversion points’,12 where negative feelings may become positive feelings if attention is captured – and converted – to activism. Through their live interventions in front of relatively small and occasionally hostile audiences, the other RSC has inspired similar guerrilla acts and even lone-wolf performances. For instance, high-school student Matthew

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Walpole went rogue at a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of Hamlet, where (much to the visible surprise and chagrin of the audience) he delivered the ‘BP-or-notBP’ soliloquy. As a guest blogger on bp-or-bp.org, Walpole writes that BP’s sponsorship of the real RSC is especially toxic because ‘it targets young people, giving 16–25-yearolds money off tickets. The deal promotes the oil giant to the emerging generation, the ones who will be most affected by the effects of climate change in the future’.13 Recognizing the intersectionality of environmental activism with rights discourse more broadly, ‘actorvists’ associated with the Reclaim Shakespeare Company deploy their counterbranded Shakespeare as a firebrand. During the intermission of a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance, two female members of the other RSC took over the stage and enacted a lesbian adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, titled Ramira and Juliet, explicitly linking BP’s aggressive efforts to invest in Russian oil to Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay agenda. Typically, these anarcho-thespian interventions end with a call for direct action on the part of audience members, who are invited to tear the BP logo from their programmes and, in so doing, to take back Shakespeare – the Bard, the brand – from the dark side of oil sponsorship. Thus, what Richard Lanham argues of the role of art in an attention economy might be extended, in the context of media ecology, to Shakespeare, whose work exists ‘not to be gazed on for its own sake but to focus social purpose’.14 But it is precisely the loss of social purpose that Henry Jenkins, writing in 2008, anticipates with the end of the broadcast era: Throw away the powers of broadcasting and one has only cultural fragmentation. The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media.15

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Jenkins’s already dated remarks nevertheless typify the ongoing tensions between broadcasting and narrowcasting; whereas the former is associated with the centripetal forces of consolidated messaging, the latter is wrought with the centrifugal energies of participatory culture. Special affects occupy the border of these distributed agencies, enkindled by discrete events in what Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth describe as ‘bloomspaces’16 – sites where, in their most optimal form, unexpected affinities and alliances spring from affective intensities. But for youth organizations like the other RSC, this conversional experience remains elusive in the digital world; to this day, their rogue performances have attracted only a few thousand followers on YouTube.17 And as Jenkins and others observe, we live in a world where, ‘if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’.18 Hence, similar to the philosophical quandary about whether the tree that falls in the empty forest makes a sound, we might consider how – and when – to value those narrowcasts that never become broad. It seems fitting to conclude with the story of a youth organization whose narrowcasts ultimately handed a major defeat to big oil: the One Mind youth movement. Inspired not by Shakespeare but by the Lakota myth of the black snake that brings dysfunction to native communities, One Mind began as the work of three young activists on a suicide prevention mission, whose efforts to create safe spaces for Sioux youth at Keystone and Standing Rock galvanized international opposition against the black snake, reenvisioned, appropriately, as the XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. Although Trump has since issued the executive order reversing the decision by the Obama administration to halt construction of the pipelines, there can be no doubt that in those fragile ‘bloom-spaces’ at Keystone and Standing Rock, special affects were ‘sewn and scattered’ by both physical runners and social media, spawning the encampments that created an unlikely rapprochement between indigenous rights organizations and US military veterans, as well as between environmental activists, the Rainbow Family and the Black Lives Matter movement. It was

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during the early stages of the encampments, on 14 September 2016, that the other RSC’s umbrella organization, bp-or-notbp.org/Reclaim Our Bard, tweeted a message of solidarity with fellow travellers at Standing Rock. Fundamental to both groups’ ethos of resistance is a recognition of the body-asstage and broadcast mechanism. Huddled in bunkers in subzero temperatures and menaced by tear gas and pepper spray, members of the One Mind youth movement remind us that in the context of the present political moment, it is the vulnerable, performing body – labouring, racially coded, class-inflected and often female – over which current foreign and domestic policies are being violently inscribed. Hence, if in this brief afterword to Broadcast Your Shakespeare I have ultimately leaned more heavily on the implications of broadcasting than on Shakespeare, it is because the more urgent project lies in the pursuit of a solidarity which, as Diana Henderson contends in her chapter, must extend beyond academia. While it is important to honour the tree that falls out of earshot, now is not the time to miss the forest for the trees.

NOTES Introduction 1 2

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5 6

Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge, 2014). On Bell’s use of Hamlet, see Galey, 192–94. See Erin Sullivan’s blog post on the fascinating connections between Shakespeare themed board, book and card games of the nineteenth century and digital Shakespeares of the early twenty-first century, ‘Shakespeare: The Game’, https://digitalshakespeares. wordpress.com/author/areturntoform/(accessed 4 May 2017) See Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (London, 2014); Daniel Fischlin, ed. Outerspeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia and the Limits of Adaptation (Toronto, 2014); Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, eds. Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (Cambridge, 2014); Maurizio Calbi, Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2013); Mark Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh, 2011). See Richard Burt and Julian Yates, What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare (New York, 2013) Kindle edn. See also Bruce R. Smith’s spatial figure for Shakespeares as a set of four continents, of which ‘Shakespeare as cultural icon’ is the most dominant, in his Preface to The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, Bruce R. Smith and Katherine Rowe eds. (Cambridge, 2016), xxii. YouTube’s self-description, quoted in Tarleton Gillespie, ‘The Politics of Platforms’, New Media and Society 12.3 (2010), 353. The now-classic study is Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

NOTES

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14 15 16

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Ingo Berensmeyer, ‘Shakespeare and Media Ecology: Beyond Historicism and Presentism’, Poetics Today 35.4 (2014), 519. Berensmeyer, 519. Berensmeyer, 521. Burt and Yates, loc. 1694. Of course, there has been much debate about what constitutes the original or definitive Shakespearean medium, theatre or print. See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003); and W. B. Worthen, ‘Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama and Performance (Studies)’, SQ 62.3 (2011), 309–39. Alan Galey, ‘Reading Shakespeare Through Media Archaeology’ in Shakespeare in Our Time, Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett eds. (New York, 2016), 105. James Hamilton, ‘Unearthing Broadcasting in the Anglophone World’ in Residual Media, Charles R. Acland ed. (Minneapolis, 2007), 285. Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Peter Holland ed. (London, 2013), 3.1.73–74. Hamilton, 285. For a reading of Shakespeare in such terms, see Kylie Jarrett and Jeneen Naji, ‘What Would Media Studies Do? Social Media Shakespeare as a Technosocial Process’, Borrowers and Lenders 10.1 (2016), http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show (accessed 11 February 2017). See David Beer, ‘Power Through the Algorithm? Participatory Web Cultures and the Technological Unconscious’, New Media and Society 11.6 (2009), 985–1002; Tarleton Gillespie, ‘Algorithms’ in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture, Benjamin Peters ed. (Princeton NJ, 2017), 18–30. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Teaching a Different Shakespeare from the One I Love’, New York Times, 11 September 2015, https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/teaching-a-differentshakespeare-than-the-one-i-love.html?_r=0 (accessed 11 February 2017). See Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know (New York, 2013). Burt and Yates, loc. 133; loc. 120. See also Jarrett and Naji. Arthur L. Little Jr, ‘Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property’, SQ 67 (2016), 84–103.

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For a cautious defence of Shakespeare’s dominance, see Emma Smith, ‘Shakespeare: The Apex Predator’, TLS, 4 May 2017, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/shakespeare-apexpredator/ (accessed 4 May 2017). Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, written by Cyrus Wood and directed by Roy Mack (Vitaphone, 1936); and YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cwq0q7HFjkw (accessed 11 February 2017). See Denis Austin Britton, ‘Ain’t She a Shakespearean? Lessons from Giovanni on Shakespeare’, ‘The Color of Membership’, Plenary Panel Session, organized by Arthur L. Little Jr, Shakespeare Association of America, Atlanta, Georgia, 7 April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f8_sOAucWw (accessed 19 April 2017). Britton’s paper was read by David Sterling Brown. Orson Welles and Roger Hill, ‘On the Teaching of Shakespeare and Other Great Literature’, English Journal 27.6 (1938), 467. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Audiences’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 1483–93. See Katherine Rowe, ‘Shakespeare and Media History’ in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 1907–18. See Christy Desmet, ‘Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: From Tom Stoppard to YouTube’, SS 61 (2008), 227–38; Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America (Oxford, 2011), 145–67; Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London, 2014). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 134. See Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, ‘Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Adaptation’ in The Afterlife of Ophelia, Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams eds. (Basingstoke, 2012), 59–78; and the special issue of Borrowers and Lenders 9.1 (2014), on ‘Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare’, http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/27/toc (accessed 11 February 2017). Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’ in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 21–40. Lanier, 35. See SS 68 (2015). Rowe, 1911.

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Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge, 1994), 30. Black, 31. Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–34 (New York, 1999), 6. OED, http://www.oed.com.jproxy.nuim.ie/view/Entry/23508 rskey=Dzhuq&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed 11 February 2017). Laura Wittern-Keller, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981 (Lexington, KY, 2008), 20. Wittern-Keller, 51. Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood Censorship and the Production Code (Lexington, KY, 2001), 4. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Morals of the Movie (Philadelphia, 1922), 147. Francis G. Couvares, ‘Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church’ in Movie Censorship and American Culture, Francis G. Couvares ed. (Amherst, 2006), 143. Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Role of the Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, 1996), 58. Walsh notes that many Catholics wanted something stronger than just new regulations. Martin Quigley, Decency in Motion Pictures (New York, 1937), 45. See William D. Romanowski, Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies (Oxford, 2012). Cited from the ‘United States Motion Picture Production Code (1930)’ in Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America, Thomas A. Foster ed. (Chicago, 2013), 133–37. Anthony Schillaci, Movies and Morals (Notre Dame, IN, 1968), 35. Gottfried Reinhardt, The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt (New York, 1979), 18. Oliver M. Saylor, ed. Max Reinhardt and His Theatre, trans. Mariele S. Gudernatsch (New York, 1968), 146.

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J. L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge, 1982), 51. Styan notes that Reinhardt became famous for his Shakespearean productions. Huntly Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (New York, 1964), 186. Anthony R. Guneratne, ‘“Thou Dost Usurp Authority”: Beerbohm Tree, Reinhardt, Olivier, Welles, and the Politics of Adapting Shakespeare’ in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, Diana E. Henderson ed. (Oxford, 2006), 41. Shake, Mr. Shakespeare, dir. Roy Mack, Warner Brothers, 1934. DVD. The film is also available on YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cwq0q7HFjkw (accessed 11 February 2017). ‘Production Code’, 133. Trailer, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, Warner Brothers, 1935. Robert F. Willson Jr, Shakespeare in Hollywood: 1929–1956 (Madison, NJ, 2000), 41. Douglas Lanier, ‘WSHX: Shakespeare and American Radio’ in Shakespeare After Mass Media, Richard Burt ed. (New York, 2002), 201. Pierre Berthomieu, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle: Shakespeare Should Have Emigrated to Hollywood’ in Shakespeare on Screen: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin eds. (Rouen, 2004), 207. ‘Production Code’, 134–37. Jon Lewis, Hollywood V. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York, 2000), 8. Ken Ludwig, Shakespeare in Hollywood (New York, 2005), 11. Further citations are indicated parenthetically within the text. Ruth Ann Alfred, ‘The Effect of Censorship on American Film Adaptations of Shakespearean Plays’ (MA thesis, Texas A&M University, 2008). Alfred finds, however, that changes were made to the fairies’ and elves’ costumes to conform to the Production Code, as well as some minor changes in word choice (11–18). William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, foreword by Max Reinhardt (New York, 1935), dust jacket. Further citations are indicated parenthetically within the text.

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Willson, 48. Northrop Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy’ in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, Leonard F. Dean ed. (New York, 1961), 85. Styan, 55. Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (New York, 1971), 26. Peter W. Marx, ‘Max Reinhardt’ in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, John Russell Brown ed. (London, 2008), 377. Wilhelm Hortman, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998), 34. Hortman also points out that Reinhardt’s modified theatrical settings, so that his stages could be equally ‘opulent’ or ‘abstract’ (31). Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge, 2001), 58. Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City, IA, 1997), 164. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Harold F. Brooks ed. (London, 2006), 4.1.61–62. Further citations of the play refer to this edition and are indicated parenthetically within the text. Ann E. Kaplan, ‘Is the Gaze Male?’ in Feminism and Film, Ann E. Kaplan ed. (Oxford, 2000), 135. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, Sue Thornham ed. (New York, 1999), 59. Barbara Freedman, ‘Dis/Figuring Power: Censorship and Representation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, Dorothea Kehler ed. (New York, 1998), 205. Carter, 47.

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Mark Raboy, Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford, 2016), 340. Raboy, 340. Raboy, 341.

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Maria Cristina Marconi, Marconi My Beloved (Boston, 2001), 122. In the Arden Midsummer Night’s Dream, Harold F. Brooks ed. (London, 1979), Puck’s line ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes’ is found in Act 2, Scene 1, 175–76. Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, D. D. Paige ed. (New York, 1971), 297. Pound also challenged the notion of ‘disinterested’ modern art. In a letter composed to Felix Schelling in 1922, he wrote that it is ‘all rubbish to pretend that art isn’t didactic’ (180). Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge MA, 2008), 6. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York, 1999), 4. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham NJ, 2003), 237. John Houseman, ‘The Men from Mars’ in Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels, Horace Knowles ed. (New York, 1972), 485. Holly Cowan Shulman, ‘John Houseman and the Voice of America: America Foreign Propaganda on the Air’, American Studies 28.2 (1987), 23. Shulman, 25. Quoted in Shulman, 25. Orson Welles, Mercury Theater Recordings 1938, https:// archive.org/details/OrsonWelles-MercuryTheater1938Recordings (accessed19 April 2017). John Anderson, ‘“Julius Caesar” Brings Brilliant Life to the Bard’, New York Journal and American, 12 November 1937. Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New York, 1999), 50. Houseman recalled in his memoir the irony of his appointment: ‘no one … seemed to question the propriety of placing the Voice of America under the direction of an enemy alien of Rumanian birth, who as such, was expressly forbidden by the Department of Justice to go near a shortwave radio set’ (487). Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), 158. Kenneth Tynan, ‘Orson Wells’ in Focus on Orson Wells, Ronald Gottesman ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976), 13.

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Houseman, 146. Quoted in Alva Johnston and Fred Smith, ‘How to Raise a Child: The Education of Orson Welles, Who Didn’t Need It’, Saturday Evening Post (part 1, 20 January 1940; part 2, 27 January 1940; part 3, 3 February 1940), part 2, 54. Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London, 1997), 127. Callow, 177. Tom Rooney, ‘“A Thousand Shylocks”: Orson Wells and The Merchant of Venice’, SS 59 (2006), 64. Anderegg, 24. Rooney, 63. Orson Welles, Mercury Theater Recordings 1938, https:// archive.org/details/OrsonWelles-MercuryTheater1938Recordings (accessed 19 April 2017). Callow, 85. Micheál MacLiammόir, All for Hecuba (Dublin, 1961), 128–29. For example, he played Lear onstage in a wheelchair at New York’s City Center in the 1950s; he acted Lear for Peter Brook in a 1953 televised version on CBS; in the 1960s, he filmed a version of The Merchant of Venice which was never released; and in the 1970s, he produced a West German-funded documentary called Filming Othello. Anderegg, 20. Anderegg, 48. Six years earlier in 1931, the National Advisory Council of Radio in Education was established by grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr, and the Carnegie Corporation, a move which ‘represented the first important attempt’ to create some type of cooperation and coordination ‘between the educators and the broadcasters’. See George V. Denny, ‘Radio Builds Democracy’, The Journal of Educational Sociology 14.6 (1941), 372. Lanier, 202. The NBC network at the time was divided into two divisions: the Red Network and the Blue Network. The latter one, smaller and often considered more highbrow, lasted from 1927 to 1945. Its productions, as Lanier notes, ‘had limited commercial potential’, but many of the programs, such as Streamlined Shakespeare, gave the ‘radio medium a veneer of artistic prestige’ (200).

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For more on these readings, see Chantal Zabus, Tempests After Shakespeare (New York, 2002). Streamlined Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, http://otrrlibrary. org/OTRRLib/Library%20Files/S%20Series/Streamlined%20 Shakespeare/Streamlined%20Shakespeare%2037-08-30%20 Twelfth%20Night.mp3 (accessed 1 July 2015). The six plays in order of their broadcast dates were the following: Hamlet (21 June), Richard III (28 June), Macbeth (5 July), The Tempest (12 July), Twelfth Night (19 July) and The Taming of the Shrew (26 July). The production of Shrew, which the announcer refers to as ‘Shakespeare’s most famous domestic comedy’, is still available and can be accessed at http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/ DigitalDeliToo/dd2jb-Streamlined-Shakespeare.html. Sally Bedell Smith, In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley, the Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle (New York, 1990), 144. Galey, 159. Galey, 170. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology – Schizophrenia – Electric Speech (Lincoln, NB, 1989), 283. Katherine Rowe, ‘Shakespeare and Media History’ in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells eds. (Cambridge 2010), 306. ‘Original Wax Record, Made by Bell, Is Heard at Smithsonian After 56 Years’, New York Times (28 October 1937), 8. Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War’, SQ 52.4 (2001), 441–55; 451–52; 454. Habicht, 454–55. Habicht, 455. Welles and Hill, 465–68; 465. Welles’s approach to Shakespeare is particularly pedagogical, according to Anderegg, and Welles also contributed to the dismantling of the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow Shakespeare, in ‘an attempt to detach Shakespeare from his rarefied cultural ghetto’ (15). Welles and Hill, 468. The Julius Caesar recording was taken from a second reading of the play, which followed by some weeks the original broadcast by the Mercury Theater on Air. The plays were The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Shulman, 24.

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For more on oration and the use of words as weapons, see David Lucking, ‘Brutus’s Reasons: Julius Caesar and the Mystery of Motive’, English Studies 91.2 (2010), 119–32. In this essay he argues that the ‘frequency with which the words cause and reason recur in connection with Brutus, and the complexity of the manner in which the various meanings of the words are played off against one another, suggest that the thematic interest in the problem of defining human motivation is central to the concerns of the play as a whole and to the understanding of this character in particular’ (119). Richard France, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York, 1972), 148–51. Anderegg, 50; Callow, 337. Rudolph Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London, 1936), 72. Shulman, ‘John Houseman’, 24. Richard France, ‘The “Voodoo” Macbeth of Orson Welles’, Yale Theatre 5.3 (1974), 66. Quoted on Welles Net website, http://orsonwelles.org/2012/10/ mercury-theatre.html (accessed 1 July 2015). Alva Johnston and Fred Smith, ‘How to Raise a Child’, part 3 The Saturday Evening Post (1940), 27. Houseman, 30–31. While there have been some disputes in hindsight over how widespread the ‘panic’ may have been due to Welles’s broadcast, for those hearing it in 1938, it seemed particularly real, as the number of articles about it demonstrates. Catherine L. Benamou, It’s All True: Orson Welles’s PanAmerican Odyssey (Berkeley, 2007), 2. Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (New York, 1985), 231. Robert Sawyer, ‘“All’s Well That Ends Welles”: Orson Welles and the “Voodoo” Macbeth’, Multicultural Shakespeare 13.1 (2016), 98. Sawyer, 98. Sawyer, 98. Orson Welles, The Daily Worker (15 April 1938), 9. Welles, Daily Worker, 9. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, 2006), 3.

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Lanier, 198. Quoted in Tynan, 19. Tynan, 19.

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Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill similarly raise this concern in ‘Introduction: #SocialMediaShakespeares’, Borrower and Lenders 10.1 (2016): ‘That both Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming are no longer fully available as archive or otherwise difficult to find online returns us to the earlier question of how quickly the “newly new” of social media, in spite of its initial impact, recedes into obsolescence’ (17, note 9), http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783211/show (accessed 11 February 2017). For earlier accounts see Alexa Huang, ‘Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive’, SS 64 (2011), 38–51, in which Huang described what was then just being launched as this MIT archive; Whitney Anne Trettien’s ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Goes Global Shakespeares’, The Shakespearean International Yearbook 14: Special Section, Digital Shakespeares (Dorchester, 2014), 155–160, Peter S. Donaldson, ‘The Shakespeare Electronic Archive: Collections and Multimedia Tools for Teaching and Research, 1992–2008’, Shakespeare 4.3 (2008), 250–60. On the prehistory of MIT’s Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive that helped shape its mission, see Donaldson’s ‘The Electronic Archive in the Classroom: Multimedia Shakespeare at MIT’ in Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance, Milla Cozart Riggio ed. (New York, 1999), 390–412. Much of my data is based on a series of conversations during the spring and summer of 2016 with Peter Donaldson and Belinda Yung (conducted separately) and presentation slides provided by Yung. See the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) series of articles sparked by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette and David Golumbia’s ‘Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities’, suitably polemical and appropriately published on 1 May 2016: https://

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lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political -history-digital-humanities/. As one among the co-founders of Comparative Media Studies at MIT who has seen it morph away from its historicist, comparativist reading model over the past decade, I have sympathy with the politics and fractures identified in the LARB essay, although I regard the Global Shakespeares projects as far from its target. My former colleague and friend Brouillette might retort ‘of course you do’ – or she might agree. The three MIT faculty members who regularly teach and publish in Shakespeare studies are Peter Donaldson, Diana Henderson and Shankar Raman; early modernist Mary Fuller focuses on non-Shakespearean material. All have appointments on the Literature faculty within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). As noted below, Belinda Yung is the staff person who has supported Donaldson’s various projects over the decades. Faculty at other universities have played major roles in the Global Shakespeares Performance & Video Archive, including Alexa Huang (George Washington University), Margaret Litvin (Boston University) and Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi). Important collaborators who oversee their own databases include Bi-qi Beatrice Lei (Taiwan) and Yong Li Lan (National University of Singapore). Other regional editors and an advisory board appear on the website, although levels of engagement vary widely and some internal collaborations are not represented there: http:// globalshakespeares.mit.edu/# (accessed 11 February 2017). For some videos in the collection, such as those shared by Robert Lepage and his Ex Machina company after our collaborations as he worked on Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes’s contemporary opera version of The Tempest and devised a new one-man Hamlet, MIT faculty have access to use for educational purposes only; this and the inclusion of commercial films in part motivated our development since 2013 of several Global Shakespeares in Performance modules for teaching Hamlet, The Tempest and King Lear. These modules allow us to experiment with more functionalities than the Global Shakespeares Archive currently affords. As far back as 2000, I was among the MIT faculty leads who collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company on a

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number of projects including the development of a play, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes by Adriano Shaplin, performed by the RSC at Wilton Hall in East London, November–December 2008; a videogame environment prototyped with Michael Boyd and Tom Piper, among others; and use of RSC production stills scanned into our Metamedia teaching tool. At that time, however, the hurdles to filming rehearsals and interviews were too great for us to proceed. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, 2003), passim. Galey, Shakespeare Archive, 75–76. See Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York, 1999, 2008). Alice Reyner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theater (Minneapolis, 2006). I do not wish to give a false sense of uniformity as to the standards of inclusion; as a small shop operation that has no commercial constraints, those at the Global Shakespeares Archive have shown some willingness to consider work on a case-by-case basis. In a personal interview (summer 2016), Donaldson stressed the roles at conferences and in publications on Global Shakespeares topics of the regional editors, as well as some other collaborators not listed on the website. This might be the point where Allington et al. (cited above) could reasonably posit the Global Shakespeares Archive project to be a tool of the neoliberal academy; by contrast, I would emphasize the opportunity being provided to escape adjunctification and also the greater ethnic, regional and racial diversity of those under discussion, who are far from the privileged ‘R1’ North American research university model the LARB piece features (albeit the origination of DH at University of Virginia, a state school, itself raises more complicated class issues than their delimited topic confronts). Here I distinguish between generous start-up support (through university funds and individual donor contributions) and infrastructure expressed through IT organizations and mission-critical prioritization: even in non-profit education, administrators tend to rank legal, university-wide, revenue-raising (or at least revenue-neutral) and systemtransforming projects well above discipline-specific ones – and understandably so. I have no space to detail the numerous

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software tools that have been tried and superseded over the years. I cite the special issue of Journal of Gender Studies (23.3), ‘Feminism, Academia, Austerity’ (2014), in Diana E. Henderson, ‘Tempestuous Transitions and Double Vision: From Early to Late Modern Gendered Performances in Higher Education’ in Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez eds. (New York, 2016), 59–71, where I also discuss labour conditions and online learning more extensively. On the limits thereof as well as thoughts about (in)attention (modifying Richard Lanham’s emphasis), see Christy Desmet, ‘The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare’, Borrowers and Lenders 10.1 (2016), http://www.borrowers. uga.edu/783210/show (accessed 11 February 2017). For a case study of the competing metrics of value now at stake, see Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold, Cultural Value in Twenty-First-Century England: the Case of Shakespeare (Manchester, 2014). Similarly, the top reference to our Shakespeare class (about 100 slots below) falsely claims our OpenCourseWare site provides a ‘free … class’ when it does no such thing: it provides access to our syllabi, some course materials and prompts, but little more. Buyer beware, http://educhoices.org/articles/Shakespeare_ OpenCourseWare_MITs_Free_Bachelor_Level_Class_on_ Shakespeare.html (accessed 11 January 2016). Pascale Aebischer, ‘Performing Shakespeare Through Social Media’ in Shakespeare in Our Time, Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett eds. (London, 2016), 99. Alan Galey, ‘Reading Shakespeare Through Media Archaeology’ in Shakespeare in Our Time, 106. Henderson, ‘Tempestuous Transitions’, 71. Annette Kolodny, ‘Dancing Through the Minefields: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism’, Feminist Studies 6.1 (Spring 1980), 1–25. See ‘Statement Regarding the Globe’s Future Artistic Director’, http://blog.shakespearesglobe.com/post/152286922818/ statement-regarding-the-globes-future-artistic (accessed 19 April 2017). See also, Emma Rice’s open letter to the future director, along with Dominic Dromgoole’s own endorsement of Rice’s tenure, http://blog.shakespearesglobe.com/tagged/A-Letter-From.

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Altogether, Wikipedia’s English version alone has over 1,200 articles marked as Shakespeare-related. The page view count for ‘William Shakespeare’ utilizes data for all language editions of Wikipedia from April to July 2016, ‘Langviews Analysis’, Wikimedia Tool Labs, https://tools.wmflabs.org/langviews/ (accessed 15 July 2016). By way of comparison, for this single page on Wikipedia, this translates into over 2 million ‘hits’ per month, while the University of Victoria’s popular Internet Shakespeare Editions website as a whole, with all of its individual web pages, saw around 5 million hits per month, though this has certainly fluctuated since. See Michael Best, ‘The Internet Shakespeare Editions: Scholarly Shakespeare on the Web’, Shakespeare 4.3 (2008), 237. See Adam R. Brown, ‘Wikipedia as a Data Source for Political Scientists: Accuracy and Completeness of Coverage’, PS: Political Science & Politics 44.2 (2011), 339–43; ‘Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past’, The Journal of American History 93.1 (2006), 117–46; Hannah B. Murray and Jason C. Miller, ‘Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites Is Appropriate’, St. John’s Law Review 84.2 (2010), 633–56; Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Thomas M. Leitch, Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (Baltimore, 2014); Nathaniel Tkacz, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness (Chicago, 2015); Chitu Okoli, Mohamad Mehdi, Mostafa Mesgari, Finn Årup Nielsen and Arto Lanamäki, ‘Wikipedia in the Eyes of Its Beholders: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia Readers and Readership’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65.12 (2014), 2381–403; and Robert E. Cummings, Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia (Nashville, 2009). Nielsen and Lanamäki, ‘Wikipedia in the Eyes of Its Beholders’; Mónica Colón-Aguirre and Rachel A. Fleming-May, ‘You Just Type in What You Are Looking For’: Undergraduates’ Use of Library Resources vs. Wikipedia’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship 38.6 (2012), 391–99; Xiao-Liang Shen, Christy

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M. K. Cheung and Matthew K. O. Lee, ‘What Leads Students to Adopt Information from Wikipedia?: An Empirical Investigation into the Role of Trust and Information Usefulness’, British Journal of Educational Technology 44.3 (2013), 502–17; Charles Knight and Sam Pryke, ‘Wikipedia and the University, a Case Study’, Teaching in Higher Education 17.6 (2012), 649–59. See Christy Desmet, ‘Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube’, English Journal 99.1 (2009), 66; Katherine Rowe, ‘Living with Digital Incunables, or a “Good-Enough” Shakespeare Text’ in Shakespeare and the Digital World, 152; Christie Carson, ‘eShakespeare and Performance’, Shakespeare 4.3 (2008), 270–86; Alan Liu, ‘Knowledge 2.0? The University and Web 2.0’, Video lecture, The Higher Education Academy, 6 July 2007, http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/; Robin Farabaugh, ‘“The Isle Is Full of Noises”: Using Wiki Software to Establish a Discourse Community in a Shakespeare Classroom’, Language Awareness 16.1 (2007), 41–56. Christopher Shamburg and Cari Craighead, ‘Shakespeare, Our Digital Native’, The English Journal 99.1 (2009), 75. Jeremy Ehrlich, ‘Back to Basics: Electronic Pedagogy from the (Virtual) Ground Up’, Shakespeare 4.3 (2008), 293; Carson, ‘eShakespeare’, 276. Jenni Ramone, ‘Online Appropriations: Collaborative Technologies, Digital Texts, and Shakespeare’s Authority’, Authorship 1.1 (2011), https://www.authorship.ugent.be/ article/view/778 (accessed 15 July 2016); Alexa Huang, ‘Global Shakespeares and Shakespeare Performance in Asia: OpenAccess Digital Video Archives’, Asian Theatre Journal 28.1 (2011), 245. Matthew Steggle, ‘Prospero and Plagiarism: Early Modern Studies and the Rise of Wikipedia’, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 2.1 (2010), http://www.digitalstudies.org/ (accessed 15 July 2016). Steggle. James S. Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York, 2010), 8. Alexander Halavais, ‘The Hyperlink as Organizing Principle’ in The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui eds. (Ann Arbor, 2008), 39–55.

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Steggle. Steggle. Bill Blakemore, ‘“Anonymous”: Was Shakespeare a Fraud?’, ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/ (accessed 15 July 2016). Bertrand Gervais, ‘Is There a Text on This Screen?: Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality’ in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman eds. (Malden, 2007), 194. George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore, 2006), 374–75. Pages that link to ‘William Shakespeare’, Wikipedia, http:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php ?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/ William_Shakespeare&from=9316&limit=500 (accessed 10 December 2011). A 2012 study found that the ‘William Shakespeare’ page on Wikipedia was the seventh most linked-to biographical page on the English Wikipedia, following only five US presidents and Adolf Hitler. See Pablo Aragon, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado and Yana Volkovich, ‘Biographical Social Networks on Wikipedia: A Cross-Cultural Study of Links that Made History’, Proceedings of WikiSym, 2012 (2012), https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3799. Mark Leahy, ‘Private Public Reading: Readers in Digital Literature Installation’ in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, 311. Yuejia Zhang, ‘Wiki Means More: Hyperreading in Wikipedia’, HT’06 (22–25 August 2006), 25. ‘Revision History of William Shakespeare’, Wikipedia, last modified 8 December 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index .php?title=William_Shakespeare&action=history; ‘William Shakespeare’, Wikipedia, last modified 17 June 2005, http:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Shakespeare&diff =15356456&oldid=15356409. ‘Wikipedia: Recent Changes Patrol’, Wikipedia, last modified 7 December 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:Recent_changes_patrol. ‘Talk: William Shakespeare/Authorship Archive’, Wikipedia, last modified 2 May 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Talk:William_Shakespeare/Authorship_Archive. See Alan Galey and Ray Siemens, ‘Introduction: Reinventing Shakespeare in the Digital Humanities’, Shakespeare 4.3 (2008),

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217–23. They describe how, in 1881, in one of the first waxcylinder graphophone recordings, Alexander Graham Bell said: ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy, … I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph [sic].’ In this way the new medium and Shakespeare’s text ‘invest each other with authority’ (221). See also Galey, The Shakespearean Archive, 192–94. ‘Wikipedia: Featured Article Candidates/William Shakespeare’, Wikipedia, last modified 22 February 2008, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/William _Shakespeare. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Boston, 1964). ‘Main Page’, Wikipedia, last accessed 8 December 2011, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Galey and Siemens, 221. Ruediger Glott, Philipp Schmidt and Rishab Ghosh, ‘Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results’, United Nations University, last modified March 2010, http://www.ris.org/uploadi/ editor/1305050082Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010 -FINAL.pdf. Ruediger Glott and Rishab Ghosh, ‘Analysis of Wikipedia Survey Data’, United Nations University, last modified March 2010, http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Age _Gender_30March%202010-FINAL-3.pdf Shyong K. Lam, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen and John Riedl, ‘WP: Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance’, WikiSym’11 (3–5 October 2011), 4. Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire and Oded Nov, ‘Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing’, WikiSym’11 (3–5 October 2011), 3. Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw, ‘The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation’, PLoS ONE 8.6 (2013). The study analysed film articles on Wikipedia using data from a movie database containing ratings for each film made by over 150,000 users. Films receiving higher ratings from women were rated as ‘female’ movies and those receiving higher ratings by males, ‘male’ movies. Each movie’s Wikipedia article was then examined for depth of coverage. See Lam et al., 6.

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Claudia Wagner, Eduardo Graells-Garrido, David Garcia and Filippo Menczer, ‘Women Through the Glass Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia’, EPJ Data Science 5.5 (2016), 1–24. Related studies with similar findings include Bamman D. Smith, ‘Unsupervised Discovery of Biographical Structure from Text’, Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics 2 (2014), 363–76; E. Graells-Garrido, M. Lalmas and F. Menczer, ‘First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia’ in Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext. HT’15 (New York, 2014), 165–74; C. Wagner, D. Garcia, M. Jadidi and M. Strohmaier, ‘It’s a Man’s Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia’, Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2015; Y. Eom, P. Aragón, D. Laniado, A. Kaltenbrunner, S. Gigna and D. L. Shepelyansky, ‘Interactions of Culture and Top People of Wikipedia from Ranking 24 Language Editions’, PLoS ONE 10.3 (2014). Andreas Kolbe, ‘A Feminist’s Wikipedia Biography’, Wikipediocracy, 29 January 2013, http://wikipediocracy. com/2013/01/29/a-feminists-wikipedia-biography/(accessed 15 July 2016). Dan Murphy, ‘In UK, Rising Chorus of Outrage over Online Misogyny’, Christian Science Monitor, 1 August 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/ Backchannels/2013/0801/In-UK-rising-chorus-of-outrage-overonline-misogyny (accessed 15 July 2016). Amanda Filipacchi, ‘Sexism on Wikipedia Is Not the Work of “a Single Misguided Editor”’, The Atlantic, 30 April 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/ sexism-on-wikipedia-is-not-the-work-of-a-single-misguidededitor/275405/ (accessed 15 July 2016). Nathalie Collida and Andrea Kolbe outline other examples of deletion and subsuming of women’s biographies on Wikipedia, including those of Sandra Fluke and Beate Klarsfeld, in ‘Wikipedia’s Culture of Sexism – It’s Not Just for Novelists’, Wikipediocracy, 29 April 2013, http://wikipediocracy. com/2013/04/29/wikipedias-culture-of-sexism-its-not-just-fornovelists/ (accessed 15 July 2016). ‘William Shakespeare’, Wikimedia Tool Labs, https://tools. wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=William_Shakespeare& project=en.wikipedia.org (accessed 24 August 2016).

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The men are, as of this writing, Coleridge, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Giuseppe Verdi, Henry Fuseli, Sigmund Freud and Samuel Johnson. Note that of these eleven, all but three are either from the British Isles or the United States, and all are from the West. The ‘Influences’ section, then, gives Wikipedia readers no details of Shakespeare’s global influence, nor any hint that non-Westerners have had anything to do with him or his work. This reveals another known bias of the English Wikipedia: its Anglo-centrism. For more on this topic, see Ewa S. Callahan and Susan C. Herring, ‘Cultural Bias in Wikipedia Content on Famous Persons’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62.10 (2011), 1899– 1915; Elijah Meeks, ‘Mapping Wikipedia: Geolocated Articles as a Proxy of Culture and Attention’, Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources, last modified 15 November 2011; Brent Hecht and Darren Gergle, ‘Measuring Self-Focus Bias in Community-Maintained Knowledge Repositories’, C&T’09 (25–27 June 2009). Peter Holland, ‘Shakespeare, William (1564–1616)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison eds. (Oxford, 2004); online edn., Lawrence Goldman ed., January 2011. Hallett Smith, ‘Shakespeare, William’ in Encyclopedia Americana International Edition, Vol. 24 (Danbury, 1988), 662–63. John Russell Brown, Terence John Bew Spencer and David Bevington, ‘William Shakespeare’, Encyclopedia Britannica, last modified 17 May 2016, https://www.britannica. com/biography/William-Shakespeare (accessed 15 July 2016). See Gillespie, 347–64.

Chapter 5 1

2

Kate Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen (Cambridge, 2015), 96. Hamlet, dir. Laurence Olivier, perf. Laurence Olivier, Eileen Hurlie, Jean Simmons, Two Cities Films, 1948.

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Hamlet, dir. Michael Almereyda, perf. Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Bill Murray, Julia Stiles, Double A Films, 2000. Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/ (accessed 1 February 2017). Descriptions and assessments of emo culture are all over the internet; there are even student study guides to the topic. Anyone wanting an accurate and fun introduction to the emo life, however, can find a first-rate primer in the ‘Emo Dad’ animated cartoon series, readily available on YouTube. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Harold Jenkins ed. (London, 1982), 1.2.85. Further citations of the play refer to this edition and are indicated parenthetically within the text. ‘Emo Hamlet Is Emo’, DeviantArt, http://luvpunkie. deviantart.com/art/Emo-Hamlet-is-Emo-103973437 (accessed 20 January 2017). ‘click!’, woot!, http://derbyimages.woot. com/2835587/3fd2fddc-4633-441b-b7eb-c9a6362d7ef4.jpeg (accessed 20 January 2017). ‘Hamlet’, Pinterest, https://comicmole.files.wordpress. com/2009/10/hamletclothes.jpg?w=450 (accessed 20 January 2017). ‘Emo’, Twitter, https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_ images/719651311533236225/l17Oenin (accessed 20 January 2017). ‘Emo Song Lyrics’, YouTube, 25 July 2008, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ibsv1qrHGVE (accessed 15 December 2016). ‘Hamlet Is an Emo Teenager (MCR)’, YouTube, 7 August 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APRbFJ4ZkRM (accessed 20 January 2017). See Rachel Helene Swift, ‘Mr. Emo, Prince of Denmark: An Interview with Stick Figure Hamlet Cartoonist Dan Carroll’, Newcity Lit, n.d., http://lit.newcity.com/2012/06/22/mr-emoprince-of-denmark-an-interview-with-stick-figure-hamletcartoonist-dan-carroll/ (accessed 15 December 2016). Dan Carroll, ‘Stick Figure Hamlet’, http://www. stickfigurehamlet.com/ (accessed 20 January 2017). Ryan North, To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure (New York, 2016). North.

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22 23

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‘Emo Hamlet’, YouTube, 21 April 2012, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=-yGdUPjujy8 (accessed 14 October 2016). ‘Hamlet: The Emo Spectacular’, YouTube, 7 February 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzDL3eB3YRc (accessed 14 October 2017). ‘Emo Hamlet’, YouTube, 21 April 2012, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=-yGdUPjujy8 (accessed 14 October 2016). ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Emo’, YouTube, 12 February 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCtvtKnlFHU (accessed 5 January 2017). Limor Shifman, ‘An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme’, New Media & Society 14 (2012), 190, emphasis in original. According to Bernardo A. Huberman, the ‘law of surfing’ predicts that most users will not move beyond the first page of hits in a given search; ‘Social Attention in the Age of the Web’, in Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship, Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC, March 2009, http:// www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf (accessed 21 April 2016). ‘2B or Not 2B’, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/search/ top/?q=emo%20hamlet (accessed 1 February 2017). American Shakespeare Center, Facebook, https://www. facebook.com/search/top/?q=american%20shakespeare%20 center%20emo%20hamletamlet (accessed 1 February 2017). This was a search conducted on 9 October 2016; repeating the search on 1 February 2017, of course, produced an entirely different result, but one that was equally discontinuous. On Facebook, large amounts of content for each user – up to 1,500 posts – are collected weekly, sorted and displayed according to the algorithm’s estimate of a given item’s interest to the user; most people see no more than the top 100–150 postings; Will Oremus, ‘Who Controls Your Facebook Feed’, Slate, 3 January 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/ technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_ algorithm_works.html (accessed 20 January 2017). Numbers of ‘Likes’ and repostings also play a role; ‘How News Feed Works’, Facebook Help Center, https://www.facebook.com/ help/166738576721085?helpref=uf_permalink (accessed 20 January 2017).

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‘Emo Hamlet’s Vlog’, Facebook, 29 May 2011, https://www. facebook.com/qquintero/videos/vb.18801816/576927835019/? type=2&theater (accessed 9 October 2016). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, 2004), 18. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York, 1996). Joseph LeDoux, ‘Rethinking the Emotional Brain’ in The Emotional Brain Revisited (2014), 16 (emphasis added), http:// www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/pdf/rethinkingEM.pdf (accessed 9 October 2016). Actor-network-theory is not necessarily in conflict with the other dominant metaphor for internet relations, the meme, as both envision actants or memes as circulating automatically, endlessly and independent of human intention. But actor-network-theory places less emphasis on artefacts (e.g. the memes that replicate) than on the activity of creating connections, a ubiquitous ‘movement of re-association and reassembling’; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005), Kindle edn., loc. 7. Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 8 (2005), http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php, para. 5 (accessed 15 December 2016). Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth eds. (Durham, 2009), Kindle edn., loc. 57. For a more nuanced view of such connections, see Nancy K. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Cambridge, 2010), 11 and Chapter 3, passim. Tanya Lewis, ‘Facebook Emotions Are Contagious’, Scientific American, 21 July 2014, https://www.scientificamerican. com/article/facebook-emotions-are-contagious/ (accessed 15 December 2016). Shouse, para. 13. Adi Kuntsman, ‘Introduction: Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures’ in Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change, Athina Karatzogianni and Adi Kuntsman eds. (New York, 2012), 1, emphasis in original.

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45 46

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Anna Gibbs, ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication’ in The Affect Theory Reader, loc. 2569–70. Gibbs, loc. 2663–66. Gibbs, loc. 2668–69. See Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 109–10 and Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999), passim. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh, 2014), 9. Ahmed, 12. For an intelligent reading of the Player’s speech as a reflection on emotion within theatrical experience (rather than specifically social media), see Amy Cook, ‘For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25 (2011), 71–87. ‘One Direction Sings About Hamlet’, YouTube, 12 January 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TnS4vjReJU; ‘Hamlet Style – Gangnam Style Parody’ (accessed 2 January 2017), YouTube, 27 October 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xPbVxnT1EZM (accessed 2 January 2017); ‘Hamlet (Thrift Shop Parody)’, YouTube, 24 March 2013, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=OrT-iHx2gLo (accessed 2 January 2017). ‘Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball PARODY’, YouTube, 5 October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLtmauJLP-A (accessed 10 January 2017). Desmet, ‘Paying. Attention in Shakespeare Parody’, 227–38. ‘Wrecking Ball – Ophelia (Hamlet) Version’, YouTube, 14 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GQvj84SWh5g (accessed 9 October 2016). ‘Hamlet Wrecking Ball Parody’, YouTube, 16 December 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snOT715pLuk (accessed 9 October 2016). ‘Some Dead Body (That I Used to Know) – Hamlet Parody’, YouTube, 27 September 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tcgZnJo0_AQ (accessed 15 December 2016). ‘Gotye – Somebody That I Used to Know (feat. Kimbra) – Official Video’, YouTube, 5 July 2011, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY (accessed 15 July 2017). Christina Panfillo and Matt Schwader, ‘Hamlet & Ophelia Somebody That I Used to Know Parody’, YouTube, 27 August

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2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNLWBr4GGPM (accessed 10 January 2017). Seigworth and Gregg, loc. 63–64, emphasis in original. Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge, 2011), 45. ‘Hamlet as the “first and finest Emo”?’, YouTube, 28 November 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufmZNX9mTzk (accessed 15 December 2016).

Chapter 6 1 2

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Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, 1988), 57–69. Henry Norman Hudson, Preface, Plays of Shakespeare Selected and Prepared for Use in Schools, Clubs, Classes, and Families, 3 vols (Boston, 1870), iv, https://hathitrust.com (accessed 12 July 2016). The essay was republished as ‘Shakespeare as a Text-Book’ in English in Schools: A Series of Essays (Boston, 1881 and 1884). It was republished again in Essays on English Studies (Boston, 1906). Henry Norman Hudson, ‘How to Use Shakespeare in Schools’ in English in Schools: A Series of Essays (Boston, 1881), xi., https://books.google.com (accessed 12 July 2016). This essay was likewise republished in the 1906 Essays on English Studies (see previous note). Helen O’Lemert, ‘Classical Plays for High Schools’, English Journal 2.6 (1913), 366–88. Isabel Graves, ‘A Plan for Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, English Journal 4.6 (1915), 371. Jessie Thompson, ‘The Correlation of Music with Literature’, English Journal 10.7 (1921), 376. Laura McGregor, ‘A Lesson Series: The Correlation of Music and Literature’, English Journal 13.7 (1924), 490. Max Herzberg, ‘The Twin Arts’, English Journal 13.9 (1924), 624. Emily Carlisle, ‘News and Notes: Meeting of the Utah Educational Association’, English Journal 13.2 (1924), 144. Helen Francis. ‘The Wherewith We Fly’, English Journal 15.6 (1926), 461.

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Frances Hicks, ‘Relational Lessons in Literature’, English Journal 23.7 (1934), 589–91. Juanita Peck, ‘The English Laboratory’, English Journal 23.9 (1934), 751–64. Louise Mortenson, ‘Music and the English Classes’, English Journal 21.10 (1932), 837. Ruth Messenger, ‘Assimilative Material’, English Journal 23.1 (1934), 61. Joy Nevins, ‘Hamlet in 1937’, English Journal 26.8 (1937), 650. Henry Simon, The Reading of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges: An Historical Survey (New York, 1932), 137. Henry Simon, ‘Why Shakespeare’, English Journal 23.5 (1934), 368. Anderegg, 47–48. Welles and Hill, 467. Welles and Hill, 468. Walter Ginsberg, ‘How Helpful Are Shakespeare Recordings?’ English Journal 29.4 (1940), 296. Cited in Anderegg, 54, 175. Ginsberg, 300. P. S. Nickerson, ‘A Study of the Value of Recordings in the Teaching of Shakespeare’ in Radio and English Teaching, M. J. Herzberg ed. (New York, 1941). William Ladd, ‘Macbeth – As a Reading Production’, English Journal 33.7 (1944), 375. Dora Palmer, ‘A Good Deed in a Naughty World’, English Journal 35.7 (1946), 371. Cecilia Gray, ‘Listening to Julius Caesar’, English Journal 36.3 (1947), 152. Carl Wonnberger, Review, ‘The Mercury Macbeth’, English Journal 30.10 (1941), 861. Dennis Hannan, ‘The Olivier Hamlet’, English Journal 38.4 (1949), 242. Walter Ginsberg, ‘Sound Recordings in the High-School English Class’, English Journal 29.3 (1940), 230. Mary Wells, ‘A Musical Term Paper’, English Journal 38.9 (1949), 526. Charles Morris, ‘How Shall I Use That New Recording Machine?’ English Leaflet 49.2 (1949), 23.

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Morris, 23. Morris, 26. On new media Shakespeares and pedagogy, see Erin Sullivan, ‘Internal and External Shakespeare: Constructing the TwentyFirst Century Classroom’ in Carson and Kirwan, loc. 1443– 1698; O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube, 189–277. Other actors who thrive in that Wellesian borderland between popular culture and Shakespearean film and media include Al Pacino for his work in The Merchant of Venice (2004) and Looking for Richard (2008), Kevin Spacey for his Now: In the Wings on a World Stage (2014) and Benedict Cumberbatch for his performance as Richard III in The Hollow Crown series (2016). See Jennifer Ailles, ‘“Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone and in the Cloud’ in Outerspeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia and the Limits of Adaptation, Daniel Fischlin ed. (Toronto, 2014), 75–112; Christy Desmet, ‘Shakespeare and the Digitized Word’, CEA Critic 78.2 (2016), 213–28; and Catherine Allen, ‘Apps: A New Medium for NonFiction Innovation’, Insights 28.2 (2015), http://insights.uksg. org/articles/10.1629/uksg.241/ (accessed 11 February 2017). Heuristic Media, The Tempest, http://www.heuristicmedia.tv/ Heuristic-Shakespeare.php (accessed 11 February 2017). ‘Re: Shakespeare’, http://www.samsung.com/uk/discover/news/ bringing-shakespeare-to-life-through-technology/ (accessed 11 February 2017). On the positioning of Akala vis-à-vis Tennant as the Shakespearean actor, see Stephen O’Neill, ‘“It’s William Back from the Dead”: Commemoration, Representation, and Race in Akala’s Hip-Hop Shakespeare’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 16.2 (2016), 246–56. See Jeffrey Kahan, ‘CSI 1595: The Case of the Stiletto Kid’, CEA Critic 78.2 (2016), 268–76.

Chapter 7 1

Jennifer Hulbert, ‘“Adolescence, Thy Name Is Ophelia!”: The Ophelia-ization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl’ in

NOTES

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9

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Shakespeare and Youth Culture, Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Robert L. York eds. (New York, 2006), 202. Hulbert, 202. Hulbert, 219. Jennifer Milone and Glen O. Gabbard, ‘Shedding Light on Women’s Response to Twilight’, Academic Psychiatry 35 (2011), 412–13, analyse Bella’s popularity in the Twilight series, offering analogous reasons for Juliet’s continuing importance and influence; see also Steven C. Schlozman, ‘Vampires and Those Who Slay Them: Using the Television Program Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Adolescent Therapy and Psychodynamic Education’, Academic Psychiatry 24 (2000), 51–52. Both frame their discussions such that individuals of any gender, gender identity or sexual orientation might identify with the female protagonists’ troubles. ‘Community Guidelines’, Tumblr, http://tumblr.com (accessed 25 June 2016). Brand identity is crucial to the platform. See also ‘Inside Tumblr’, Creative Review (2016), 57–62, http://web.b.ebscohost.com (accessed 20 May 2016); ‘Terms of Service’, Tumblr (accessed 25 May 2016), http:// tumblr.com; and Carrie Cummings, ‘Tumblr’, Adweek, 15 February 2015, 34, http://web.b.ebscohost.com (accessed 24 May 2016). On the political implications of the term ‘platform’ as well as of platform branding, see Gillespie, ‘Politics’, 352. ‘Inside Tumblr’, 58. Cummings, ‘Tumblr’, 34. Cummings, ‘Tumblr’, 26. For a more technical description of how Tumblr works, see Yi Chang, Lei Tang, Yoshiyuki Inagaki and Yan Liu, ‘What Is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison’, SIGKDD Explorations 16 (2014), 22–28, SIGKDD, http://www.kdd.org/explorations (accessed 6 August 2015). ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Community Guidelines’. Gillespie, ‘Politics’, calls the intersection between a platform’s brand and the conditions and restrictions the platform places on its users ‘edges’ (358–59). Aimee Morrison, ‘Facebook and Coaxed Affordances’ in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, Anna Poletti and Julie Rak eds. (Madison 2014), 117. Gillespie,

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

27

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‘Politics’, addresses the affordances of the term ‘platform’ itself: it ‘sanction[s] and sanctify[ies] a particular state of things, an established order’ (349). Morrison, 117. Morrison, 117–18. All results have ‘juliet’ or ‘Juliet’ in their hashtags, titles or URLs. The impact of these proximate relationships on how the user ‘reads’ the page, the results and the subject of the results merits further consideration. ‘Juliet’s Closet’, Tumblr, http://tumblr.com (accessed 24 May 2016) evaporated between 6 pm EST on 24 May 2016 and 10.30 am on 25 May 2016. Morrison, 113. Bolter and Grusin, 45. Bolter and Grusin, 45–46. Bolter and Grusin, 46. Bolter and Grusin, 59; 60. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, 2006), 290. Henry Jenkins, Ravi Puroshotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton and Alice J. Robison, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA, 2009), xi. See Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer, ‘Juliet, I Prosume? or Shakespeare and the Social Network’, Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10 (2015), n. pag., http://borrowers.uga.edu (accessed 20 May 2016). ‘incorrect shakespeare quotes’, Tumblr, http:// incorrectshakespeare.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘This world is no prison’, Tumblr, http://juliet.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘Ballerina Project’, Tumblr, http://ballerinaproject.tumblr.com (accessed 5 November 2016). See also ‘solisseblog’, Tumblr, http://soliesseblog.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016) and ‘loving him was RED’, Tumblr, http://romeoandju-liet.tumblr. com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘loving him was RED’, Tumblr, http://romeoandju-liet.tumblr. com (accessed 25 May 2016).

NOTES

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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‘Romeo and Juliet’, Tumblr, http://thewritingbard.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘Dream’, Tumblr, http://do-you-think-will-be-in-love.tumblr. com (accessed 15 October 2016). ‘mijuliet’, Tumblr, http://leemijoos.co.vu (accessed 25 May 2016). See also ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Tumblr, http://graviteu. tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘sad girl’, Tumblr, http://hell-can-have-me.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016); Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, René Weis ed. (London, 2012), 1.1.163–66. This post may be a relic, as may the blog itself. In February 2015 the link was dead. In June 2016, the URL was attached to another blog and the source, the blog ‘sad girl’, does not appear to exist. A new ‘sad girl’ blog has replaced it. ‘Dream’, Tumblr, http://do-you-think-will-be-in-love.tumblr. com (accessed 15 October 2016). ‘I Am Linux User’, Tumblr, http://iamlinuxuser.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016) echoes this sentiment by privileging a good Wi-Fi connection over Romeo and Juliet’s romance. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York, 2013), 18. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. ‘sakorbsims’, Tumblr, http://sakorbsims.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge, 2007), 116. See also ‘insert witty title here’, Tumblr, http://gimmesims. tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016) that features a Juliet sim inspired by ‘the scene were [sic] Belle reads Romeo and Juliet to the Beast in the extended edition’ of the Disney animated film. Megan B. Abrahamson, ‘J. R. R. Tolkien, Fanfiction, and “The Freedom of the Reader”’, Mythlore 32 (2013), 59–60, http:// go.galegroup.com.olicat.olivetcollege.edu/ (accessed 26 May 2016). ‘headcanon’, Wiktionary, http://www.wiktionary.com (accessed 26 May 2016). A fuzzy distinction not helped by the fact that many Tumblrs use the terms inconsistently and interchangeably.

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57 58 59 60 61

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‘the bard writes’, Tumblr, http://www.wiktionary.com (accessed 26 May 2016). ‘the bard writes’, Tumblr, http://thewritingbard.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). Cartelli and Rowe, 112. Cartelli and Rowe, 113. See Sulagna Misra, ‘The Subversive and Cathartic Act of “Fancasting” Movies’, Wired, http://www.wired.com (accessed 8 June 2016) and ‘Fan Casting’, Fanlore, http://fanlore.org/ wiki/Fan_Casting (accessed 7 June 2016). ‘well, what was yours?’, Tumblr, http://thatdreamersoftenlie. tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23–24. ‘incorrect shakespeare quotes’, Tumblr, http:// incorrectshakespeare.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 45. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. Kee Lundqvist, ‘Stories of Significance: The Process and Practices of Sense-Making in the Sherlock Fan Community’, DiVA Portal 19, https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/ diva2:821716/FULLTEXT01.pdf (accessed 16 October 2016); see also Neva Chonin, ‘If You’re an Obsessed Harry Potter Fan, Voldemort Isn’t the Problem. It’s Hermione Versus Ginny’, SFGate, http://sfgate.com (accessed 16 October 2016). P.J. Falzone, ‘The Final Frontier Is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction’, Western Folklore 64 (2005), 244. Falzone, 249. ‘Juliet’s Closet’, Tumblr, http://juliet’scloset.tumblr.com (accessed 24 June 2016). ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Tumblr, http://graviteu.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘well, what was yours?’, Tumblr, http://thatdreamersoftenlie. tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016). On representations of dommes in popular culture, see Jenny Barrett, ‘“You’ve Made Mistress Very, Very Angry”: Displeasure and Pleasure in Media Representations of BDSM’, Participations 4 (2007), n. pag., http://www.participations.org/Volume%204/ Issue%201/4_01_barrett.htm (accessed 14 June 2016).

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Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, René Weis ed. (London, 2012), 2.2.133; 4.1.55. Weis adds a scene break at Romeo’s ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound’ (2.2.1): Juliet never appears in 2.4. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. See Matthew G. Birnbaum, ‘The Fronts Students Use: Facebook and the Standardization of Self-Presentations’, Journal of College Student Development 54 (2013), 157; Sarah Barber and Hayley Esther, ‘Supplementing Shakespeare: Why Young Adult Novelizations Belong in the Classroom’, The ALAN Review (2011), 2, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/ v38n3/barber.html (accessed 7 June 2016); Ariane M. Balizet, ‘Shakespeare, Television, and Girl Culture’, Borrowers and Lenders 9 (2014), passim, http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1354/ show (accessed 30 May 2015); danah boyd, ‘Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle’ in The Social Media Reader, Michael Mandiberg ed. (New York, 2012), 75–76; dana boyd, ‘Am I a Blogger?’, Biography 38 (2015), 305; Hala Guta and Magdalena Karolak, ‘Veiling and Blogging: Social Media as Sites of Identity Negotiation and Expression Among Saudi Women’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 16 (2015), 118–19; Mizuko Ito et al., Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Cambridge, 2010), 65–75; Sonia Livingstone, ‘Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers’ Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression’ in Self-Mediation: New Media, Citizenship and Civil Selves, Lillie Chouliaraki ed. (Abingdon, 2012), 44–48; and David R. Zemmels, ‘Youth and New Media: Studying Identity and Meaning in an Evolving Media Environment’, Communications Research Trends 31 (2012), 5–7; 17. Serena Hillman, Jason Procyk and Carman Neustaedter, ‘“alksjdf;Lksfd”: Tumblr and the Fandom User Experience’, Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, ACM, 2014, 775–84. On the ways social media blur the line between professional and amateur, see Tarleton Gillespie, ‘Designed to “Effectively Frustrate”: Copyright, Technology, and the Agency of Users’, New Media & Society 8 (2006), 660; see also Stephen O’Neill, ‘Shakespeare and Social Media’, Literature Compass 12 (2015), 278.

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Guta and Karolak, 118. Guta and Karolak, 118. Guta and Karolak, 118–19. Gillespie, ‘Designed to “Effectively Frustrate”’, 661; 664; see also Anja Bechman and Stine Lomborg, ‘Mapping Actor Roles in Social Media: Different Perspectives on Value Creation in Theories of User Participation’, New Media & Society 15 (2012), 771. Calbi, 153. ‘This world is no prison’, Tumblr, http://tumblr.juliet.com (accessed 25 May 2016). ‘So Anyway, Hello’, Tumblr, http://soimdean.tumblr.com (accessed 25 May 2016).

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Douglas Lanier, ‘“Art Thou Base, Common and Popular?”: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet’ in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehman eds. (Madison, NJ, 2002), 149–71; Lynne Bradley, Adapting ‘King Lear’ for the Stage (London, 2016). ‘Generation of Vipers’, Lewis, ITV, 23 May 2012, television broadcast; Tim Martin, ‘Endeavour, Series Two, ITV, review’, Telegraph, 30 March 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ tvandradio/tv-and-radioreviews/10730453/ (accessed 17 December 2014). Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, R. A. Foakes ed. (London, 1987), 10. Foakes, ed. Troilus and Cressida, 3.1.126. Further citations of the play refer to this edition and are indicated parenthetically within the text. Sarah Olive, ‘Fabricated Evidence: Exploring Authenticity in a Murder Mystery’s Appropriation of Early Modern Drama’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.1 (2014), 83–96. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1997); and Marty Roth, Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction (Georgia, 1995), 9–12.

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Susan Baker, ‘Comic Material: “Shakespeare” in the Classic Detective Story’ in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays, Frances Teague ed. (Cranbury, NJ, 1994), 164–80. Such a project is also ongoing at the RSC under Artistic Director Gregory Doran: witness 2014’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, part of Doran’s aim to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays during his premiership. See Lewis (TV series), ratings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Lewis_(TV_series)#Ratings (accessed 4 May 2016). Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford, 2002), 54. Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder (London, 1984), 44; Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Baltimore, 1991), 8. These shows are examples of later-twentieth-century detective outputs emulating Golden Age style. See Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (London, 1992). For a catalogue of further features, see Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York, 1976). Susan Baker, ‘Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story’, SQ 46.4 (1995), 424–48; Louise Harrington, ‘P.D. James’ in A Companion to Crime Fiction, Charles Rzpeka and Lee Horsley eds. (Chichester, 2010), 495–502; Julie Kim, ed. Class and Culture in Crime Fiction: Essays on Works in English Since the 1970s (Jefferson, 2014). Emma Smith, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Approaching Shakespeare, https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/feed/ id399194760 (accessed 4 May 2016). Roth, 10; 17. Patrick Smith, ‘Endeavour, ITV, review’, Telegraph, 14 April 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-andradioreviews/9991087/Endeavour-ITV-review.html (accessed 17 February 2014). Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (New York, 1998), 106–7. Annalisa Castaldo, ‘Fictions of Shakespeare and Literary Culture’ in Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia

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of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, Richard Burt ed. (Westport CT, 2007), 408–12. Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare, Glo-cali-zation, Race’ in Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD, Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose eds. (New York, 2003), 14–36; Susan Greenhalgh, ‘“True to You in My Fashion”: Shakespeare on British Broadcast Television’ in Shakespeares After Shakespeare, 651–73; Graham Holderness, Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (Hertfordshire, 2002). Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London, 2006), 97. Desmet, ‘Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody’; O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube. Something Emma Smith has argued that Shakespeare fails to do in Much Ado About Nothing, where the vindicated Hero nonetheless asserts that she has ‘learnt her lesson’ from an act she did not commit, unchecked by other characters, even her constant ally Beatrice. An episode trailer from Masterpiece is available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPKsYgMx9Dc (accessed 12 December 2014). In this way she resembles the professional women of P. D. James’s detective fiction, see Harrington, 499. Castaldo, 411. See Sarah Olive, ‘Representations of Shakespeare’s Humanity and Iconicity: Incidental Appropriations in Four British Television Broadcasts’, Borrowers and Lenders 8.1 (2014), n. pag., http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/700/show. Mandel, 25. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan eds. (London, 2011), 3.1.37. I name just a few very evident references but on the literary origins of character names and momentary shots of book spines, see Leslie Gilbert Elman, ‘Endeavour: “Home”’, Criminal Element, http://www.criminalelement.com/ blogs/2013/07/endeavour-home-masterpiece-mystery-morseshaun-evans-roger-allam-leslie-gilbert-elman (accessed 15 December 2014). Olive, ‘Fabricated Evidence’, 83–96.

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William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Kenneth Palmer ed. (London, 1982), 9. Other episodes have alluded to Sir Francis Bacon, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie (whom Dexter cited in interviews as influencing his own detective writing), Euripides, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, Percy Bysse Shelley, Sophocles and William Wordsworth. Nic Ransome, ‘From ITV to SVU’, ScriptWriter 13 (2003), 11–13. For a comprehensive filmography of Harbison’s works, see Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0361927/ (accessed 12 December 2014). Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (London, 2010), 16. Harbinson has adapted classic novels and thrillers alike: Day of the Triffids, Frenchman’s Creek, Hornblower, Wire in the Blood and Place of Execution. He commonly engages in allusive wordplay, with classically inspired episode titles such as ‘Deus Ex Machina’, ‘In extremis’, ‘Trojan horse’, ‘Proteus’, ‘Cura Te Ipsum’, ‘Mors Praematura’, ‘Lethe’, ‘Aletheia’, ‘Pandora’ and the Homeric ‘Be still my heart’. Episode titles alluding to other literature include ‘Nautilus’ (the name of the ship in Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), ‘Scheherazade’ (the heroine of the Arabian Nights tales), ‘Such Sweet Sorrow’ (from Romeo and Juliet), Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’, Wendell Berry’s poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ and Graves’s autobiography ‘Goodbye to All That’. In interviews, he has described his ‘odd reading’ into ‘odd areas of research … to try and find the germ of the next idea’ for his storylines, from biographies such as Darwin’s Eye to ‘gothic gore’ and streamof-consciousness writing, with which he has experimented in, for example, Millennium’s ‘Sound of Snow’ episode. See Mark Hayden, ‘TIWWA Exclusive Interview with Patrick Harbinson’ in This Is Who We Are, http://www.millenniumthisiswhoweare. net/tiwwa/topic/24127-tiwwa-exclusive-interview-with-patrickharbinson/ (accessed 16 December 2014). Roth, 10. Roth, xi. Mandel, 16. Baker, ‘Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story’, 424–48.

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

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Paul Taylor quoted in Carol Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge, 2001), 113. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Kenneth Muir ed. (Oxford, 1982), 39. Muir, 33. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, eds. RSC Complete Works (New York, 2008), 1458. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Anthony Dawson ed. (Cambridge, 2003), 45. Frank Kermode, ‘Opinion in Troilus and Cressida’ in Teaching the Text, Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson eds. (London, 1983), 164–79. Something that Emma Smith has pointed out (typically for the period) does not happen in another play that I have invoked in thinking about this episode, Much Ado, where none of the male characters reflect on the gender and sexual politics of shaming allegedly promiscuous women. Dawson, 1. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), 185. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, John Dover Wilson ed. (Cambridge, 1957), 114. Muir, 40. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare on Love and Lust (New York, 2000), 70. Charney, 63–64. Dawson, Troilus, 1. Bate and Rasmussen, 1456. Rutter, 114. Charney, 70. Foakes, 15. John Wilders, The BBC TV Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (BBC, 1981), 14 Unlike the fictional lecturers Baker describes, Miranda avoids representing her interpretation as Shakespeare’s authorial intention – arguably another testament to Harbinson’s craft. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, David Bevington ed. (London, 1998), 46. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London, 1965), 65.

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William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Jonathan Crewe ed. (London, 2000), xxxvi. Foakes, 22. Dawson, 16. Elizabeth Freund, ‘“Ariachne’s broken woof”: The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds. (London, 1985), 19–36. Crewe, xxxvi. Ransome, 12. Ransome, 12. Mandel, 113. Mandel, 113. Sally Munt, Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London, 2003), 4. Mandel, 113. Glenwood Irons, ed. Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (Toronto, 1995), 66–67. Mandel, 114; Gill Plain, ‘Passing/Out: The Paradoxical Possibilities of Detective Delafield’, Women: A Cultural Review 9.3 (1998), 278–91. Leyton Elliott, Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder (New York, 1986), 288–89; Black, 117; Mandel, 68. For example, the forensic officer and Lewis’s romantic partner Laura Hobson’s desire for the eponymous detective to lessen his long anti-social working hours, potentially threatening his crime-solving capacity, has been a frequent feature in later series of Lewis. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London, 1980), 85–101. Munt, 5. Patricia C. Brückmann, Review of Glenwood Irons, ed. Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, University of Toronto Quarterly 67.1 (1997), 160–62. Significantly, Mrs Lewis was killed off for the Lewis pilot, thus enabling its eponymous detective to fulfil the generic loner/‘perfect lover’ detective role for the first few seasons. It did so with the help of Kristoffer Nyholm, director of The Killing; see Martin, ‘Endeavour’. Martin, ‘Endeavour’.

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To this list might be added the myriad teen films produced between 1995 and 2005 that feature a classroom scene involving Shakespeare, what would become something of a cliché in the genre. Other youth-market Shakespeare films produced during the period might be also included: though they are not set in high school, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) and Billy Morrissette’s Scotland PA (2001) feature twentysomething protagonists whose life crises are designed to appeal to indie film audiences. Hamlet (2000) is anomalous among this group because it retains Shakespeare’s language. I am omitting from this list several animated TV series and films made during the period under discussion, most of them Japanese anime (though Gnomeo and Juliet [dir. Kelly Asbury, 2011] is a notable exception). Though these works are related to youth-market Shakespeare, they constitute a genre sufficiently distinct to warrant separate critical consideration. Those TV series with Shakespearean resonances that did have staying power tended to focus on adult professional life, often viewed through a jaundiced lens: Slings and Arrows (2003–6), Breaking Bad (2008–13, Macbeth), Sons of Anarchy (2008–14, Hamlet), House of Cards (2013–present, Richard III and Macbeth) and Empire (2015–present, King Lear). Other examples of Shakespeare-resonant TV series which are not directed to a youth market include Lost (2004–10, The Tempest), My Bare Lady (2006, Romeo and Juliet), Game of Thrones (2011–present, Henry VI plays), The Royals (2015–6, Hamlet) and Upstart Crow (2016, renewed for a second season in 2017). As of this date, Will (2017), a new TV series based upon Shakespeare’s life as a rebellious youth in Renaissance London, has not appeared, though it comes with the imprimatur of much-lauded writer-director Shonda Rhimes. Also notable in this discussion is Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2012). Though the film’s protagonists are considerably older than teens and Whedon retains Shakespeare’s language, much of the film’s appeal is linked to Whedon’s status as an auteur director-writer for millennials who grew up with his teen series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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(1996–2003) and Angel (1999–2004), and his follow-up series Firefly (2002–3). Whedon’s casting of actors from those series in principal roles added considerably to the resonances of the film for those viewers, and so his Much Ado reads for his fan audience as a kind of Shakespearean sequel to those series. Whedon’s film was largely a critical success, though it did only moderate business at the box office. Barbara Hodgdon, ‘(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.3 (2010), 317. For a discussion of parody and YouTube Shakespeare, see Desmet, ‘Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody’ 227–38. On the ideological implications of the high school Shakespeare project on YouTube, see Ayanna Thompson, ‘Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube’, SQ 61.3 (2010), 337–56. See the list in the appendix. On the blog as a distinctive media form, see Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, 2010), and Jill Walker Rettburg, Blogging (Cambridge, 2014). See Sarah Hatchuel, Rêves et Séries Américaines, La Fabrique d’autres Mondes (Paris, 2016). For a more general discussion of the phenomenon of serialization, see Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, eds. Serialization in Popular Culture (New York, 2014). To be sure, Shakespeare web series are not the first to use multiple social media channels to adapt Shakespeare’s narratives. In Spectral Shakespeares, 137–62, Maurizio Calbi cites Such Tweet Sorrow (2010) as a precedent; Daniel Fischlin identifies Hamlet Live (2012) as a precedent in ‘OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation’ in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, 3–50. These examples are also cogently discussed by Stephen O’Neill in ‘Shakespeare and Social Media’, 274–85. For a full version of this argument, see Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, NC, 2010), and Jim Collins, ‘The Use Values of Narrativity in Digital Cultures’, New Literary History 44.4 (2013), 639–60.

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Rettburg, 125. Constance Penley, ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’ in Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg et al. eds. (New York, 1991), 479–500. See also Clinton D. Lanier and Aubrey R. Flower III, ‘Digital Fandom: Mediation, Remediation and Demediation of Fan Practices’ in The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption, Russell Belk and Rosa Llamas eds. (New York, 2013), 284–95. O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube, 86–95. In ‘Web-series Between User-Generated Aesthetics and SelfReflexive Narration: On the Diversification of Audiovisual Narration on the Internet’, Beyond Classical Narration (2014), 137–60, Markus Kuhn remarks on the growing selfconsciousness of the vlog format, though he makes no mention of literary web series. Richard Burt, ‘Te(e)n Things I Hate About Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or Not-so-Fast-Times at Shakespeare High’ in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks eds. (Madison, NH, 2002), 205–32. For another perspective on this shift in new media Shakespeare, see Kate Rumbold, ‘From “Access” to “Creativity”: Shakespeare Institutions, New Media, and the Language of Cultural Value’, SQ 63.1 (2010), 313–36.

Chapter 10 1 2 3 4 5 6

For a study of Such Tweet Sorrow, see Calbi, 137–63. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA, 2001). Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstoke, 2007), 47. Twitter, https://about.twitter.com/company (accessed 4 August 2016). OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/23507?rskey=IOWoj5& result=1isAdvanced=false#eid (accessed 4 August 2016). Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr and Marry Ellen Kassotakis, Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance (San Francisco, 2010), 4.

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Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Cambridge, 2013), 31. Gilad Lotan et al., ‘The Arab Spring! The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions’, International Journal of Communication 5(2011), 1375–1405. Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London, 2014). Daya Thussu, ‘Why Internationalize Media Studies and How?’ in Internationalizing Media Studies, Daya Thussu ed. (Abingdon, 2009), 24. Katherine Rowe, ‘From the Editor: Gentle Numbers’, SQ 61.3 (2010), iii. Social media use at conferences has become particularly popular, but there is an acknowledgement that conventions around citation, consent and tone are still forming. To that end, the Shakespeare Association of America produced a social media protocol in 2016, in order to ensure accurate quotation and attribution as well as generate a professional yet convivial atmosphere online, SAA, http://www.shakespeareassociation. org/about/saa-policies/social-media-guidelines/ (accessed 11 August 2016). See Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O’Neill, eds. ‘Shakespeare and Social Media’, Borrowers and Lenders 10.1 (2016); Carson and Kirwan; O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube. Rumbold, ‘From “Access” to “Creativity”’, 333. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation’ in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, 1. Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, ‘A “United” Kingdom: The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 35.1 (2013), 20. Burnett, 3. @HollowCrownFans (accessed 20 May 16), https://twitter.com/ HollowCrownFans/with_replies. Geoffrey Way, ‘Romeo and Juliet, Social Media and Performance’, Journal of Narrative Theory 41.3 (2011), 402. See Jenkins, Textual Poachers. Jenkins, Textual Poachers. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3. Jenkins’s most recent work has focused on what he terms spreadable media and the

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creation of value in an environment of participation. See Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York, 2013). William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford, 2004), 102. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, eds. Quality Popular Television (London, 2011), 2. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 5. @GuyLucas (accessed 20 May 2016), https://twitter.com/ GuyLucas0/status731755190131556352. John Plunkett, ‘BBC white paper: key points at a glance’, Guardian, 12 May 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/ media/2016/may/12/bbc-white-paper-key-points-john -whittingdale (accessed 20 May 2016). @SherlocksiPod, https://twitter.com/HollowCrownFans/ status/731104802223083528 (accessed 20 May 2016). John Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York, 2010). @HollowCrownFans, https://twitter.com/search?f=images& vertical=default&q=%23shakespearesunday&src=typd (accessed 19 May 2016). @KTraxton, https://twitter.com/KTraxton/ status/729777285226704897 (accessed 19 May 2016). ‘Shakespeare Lives’ is a programme of events that celebrates Shakespeare, his works and legacy on the 400th anniversary of his death, http://www.shakespearelives.org/about (accessed 28 June16). @Bassett12Carol, https://twitter.com/Bassett12Carol/ status/729744542455476224 (accessed 19 May 2016). Matt Hills, ‘Mainstream Cult’ in The Cult TV Book, Stacey Abbot ed. (New York, 2010), 70. @HollowCrownFans, https://twitter.com/HollowCrownFans/ status/746728097169477632 (accessed 11 August 2016). @RosieBlackadder, https://twitter.com/RosieBlackadder/ status/746985054333702144 (accessed 11 August 2016). @ashleydye3, https://twitter.com/ashleydye3/ status/747016495918616576 (accessed 11 August 2016). Tanya R. Cochran, ‘From Angel to Much Ado: Cross-Textual Catharsis, Kinesthetic Empathy and Whedonverse’ in Popular

NOTES

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Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, Lincoln Geraghty ed. (New York, 2015), 153–54. Ramona Wray, ‘The Network King: Re-creating Henry VIII for a Global Television Audience’ in Filming and Performing Renaissance History, Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete eds. (New York, 2011), 19. Since April 2015, another Twitter account, @BardOfHeroes – ‘The Bard’s Avengers’ – has generated crossover tweets between Shakespeare and Marvel’s Avengers universe, https://twitter. com/bardofheroes (accessed 11 April 2017). @Kirsten_STR, https://twitter.com/Kirsten_STR/ status/729300533530529792 (accessed 20 May 2016). Shira Levine, ‘Kenneth Branagh on Thor’s Physique and Shakespearean Parallels’, Vulture, 29 April 2011, http://www. vulture.com/2011/04/kenneth _branagh.html# (accessed 20 May 2016). Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 2, James C. Bulman ed. (London, 2016), 4.3.313. O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube, 13. Melissa Croteau, ‘Introduction: Beginning at the Ends’ in Apocalyptic Shakespeares: Essays on Visions of Chaos and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations, Melissa Croteau and Carolyn Jess-Cooke eds. (London, 2009), 19. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London, 2002), 22. @TopazDragonfly, https://twitter.com/search?f=images& vertical=default&q=%23shakespearesunday%20%20 henry%20v&src=typd (accessed 20 May 2016); Shakespeare, King Henry V, T. W Craik ed. (London, 1995), 4.3.58. Further citations of the play refer to this edition and are indicated parenthetically within the text. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, ‘Introduction: Presenting Presentism’ in Presentist Shakespeares, Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes eds. (London, 2007), 5. @anne_obrien, https://twitter.com/anne_obrien/ status/731768537358958592; @lissybeth91 https://twitter.com/ lissybeth91/status/731740991556751360 (accessed 20 May 2016). @ItsYourDadAherr, https://twitter.com/ search?q=%23shakespearesunday%20brexit&src=typd (accessed 20 May 2016); Shakespeare, Richard II, Charles R. Forker ed. (London, 2002), 2.1.50.

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Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3. Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London, 1992), 3. Douglas Lanier, ‘Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital’, SSt 28 (2010), 106. Sanjay Sharma, ‘Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion’, New Formations 78 (2013), 46. Sharma, 64. Jeff Connor-Linton, ‘Competing Communicative Styles and Crosstalk: A Multi-Feature Analysis’, Language in Society 28.1 (1999), 25–56. Jack Somers, ‘General Election Exit Poll Results Stun Just About Everyone on Twitter’, Huffington Post, 8 May 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/07/generalelection-exit-poll-twitter_n_7236578.html (accessed 20 May 2016). @HollowCrownFans, http://www.hollowcrownfans.com/ shakespearesunday/shakespearesunday-faq/ (accessed 20 May 2016). Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, eds. Shakespeare the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD (London, 2003), 8.

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2 3

4

John Gaffney and Diana Holmes, ‘Introduction’ in Stardom in Postwar France, John Gaffney and Diana Holmes eds. (New York, 2007), 1. Stanley Wells, Great Shakespeare Actors: From Burbage to Branagh (Oxford, 2015), 2. This will be done partly through a discussion of memes. A term first used by Richard Dawkins in reference to genetics, the ‘internet meme’ has since gained distinction and is commonly regarded as an overarching term for a successfully transmitted or shared unit of culture. Practically speaking, examples of online memes include viral videos, image macros (an image superimposed with text for humorous effect), hashtags and intentional misspellings. Gaffney and Holmes, 1.

NOTES

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7 8

9

10 11

12 13

14 15

16

301

The Graham Norton Show, Season 19, Episode 7, BBC 1. ‘Tom Hiddleston Industrial Scripts Interview’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTnJIW-IuO8 (accessed 1 November 2014). Martin Shingler, Star Studies: A Critical Guide (London, 2012), 121. Possession of Greek and Latin A Levels has only recently been removed as a prerequisite for studying Classics at Pembroke College; A Levels which are more commonly offered at independent schools. Jan Moir, ‘He can dance, he dresses to impress and he loves his mum’, Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article3520027/16-reasons-Tom-Hiddleston-truly-perfect-husbandJAN-MOIR-says-form-queue-ladies.html/ (accessed 1 June 2016); Xan Brooks, ‘Tom Hiddleston: “I never wanted to be the go-to guy for tails and waistcoats”’, Guardian, 25 November 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/25/tomhiddleston-deep-blue-sea (accessed 30 November 2011). John Naughton, ‘Major Tom’, [British] GQ, 1 November 2013, n.p. James Mottram, ‘Soldier of fortune: Tom Hiddleston is set to become 2012’s hottest new star’, Independent, 12 January 2012, x http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/soldierof-fortune-tom-hiddleston-is-set-to-become-2012s-hottest-newstar-6284844.html (accessed 21 January 2014). Giles Hattersly, ‘Kneel, for I shall be lord of the multiplex’, The Sunday Times, 2 November 2013, 5. Ben Beaumont-Thomas, ‘Tom Hiddleston’s Thor PR antics are a lesson in mischief as marketing’, Guardian, 20 November 2013, n. pag., http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/ nov/20/thor-tom-hiddleston-publicity-social-media (accessed 21 January 2014). Beaumont-Thomas, n. pag. Hiddleston was initially only contracted for Henry IV. After the success of Thor, however, he was invited to take the lead in the more iconic Henry V. ‘Tom Hiddleston in Conversation’, YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=yPFvnxNubeM (accessed 1 June 2016); Michael Leader, ‘Tom Hiddleston interview: The Avengers, modern myths, playing Loki and more’, Den of Geek,

302

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19

20 21 22

23 24 25

26

27 28

NOTES

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/19100/tom-hiddlestoninterview-the-avengers-modern-myths-playing-loki-and-more (accessed 13 February 2014), Amy Raphael, ‘Tom Hiddleston: From theatre to Thor’, Guardian, 24 April 2011, http://www .theguardian.com/culture/2011/apr/24/tom-hiddleston-thor (accessed 13 February 2014). Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Detroit, 2007), 66. ‘Thor – Kenneth Branagh interview’, YouTube, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=puOhV45B4A0 (accessed 1 September 2013). Anna Blackwell, ‘“Yes, I have gained my experience” (As You Like It, 4.3.23): Kenneth Branagh and Adapting the “Shakespearean” Actor’, Critical Survey 25.3 (2014), 29–42. Sara Vilkomerson, ‘From Hamlet to Hammers’, Entertainment Weekly, 20 May 2011, 17. Stefanie Marsh, ‘The conversation’, The Times, Saturday Review, 23 June 2012, 8. Baz Bambigboye, ‘A strict diet for six months? That is a Thor point’, Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ article-1189315/BAZ-BAMIGBOYE-Weisz-words-philosophy. html (accessed 1 August 2013). ‘Tom Hiddleston in Conversation’. ‘Tom Hiddleston in Conversation’. Blockbusters set in space do not typically perform well at the box office, as The Green Lantern (dir. Martin Campbell, 2011) demonstrated. It made a worldwide income of only $219,851,172, earning it the dubious honour of the thirteenth biggest box-office bomb in history. See ‘Green Lantern Box Office’, Box Office Mojo, http://boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=greenlantern.htm (accessed 14 August 2014). Martin Zeller-Jacques, ‘Adapting the X-Men: Comic Book Narratives in Film Franchises’ in A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation, Deborah Cartmell ed. (Malden, MA, 2012), 148. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London, 2000), 165. Anna Blackwell, ‘Shakespearean Actors, Memes, Social Media and the Circulation of Shakespearean “Value”’ in Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital: His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth

NOTES

29 30 31

32

33

34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

303

to the Twenty-First Century, Dominic Shellard and Siobhan Keenan eds. (London, 2016), 82. Link no longer available. Originally sourced from 9gag.com (accessed 9 July 2013). ‘Loki – Seven Devils’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lrvGbRpvTQY (accessed 20 May 2016). Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen eds. (New York, 1999), 837. Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge, 2000), 24; ‘Tom Hiddleston’, YouTube, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD-E-ddTp8E (accessed 1 June 2013). For more on the intersections between Coriolanus, the action film genre, and Hiddleston’s star persona, see Anna Blackwell, ‘Adapting Coriolanus: Tom Hiddleston’s Body and Action Cinema’, Adaptation 7.3 (2014), 344–52. Mulvey, 837. Dave Schilling, ‘Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift pictures: As close as we’ll get to two memes dating’, Guardian, 15 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/15/taylorswift-tom-hiddleston-dating-rumors-photos-beach (accessed 16 June 2016). Henry Barnes, ‘Tom Hiddleston: It’s impossible to go through life without experiencing its random cruelty’, Guardian, 8 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/08/ tom-hiddleston-interview-crimson-peak (accessed 10 June 2016); Beaumont-Thomas, n. pag. ‘Tom Hiddleston’, Know Your Meme, http://knowyourmeme. com/memes/people/tom-hiddleston (accessed 1 May 2016). Katherine W. Jones, Accent on Privilege: English Identities and Anglophilia in the U.S (Philadelphia, 2001), 7. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Kenneth Muir ed. (London, 1997), 5.3.11. Barnes. ‘Conversation with Tom Hiddleston – Nerd HQ’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLX-tdqEjUg (accessed 2 July 2014). ‘Conversation with Tom Hiddleston – Nerd HQ’. Jones, 78.

304

44

45

46

47

48

NOTES

This macro was first inspired by the Tumblr user, templeofloki, who posted two GIFs of Hiddleston looking intently with the commentary: ‘What is with the look on his face he’s like “Somewhere in the world, somebody is misquoting Shakespeare. I can sense it.”’ Although templeofloki’s account is no longer active, The Daily Laugh’s repost of the original entry is still available. In an indication of the meme’s popularity, The Daily Laugh’s post has been engaged with by 142,527 other Tumblr users to date (whether liked or reblogged), and it has inspired not only the meme described above but at least two other variations with the same wording. Imgur, http:// imgur.com/q9mhkCZ (accessed 2 May 2017); The Daily Laughs, http://thedailylaughs.tumblr.com/post/77767195278/ templeofloki-what-is-with-the-look-on-his-face (accessed 2 May 2017). ‘Watch this video if you dont get it’ [sic], Hello Darling, http://hellodarlinghiddles.tumblr.com/post/51299904158/ watch-this-video-if-you-dont-get-it (accessed 2 May 2017). Originally posted on Memecrunch.com but accessed at ‘Memento Merry I Really Random Shakespeare I Shakespeare Memes for the Week of August 16, 2013’, The Shakespeare Standard, http://theshakespearestandard.com/memento-merryreally-random-shakespeare-shakespeare-memes-for-the-week-of -august-16-2013/ (accessed 2 May 2017). Meme Generator, https://memegenerator.net/instance/53544979/ william-shakespeare-oh-you-liked-macbeth-i-was-freestyling (accessed 21 August 2016); ‘L’influenza di Shakespeare su George Martin e le Cronache del Ghiaccio e del Fuoco’, Arcanda Supreme, https://voxcalantisindeserto.blogspot. co.uk/2014/03/linfluenza-di-shakespeare-su-george. html (accessed 15 July 2016); Meme Generator, https:// memegenerator.net/instance/65680797/william-shakespeare-imeme-therefore-i-meme (accessed 15 July 2016). ‘Have a look insight my mind when I look at Tom’, I Fucking Hate Tom Hiddleston, http://ifuckinghatetomhiddleston.tumblr. com/post/75716260126/have-a-look-inside-my-mind-when-ilook-at-tom (accessed 15 July 2016).

NOTES

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Afterword 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

See Ben Brantley, ‘Hamilton Duel: Addressing the PresidentElect on His Own Blunt Terms’, New York Times, 20 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/theater/ hamilton-duel-addressing-the-president-elect-on-his-own-bluntterms.html?_r=0 (accessed 19 February 2017). See Jenkins, Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 162. Anna Watkins Fisher, ‘User Be Used: Leveraging Play in the System’, Discourse 36.3 (2014), 383–99. Fisher, 385. See Jonathan Beller, ‘Cognitive Capitalist Pedagogy and Its Discontents’ in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, Michael Peters and Ergin Bulut eds. (New York, 2011), 123–49 (130). For a thorough treatment of cognitive capitalism, see Carlo Vercellone, ‘From Formal Subscription to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism’, Historical Materialism 15 (2007), 13–36; and Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge, 2011), 55–56. Playing Shakespeare, http://www.playingshakespeare.org/ (accessed 19 February 2017). For a more thorough treatment of the Globe’s Deutsche Bank-sponsored educational programmes, see Courtney Lehmann and Geoffrey Way, ‘Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Cognitive Capitalism and the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy’ in The Shakespeare User, Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes eds. (New York, 2017). See James Andreoni, ‘Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving’, The Economic Journal 100.201 (1990), 464–77. For a detailed analysis of individual performances of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company, see Susan Bennett’s provocative essay ‘Sponsoring Shakespeare’ in Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital, 163–79. In examining Shakespeare’s complex role in the performances and counter-performances associated with the Cultural Olympiad and the 2012 London Olympics,

306

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11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

NOTES

Bennett’s overarching objective is ‘to identify instrumental uses of the Shakespearean signature for multinational companies who make it part of their business to underwrite cultural performances and exhibitions’ (163), focusing specifically on the ‘ethical entanglements’ (175) that challenge the corporate ruse of ‘greenwashing’. See also McLuskie and Rumbold’s Cultural Value in Twenty-First Century England. See Sunita Nigam, ‘Feeling in Public: Blackface as Theatre of Action in Contemporary Quebec’ in Theatres of Affect: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Vol. 4, Erin Hurley ed. (Toronto, 2014), 61. Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago, 2007), 53. Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’ in The Affect Theory Reader, 38. Bp or not Bp, https://bp-or-not-bp.org/2016/06/08/the-rscsbp-sponsorship-under-fire-from-student-protest/ (accessed 19 February 2017). Lanham, 59. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 257. I interpret this phrase in the most optimistic of terms; for a more nuanced discussion, see Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in The Affect Theory Reader, 9–17. In the UK, as Bennett notes, the other RSC has enjoyed greater notoriety, even receiving rare international press coverage. Jenkins, Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 188.

INDEX

ABC 67 ABC News 91 actor-network theory 115 adaptation 6, 8, 14, 17, 18, 55, 102–3, 117, 119, 139, 163, 164, 169, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 200, 201, 208, 214, 216, 217, 225, 229, 233, 239, 242, 253 affect and social media 115–18 affect theory 12, 115–18, 251–2 affordances. See platforms agency 5, 7, 11, 15, 156–7, 173, 176, 237. See also users human 3–5, 6, 20 nonhuman/technological 5, 15, 20, 22 (see also algorithms) Ahmed, Sara 117, 252 Akala 140 Al-Bassam, Sulayman 72 algorithms 5, 75, 79, 107, 114, 277 n.24 Almereyda, Michael 13, 108, 111, 113, 186 Amar te Duele (dir. Fernando Sariñana) 186 amateur culture 88, 103, 109, 110–13, 120, 188, 200, 287 n.66. See also vernacular

America 28, 38, 59, 247 American Players Theater of Wisconsin 120 American Shakespeare Center 114 anti-Stratfordian 90–1 appropriation 7, 16, 113, 161–2, 164–5, 168, 170, 173, 175, 179, 180, 182, 211 Arab Spring 210 archive 10, 67–85, 103 Armin, Robert 228 Arnheim, Rudolf 61 Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive 76 As You Like It 193 and web series 200–1 AU (alternative universe) 150–4 audience Anglophone 140 film 39–40, 45, 185–7 gaze 238 history 12, 13–14 mass audience 9, 28, 35, 62, 88, 196 and media genres 21, 45 non-Anglophone 30, 40, 161 online 75–6, 191, 194–5, 207–9, 212, 213, 228 pleasure 15, 200 Shakespearean 4, 6, 11, 14 youth 190, 191, 250–1

308

INDEX

Austen, Jane 187 Avengers movie franchise 217, 218, 229, 236, 237, 238. See also Marvel films Bankhead, Tallulah 55 The Banquet (dir. Xiaogang Feng) 72 Barrymore, John 9, 56, 59, 134 BBC 140, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219 Bell, Alexander Graham 1, 57 Bell, Chichester 57 Bennett, Susan 251 Berliner Gramophone Company 123 Biers, Susanne 240 Black Lives Matter movement 254 Blockbuster 113 Blogger 113 blogs and blogging 74, 79, 84, 143–58, 200, 249, 253 BP 251–2, 253 Branagh, Kenneth 119, 218, 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 236 Brexit 216, 221 British Library 78 Britton, Denis Austin 11 broadcast, definition of 3, 5–6, 22, 28, 209 Broadchurch 140 Brown, Joe E. 27 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 217 Burbage, Richard 228 Burnett, Mark Thornton 208 Burt, Richard 4, 6, 225 Cagney, James 27

Calbi, Maurizio 158 Cambridge University 227, 231 Cavendish, Margaret 101 CBS 9, 35, 55, 63, 67 celebrity 9, 19, 21, 56, 228, 229 censorship 27–45, 199 Cesaire, Aimé 56 Cheek by Jowl 232 Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah) 186 Citizen Kane 62, 132 Columbia Recordings 125, 127, 128, 134, 136 consumers. See users copyright 10, 71, 77, 80, 186, 188 Coriolanus 4–5, 19, 20, 22, 239, 240 Coriolanus 58, 239, 242, 245 Cotton, Joseph 60 Coulouris, George 60 Crimson Peak (dir. Guillermo del Toro) 242 Cumberbatch, Benedict 194, 211, 212, 220, 228, 235, 282 n.35 Cymbeline (dir. Michael Almereyda) 186 Danes, Claire 186 DeHavilland, Olivia 27 del Toro, Guillermo 242 Dench, Judi 211 Depression era 30 Deutsche Bank 249, 250, 251 Deutsches Theatre 33 DeviantArt 108 Dieterle, William 8, 28, 34, 35, 41, 45 DiCaprio, Leonardo 186

INDEX

digital age/culture 1, 2, 6, 10, 17, 19, 22, 68, 85, 87–104, 115, 122, 125, 138, 139, 140, 186, 195, 207–26, 229, 238, 241, 245, 248–9, 254, 256 n.2. See also online digital denizens 11 digital humanities 69, 73, 83, 210 digital objects 15, 18, 143, 208 digital performance 20, 71, 72 digital storytelling 188 diversity. See race Dixon, Brandon Victor 247 DIY. See participatory culture Dockery, Michelle 211 Doctor Faustus 54 Doctor Who 140 Donmar Warehouse 19, 20, 239 Donaldson, Peter 71–6, 81. See also Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive Downey Jr, Robert 237 Downton Abbey 180, 211, 217, 222 Dublin 54 Edison, Thomas 57, 58 Egypt 71, 210 Ejiofor, Chiwetel 233 Eliot, George 102 Elizabeth I 102 Elizabethan 52, 109 emo 107–22 Encyclopedia Americana 102 Encyclopedia Britannica 95, 102

309

English Journal 11, 13, 59, 125–38 Englishness, and English identity 19, 221–2, 228, 231, 241, 242, 243, 246 Europe 30, 50, 58, 59, 60, 65, 70, 163 European Union 18, 216, 221 Everybody’s Shakespeare 52 Facebook 107, 114, 116, 143, 187, 191, 209 Falstaff 34 fans/fan culture 69, 146–9, 152–4, 156, 158, 169, 192, 213, 214, 229, 239, 241, 242, 244 Farage, Nigel 216 Fassbender, Michael 139 film 4, 8, 10, 13, 17, 20, 27–45, 54, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80, 81, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 125, 126, 134, 136, 139, 146, 185–7, 194, 200–1, 208, 210, 216, 236. See also Shakespeare First Folio 6, 128 and Folio texts 71, 78 First World War 58, 61, 230 Folger Shakespeare Library 78 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 59 Francis, Helen 129 Galey, Alan 4, 57, 81, 99 Gambon, Michael 212 Game of Thrones 245 Garrick, David 107 Gate Theatre 54, 132 Gedebe (dir. Namron) 186

310

INDEX

gender 7, 11, 16, 84, 162, 163, 176, 179, 181, 195, 227, 229 gender cross-casting 120 gender gap and Wikipedia 87–104 and Hamlet 109, 118–19 gender fluid identities on Tumblr 153–4 and web series 200–1 ‘Generation of Vipers’ 15, 16, 21, 161–82 Germany 30, 58, 59, 61 Get Over It (dir. Tommy O’Haver) 185 Gielgud, John 59, 134 GIFs 15, 141, 143, 144, 147–8, 155, 158, 208, 209, 212, 215, 217, 222, 304 n.44 global 17, 18, 45, 47, 48, 58, 64, 143, 148, 208, 223 Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive 10, 68–85, 103 globalized 82, 212, 222–3 Globe 76, 84, 133, 250 Google 79, 94. See also search engines Gosling, Ryan 242 Graves, Isabel 127 Gray, Cecilia 135 Greenblatt, Stephen 5 Griffiths, Elizabeth 102 Grot, Anton 36 Hamilton 247–8 Hamlet 12–13, 15, 54, 58, 71, 72, 73, 131, 132, 136, 186, 203, 217, 253 and social media 107–22

and web series 198–9 Hamlet 34, 54, 55, 56, 57, 82, 123, 133, 198 Hamlet (dir. Michael Almereyda) 12, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114. See also Ophelia Hamlet on the Ramparts 73 Harbinson, Patrick 163, 169, 170, 171, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 291 n.36 Harry Potter 212 hashtags 18, 143, 145, 215 Hawke, Ethan 12, 110, 111, 113, 116, 122 Hawkins, Sally 215 Hays, Will 27, 28, 30, 36, 38, 44 Hemsworth, Chris 218 Henry IV Part 1 211, 213, 218, 239 Henry IV Part 2 211, 224 Henry V 97, 211, 218, 220, 233, 234, 239 Henry VI 211, 215–16 Heuristic Media 139 Hiddleston, Tom 18, 19–20, 211, 218, 220, 227. See also Loki; Thor High-Rise (dir. Ben Wheatley) 242 High School Musical 185 Hill, Roger 11, 13, 52–3, 59, 133 Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company 140 Hogg, Joanna 230 The Hollow Crown 18, 208, 211–13

INDEX

@HollowCrownFans 18, 207–26 Hollywood 27–45, 138, 228 Hollywood Production Code 27–45 Hopkins, Anthony 234, 235, 236 Houseman, John 49–50, 51, 61, 63 HTML 78, 82, 90, 92–5 Hudson, Henry Norman 126, 133, 134, 139 hyperlinks 90, 92–3, 95, 143, 249 Iago (dir. Volfango De Biasi) 186 Instagram 191 internet 20, 94, 95, 97, 103, 108, 110, 125, 153, 188, 195, 197, 225, 228, 238, 243, 244, 245. See also online and memes 113, 117, 241, 244 and trolls 101, 172 Jackson, Glenda 68 Jarmusch, Jim 244 Jenkins, Henry 146, 149, 150, 156, 212, 213, 222, 249, 253, 254 Johansson, Scarlett 237 Jory, Victor 27 Julius Caesar 52, 53, 59, 60, 129, 132, 135, 235 Julius Caesar (1937) 50, 59, 60, 61, 63 Julius Caesar (1938) 9, 53, 54, 63, 132. See also Welles, Orson

311

Kaltenborn, H.V. 50, 60 Kemp, Will 228 Kenyon, Charles 38 Keystone 254 King Lear 54, 235, 251 Kings 187 Kiss Me Kate 2, 7 Knina, Gustav 41 Kong: Skull Island (dir. Jordan Vogt-Roberts) 242 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 36 Ladd, William 135 Lady Macbeth 176 Lanham, Richard 252–3 Lear is Here teaching module 73 Leavitt Nevins, Joy 131 Lennox, Charlotte 102 Levi, Zachary 243, 244 Lewis. See ‘Generation of Vipers’ Little, Arthur 7 liveness 72 Lizzie Bennet Diaries 187 Loki 19, 218, 223, 229, 230, 233, 235–40, 242. See also Hiddleston, Tom London 48, 58, 102, 211, 225, 251 Ludwig, Ken 37–8 Luhrmann, Baz 141, 146, 147, 185, 190, 223 Macbeth 54, 55, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 189, 203, 204, 252 Macbeth 54, 245 Mack, Roy 34 MacLiammóir, Michéal 54

312

INDEX

macros 237–8, 244, 245, 300 n.3 Marconi, Guglielmo 47 Marion, Isaac 187 Marvel films 19, 218, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 244 mashup 138, 208, 222 McCall, Mary C. 38 McGregor, Ewan 233 McGregor, Laura 128 McKellen, Ian 139–40 McLuhan, Marshall 98 Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters) 237 media. See also new media continuity 3, 14, 16, 21, 57 convergence 15, 18, 213, 222, 248 ecology 3–4, 5, 13, 14, 20, 23, 64, 253 frame effects 21 media studies 13–14, 116 medium 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 28, 39, 45, 69, 96, 139, 146, 172, 201, 219 pleasure of 15, 72, 88, 92, 98, 103 specificity 4, 14, 16, 21, 72 memes 2, 19, 22, 117, 208, 212, 237–8, 241, 243–5, 278 n.20, 300 n.3 Mendelssohn, Felix 35, 127–8, 129, 133, 137, 139 The Merchant of Venice 52, 54, 77, 135, 150, 163, 169 Mercury Shakespeare Records 132 Mercury Theater 50, 61, 63–4 Meredith, Burgess 55

Messenger, Ruth 129 M.G.M 36 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 30, 35, 39–40, 44, 45, 48, 79, 82, 127, 128 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt) 27–45 Miller, Jonathan 72, 77 MIT 10, 68 Morris, Charles R. 137 Morse 15 Mortenson, Louise 129 Motion Picture Producers of America 27 Motorcrossed (dir. Steve Boyum) 185 Much Ado About Nothing 191 and web series 193–4, 195–6 Mulvey, Laura 44, 239, 240 Murphy, Spencer 19 MySpace 113 National Theatre 76 and NT Live 20, 71, 240 NBC 9, 35, 55, 56, 57, 67 networks 3, 107, 114, 115, 121, 157, 194, 209, 224 Never Been Kissed (dir. Raja Gosnell) 185 new media 4, 5, 12, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 48, 57, 62, 81, 84, 98, 114, 115, 116, 125, 139, 188, 189, 193, 207, 219 New York Times 58, 62, 101 The Night Manager 239, 240 Njinksa, Bronislava 36 North, Ryan 110, 111 Norton, Graham 229

INDEX

O (dir. Tim Blake Nelson) 185 Obama, Barack 254 Okonedo, Sophie 215, 220, 224 O’Lemert, Helen 127 Olivier, Laurence 107, 116, 136 Olivier Award 233 One Mind youth movement 254, 255 online 1, 10, 11, 20, 70, 71, 76, 78, 80, 81, 87, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 115, 142, 166, 176, 190, 195, 198, 207, 210, 211 community 143, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 196, 208, 212, 214, 218, 221, 228 identities 17, 18, 19, 132, 156, 157, 197 participation 79, 95, 96, 98, 156, 212, 214, 249, 253 (see also participatory culture) Open Access 10, 70–1, 77, 78, 80, 81–2, 99 Ophelia 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 119, 120, 121, 153, 176 Othello 54, 162, 164, 232, 233, 235 and web series 195–6, 198–9 the other RSC. See Reclaim Shakespeare Company Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 101 Palmer, Dora 135 parody 113, 119, 120, 121, 188, 201, 222, 225, 237, 245

313

participatory culture 11, 14, 17, 88, 89, 92–3, 95, 98–9, 142, 146, 149, 151, 159, 190, 201, 208, 212–14, 248–9, 254. See also users PBS 67 Pearl Harbor 49, 65 Pence, Mike 247 performance 2, 10, 20, 22, 53, 55, 56, 60, 69, 94, 97, 118, 125, 127, 134, 136, 138, 179, 188, 227, 235, 236, 239–40, 241, 243, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 253 archives 67–82 studies 72 Philips, A.B. 39 phonograph 6, 12–13, 14, 48, 51, 58–9, 123–40, 272 n.23 Pine, Jonathan 240 Pinterest 107, 108, 242 platforms 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 74, 81, 84, 112, 113, 114, 140, 143, 145, 153, 156, 191, 207, 212, 215, 217, 219, 222, 223, 228 affordances 9, 15, 18, 22, 140, 142, 144, 157, 189, 229 newness 3, 22 Playing Shakespeare 249, 251 Plutarch 60 popular culture 2, 8, 16, 19, 138, 162, 170, 185, 229, 241, 245, 246 Porter, Cole 2, 7

314

INDEX

Portman, Natalie 241 Pound, Ezra 48 Powell, Dick 27 Private Romeo (dir. Alan Brown) 186 producers. See users Prokofiev, Sergei 253 ‘prosumers’. See users public/private 193, 195–6, 201, 251 Putin, Vladimir 253 quartos 78 quotation 158, 171–2, 179, 214–19, 220, 221, 222, 234, 297 n.12 race and racism 7, 19, 38, 83, 163, 224, 227, 248 racial politics 198, 255 racial slurs 100 Radford, Michael 77 radio 1, 3, 6, 9, 35, 47–65, 68, 98, 125, 126, 127, 132, 133, 174 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) 48–9 Rainbow Family 254 Ramira and Juliet 253. See also Reclaim Shakespeare Company Reclaim Shakespeare Company 251–2, 254, 255 Reinhardt, Max 8, 28, 30, 33, 35, 38, 39–40, 41, 45 remediation 3, 146–7 ‘Re: Shakespeare’ 140 Rice, Emma 84 Richard II 211, 218, 221 Richard III 57, 152, 224

Robinson, Edward G. 55 Rome and Jewel (dir. Charles T. Kanganis) 185 Romeo and Juliet 36, 54, 141–59, 187, 191 and Tumblr 146–59 and web series 191, 196–7, 202, 204 Romeo + Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann) 185, 190, 223 Romeo & Juliet (dir. Carla Carlei) 186 Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (dir. Eve Annenberg) 186 Rooney, Mickey 27 Rourke, Josie 239 Rowe, Katherine 57, 150, 210 Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) 232 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 71, 73, 140, 207, 251, 253, 254, 255 San Francisco 208 search engines 75, 79 Second World War 30, 48, 61, 65 sexuality 7, 96, 119, 153, 155, 162, 176, 177, 180, 193, 198. See also gender Shake, Mr Shakespeare 8, 21–2, 34 Shakespeare, William 101. See also individual plays as agential property 7, 9 authenticity 6, 19, 225 authorship question 89–91, 103, 157 cultural authority 92, 157, 164, 165

INDEX

cultural capital 208, 229, 234, 241 digital performance 79–80, 207, 210 and film 27–45, 185–7 as global 5, 10, 17, 67–85, 148, 208, 211, 212, 222, 223, 224 as launch content 1, 57 live performance 53, 60, 64, 72, 79, 229, 250, 251, 252 in performance 2, 20, 22, 53, 97, 127, 136–7, 138, 188, 245, 250–1, 252 and race 7 and radio 47–65 and social media 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 107–22, 138, 141–59, 185–202, 207–8, 209–10, 266 n.1 and technology 13–14, 22, 60, 65, 89, 96, 140 and television adaptation 161–82, 187, 190 and Tumblr 12, 14–15, 22, 111, 113, 141–59, 191 and Twitter 17–18, 22, 207–26 and YouTube 13, 68, 107–22, 189–90, 192, 194, 195, 196, 200–1, 214, 218 Shakespeare Association of America 210, 258 n.24, 297 n.12 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 122 Shakespeare Electronic Archive (SHEA) 71, 73, 78

315

Shakespeare in Hollywood 37–8 Shakespeare in Love 211 Shakespeare Performance in Asia database 89 Shakespeare studies 1, 7, 11, 14, 15, 210 #ShakespeareSunday 18, 209, 214–21, 223–5 Shakespeare Unlocked 211, 222 Shakespearean 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 28, 33–4, 36, 49, 53, 54, 70, 91, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 139 character 17, 148, 158, 167, 176, 178 language 98, 151 narratives/plot 36, 178–9, 190–1, 192, 194, 200, 202, 142, 150, 154, 159, 189 performer 98, 227–46, 252 text 13, 72, 111, 131, 142, 157, 208, 213, 215, 219, 220 songs 129 Sharrock, Thea 239, 240 Sherlock 217 She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman) 185 Siddons, Sarah 102 Simon, Henry 131 Sioux 254 Skin 187 Smithsonian 57 social media 3, 4, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 48, 109–22, 142–3, 156, 173, 185–202, 207–8, 209–10,

316

INDEX

222, 224, 228, 254, 266 n.1, 297 n.12 Sonnet 18 98 Sons of Anarchy 186 Spurgeon, Caroline 102 Standing Rock 254, 255 Star-Crossed 187 Stewart, Patrick 139, 211 Stratford Festival (Ontario) 76 Stratford-upon-Avon 92, 94, 122, 251 ‘Stratfordian’ case and Wikipedia 103 Such Tweet Sorrow 207 Tainter, Charles 57 Taming of the Shrew 2, 176, 190, 195 and web series 194–5 The Tempest 56, 89, 167, 217 and The Tempest app 139 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger) 185, 187, 223 Tennant, David 140, 282 n.39 Theilade, Nina 42 Thompson, Jessie 127, 128 Thor 19, 211, 218, 228, 233–8, 241, 242. See also Hiddleston, Tom; Marvel films Timon of Athens 97 Titus Andronicus 162, 169 Troilus and Cressida 15–16 and TV adaptation 161–82 Trump, Donald 254 Tumblr 12, 14–15, 22, 111, 113, 141–59, 187, 191 and gender fluid identities 153–4

TV 1, 4, 12, 15–16, 18, 82, 140, 187, 213, 216 serialization 190, 191 Shakespeare adaptation 139, 161–82, 187 Twelfth Night 52, 54, 55, 129, 132, 176, 201, 251 and web series 201 Twitter 17, 18, 22, 143, 150, 187, 191, 207–26, 241, 243 Urban Dictionary 108, 111 users 3, 11, 22, 77, 79, 84, 92, 94, 97, 99, 142, 143, 145–8, 156, 157, 173, 208, 212–19, 220–1, 223, 224, 225, 277 n.21 consumers 14, 146, 201, 213, 222 producers 12, 14, 195 ‘prosumers’ 14, 201 user-generated 89, 145, 165, 208, 212, 214, 215 vernacular culture 1, 3, 12, 15, 17, 234, 237, 245 VHS technology 113 Victor Record Company 48–9, 125, 127, 128 vlogs/vlogging 2, 17, 114, 185–206. See also web series and ‘reality effect’ 17, 189, 199–201 Vogt-Roberts, Jordan 242 voice 9, 13, 50, 53, 54, 56, 59, 119, 121, 123–5, 128, 132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 211

INDEX

Apple’s SIRI 94 Google voice search 94 Voice of America 50, 51, 64 Warm Bodies (dir. Jonathan Levine) 187 Warner Brothers 8, 27, 28, 33, 34, 36, 39, 45 Warner, Jack 38 Wars of the Roses 212 War of the Worlds 61, 62, 65, 132 Washington DC 49, 57 Web 2.0 89, 151, 153 web series 16–17, 18, 187–206 gender fluid identities 200–1 and immersiveness 17, 188, 191–2, 194, 201 Welles, Orson 9, 11, 13, 47–65, 132–4, 135, 139. See also Julius Caesar Wells, Mary 136 Wells, Stanley 228

317

Were the World Mine (dir. Tom Gustafson) 185 Wheatley, Ben 242 Wikimedia Foundation 99 Wikipedia 10, 11, 87–104, 248 and gender gap 87–104 Williams, Raymond 12 Wonnberger, Carl 135 Wood, Cyrus 34 Woolf, Virginia 102 Wyndham’s Theatre 232 X-Men franchise 139, 211 Yates, Julian 4, 6 YouTube 3, 8, 12, 14, 68, 69, 75, 77, 107–22, 143, 145, 165, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 210, 212, 214, 254 YouTubers 218 youth culture 190, 192, 194, 200, 201