IS THIS A LIVESTREAM I SEE BEFORE ME?
The Covid lockdown has seen a boom in tech-twisted Shakespeare performances
On April 23, Shakespeare turned 456. Like many of us, he celebrated that birthday online.
Sonnets were recited, soliloquies delivered to stuffed animals, cakes iced with dubious quotations. Searching for the #ShareYourShakespeare hashtag across Instagram and TikTok, I saw Playmobile figurines do The Tempest and Ophelia drown in a bathtub. On Twitter, two turtles performed the balcony scene from Romeo And Juliet. All the world with an internet connection has suddenly become a stage. A lot of those stages have programmed Shakespeare.
Shakespeare and technology go way back. As early as the 1960s, programmers created machine readable versions of the plays and in the 1980s the collected works became available as CD-ROMS. In the 1990s, the plays migrated online. A designated channel on the internet chat relay even hosted an online Hamlet called Hamnet in 1993, complete with programmer jokes like “
More recently, the plays have been adapted for SMS and Twitter. In 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Such Tweet
Sorrow, spattered Romeo And Juliet across Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook.
And in the past month, as the pandemic lowered the curtains on live performance, streaming videos and audio recordings of Shakespeare’s work have proliferated. #ShareYourShakespeare, the hashtag devised by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library, attracted thousands of entries and tens of millions of views. The week of Shakespeare’s birthday, I participated, at my desk, in an interactive
Tempest, watched scenes from a Zoom reading of King Lear led by Stacy Keach, sat in on rehearsals for an iPhone Macbeth, watched Patrick Stewart recite sonnets and took in more mediocre Stratford-motivated content than any sane person should.
“Nobody thinks that Shakespeare is bad for anybody, right?” William Worthen, a Columbia University professor and the author of Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre, said. “So in a period of time in which everybody is feeling the need for any kind of uplift, Shakespeare sort of makes sense.”
After Shakespeare’s death, his plays became a way to legitimise new technologies.
“New media forms are always tried out on Shakespeare,” Michael Witmore, director of the Folger, said. When Alexander Graham Bell wanted to test the telephone, he borrowed lines from Hamlet. And when demonstrating the gramophone, he had his father record more Hamlet onto a cylinder. Those snippets somehow conferred authority. Today, when artists play with newish forms like virtual reality or real-time motion-capture, Shakespeare supplies the content. Why Shakespeare?
“The thing about Shakespeare is the stories are so good,” Zoë Seaton, who directed the Zoom Tempest, said. “The best thing to try a new format with was something as robust as Shakespeare and as strong in terms of narrative and characters.”
The glut of new content speaks to the reach and ubiquity of his work, the open-source accessibility of his plays, the confidence that if you do share a snippet of pentameter, you will be heard, recognised and retweeted. The plays — and the humanist values they intimate — offer a cultural touchstone when the rest of our lives feel unsteady.
If #ShareYourShakespeare, which includes Witmore’s dog reciting “Some are born great” has the feel of a marketing ploy, it is a marketing ploy that has made excellent use of Lego blocks and created community, albeit online.
“It really is Shakespeare by everybody and for everybody as a way of bringing people together,” said Kerry Radden, who heads audience and marketing at the RSC. No one is claiming that a Lego Coriolanus or a version of “To be or not to be” performed via beans on toast substitutes for live theatre. As Gregory Doran, the RSC’s artistic director, said: “Ultimately, for me, a live actor performing live, you’re never going to replace that spontaneity.”
But The Tempest livestream, a participatory, hour-long romp from Creation Theater, sometimes came close. Seaton, the director, decided midway through rehearsal to jettison a traditional adaptation and mess around with Zoom’s capabilities instead. Which explains the audience participation prompts via chat and why a dinosaur chased Trinculo.
Because I know The Tempest fairly well, this brave new world felt comfortingly like the old one, except that when I hit grid view I could see other spectators, seated on various sofas, some of them snarfing Cadbury mini eggs.
Seaton hadn’t known if people would want to participate — enabling your camera means that lurkers like me can evaluate your snack selection — but she found nearly everyone willing.
“I think it’s that sense of community, that sense that we’re all part of the same thing,” she said.
Making Shakespeare more democratic and communal, less prone to snobbery and gatekeeping, that can’t be bad? Or can it?
Laura Estill, a professor of digital humanities at St. Francis Xavier University, noted that in pre-pandemic tallies, Shakespeare tops every most-performed list.
“We keep coming back to Shakespeare to the exclusion of other writers,” she said.
But now, with no seats to fill and no tickets to sell, theatres could look elsewhere.
“We could look at new playwrights, we could look at playwrights of colour, we could look at women playwrights or queer playwrights,” Estill said. “We could even look to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.”
If we don’t take artistic risks now, when will we? Shouldn’t new forms demand new texts? Or at least the occasional Christopher Marlowe Facebook Live?
Once the pandemic ends and theatres reopen and people delete Zoom en masse, Shakespeare’s online footprint may recede. Some theatres will continue to incorporate new technologies, and to make their work available remotely. But others will return to the basics — bodies, breath, wood.
“I’m hoping that we’ll be back where we were,” Doran said, “still with the opportunities of digital access and possibly of new ways of creating digital experience.”
Two years ago, the RSC, in collaboration with theatres, schools and technology companies, created Audience of the Future, an initiative designed to anticipate how audiences will eventually experience live performance. I found an old news release, from January 2019, which included a line about how “even in the home, wherever they are, audiences will experience live performance like never before”. It sounds prophetic now. Though it doesn’t specifically mention the photo I just saw of Calico Critters performing the first scene of King Lear.
So this online moment was coming and Shakespeare always had an access code. In the English-speaking world we deploy Shakespeare whenever we’re adjusting to new technologies or just feeling weird about our world and our place in it.
At the end of the endless scroll, this explosion of online Shakespeare is less about Shakespeare and more about the feeling of virtual community that the shared knowledge of the works enables. With live theatre and other public pleasures unavailable, we pose Critters and stream Antony And Cleopatra and film turtles and drown Ophelia again and again. Because if we didn’t, we might have to admit that, as Hamlet put it, the rest is silence.