About the Book
This edited collection offers the first in-depth analysis and sourcebook for ‘Lockdown Shakespeare’. It brings together scholars of stage, screen, early modern and adaptation studies to examine the work that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and considers issues of form, liveness, reception, presence and community. Interviews with theatre makers and artists illuminate the challenges and benefits of creating new work online, while educators consider how digital tools have facilitated the teaching of Shakespeare through performance. Together, the chapters in this book offer readers the definitive work on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare online during the pandemic.
From The Show Must Go Online, which presented Shakespeare’s First Folio via YouTube, to Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged during the pandemic. It reveals how, by taking Shakespeare online in new and innovative ways, the theatre industry sparked the evolution of new forms of performance with their own conventions, aesthetics and notions of liveness. Among the other productions discussed are Arden Theatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tender Claws’ ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’, The Shakespeare Ensemble’s What You Will, Merced Shakespearefest’s Ricardo II, CtrlAltRepeat’s Midsummer Night Stream, Sally McLean’s Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) and Justina Taft Mattos’s Moore – A Pacific Island Othello.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Cultural Cartography of The Digital Lockdown Landscape
Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Benjamin Broadribb (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
Part One: Analyses
1. The Screen Language of Lockdown: Connection and Choice in Split-Screen Performance John Wyver (University of Westminster, London, UK)
2. Lockdown Shakespeare and the Metamodern Sensibility Benjamin Broadribb (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
3. Notions of Liveness in Lockdown Performance Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
4. Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s The Tempest: Digital Theatre and the Performing Audience Pascale Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas (University of Exeter, UK)
5. Immersion in a Time of Distraction: ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’ Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
6. What You Will in the Time of COVID-19: Exploring the Digital Arts, Race and Flexible Resistance David Sterling Brown (Trinity College, Connecticut, USA ) and Ben Crystal (The Shakespeare Ensemble, Global)
Part Two: Case Studies
7. ‘Shakespeare for Everyone’ The Show Must Go Online in conversation with Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Benjamin Broadribb (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
8. Ricardo II: una producción bilingüe de Merced Shakespearefest William Wolfgang (University of Warwick, UK) and Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
9. ‘Your play needs no excuse’ CtrlAltRepeat in conversation with Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Benjamin Broadribb (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
10. ‘Are we all met?’: Responding to Shakespeare’s Canon through Online Community Performance Jennifer Moss Waghorn, Katrin Bauer, Sarah Hodgson, Diane Lowman, Kathryn Twigg and Martin Wiggins (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
11. ‘Present fears are less than horrible imaginings’ Big Telly Theatre Company in conversation with Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Benjamin Broadribb (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
12. Teaching Shakespearean Performance in Lockdown Andrew James Hartley (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA), Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France) and Yu Umemiya (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan) in conversation with Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
Part Three:
Lockdown Digital Arts: An Extended Year in Review
Gemma Kate Allred (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
I. Spring
II. Summer
III. Autumn
IV. Winter / Spring
Conclusion: Shakespeare after Lockdown
Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK)
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Gemma Kate Allred is a doctoral researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Benjamin Broadribb is a doctoral researcher at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK.
Erin Sullivan is Reader in Shakespeare at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK.
Review :
A remarkably cathartic read.
The collaboration and (authorial) co-presence of Lockdown Shakespeare allows the collection itself to symbolically counter the generalization that watching digital performances during this period of enforced isolation lacked a sense of communal experience. One of the collection’s greatest strengths lies in this collaborative structure, which gives space both to critical frameworks for understanding lockdown Shakespeares and to the creative decisions of many artists and creatives who produced them … Intermingled with criticism that allows us to reflect on the responsive developments in digital theater during this period, the frankness and depth with which [the study engages] with the experience of watching and rewatching Shakespeare in a state of lockdown will enrich our future understandings of what the playwright came to mean in this period.
