In the summer of 2020, libraries were closed and the universities in the UK were in chaos, in the wake of decisions being made by the government about student results and social distancing. Writing about Shakespeare pedagogy under lockdown conditions sharpens one’s focus in terms of the resources that are available, physically, digitally and intellectually. In addition to the loss of access to the libraries in person, having recently given up my position at Royal Holloway University of London, I found myself in digital isolation, in terms of access to resources that were formerly at my fingertips. The cancellation of the 2020 International Shakespeare Conference on Shakespeare and Education in Stratford intensified this isolation in thinking about pedagogic practice in my study, rather than in the classroom or in a conference seminar room. However, what remained available to me was my international network of colleagues, with whom I have been discussing for many years the possibilities that the digital world opens up for supporting the teaching of Shakespeare in performance.

In introducing a volume entitled Shakespeare and the Digital World, perhaps the first questions to address are what is encompassed in the term ‘Shakespeare’ and what is meant by ‘digital’. In working towards completing this volume the editors have been asked innumerable times two things; first, ‘why Shakespeare?’ and second, ‘the digital what?’ To deal with the first of these questions ‘Shakespeare’, for the purposes of this collection, includes the wide and varied arena of Shakespeare studies and all of its potential contributors and audiences. The scope of this collection therefore is vast, yet it is much more focused than other studies of digital humanities in that the subject focus implicates a particular group of people who self-identify as Shakespeareans. The sheer volume of material that is published online or in print that refers to Shakespeare makes it a verifiable and distinct cultural entity of considerable weight, and the size, popularity, duration and geographic spread of the debate that surrounds the author and his associated works positions it as a leader for other areas of the humanities. In yoking the ‘digital’ to ‘Shakespeare’ in this volume (with the ‘and’ that John Jowett argues ‘puts Shakespeare in relation to something that affects his work and leaves its impression on his work’ (2007: 3)) we assert the mutual importance of the ‘digital’ as a context that influences the study of Shakespeare and, conversely, the importance of Shakespeare as a case study to understand the developing nature of the digital world. In asking ‘what does Shakespeare add to a discussion of the digital world?’ the answer must be scope, form and direction. This collection is concerned to address whether Shakespeare studies is acting on or reacting to technology, whether scholarship and practice are leading or following technological innovations. Looking at this specific field across the period of digital development is designed to confront these questions.

Katherine Rowe, in her introduction to a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on ‘Shakespeare and New Media’, writes: ‘Older forms and values provide a vital intellectual framework for the way we use newer media, shaping the needs we bring to the new tools and the opportunities we find in them’ (2010: iii). This simple statement makes clear that what we bring to digital media helps to determine what we find in these new ways of working. Research in this environment is both enhanced and extended by the fact that large databases of information are now available at our fingertips and fragile texts are accessible at the click of a button. However, access to information is not the same as knowledge and the opportunities afforded by the new environment raise as many questions and problems as they answer. The chapters in this section look at the ‘intellectual framework’ of research as well as the day-to-day processes involved in that activity. Can research today be said to be the same activity as it was twenty years ago when finding and analysing texts and/or performance was considered the primary aim of Shakespeare scholarship?

The first step in ‘Defining current digital scholarship and practice’ is to map out a history for this area of activity as it relates to ‘older forms and values’. This is achieved in the first two chapters of this section by John Lavagnino, who makes clear the relationship between the wider field of digital humanities and Shakespeare scholarship, and Bruce R. Smith, who looks in characteristically astute detail at the phenomenological shift that has taken place in terms of the physical activity of ‘doing research’. These two scholars, both in form and in content, reassess the way we do what we do as well as why we do it. Returning to the first principles of research, first looking back for historical precedents and then looking straight down at the desk and the body of the researcher, begins the process of this volume, which is to stop and reconsider the changes taking place in our world, assuming that we have the power to have an impact on those changes if only we take the time to reflect critically.

Identity politics in the digital age can be confusing. My departmental profile announces me as ‘Dr. Peter Kirwan’, while my email signature usually identifies me as ‘Peter’. To many of my colleagues I am ‘Pete’, while for those students who prefer a degree of formality I am ‘Dr. Kirwan’. On Twitter I am @drpetekirwan, and in online discourse I am often referred to by the title of my performance review blog, The Bardathon. Each of these identities is performed differently, assuming a unique series of relationships, hierarchies, content specialisms, presentational conventions and technical limitations. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Janet Wright Starner and Barbara Howard Traister’s introduction to their study of cultures of anonymity in early modern England begins by noting that:

In my earlier chapter, I discussed the ways in which the Gutenberg Parenthesis provides a model for understanding the relationship between the often-anonymous textual discourse that preceded the printing press and the often-anonymous textual discourse that can be found throughout the internet. What Starner and Traister’s comparison does not make explicit, however, is that the lack of a ‘real’ name in internet discourse does not equate to an absence of signature. The politicisation of even the word ‘Anonymous’ both by Roland Emmerich’s 2011 movie and the digital ‘hacktivist’ group that share the name ensures that anonymity, in the digital age, is far from neutral or invisible. Handles, tags, usernames and institutional identities all feature strongly in the exchange of digital information as Shakespeareans from all backgrounds form electronic identities in web publishing.

The previous section of this volume focused on the multiplication of identities as individuals and texts move into the digital world. This section, by contrast, looks at collective identity, institutional identity and the idea that the individual can be part of a number of different larger pieces of work while still maintaining a personal profile and identity. Joint authorship or collective creation relates to a number of ways of working that pre-date the digital world – the science laboratory and the theatrical rehearsal room are two cases in point – however, the digital communications environment allows for simultaneous participation in a wide range of virtual communities that may have very different aims, purposes and underlying structures.

While this is my fifth project for Cambridge University Press I have coedited each of those projects with a different colleague on a different topic. Clearly, I am partial to the collective voice, and the theatrical rehearsal process requires that everyone defer, not to the Director, but to the ‘best idea in the room’.1 I have always been a firm believer in the value of smart rooms and the value of conversation over pronouncement. But I was also trained in the Socratic method from a young age. While the digital world is a conversational one, the fact that communication determines identity and authority in this world means that rhetoric matters almost as much now as it did in Shakespeare’s own time.

As Brett D. Hirsch argues in the introduction to Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics (2012), pedagogy has been sidelined in the ongoing studies of and reflections on shifts in the digital humanities. In the focus on open-access publishing, new research tools and scholarly networks, the danger is that teaching becomes treated as a subset of developments elsewhere, or that we risk ‘simply “digitising” existing ways of learning’ rather than advancing ‘a genuinely digital pedagogy’, in the words of David Puttnam (2012). As Hirsch argues,

The potential tension between the two fields is heightened by the political movements driving pedagogic practice. In the UK, fee increases and growing concern for the ‘student experience’ as a Key Performance Indicator for universities inform a climate in which student evaluation of teaching environments, and students’ sense of their value for money, are increasingly important factors in institutional spending. Across the last decade, the number of digital initiatives designed to support teaching – from e-books to virtual learning environments, open-access online courses to tablet devices in the live classroom – has proliferated. Yet the speed at which new technologies are adopted does not always leave time for pedagogic reflection on how and why they are being used, and the teacher struggling to keep up may find her or himself grappling with devices with which students are much more au fait.

In June 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company partnered with Google Creative Lab to create its fortieth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, taking place in real time over the midsummer weekend as a combined digital and live event. Actors performed sections of the play to private, invited and public audiences over a three-day period, while online audiences were invited to engage with a cast of over forty fictional characters with Google+ accounts who blogged, tweeted, shared pictures and video, philosophised and chatted with each other. As Erin Sullivan notes elsewhere in this volume, ‘Stratford is a small town that can at times be difficult to get to’ (above 64), and this production attempted to close the transactional distance between the RSC’s physical and virtual audiences, creating the RSC’s version of the Globe’s ‘meaningful digital experiences that can stand alone from any real-world experience and act as a viable alternative for those who cannot access the physical space’ (Nelson, above 207).

The rationale was not merely to extend Stratford’s audience, however, but to investigate the potential for an entirely new version of Shakespearean engagement designed specifically for the digital sphere. Tom Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab explains:

In approaching a collection of essays on developments in the digital humanities, one might question the validity of Shakespeare as a case study. However, I would suggest that the strength of the community of scholars who work in this field is that while the work encompasses the analysis of the approaches of actors, directors, playwrights and, increasingly, reviewers, librarians and archivists, within the society we live in today, as well as across many time periods and geographic locations, the subject field shares a common series of reference points. The plays, and the character situations they illuminate, provide an abundance of role models for critics to follow. In this final chapter of the final section of the collection I would like to look at the role of the critic of the future by testing out that role in Shakespearean terms. What sort of critical debate can an embattled academy have in the increasingly competitive but also incoherent online world? What follows is a contemplation of just some of the options available to us as a community, taking seriously, and for granted, the notion that there is value in focusing on ‘the analysis and creation of powerfully styled writing’ (O’Dair, 124).

Controlling the gaze in the new millennium

Feminist criticism has championed the importance of the personal account and has highlighted the individual experience as political since the 1970s. Laura Mulvey’s identification of the female viewer’s need to split herself into subject and object, being both the viewer and the viewed, to accommodate the mostly male director’s perspective, began a field of reception theory that has influenced performance criticism ever since. Experimental theatre, which changes from one performance to the next, also has required a critical response that is specific and personal.