Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre

This urgent and provocative study explores contemporary Shakespeare performance to bring a sense of theatre as technology into view. Rather than merely using technologies, the theatre's distinctively intermedial character is essential to its complex technicity; the changing function of gesture and costume, of written documents in the making of performance, of light and sound, and of the interplay of live and recorded acting complicate the sense of theatre as a medium. In a series of probing discussions, Worthen interrogates the interaction of live and mediated acting onstage, the impact of written media from the handwritten scroll to the small-screen app in acting as a technē, the work of Original Practices as an interactive modern theatre technology, the economies of theatrical immersion, and the consequences of an emerging algorithmic theatre, providing a richly theoretical reading of the stakes of theatre as an always-emerging technology.

• Enables a rethinking of the uses of digital media in theatre as part of a longer-term history of theatre as a technology in itself
• Features wide-ranging reference to contemporary and historical performance, and provides cutting-edge scholarship of recent theatre and Shakespeare performance
• Provides close discussion and exemplary illustration of a range of innovative theatrical productions, from postcard plays, to Original Practices, immersive theatre, and algorithmic performance