Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard
Added by: miaow | Karma: 8463.35 | Other | 14 August 2015
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The video-sharing platform YouTube signals exciting opportunities and challenges for Shakespeare studies. As patron, distributor and archive, YouTube occasions new forms of user-generated Shakespeares, yet a reduced Bard too, subject to the distractions of the contemporary networked mediascape.
n 2002, for the second volume of this journal, Ian Lancashire reflected on the state of computing in Shakespeare. The decade since his review has seen dramatic change in the web of 'digital Shakespeares'-experiments in editing and publishing, paradigm shifts in research and pedagogy, new tools and methods for analyzing a growing and varied multimedia archive-all with their share of successes and failures, a veritable 'mingled yarn' of 'good and ill together.' This issue's special section on Digital Shakespeares reflects on these developments and achievements, highlights current research in the field, and speculates on future directions.
Alternative Shakespeares, published in 1985, shook up the world of Shakespearean studies, demythologising Shakespeare and applying new theories to the study of his work. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 investigates Shakespearean criticism over a decade later, introducing new debates and new theorists into the frame.
When critical theory met literary studies in the 1970s and '80s, some of the most radical and exciting theoretical work centred on the quasi-sacred figure of Shakespeare. In Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis brought together key essays by founding figures in this movement to remake Shakespeare studies.
